Month: November 2024

A reader has shamed me into updating yesterday's chart showing how often Fox News mentioned inflation after the election was over. Here's a comparison with all TV news:

The drop at Fox News was more dramatic than most, but in fact everyone decided to stop talking about inflation once the election was over. (The mid-month spike is when the November CPI report was published.)

I guess everyone agrees: Inflation is only hurting consumers enough to be newsworthy if there's a political campaign saying so.

POSTSCRIPT: I'd also show you a longer-term comparison, but these numbers are a pain in the butt to collect and I'm too lazy to do it.

The Michigan index of consumer expectations (not current consumer sentiment) is doing its usual thing in the wake of the election:

As usual, Republicans are considerably more partisan about the economy than Democrats. After Joe Biden's election their expectations dropped about 75 points while Democratic expectations rose 30 points. This time around Republican expectations are already up 27 points compared to a Democratic drop of about 16.

This is a partisan dynamic we see frequently, and I don't know why. Are Republicans just more partisan? More scared of Democrats than Democrats are of Republicans? Is it media driven? Some enterprising grad student should look into this.

I'm not trying to be the bearer of bad news, but it strikes me that several economic indicators are blinking red right now. The yield curve has been negative for a while and has just turned upward. GDP growth has been above potential for several quarters in a row. Job growth has been slowing down for a long time and is now close to zero. The Fed has kept interest rates high too long. And there's this:

The Sahm Rule is triggered when the unemployment rate increases by 0.5 percentage points relative to its low in the previous 12 months. The low point of the past 12 months is 3.7% and unemployment hit 4.3% a couple of months ago. That's 0.6 percentage points. Unemployment has gone down a bit since then and we're now slightly below Sahm territory.

But even at that we're well above the level that signaled the last four recessions. In fact, if the Sahm Rule holds up, it suggests we're already in a recession.

I sort of doubt that, and the post-pandemic era has always been economically weird. If there's ever been a time for the usual rules to break down, this is it. Still, unless they all break down we're probably not too far away from a recession.

With Matt Gaetz out of the picture, Donald Trump has moved quickly to refill the attorney general job. His choice is Pam Bondi, the telegenic former attorney general of Florida and frequent Fox News guest host.

Bondi is a big time Trump loyalist these days, but it hasn't always been so. Remember when Trump had to give her a $25,000 bribe to avoid being prosecuted for fraud related to Trump University? All perfectly legal, of course. Good times.

Guess what? Inflation is over! According to Fox News, anyway:

Inflation itself hasn't changed over the past couple of weeks, but for some reason Fox News doesn't seem to care about it anymore. Here's a longer look:

Sadly, the Internet Archive suffered some technical difficulties right before the election, so the series is interrupted. But as you can see, for months and months Fox hosts were obsessed with inflation, mentioning it 10 to 20 times a day. This week it's down to two or three.

Remarkable, no? Inflation has been running around 3% for more than a year but it remained vitally newsworthy anyway the whole time. Until November 6.

Good news! Remember all those Republicans who said their personal finances got worse as soon as Joe Biden was elected? They're suddenly all better:

In just the past two weeks, the share of Republicans who say their personal finances are worse than a year ago has plummeted by 14 percentage points. Apparently our long national nightmare of strong growth and low unemployment is finally over.

This is a throwaway sentence in a CNN story about problems with the Stellantis vehicle lineup:

Chrysler, once the company’s core brand, is essentially down to one model, the Pacifica minivan, arguably the weakest segment of the US market.

It turns out this isn't quite fair. It's true that the Voyager minivan is just a version of the Pacifica, but Chrysler also sells the 300 sedan. So that's two models.

But wait! It turns out the 300 has been discontinued even though it still shows up on Chrysler's website. So they really do sell just a single car in 2024. I did not know that.

This is muddy old Santiago Creek after a rainstorm last year that tossed a little bit of snow onto our local mountains. Even with the rain it's unusual to get a sky so clear all the way to the horizon around here. Even when there's no smog, there's always haze.

According to the Census Bureau's latest estimate, total revenue for childcare establishments increased 6.1% in the second quarter of the year. Not bad. Here's a long-term look at childcare adjusted for the population of 0-4 year-olds:

Childcare seems to be doing nicely even after the pandemic subsidies went away. However, families are paying a price: over the past three years the cost of childcare has gone up 7% more than overall inflation.

Did you know that housing prices increased as much under Trump as they have under Biden? They did:

If you adjust for inflation the increase is bigger under Trump than Biden. Unexpected, perhaps, but true.