I wrote about permanent layoffs for the @markets newsletter today, and how even with an overall recovery that's clearly faster than expected, they're still getting worse at a quicker pace than the Great recession bloomberg.com/news/newslette…
@markets BTW, I think when thinking about the election, it's going to be extra-difficult to plug in some "economic fundamentals" into a model. Top-line GDP growth may be surging, and unemployment is coming down. But beneath the surface, deeper labor market pain is continues to grow.
A middle class, professional thinking about the state of the economy may have been extremely worried about their job in March/April. Then relatively sanguine in June/July, and then increasingly anxious August - October.
Now bear in mind that there's dual-Y axes here, but I think this chart really drives home how weird the situation is right now, and how hard it is to say whether the economy is improving or worsening. And why it may be impossible to gauge its electoral impact this time.
@tracyalloway and I talked to @NNNIncome about the ongoing scarcity of switchgears and transformers, and how you have virtually complete buildings going empty because they can't get one critical missing part.
As @NNNIncome explained there are basically five companies that make this gear. And thanks to booming demand (chips, AI, electrification etc.) they're still absolutely slammed.
He ordered a switchgear a year ago, and was just told it'd be another year's wait.
@NNNIncome And in the meantime, he's carrying an entirely completed building (sans-switchgear), financed at some of the highest rates in decades, for another year, meaning a need to roll debt, accumulate more interest etc.
A 4-hand on the unemployment rate would have really set off some alarm bells. The fact that U3 fell, and thus pushes back the triggering of Sahm Rule removes the impulse for immediate rate cuts.
The company was cofounded by @sama, whose work at OpenAI is contributing to the environment where we might feel the need to get their eyeballs scanned, in order to biometrically prove that they're not a bot.
On this episode we talked about privacy, the technology, what AI could do to the economy, deepfakes, scams, why they decided to build eyeball scanning orbs, how they constructed them. And much more
I've been kind of following markets in one way or another for 25 years now, and I still don't know that much. But one thing that's true that I've observed is that every time the animal spirits get going, people start buying $PLUG
Wrote about it in yesterday's newsletter.
This has got to be one of my favorite charts ever.
$PLUG share price (white) vs. $PLUG market cap (yellow)
With this morning's move, the stock is up 60% since mid-may
If you're interested in State Capacity and "can governments build things" and all that stuff, there's so much in here that's eye opening and insightful on these questions. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
@pahlkadot@allafarce I don't even know where to begin with the various fascinating parts of this conversation, because there were so many.
One darkly hilarious nugget is that during the UI emergency in 2020, California hired people like crazy, and the effect was to slow claims processing down.
@pahlkadot@allafarce This was also really interesting about government RFPs, their complexity, and why the nature of the budgeting process works against good practices in building software.