Kevin Drum

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.

About a week ago I received my Middle Class Tax Refund from the state of California. Apparently we don't file our state taxes electronically, so instead of getting the money direct deposited to our bank account we got a debit card for $500.

I've never used a debit card other than my normal bank card, so I was curious how easy it would be. Here's my story.

1. I called to activate it. With a normal card this takes about 30 seconds. With this one I first had to wait through a 60 second spiel about something or other, then had to press 1 to tell it I wanted to activate a MCTR card.
2. The computer then asked for the last six digits of my Social Security number. This momentarily threw me and I entered the wrong digits. It eventually gave me a second try, and a little mental effort pulled up the correct answer. My card then got activated.
   .
   
3. I surfed over to a website that showed me all the ATMs that would work for free. I went to the closest one but couldn't make it work. It kept showing me a screen asking where I wanted to withdraw money from: checking, savings, or credit card. None of them! I wanted to withdraw money from the debit card I had inserted.
4. Confused, I went to the next place on the list. It was exactly the same. It was also broken.
5. Then I went to a third place. By then I realized that all the ATM machines were Allpoint branded, so they all worked the same. No dice on the money withdrawal.
6. Finally I went to my own bank, but the same thing happened.
7. Feeling dejected, I went home. Eventually, Marian pulled up the 2-sided, small print instructions and showed me where it clearly said I should have picked checking in order to get my money. This does not strike me as intuitive at all.
8. A couple of days later I paid for lunch with the debit card. It worked fine!
9. So I went back to one of the ATM machines, and this time I chose the checking option and tried to withdraw $100. This got me a little further, but then it reported an error and ejected my card.
10. The same thing happened at two other ATMs on two more days.
11. WTF?

So that's where I am. I still don't know why I can't get money from it, though I suppose I'll eventually deplete it if I remember to use it to buy enough stuff. That said, I don't give the state of California high marks for all this nonsense. For me this is just a minor annoyance, but for someone who really needed the money it would be frustrating indeed.

I am bored. Kevin McCarthy just lost his 7th vote for Speaker, amassing his usual 201 votes. Matt Gaetz switched his vote from Byron Donalds to Donald Trump. Here are a few miscellaneous charts to keep you entertained while we continue this dreary process.

We're about to start the latest vote-a-thon for Speaker of the House, and it strikes me that the key question is:

Are there five Republicans who flatly won't vote for Kevin McCarthy no matter what? Deals don't matter, promises don't matter, ideology doesn't matter. They just won't do it.

Well, are there?

Imports and exports continued their downward trend in November:

Imports of consumer goods are down $23 billion since the March peak. Imports from China are down $11 billion. This is yet another example of the general decline of economic activity over the past six months or so.

Emma Fraser is really unhappy that Netflix has canceled 1899 after only a single season:

Nothing says ushering in the new year like attempting to break old habits. Netflix obviously didn’t get the resolutions memo, not even waiting until everyone had gone back to work before swiftly canning yet another ambitious series after one season. Yep, 1899 walks the same cancellation plank as shows like Archive 81 and The Midnight Club, with the news this week that, despite its popularity, Netflix is ending the series.

....So, why is this a big deal? Shows have long been dumped unceremoniously throughout the history of network TV....It is a business, after all, and only a handful of episodes have likely been shot in those cases; viewer investment isn’t as entrenched.

Flashforward (unintentional TV reference ahoy!) to the binge model and getting shit-canned after an entire season—complete with a tantalizing cliffhanger—is now the norm. Getting invested in a new series at all starts to feel rather pointless. It’s no wonder that, following the cancellation of 1899, people on Twitter are venting about how they’re so tired of getting hooked on a new Netflix series only for it to end after a season. The sentiment online is fueled by annoyance that this has happened yet again.

Two things. First, I'll bet that 1899's fans aren't so unhappy that they'll give up on Netflix—and that's probably all Netflix cares about.

Second, there's no telling why this happened. It might have been purely financial, but it also might have been a fight over creative control or something like that. Netflix might not be entirely to blame.

OK, three things. My advice is for Netflix to follow the Firefly model. It had a genuine following but wasn't profitable enough to keep going as a TV series. But it also had a bunch of unresolved story lines, so Joss Whedon shopped around the idea of a theatrical film to tie things up. Universal bit and the film was made. The same thing could be done with 1899.

Now, it's true that Whedon's movie didn't do well. But why not try again with 1899, except as a Netflix film? The great thing is that at the end of 1899, we discover that all the weird stuff happening is because the characters are living in a virtual reality created by a space ship in the year 2099. So instead of a weird, hard-to-describe puzzle box set on an ocean liner a hundred years ago, the sequel would be a nice, genre-friendly science fiction film that has a good chance of attracting a wider audience.

Why not?

The New York Times reports that the Fed is still worried about inflation:

Federal Reserve officials worried that inflation could remain uncomfortably fast, minutes from their December meeting showed, and some policymakers fretted that financial markets might incorrectly interpret their decision to raise interest rates more slowly as a sign that they were giving up the fight against America’s rapid price gains.

I get it. I'm not an economist, and it's easy to heckle from the cheap seats. If I were sitting on the Fed board I might feel more nervous about things.

But the Fed seems to have fallen completely into the rabbit hole of forward expectations. That is, they believe the Fed needs to credibly signal what it's going to do so that financial markets will respond "correctly."

There are some cases where this makes sense, mostly when you're dealing with a recession or a crash. If markets know that the Fed is committed to being a liquidity backstop, they will panic less and be less likely to produce a doom spiral.

But I just don't get the whole "forward expectations" school of thought when it comes to inflation. How are the markets going to respond? Will companies decide not to raise prices? Will workers decide not to ask for higher wages? I've never seen any credible evidence of this outside of hyperinflation episodes.

Rather, I continue to believe that inflation is fundamentally hydraulic. It goes up and down based on underlying movements of the economy, and that's it. These fundamentals might or might not include money supply, interest rates, tightness of labor markets, oil prices, endogenous variables, and so forth, all lagged by various amounts (oil hits inflation quickly, interest rates take a year or so). The Fed controls some of these, but (a) has only a modest impact and (b) has to be aware of lags.

In any case, I have no reason to think that expectations are on this list. Hell, Japan has been trying to raise inflation for years with no luck. And serious economists have taken to saying that nobody understands inflation. If that's the case, then why are so many people enthused about expectations, which strikes me as akin to clapping your hands or wearing a WIN button? It just doesn't work.

But I'm open to argument on this. What's the best shortish piece around on the impact of expectations on inflation?