Author: Kevin Drum

We've all been inundated lately with the news that America's teens are in terrible shape. Addicted to social media. Lonely. Depressed, anxious, and suicidal. Fragile.

But did you also know this?

Marijuana is still fairly widespread, but every other drug is down to practically nothing since 2000. Cocaine, heroin, meth, ecstasy, inhalants, sedatives—you name it and it's dropped off the map. Alcohol use is down by half and cigarette smoking is all but extinct (though vaping has replaced some of it).

Maybe the kids these days are in better shape than we give them credit for?

How's your Swedish?

Does it help if I tell you that fobi is Swedish for phobia? Not really? Fine:

Swedish tabloid Expressen revealed Wednesday that government officials have been ensuring in advance that all places frequented by Gender Equality Minister Paulina Brandberg are free of bananas — due to the minister’s strong phobia of the yellow fruit.

....“Paulina Brandberg has a strong allergy to bananas, so it would be appreciated that there are no bananas in the areas where she will be staying,” states one of the emails.... “It’s sort of an allergy, you could say,” Brandberg told Expressen on Wednesday, then added, “It’s something that I get professional help with” in a follow-up email to the news outlet.

The Swedes seem to be taking this in stride. If it were happening here Brandberg would probably be assaulted with showers of bananas by MAGA enthusiasts every time she appeared in public.

Anyway, I wonder how she handles grocery shopping? Unless you forsake all fruits and vegetables, it's a little hard to avoid the sight of bananas. I expect that eventually AI-powered virtual reality glasses will take care of this.

Over at New York, Kevin Dugan asks the question on everyone's mind: Why has DJT stock tanked over the past week? Shouldn't it have gone up after Donald Trump won? Instead it's plummeted 25% since the election:

Dugan notes that there's been some insider selling, and also that DJT might be suffering due to the frothiness of the entire market. Maybe investors are too busy buying Bitcoin, tech stocks, and S&P 500 index funds to waste time on risky little stocks, even if they're backed by the president of the United States.

These are good points, but after thinking about this for a while I've come around to a different, more prosaic view. We've all been assuming that DJT is basically a play on Trump himself, and that's probably true as far as its meme value goes. But aside from its possible usefulness as a tool of bribery, DJT is still a company that's valued by investors in the usual way based on revenue and earnings. So how will those be affected by Trump's victory? The answer is that they won't be. DJT's value depends entirely on Truth Social's user base, which is so tiny it's almost invisible. Nor is there any real sign it's about to skyrocket. Why would it? You don't have to join Truth Social to read Trump's posts, and there's certainly no other reason to join whether Trump is president or not.

Bottom line: The election didn't really matter after all. Truth Social still has no plausible growth path, and that means revenue will remain minuscule and the company will keep hemorrhaging cash. Given that, even slight selling pressure will drive it down. And it has.

POSTSCRIPT: Needless to say, as with anything Trump related, WTFK? Who the fuck knows? This will be our mantra for the next four years. Anything could happen.

US air travel has continued to grow steadily since the end of the pandemic:

Of the 87 million passengers in August, 75 million were domestic and 12 million were international.

There is still much discourse about Donald Trump bypassing the Senate confirmation process via recess appointments. And I still don't get it. Neither house can adjourn for more than three days without the consent of the other, and the Supreme Court says you need to be adjourned at least ten days for it to count as a recess. So Senate and House would both have to agree to adjourn for three weeks or so.

Or, according to the latest cockamamie theory, they could agree to disagree. Instead of agreeing to adjournment, they'll deliberately disagree and then Trump will use his Article II power to step in and adjourn Congress himself.

This is starting to sound like a conservative version of the trillion-dollar coin. If both Houses are planning to cave to Trump, why would they concoct a weird plan to disagree instead of just adjourning? That doesn't make sense.

Bottom line: This can only happen if both houses agree to adjourn for a considerable time right at the beginning of the session. What are the odds of that?

And anyway, this only matters with a nominee that the Senate doesn't want to confirm. But if they're willing to defy Trump by not confirming, why would they then cave to Trump and go into recess so he can do it himself? And if they aren't willing to do that, would the House really be willing to provoke the Senate by adjourning on its own and causing a constitutional crisis?

And would the Supreme Court allow such an obviously bogus use of the recess appointment power? Even the court's conservatives haven't been very open to that kind of thing.

Unless I hear something that makes sense—even by the loose standards of Donald Trump—I'm sticking to my guns on this. The Senate goes into session on January 3 and the first recess doesn't come until August. End of story.

According to the Washington Post, "live commerce" allows users to buy products in real time, "typically advertised by hosts during live video events on platforms such as TikTok Shop and Instagram Live." And it's booming!

Global sales on these platforms hit $918.9 million last year, according to a Verified Market Research study, and are projected to more than triple by 2031, to about $3.1 billion. And TikTok Shop is among those quickly gaining ground....

Hmmm. Global retail sales amount to about $30 trillion, with a t. So $918 million, with an m, is 0.003% of the total unless I've dropped a digit somewhere. By 2031, that will be up to 0.007%. Approximately. Mostly in China.

Let me put this a different way. Live commerce sales are so small I had trouble finding another product category for comparison. It turns out it's about the size of the rutabaga market. It's one quarter the size of the nail clipper market. But it's bigger than either the frankincense market or the myrrh market.

In other words, you might want to hold off on being too impressed by the hype.

Since I'm beating dead horses this week, let's continue. When Congress passed the various COVID rescue bills, it resulted in massive deficits in 2020-21, which drove up the money supply. How much? This much:

The red shaded area is the excess above the normal growth of M2 money supply, and provides a good proxy for the way COVID stimulus worked its way through the economy. It's easy to add up the total excess and put it in a chart. Here is that chart:

Apologies that it's so busy. The dark blue dashed line is inflation. The other two blue lines show the M2 excess and the stress on supply chains as calculated by the New York Fed. Notice that they both follow the inflation line pretty closely.

The light orange line shows interest rates set by the Fed. Notice that it doesn't follow inflation even slightly. By the time it peaks inflation is already gone.

Inflation was caused by supply chain shortages and COVID stimulus. When they ended, so did inflation. I would like this chart to be tattooed on Jerome Powell's forehead.

Fine. I give up. I thought Pete Hegseth for SecDef was about as unqualified an appointment as you could get. Obviously I was wrong:

"Provocative" indeed. But wait! That's not even the craziest pick today:

Gabbard, as far as I know, has exactly zero background in intelligence. Matt Gaetz may be under investigation for sexual misconduct and might be one of the most hated people in the House (by Republicans!) but at least he has a law degree. I suppose that counts for something. Gabbard's only qualification is that she suddenly decided a few years ago that Democrats were the antichrist:

On October 11, 2022, Gabbard announced on Twitter that she was leaving the Democratic Party, accusing its leadership of "cowardly wokeness, anti-white racism, (being) hostile to people of faith and spirituality, and dragging us closer to nuclear war". Shortly thereafter, Gabbard endorsed and campaigned for several Donald Trump-endorsed Republican candidates.

She now dabbles in Russian-backed conspiracy theories and calls her old home the "Democrat Party," just like every good Republican.

However, like Pete Hegseth and Matt Gaetz, she's good looking and does boffo box office on Fox News. Being good on TV is emerging as a key quality for Trump nominees. The folks who aren't especially photogenic, like Tom Homan and Stephen Miller, have been chosen instead for White House jobs where they can remain safely anonymous. The cabinet picks, by contrast, all have plenty of experience as pit bulls on Fox. When Trump watches TV in his second term, by God, he wants to see his people singing his praises.

I pass this sign every time I return from an astrophotography session in the desert. There are two of them, both misspelled, and I keep wondering if they're ever going to be replaced. The odd thing is that the signs on the eastbound side of the freeway are spelled correctly. Go figure.

From an anonymous defense lobbyist on Donald Trump's choice of Fox News talker Pete Hegseth to be Secretary of Defense:

“Who the fuck is this guy?”

I guess this lobbyist doesn't watch Fox & Friends on weekends?

More to the point, I wonder if Sen. Roger Wicker watches Fox & Friends on weekends? He's in line to be chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, so he'll be in charge of Hegseth's confirmation hearings. Apparently the answer is yes:

“No, I don't have concerns. I'm delighted at the prospect of working with.”

Yeesh. I thought the Senate might bring a tiny bit of adult supervision to Trump's more bizarre appointments, but I guess not.