jcfin.bsky.social

Jesus, the economy is pumping. With such low hiring is it all coming from priductivity? Is ai actually starting to bleed through into the data? www.atlantafed.org/-/media/Imag...

Whoa. This new GDPval score for GPT-5.2 is something. GDPval is probably the most economically relevant measure of AI ability, suggesting that in head-to-head competition with human experts on tasks that require 4-8 hours for a human to do, GPT-5.2 wins 71% of the time as judged by other humans.

I understand MAGA is insisting the signature isn't Trump's but the WSJ piece nicely shows how the signature matches other letters he signed.

I'm not sure which is more damning, that the Atlantic is running essays like this unedited, or the appalling possibility that this *was* edited.

My entire life the pattern has been 1. Republican president ruins economy. 2. We elect Dems to fix it. 3. Republicans obstruct pace of progress and people get frustrated with Dems. 4. We elect a Republican president 5. Go back to step 1.

Klein lays out what he thinks the message and tactics should be (while acknowledging he is not sure if this will work politically)

Reminder (my personal bias is somewhere around 2, maybe slightly lower, but higher than 3).

"The United States paid nothing for these Shares" is an interesting way of describing "the U.S. released $8.9B in CHIPS funding intended for Intel in exchange for $8.9B in stock." Perhaps Congress could've demanded shares for CHIPS money, but POTUS adding this ad hoc is simply unconstitutional.

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Just an innocent bystander, no doubt just out walking his dog.

For all the hopes of an AI-driven productivity boom, its just not showing up in reality.

US labor productivity rebounded in Q2, creeping up to a new all-time high after dropping significantly in Q1 Overall productivity growth has still been noticeably faster post-COVID than pre-COVID

"why are stocks rising instead of falling because Orange Man Bad" maybe because guidance raises outnumbered guidance cuts by 60 reports last week, 99th percentile since 2001. Absolute number of guidance hikes was 84, in the 98.9th percentile for all weeks since 2001. Crazy strong!

HUGE: The Trump administration will no longer permit any solar or wind projects on federal lands unless they produce more energy-per-acre than coal, gas or nuclear power plants. Solar and wind literally produce less energy per acre, so simply this may just kill off any project on federal lands.

If Trump had said the level of revisions is far out of line than typical and changes are needed at the bls to be more accurate, would that have been accurate? Obviously he made it political, but the below implies this last report was very abnormal. Usually abnormal means rough times #econ

My prediction is that in that scenario, he blames the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which puts out employment data. Calls them corrupt, run by Democrats, out to get him. Fires people there, insists their numbers cannot be trusted, White House puts out its own fictitious data to make Trump look good

Looks like we owe adp job numbers an apology

Wow. rentrentier.com/low-income-w...

In fact, young men with a college degree now have the same unemployment rate as young men who didn’t go to college, completely erasing the graduate employment premium. Whereas a healthy premium remains for young women.

The second answer is that the tariffs ARE showing up in the data, just subtly so far. Yesterday's CPI numbers showed clear evidence of tariffs hitting certain categories, like appliances. Data from the Harvard Pricing Lab shows that prices for imported goods have risen sharply.

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/o...

Real consumer spending dead stopped growing in 2025, per @jaredb-econ.bsky.social. #NumbersDay #EconSky econjared.substack.com/p/weekly-wra...

Remember, the legal fig leaf for Trump's ability to set tariffs in the first place is that the tariffs are addressing a National Emergency. Does that mean the Trump admin is going to argue in court that Bolsonaro being prosecuted is a "national emergency" for the *United States*?

anti-doomer sentence of the day: "Globally, roughly a third more power is being generated from the sun this spring than last" www.newyorker.com/news/annals-...

Even if you assume the legitimacy of ICE operations, the idea that a fucking truck-mounted machine gun is necessary to carry them out is insane. This is about intimidation. This is them letting us know that the streets of the United States have been militarized.

But job growth was very concentrated in June. The "big three" sectors of government, health care and leisure/hospitality accounted for ALL (actually, more than all) of the job gains last month. The diffusion index fell below 50, meaning more industries were cutting jobs than adding them. #NumbersDay

NEW JOBS DATA: Non-farm Payrolls: +147k Unemployment Rate: 4.1% (-0.1%) Prime Age (25-54) Employment-Population Ratio: 80.7% (+0.2%) Average Hourly Earnings: +0.2%

The unemployment rate fell to 4.1% in June from 4.2%. Unemployment has sat in the 4–4.2% range since last May. Though the labor force participation rate fell to 62.3%, the lowest since Dec 2022 as more Americans reach retirement age. 6/

Today’s episode of The Ezra Klein Show. The MSNBC anchor, and native New Yorker, @chrislhayes.bsky.social considers what Democrats can learn from the mayoral primary. open.spotify.com/episode/12xj...

Republicans rushed around the parliamentarian, adopted current policy baseline, rushed the process to create special little carve-outs for their own special interests and kickbacks for states. They subverted the debt limit AND the appropriations process. What's even the point of the filibuster?

I feel like I'm losing my mind. Here is the transcript of what Zohran Mamdani actually said about the phrase "globalize the intifada." This is his "refusal to disavow it." This is what has people terrified. Just fucking read it. Source: podscripts.co/podcasts/the...

Easily the scariest interview I’ve ever seen. He’s on some esoteric trans-humanist russian orthodox schitzo shit. The idea he’s *intellectually influential* among the right wing VC clique is terrifying. m.youtube.com/watch?v=vV7Y...

I don’t know what to make of it but recently I wondered If part of what we’re seeing with crime is a regression to mean/trend. Teen pregnancy and homicide rates tracked for a long time and then stopped right around 2014.

"The...data from 2024 and the first third of 2025 suggests a strong possibility that the United States will report the lowest murder rate ever recorded, the lowest property rate ever recorded, & the lowest violent crime rate since 1968" - @jeffasher.bsky.social jasher.substack.com/p/its-not-ju...

Solar + storage is now $104 per MWh in Las Vegas or similar regions for nearly 100% clean firm power. There is no way new nuclear can compete with this. Even new gas plants will struggle and that is assuming access to cheap gas over the life-cycle of the plant, which is kind of a crazy gamble TBH.

New from @jessrem.bsky.social, an interesting break down on the types of places that are accommodating the most new housing: open.substack.com/pub/agglomer... While outer ring suburbs are accommodating the most new housing, downtowns are growing a lot faster than inner ring suburbs.

Real federal spending increases since just before the pandemic, by Budget Enforcement Act category www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

Trump's back-and-forth orders on immigration enforcement remind us of the fundamental logic of comprehensive immigration reform — actually removing millions of workers from the labor force would make most native-born people worse off. www.slowboring.com/p/trump-redi...

One chart that shows the huge gap between people with a ZIRP-era mortgage vs. those who don't. From today's newsletter. www.bloomberg.com/news/newslet...

New piece and Chart of the Week: All the polls on immigration and the LA protests this week: - Where Americans stand on the protesters - How people feel about Trump’s use of federal troops - And Trump's immigration approval just fell to -1.3 www.gelliottmorris.com/p/all-the-po...

Updated presidential issue approval ratings chart (YMMV) reveals a dip in Trump's immigration approval over the last week. Due mainly to a couple of big negative polls. This is the trend to watch over the next week www.gelliottmorris.com/p/data

All eyes are on the protests and Trump's response, but meanwhile Democrats won even more special elections last night. That continues a streak of overperformance for the party — and it's not *just* due to a huge turnout advantage. www.gelliottmorris.com/p/democrats-...