Month: January 2023

Jeez, I take a nap and we're up to 13 votes. And Kevin McCarthy has convinced most of his skeptics to switch sides and support him. He's up to 214 votes now. Only four more to go!

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Charlie is such a camera hog.

Our local gas company is alerting us in advance that January is going to be rough:

The warning Southern California Gas Co. issued to its customers was unusually blunt: “There’s no easy way to put this,” the company said. “January bills are likely to be shockingly high.” Anyone who heats their home with natural gas is likely to see a January bill that is more than double what they paid a year earlier, SoCalGas said.

It's funny, though. I don't recall that natural gas prices have spiked recently. And they haven't:

So what's the deal?

SoCalGas and other utilities have attributed the sudden and dramatic surge in prices to unusually cold winter weather in California and the Pacific Northwest, which boosted demand for heat, as well as supply and distribution constraints.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration pointed to reduced capacity because of pipeline maintenance in West Texas that lowered westbound natural gas flows. The EIA reported that Pacific region natural gas storage inventories in December were 30% below the five-year average.

I dunno. It might be chilly out here, and Texas might have some pipeline problems, but over the course of two months we've gone from the same price as everyone else to 7x the national price? That seems to call for a little more detailed explanation, especially in a state that went through the whole Enron fiasco 20 years ago and is still pretty suspicious about these things.

The American economy gained 223,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 133,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate declined to 3.5%.

This is a pretty good jobs report. The topline number is only so-so, but the number of employed people went up 717,000 while the number of unemployed people went down 278,000. The labor force attracted 303,000 new workers and the headline unemployment rate was down two-tenths to 3.47%, its lowest rate in the past half century. Another tenth and it will be the lowest rate since before I was born.

Unfortunately, there's good news and bad news in all this. The headline number of 223,000 is pretty much perfect. It shows moderate growth, which is good, but not so good that the Fed has to panic over it. But when you add in the record low unemployment number, the rising labor participation rate (62.2% to 62.3%), and the excellent underling numbers, the Fed is highly likely to conclude that the labor force is too tight and it needs to push us even further into a recession next year.

On the other hand, weekly wages were down -0.2%, which comes to -1.6% after adjusting for inflation. That's pretty good evidence that the labor market isn't as hot as the unemployment figures suggest.

Leisure and health care were the biggest gainers. Temp services were the biggest loser.

Hum de hum:

Massive crypto lender Genesis Global Trading Inc. laid off 30% of its staff and is considering filing for bankruptcy, according to people familiar with the matter, the latest sign of financial turmoil at the crypto lender.

It's not Binance, but it's the third of the top ten crypto firms to go belly up in the past six months (along with FTX and Three Arrows). And our upcoming recession is likely to expose the weaknesses of a bunch of other crypto exchanges that otherwise might have been able to keep their problems hidden from view with a little sleight of hand.

Think about this: has there ever been another industry that's seen three of its top ten firms die over the course of just half a year? I'm not saying there isn't. I just can't think of one.

A lot of people have been playing with ChatGPT and reporting back on all its hilarious mistakes. It makes logic errors. It bullshits its way through ignorance. It's surprisingly bad at math. It writes at a middle school level.

Fine fine fine. This is all fair enough. But you could have said all the same things about Shakespeare at age six, and look where he ended up a few years later.

There's every reason to think the next iteration of ChatGPT will be way better. And the iteration after that will be better still. Within a very few years, no one is going to be laughing anymore.

So you might as well stop laughing now and instead start thinking about how we're going to deal with this. It's about a million times more important than how many votes it takes for Republicans to elect a Speaker.

McCarthy remains at 200 votes. Kevin Hern, however, has skyrocketed to seven votes!

Kevin McCarthy is down to 200 votes. Victory is slipping away.

I wonder why they hold multiple votes each day? There's no time for negotiation between the votes, so what are the odds anyone is going to switch? The first vote of the day tells you where everyone still stands, right?

Rain got you down? Find yourself a nice, cozy seat at Benjie's Deli, my favorite local lunch spot. Don't forget to buy a cheesecake on your way out.

Yep, McCarthy is still at 201. However, Donalds is steadily shedding votes. Gaetz voted for Trump again, and two others switched to Kevin Hern of Oklahoma. I don't know anything about the guy, though Wikipedia sort of implies he played some role in the Challenger disaster, which I don't think is true. He probably lost his job at Rockwell because they downsized afterward.