The Washington Post reports today that consumer sentiment softened this month. That's true enough. But they also say this:
That pessimism is altering consumers’ spending habits. McDonald’s, Home Depot, Under Armour and Starbucks all recently reported disappointing earnings, as people cut back on fast food, kitchen renovations, sneakers and afternoon lattes.
....Employers are adding fewer jobs, wage growth has decelerated, and Americans are holding off on big purchases like homes, cars and washing machines.
Come on, folks. Do we have to keep doing this? Nobody has to guess at consumer buying habits by looking at fast food, kitchen renovations, sneakers or afternoon lattes. Why? Because every month the government publishes a nice, tidy summary of all consumer spending. Here it is through March:
Whatever else you can say about the economy, consumers are not pulling back on spending.
And guess what? The government also publishes lots of other handy statistics! I'll spare you the charts, but real wage growth has been up steadily; home sales are down from their 2021 boom year but have increased lately; auto sales are up and have been steady lately; and durable goods consumption is up. Inflation has been hovering around 3% for an entire year, which is not especially dire. Hell, even consumer sentiment, which sparked this article in the first place, has been steadily up except for the single month of May—so it's a little early to be pretending there's some kind of downward trend.
It's hard not to feel like giving up sometimes. This is not arcane information. It's all easily available in a matter of minutes from FRED or the agency websites. So why does the Post publish a jumble of misleading or outright incorrect economic statistics instead of just looking them up first? I will never figure this out.
FRED says auto sales remain below pre-pandemic peak and the numbers do look kind of soft. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TOTALSA
FRED says seasonal home sales rate is noisy, but IMO there are reasons for concern here. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EXHOSLUSM495S
But also hey, just found this one showing the crunch in housing supply, even at the national level - we definitely don't have a housing crisis, huh? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ESALEUSQ176N /s
Interest rates would hurt auto sales, but cars had been sitting at a pretty inflated price.
Why do they misrepresent the state of the economy? because a Democrat is in the white house.
This was another episode of easy to answer questions.
And 'Republicans in disarray' just doesn't have that zing.
Yep.
It is getting so that nothing is "true" in the media...Where to seek truth on a daily basis. I have cut off the NYT and WaPo is next unless they offer me another sweet very cheap deal.
Maybe it's just time to stop reading...
agreed; they feel irrelevant these days
now we have endless navel-gazers discussing mental decline in old age, surreptitiously keeping the preferred right wing narrative alive
but there are no similar articles discussing the social impact of dishonesty, narcissism and corruption in america's ruling class
we're stuck with an overton window defined by center right vs extreme right wing points of view
like a valid debate in 1860 would be: 'slavery: economic powerhouse, or civilizer of the savage races?'
"…dishonesty, narcissism and corruption in america's ruling class"
I believe you have just categorized a big thing what is wrong with the US. We minimized it before by keeping oligarchs out of government. Although further along, this seems to be the problem with Russia.
UK's next Prime Minister,
https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1cvp2j2/wish_i_was_this_expressive/
Very likely. Maybe not "next", but soon.
It's simple: in terms of the popular organized news media in America (I'm excluding unorganized media like TikTok), there's two major groupings. The first is right-wing propaganda thinly disguised (or undisguised) as news: Rupert Murdock's holdings, Sinclair Broadcasting, and their ilk.
The second is what tends to be called the "mainstream" media.
The former group can survive and thrive on a relatively small audience that it both cultivates and creates, and if that's a problem, there's enough big money investors willing to keep these platforms afloat in order to exert influence.
The latter group tries to survive by appealing to as broad an audience as possible and by presenting stories as objective and fact-based, not partisan propaganda. That consumers of the first group and right-wingers "working the refs" constantly accuse the mainstream media of being liberal propaganda seems to convince most mainstream outlets that they have to "prove" they are objective.
But any coverage that's even potentially political these days runs into a big problem: Donald Trump generates scandal whenever he speaks, and the press keeps treating that as newsworthy; worse, things like his criminal trial ARE newsworthy. But the coverage is going to be overwhelmingly negative: story after story of how Trump is a venal, corrupt man and it looks like you're taking sides. So how to counter that? You have to run positive Trump stories, obviously, but that's difficult when there's so much negative to report, so you also have to run stories that are bad for Biden, to prove you aren't taking sides.
Consider the extreme example: candidate A has a scandal a week, and almost nothing positive to write about them, while B is exemplary. The propaganda news (in the tank for A) constantly runs positive stories about A and horrific ones about B, either spinning or omitting negative stories about A. Now, a competent fact-based news media would constantly run negative stories about A and positive ones about B. But that looks EXACTLY like being B's propaganda machine, not an objective news media, even if doing so is factually correct.
So the news media can't report like that. They need to dirty up B and make A look better to "prove" they aren't picking sides. And yes, that can be hard to do, but they have two big things going for them: they can report on the propaganda about A and B (positive about A, negative about B), regardless of its truth, in the name of "balanced coverage," and they can concentrate on negative coverage of B while running fewer positive stories.
Note that "fact" doesn't enter into the equation at all. Multiple studies show that many people convinced of something contrary to fact will, when confronted with that fact, be MORE convinced of their contrary position instead of changing their minds. Presenting a journalistic story focused on the facts, then, merely reinforces the readerly perception that you're printing propaganda.
When the Post does politically-focused stories about inflation, then, its reporters DO NOT CARE about the facts so much as reporting the story in a way which is "balanced." "Inflation still a problem for Biden among voters" is an accurate political story, even if it's framed using misleading information about the economy; that misleading impression of the economy is WHY Biden is having trouble in this area, and if the Post tried instead to correct that impression, they've moved from describing the political situation impartially to supporting Biden (in their eyes).
The fact that misrepresenting the facts is ALSO an act which supports one political candidate (Trump) over the other either escapes the Post's editors, or is the point: if Trump is re-elected, they can point to all the stories that hurt Biden and claim impartiality.
Because "doom" sells? Most of the media these days is about getting clicks to sustain advertisers. I don't even read the Post anymore since I have to register to do so. I can read Reuters for free and get the same information.
I think the shorter non-clickbaity story is that people with money are still spending it. People without money are still pissed about it. All business entities are focused on the people with money and everything is being optimized for people with money.
They’re gonna be so disappointed when trump shuts them down next year.
Haha
"So why does the Post publish a jumble of misleading or outright incorrect economic statistics instead of just looking them up first? I will never figure this out."
Probably the same reason that we keep being told that police are murdering black men every day, or that women can't get accepted into university or whatever today's outrage is.
People addicted to a particular view of the world are not going to give it up based on something as trivial as "facts" and "actual reality". Not on the left, not on the right, not as "journalists", not as "pundits".
We have a word for people who DO change their mind based on facts, we call them scientists, and real scientists form about .1% of the population.
Interesting aside. Over the past ten days or so you could see how this played out in a non-political forum. Apple shipped the M4 chip with some, uh, very interesting performance numbers. Over the next ten days, the bulk internet engaged in the usual screaming match over how this was cheating, GB6 was paid for by Apple, blah blah blah, while the few scientists did their thing.
- Hypothesis 1. Has Apple implemented SME as instructions that route to AMX? Seems crazy, right? But look deeper! Apparently SME has been present in XCode for a year (but barely noticed!) And GB6 was recently revised to use SME. Soo...
Evidence builds up. Within a day it's agreed by the scientists, M4 uses SME.
- So do they use SVE? And SSVE? Now we have to wait till an iPad is available in the wild. As soon as it is some test are run. SME, yes! SVE, no! SSVE, yes! 512b wide (as expected, of course). BUT the first SSVE numbers are absolutely terrible. Why? Again the crazy internet goes off on ideological rants (Apple doesn't know what they are doing. Apple crippled the hardware. etc etc). While the scientists look at the code used to get the terrible numbers.
- Hypothesis 3. The code is broken (in multiple ways) but first hypothesis is that it does not initialize the vectors correctly (kinda true), and the test harness is very confused. So maybe that's the problem, non initialized vectors are being resynched with NEON vectors? OK, examine the manual. In fact SMESTART DOES initialize the vectors all to 0 so, just by luck, the code is OK correct here (though the test harness is still broken)
- Hypothesis 4. Why is the code accumulating to Z registers not ZA registers? That makes no sense in terms of hardware design! Quick look at the spec. Apparently that IS allowed (by a TERRIBLE decision by ARM that they are going to come to regret very soon...) and doing so of course forces some terrible slow hardware path. So another scientist writes some better code, that accumulates to ZA and, voila, full performance.
The point here is that this is the way it ALWAYS IS about EVERYTHING. Politics is not something different.The default human stance is some lazy theory of the world that privileges a certain set of actors, attitudes, and outcomes, and intreprets EVERYTHING based on those. If you think Apple sucks, then no need to understand why a result looks bad, OF COURSE it's because Apple suck. Likewise if you think the Biden economic team sucks, or the police suck, again no need to actually look at any claim about what they have done, you already know what happened and why.
The most obvious recent non-economic example of this is the "maternal mortality in America is out of control" nonsense. This was reported by some dubious organization, and IMMEDIATELY trumpeted by the usual suspects like The Guardian or SciAm because it fed directly into their prejudices. A simple examination of the data showed it had to be wrong - maternal mortality DOUBLING from 2018 to 2021? WTF???
But who needs to look at numbers when the truth is already known...
https://www.ajog.org/article/S0002-9378(24)00005-X/fulltext
Time for the name99.1 AI update, cause name99 AI just melted down into gibberish.
*sigh* There you Libruls go again, with your "facts" and your "statistics." When are you going to learn that what matters is the Received Truth as told by the Lord's Chosen. Everything else is just Satanic Lies and Hoaxes.
Also, son, you gotta understand the media are a business, and all this soft-headed "truth" and "journalistic ethics" stuff don't mean squat next to clicks and eyeballs and hard advertising revenue. Plus, gotta keep sources sweet, especially if You Know Who wins again, so waddaya waddaya?
In recent decades, journalists ("journalists"?) prefer to ask a bunch of clueless people on the street about highly technical issues which they know nothing about. Sometimes they even collect numbers, in surveys.
The result is about what you might hear in a bar late on a Friday night. Maybe "journalists" should just skip the middle man and go straight to the bar.
It is easy enough to remember the good ones, but much harder to keep track of the useless hacks pumping out stuff that makes us stupider.
So I've started keeping a list of journos who write worthless slop like this. (Perfect for the one of the special pages in the front of the paper organizer I still use.)
I have trouble caring too much about them, I just get sick of wasting my time being tricked in to reading replacement-level propaganda. So this is now a one-strike-you're out thing for me.
Those people will be replaced by ChatGPT soon enough anyway.
The U.S. mainstream press is becoming increasingly brain-dead, full stop.
The U.S. mainstream press is increasingly spewing authoritarian-style propaganda full stop; of course it's brain-dead. Has there ever been anywhere at any time authoritarian propaganda that was _not_ braindead from the get-go?
As a long-time Post reader, I have seen it go significantly down in quality over the past 8-10 years. What was once a sober center-left perspective now appears to be in a civil war with a progressive staff writing from their perspective while senior normie liberals like Ruth Marcus try to keep the paper on the older path, with waning success. A little bit of NPR type drift going on.
You keep trying to push that narrative about the Post's mission-creep, much good may it do you.
Insurance rates are up across the board. It counts as consumer spending, but acts more like rent seeking. Repairs are more costly too--again counts as consumer spending, but feels like highway robbery. Mortgage payments spiked and may be coming down a bit, but it could take a while for people to feel that.
The Whitehouse does have some info, but it's 1990 to 2019--nothing more recent--on cost of living, with some breakdown by category:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2021/08/11/the-cost-of-living-in-america-helping-families-move-ahead/
Given what does and does not appear on the X-axis of Kevin’s chart of BEA data, it ends with March of 2024. Otherwise I would expect to see an “April” on the right side of the X-axis and that last segment be a little longer. Is March from when the specific company reports used by the Post are? Or did those come out in April or thusfar in May?
Since this is consumer spending, using the BLS CPI calculator seems appropriate. That said, Kevin hasn't said which calculator he used and if he is converting "now" dollars to "then" or "then" dollars to "now." Still...
If January 2022 was $18.4 trillion in January 2022 dollars, the BLS CPI calculator implies if keeping up with inflation that would be $20.44 trillion in March 2024 dollars: https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=18.4&year1=202201&year2=202403 But the March 2024 point on the chart (last one I believe) is well below $20 trillion - the major tic on the Y-axis is $0.2 trillion, and we don't even see $19.4.
If March 2024 is $19.35 trillion (Mk I eyeballing), and he was converting "then" to "now" dollars, that would have been $17.24 trillion in January of 2022: https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=19.35&year1=202403&year2=202201 But it clearly was not that as presented on the chart. The Y-axis of the chart doesn't go below $18.2 trillion.
So, unless there was a different calculator used for inflation adjustment of overall consumer spending, it isn't clear that consumer spending has indeed kept-up with inflation. Or, where I have gone astray in my calculations.
I can't reproduce Kevin's graph either, but the BEA has done a calculation of its own:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCEC96
As I keep saying, the economy is back on the course it has been following since about 2010, that is slow improvement. People who think the economy was better in the Trump administration are denying reality - but then we know that half the country is in that state of denial anyway.
I couldn't find the data Kevin was using, but did find quarterly data for what I think is personal consumption expenditures (link below). That data from the BEA was seasonally adjusted and, according to the footnotes, "deflated using the PCE deflator"....so maybe adjusted for inflation already.
https://apps.bea.gov/iTable/?reqid=19&step=2&isuri=1&categories=survey&_gl=1*1cs6pih*_ga*OTAxMjI0MTEwLjE3MTYyMTAwNTE.*_ga_J4698JNNFT*MTcxNjIxMDA1MS4xLjEuMTcxNjIxMDEyNi41OS4wLjA.#eyJhcHBpZCI6MTksInN0ZXBzIjpbMSwyLDNdLCJkYXRhIjpbWyJjYXRlZ29yaWVzIiwiU3VydmV5Il0sWyJOSVBBX1RhYmxlX0xpc3QiLCI1OCJdXX0=
I think they took some (possibly?) correct data: 'luxury' purchases as down and extrapolated to the whole economy and consumer confidence. As Kevin points out, consumer spending on the whole is up so what's going on?
A pretty deep and interesting article could be written about how "Starbucks purchase" reduction are indicative of SOMETHING, but perhaps not overall confidence or spending. Maybe people are p-ssed about their labor practices and are staying away? Maybe jacked up MacDonalds pricing is doing the same? When home purchases are down, don't Home Depot (and Lowe's) also go down as people aren't spending more to 'fixup' their new home?
I'd say a lot of these are interesting questions, but require some digging and thinking and maybe the Post reporters just can't be bothered and go with "conventional wisdom" that can be easily debunked but no one bothers.
the most obvious 'tell' in any business news publication is when they happily provide verbal characterization of the data but absolutely refuse to publish charts
and if they use charts, they''l cherry pick the date ranges or fuck with the vertical scales
the obvious explanation is it's harder to do right wing business propaganda if you provide accurate charts
The term "journalist" no longer has the same seriousness or truthfulness as it used to have.
Solemn journalism has been replaced by partisan yelling and over talking.
Guests on news shows are chosen for their point of view rather than truthfulness of that point of view
Its NOT "state run" propaganda like a Pravda or North Korean News channel, but, its propaganda, none the less.
all business articles are just future portfolios to submit to fox, cnbc, ibd, or the wsj
The Post publishes drivel on the economy because it benefits Jeff Bezos to have people mad at Washington. Period. End of story.
The Post's new Bezos-picked publisher is a Murdoch creature awaiting judgement in a UK court.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/new-claim-puts-washington-post-boss-will-lewis-in-crosshairs-of-murdoch-scandal?ref=author
https://www.thedailybeast.com/wapo-boss-will-lewis-was-at-center-of-murdoch-cover-up-new-docs-claim?ref=author
Well, this might explain the increasing number of new, ultra-maga cartoonists appearing, and the many wingnut editorials...
Starbucks, McD's, et al are taking a beating internationally from the Pro Palestinian movement
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/companies-starbucks-mcdonalds-face-controversy-amid-israel-hamas/story?id=104219615
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