If or when the Fed raises rates next week it will close a remarkable wealth event. Over past 2 years $5 trillion in mortgages have been refinanced at interest rates that hit historical lows.

So we asked: Who had access to that wealth event?

bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-… The answer, we quickly determined, is that White homeowners had a much easier time than Black or Hispanic ones refinancing. But as my Bloomberg colleague @annjychoi dived into the data one bank kept popping up as an outlier in the industry: Wells Fargo.

Tech company ID.me is rapidly becoming a gatekeeper for Americans trying to access government services online from the IRS to Social Security and unemployment insurance. The question is: Should a for-profit company even be in that role?

bloomberg.com/news/features/… ID.me verifies your identity using a mixture of things like selfies and facial recognition software and scans of documents. It says it now has more than 68 million registered users and is adding more at the rate of ~145,000 a day.

bloomberg.com/news/features/…

Dems seem likely to vote on @POTUS' $1.6tn #BuildBackBetterAct today. One thing missing: Reform of the unemployment system.

Why does that matter? @economics dived into what happened in Georgia to 2.25m claims filed in the first year of the pandemic.

bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-… The data we got show Black workers were more likely than White ones to be denied unemployment benefits in Georgia. As much as twice as likely...

bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-…

We don’t talk enough about those who fell through the cracks in this pandemic.

People like Barb Ashbrook, Ray Rand, Ralph Wyncoop and Anthony Barela.

They and 9m others didn’t get the help needed, as my @economics colleague @readep & I write for @BW:

bloomberg.com/news/features/… We spent months gathering data and talking to people, experts, lawyers & officials around America. It was sobering. Half the 64.3m people who applied for regular unemployment – the system left after this crisis – didn’t get benefits. That’s 2x denial rate in the Great Recession.

One of the fascinating things is how rarely people challenge those who say that the Trump steel and aluminum tariffs created/saved jobs in that industry... The American steel industry was shedding jobs even before this pandemic... data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES… In January 2020 the US primary metals industry employed 5,000 fewer people than it did in January 2016, When Trump took office...

We need to talk about the middle class.

For decades the idea guiding business decisions around the world has been that of an ever-growing new middle in emerging economies.

Well you can add that to the list of economic truths upended by this pandemic.

bloomberg.com/features/2021-… The global middle class - there's 2.5bn people out there earning $10-50/day - shrank last year for the first time since the 1990s.

And as @GitaGopinath warned this week that's not the end of the story. Developing economies are recovering far slower than places like the US.

The challenge for the US here is that the US doesn’t set tax policy in other countries. And that policy makers in other countries don’t have to look back very far to see a very different message coming out of the White House...

https://twitter.com/jakesullivan46/status/1379205937752383489

https://twitter.com/sdonnan/status/1379269800610955266

Biden’s about to test just how much bipartisan backing there is for a new American industrial policy. But the forces he’s taking on in his bid to boost manufacturing aren’t just political...

My latest for ⁦@BW⁩:
bloomberg.com/news/articles/… One big hurdle: How do you make producing in US cost-competitive?

GE Lighting last week shut down a line at its plant in Bucyrus, Ohio, that made LED bulbs. They spent a year and millions trying to make it cost-competitive. And the company says they just couldn’t...

And we're off with Katherine Tai's confirmation hearing... Chairman Ron Wyden kicks it off with a call for "smarter, stronger" US trade policy... "Four more years of mean tweets and chaos from the White House won't cut it..."

finance.senate.gov Here's five questions I'd like to see senators ask @USTradeRep nominee Katherine Tai:

bloomberg.com/news/newslette…

Today in why context matters...

The initial jobless claims data out this morning points to what some are calling a "sharp fall" in weekly claims.

Claims last week were 3.5x what they were a year ago. The 4-week moving average was almost 4x. And that doesn't include special programs set up in response to the pandemic that the latest data show covering >12m of the >19m in the US claiming or receiving unemployment benefits.

Another bit of context: 19m is the population of New York state.

Been thinking about this lovely piece by my former colleague @JoshuaChaffin... My initial take on the 5 I’d invite to dinner was: Philip Roth, Don Delillo, Jan Morris. Nina Simone and Tim Flannery (Aussie polyglot). But I’m having doubts.

Your 5?

ft.com/content/75f76d… My main qualm is I’m worried that I have too many ornery people on my list... I’m pretty sure I’d just end up in a corner talking to Jan, Nina and Tim while Philip and Don grunted at each other in a corner.

If you scratch the surface of this economic crisis it’s not hard to find the legacy of the last... In Cleveland you can find it in the churn in ownership of rental properties in Black neighborhoods. One house we looked at traded hands 7x in two years... 1/ bloomberg.com/news/features/… 11410 Clarebird Ave was essentially owned by two families between 1975 and the early 2000s.

It peaked in value in 2004 at $93k.

Last year it sold to its current owner, a company called BL US1 LLC, for just over $65k.

In other words in 15 yrs it lost a third of its value.

Economics is about people. So if you want to understand an economy you have to talk to its people.

Since late March I've been speaking to people in Ambridge, PA, a place that once was called Economy.

This @BW story was the result:

bloomberg.com/news/features/… @BW This is Felicia Mycyk. She is a track and football coach. She's also a community activist who does all sorts of things from handing out laptops to kids who need them to running Zoom community discussions. She runs Ambridge Connection, which is like a community corner on Facebook,

Spoke with my mother in Australia last night and it reinforced for me how the US has completely lost perspective on COVID-19 both in terms of scale of outbreak here and needed response.

Australia has seen daily cases spike to 450+ a day. No there aren’t zeros missing there... Australia is a small country. But it has a population of 24m people. That’s more than Florida (20m), which is reporting roughly 10,00 cases a day.

My county in Maryland has a population of 1m. It has reported 17k cases and > 700 deaths. Australia has had 14k and 161 deaths.

Economics is about people. So if you want to understand if an econ policy works you need to talk to people.

I made two trips to Cleveland earlier this summer to ask whether a $2tn federal rescue is working. And I met some great people...

bloomberg.com/news/features/… This is Bridget Ferguson. She is 28 and a mother to five kids under 8. Her bid to relaunch her life after more than a year living in a shelter was delayed by the pandemic in March. She moved into a new home in June. But she still needs child care so she can go back to work.

So I can report that @M_C_Klein and @michaelxpettis’ “Trade Wars are Class Wars” is good beach reading. Woke up with a few thoughts after finishing it last night.

1. It’s not about trade wars. It’s a history book about global imbalances. The title is #2020 clickbait. 2. It’s light on the past decade since the financial crisis. In fact it feels like there’s more written about 2008 and MBS than the rise of populism.

3. Hobson’s idea that exports and “over production” are a false economy is seductive. But it ignores human ambition.

This is late. But we need a definition of what a new Cold War means.

I lived through final two decades of the last Cold War. I get the power competition parallel with what’s developing between US & China. But at no point did US and USSR have a major econ relationship, for one. I have spent more than a year hearing people deploy the phrase. It sounds ominous. But underlying the first Cold War was a decades-long tension that one mistake might mean the end of life as we know it in a matter of minutes under a mushroom cloud.

“For basically six weeks I’ve received nothing.”

One of the responses to the US economic crisis underway was an expansion of unemployment benefits.

But the reality is millions of claims are still unpaid. And that is helping fuel the push to reopen.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/… The reality is that the implementation of the UI expansion has been far from smooth. Across the country state systems have been overwhelmed.

The first wave was to file unemployment claims. Now the problem is state systems are struggling to administer those claims.

How dependent is the US on China for medical products and pharmaceuticals? Maybe less than you would think based on the current discourse...

This report from the non-partisan Congressional Research Service is fascinating:

crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/… The share with some PPE and Covid-19 related materials is different, of course.

A Saturday morning coffee thought as the kids sleep in:

Everyone wants to pull up the drawbridge in a pandemic. I can see my neighbors starting to agitate about shutting down the one-lane bridge into our little community. No one wants Covid-19 to land on their street... That’s obviously what is happening on a bigger scale with borders around the world. And yet we are quickly learning that pulling up the drawbridge is a false choice...

Trump signing this legislation and the muted reaction is a reminder that in economic diplomacy the threat is usually more powerful than the reality... The US looks like the bank robber with a gun who pulls the trigger and all that comes out is a flag that says “Bang!”

https://twitter.com/business/status/1199932681934516224

That’s convenient this time for Trump since it clears the way for the deal he wants with China. But, like the August declaration that China is a currency manipulator (which went off with a whimper) it also betrays the weakness of some US economic diplomatic “weapons”.