"...boosted expectations that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates in September to stimulate the economy"
The new unemployment rate is 4.3% That's above the Fed's 4% target for full employment, but not all that high above it.
By contrast, inflation is about 3% -- a full percentage point above the target of 2%, and 50% higher.
Lowering target rates is supposed to lower unemployment and raise inflation. Once you hit full employment, additional money for wages increases money supply without increasing product supply.
The Fed, of course, has more precise models than I've just described. But these numbers suggest to me that the Fed should leave rates as they are; they aren't any kind of emergency or pending emergency. The market is at or near record highs; it doesn't need its bubble expanded.
I know the the Fed is under political pressure because politicians like soaring stock markets. And the pressure is now verging on threats. But it still seems unlikely that the Fed will cave quite so soon when the numbers say to do just the opposite.
Well, apparently the market disagrees. Futures are now pointing to a 100% chance of at least a 25 basis point cut at the next meeting, and the chance of a 50 basis point cut went from 0 to 11.6%: https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/interest-rates/cme-fedwatch...
On one hand, it's beyond clear by now that these numbers are always much more optimistic than usual. We just say June and July revised down to negative 10,000 or so. And even then those jobs are inflated by gig work that can barely make ends meet.
On the other hand, I don't think hyper inflation is the solution to the recession we are seemingly heading towards at this rate. Seems like something is going to give. Sadly doesn't seem to be the billionarires being taxed properly./
I'm curious, if we eliminated the central bank and let interest rates float with private banks, would it have a similar lag time? Seems like it might let the market adjust faster and match supply and demand for loans better.
The Fed's job is to act counter to the trends. As the saying goes, their job is to take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going.
Their goal is to keep the economy steady, rather than maximally responsive. Their mandate is for a stable business environment, and incidentally stable employment. They were established to counter the boom-and-bust cycle we saw throughout the 19th century, with bank panics every few years.
They've created a pretty massive destabilization bust of the dollar, with a massive unrecovered crash since the inception of the fed [0].
Not long after the fed's inception, there was massive GDP destabilization[1], and then further boom-and-bust cycles.
Unemployment cycles circa before/after fed don't look terribly different either, especially if you exclude war time. In fact there was a pretty terrible boom-bust cycle about 20 years after the fed's inception. [2]
Which all does have me double checking all of this. We're getting long lag times, one giant bank bust in slow motion except distributed across all of us with USD going to zero, and even after the fed was created an awful great depression which some economists have theorized the fed even made worse.
Moving back to the response time -- it was a genuine question. I have no idea. Maybe the fed speeds up response by having an endless ability to quantitatively ease. Or maybe it acts like a big flywheel.
> They've created a pretty massive destabilization bust of the dollar, with a massive unrecovered crash since the inception of the fed [0].
The "bust of the dollar" is a valid critique if you keep your dollars literally under your mattress or literally buried in the ground. As Nick Maggiulli observed in 2022:
> Hot take: This is a good thing.
> No currency should be able to buy the same basket of goods over very long timespans through hoarding. If you want to retain the purchasing power of your money, it should participate in society via investment.
> Nick is right: Cash is a medium of exchange, not a store of value.
> Leave assets in dollars since 1913, your investing incompetency cost your estate/foundation a 99% loss. Invest cash in stocks, real estate, or other risk assets + your returns are up more than 10,000%.
If it behaves like gas prices, then they will travel one direction instantaneously and the other direction only after months of profit are accrued. Generally most markets selling tangible goods shift prices rapidly only to the benefit of sellers; one can expect interest rates to behave accordingly.
Sure, which is why they were already on track to cut again as inflation was coming down. That was until Trump through his tariff grenade into the mix causing the fed to take on a wait and see approach.
If both claims are true - unemployment rate is only 0.3% above the target AND unemployment rate is the highest in 4 years - then the only logical conclusions can be that either the unemployment rate has been exceptionally stable in the last years (or there was too little unemployment?), or 0.3% is in fact a significant deviation despite the number appearing small.
During recessions, the number goes to around 10%. That's where it was in the wake of the 2007 crash. It fell pretty much consistently after that -- except for an enormous but short surge during COVID lockdowns. It bottomed out around 3.5% -- below the Fed target, and they raised rates to try to fix that.
The jobs reports are bad, yes, but cutting interest rates is not gonna have any effect there. Companies are actively trimming their workforce or not hiring for macroeconomic/policy reasons like tariffs that have nothing to do with the FED. There simply isn't any meaningful connection between unemployment and rate cuts. No executive is sitting around waiting for a .25 rate cut to hire a bunch of employees when all the other economic data is flashing red.
Hell, even the FED themselves say this and point out correctly that lowering interest rates to "help" employment doesn't work especially in an elevated inflation environment.
"When discussing this trade-off, it is important to emphasize that, since the stagflation of 1970s, the consensus position among macroeconomists is that loose monetary policy can easily lead to high inflation without persistent gains in lowering unemployment rates. Therefore, a guiding principle of post-1980s monetary policy has been that it should not be used to try to achieve permanently higher employment."
https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/economic_b...
But of course, we have already passed through the authoritarian looking glass and the Trump regime doesn't even bother to lie badly about their justifications at this point. Trump wants lower interest rates therefore they should happen. Anything else is noise.
Let's be honest: the trouble here is that both of those numbers are wrong.
They have been changing and adding exceptions to the basket of goods measuring inflation for many years now.
Unemployment statistics have a long series of problems that have to do with considering who is counted.
The current administration is actively putting pressure on the staff publishing these numbers and replacing key stats people.
You gain a competitive power advantage through information asymmetry. It comes at great cost to the overall economy but it seems to be too juicy for politicians to ignore at this point.
You are utterly wrong, and you can easily read about it and find the process behind all of the numbers. The current administration just hates facts that go against their narrative and so are installing yes-men to give the "facts" they want them to give.
there is a lot of half correct and half in-correct information in this thread. it might be worth reading some of the articles im linking
the high-level facts are
1.) unemployment and number of available jobs is bad right now, and inflation never got back down to 2% after covid. So Powell made the announcement to lower interest rates. this effect will raise inflation, but create more jobs - which is the correct and more important thing to focus on right now
on top of this, tariffs are making things worse for the average american. based on what powell is saying, the current estimates claim the tariff's alongside the planned increase in inflation will lead to about a 20% increase in prices for the average consumer, but this one time 20% increase is better than having no jobs!
2.) the government has been overestimating the amount of available jobs for 10+ years. A large part of why this is happening is because of the gig economy
an example of what I mean is if you sign up to be an uber driver, uber registers you, the driver, as its own company with US government. this kind of thing is fine for uber, but the government doesn't count you becoming an uber driver as 1 new job - they were counting it as roughly 7 newly available jobs. this is because each new company created in the US roughly brings on 7 employees. larger private financial institutions were correcting for this, but the department of labor statistics hasn't corrected for this. this means banks and private institutions have had better data than the government on the job market for years and were calculating that in to the stock market
3.) to add another layer of confusion, the government calculates the unemployment rate by counting the number of US citizens that file for unemployment checks, but many people found it easier/faster to get a gig economy job in between full time jobs - rather than waiting a 1+ month(s) to get on unemployment checks. this means that the number of people who are unemployed is way higher/worse than what the government is reporting. what this means is that method used to count available jobs AND unemployment are wildly wrong - there are less available jobs and more people unemployed by about 5-7x what was reported this summer.
On top of that, if you look at states where there are stricter/more requirements to become an uber driver, it actually shows the unemployment rate in those states is much higher than expected. the avg unemployment rate amongst these states are probably more accurate to how bad the unemployment situation is in the US overall
4.) the current US administration has fired a lot of employees, which has led to even worse labor statistics/estimates compared to previous years
5.) trump specifically has actually caused a lot of confusion for the average person trying to understand this year's US economic status because we use to have quarterly checkins in June, but as of the past 2 years we've been doing it in July. The way the government tracks important economic indicators starts with the US gov announcing their initial stats, but these numbers often over estimate; so the US gov will often have a large correction the following month
trump this year has been making claims like, "this is the best GDP we've seen in July of recent years!" but of course it's the best because he is intentionally doing the comparison wrong
to ELI5 what I mean, June 2024 had the over estimates stats and the US government would correct them in July 2024. but now in 2025, July is the month with over estimate, and August will be the month we correct the estimates
what we should be doing is comparing august 2025's GDP with July of 2024's GDP. doing so would show you that GDP is not better, but essentially stagnant
trump and his administration are intentionally not doing the comparison correctly for better sounding headlines
Okay, so there will be rate cut soon and the USD will become even weaker, right? Then with those tariffs, which are consumption tax on imports, will become even more pronounced as US added value part will be smaller percentage of the overall final price tag. So everything will be quite expensive if people still have money to pay, if not the margins and as a result the profits of businesses will go down.
Is this an attempt to reduce the infamous American consumerism?
Also maybe force companies to build more in US but wouldn't that require strong immigration as the unemployment is actually still quite low and those who lost jobs wouldn't be plug-n-play employees for manufacturing jobs that didn't exist before.
You have the chart in front of you, yet you cherry pick to confirm your bias. Look at the entire chart. The DXY is at a higher level than it has been for most of it's history (going back the the 1960s). Yes, it's down 10% this year. Guess what? It was up 22% in 2022, putting it at an extremely high level. There is nothing unusual about the dollar's strength at the moment. That could change given that the current administration is hell bent on destroying faith in the US, but as of right now, there's not much of a reaction.
Markets react to differences not historical averages.
The US did quite well economically compared to the rest of the world when dealing with COVID and its aftermath. So some reversion to the mean should be expected, but the timing here suggests it’s policy changes responsible for these trends.
Just eyeballing the all-time chart there, it looks like ~30 of the last 39 years had similar or lower levels. So the "even weaker" = "an increase in existing weakening" reading is supported while "even weaker" = "an increase in existing weakness" is not. Presumably the former was the intention.
Right, based off this phrasing I was expecting USD to be at 5-year lows compared to JPY, CHF, EUR, RMB, BRL, etc. but that does not seem to be the case
Trump is a populist president elected on the back of disparaged unemployment-belt blue collar workers.
That's why he hates fentanyl (these places have insane opiate use rates), that why he loves coal (symbolic of the "great days"), that's why he hates immigrants (undercutting wages), why he hates china (that's were the factories went), and that is why he loves tariffs (American manufacturing protectionism).
Watch a video showcasing what West Virgina is like today, listen to what the people who live there say, and you can totally understand what Trump is trying to do, and why these people treat him like a messiah.
I'm not saying Trump is a messiah, or a good leader, or that the people in west virgina (or categorically adjacent places) are level headed. But simply that his plan is coherent if you put yourself in the shoes of the people who are clinging to the past and were left out of the future.
Completely agree. And anti-immigration policies are suprisingly popular even in non-blue collar circles, because you can sell it as "fighting foreign cultural influence", and a lot of people (globally) are quite convinced that their culture/values are superior (this is true across the political spectrum, too, however lots of groups will only admit to this indirectly).
Coherent like tarifs on everything, including resources, without legislation to bolster local manufactoring. Or how do his tax cuts fit in the big picture of the good'ol days? Or the dismantlement of public infrastructure? IMO, those 3 things are the bigges impacts he made and they are all negative.
Sorry, but this justification of trumps actions sounds delusional. The only thing that interests him is spineless loyalty to serve his will and looking like the toughest guy at the top of his incompetent boot lickers.
Damn if that's your work account I'd love to read what your other accounts say. This is the most coherent picture of what that guy is doing that I've ever read.
Which sucks, because I know people like Biden tried to pave a way to the future for folks like those in West Virginia by migrating jobs from coal to solar and stuff like that, but I can imagine how that went over.
This is an attempt to do repeat what countries like Turkey like tried. They often think cut interest rates -> increase demand -> better employment.
But often they find that combination of worsening inflation and unemployment matched with cutting interest rates is a bad situation to be in. There is often no good way to come out of this. You end up in a cycle of : High unemployment -> cut rates -> employment improves but causes hyperinflation -> increase rates to cool markets -> high employment.
Blunt tariffs is playing a large part. and once Jerome Powell leaves and replaced by a crony is when the real problem will start.
JPow has to be annoyed. He was about to stick the perfect soft landing after killing inflation, then Trump showed up and through a tariff grenade into the economy. And, ironically, the fed was already on track to cut rates until the tariff nonsense. Now when rates are cut it's going to be because we're heading into a self inflicted recession instead of the soft landing we were headed towards before. The growing worry now is stagflation again with rising prices and slowing economy. I guess one bright spot is that we won't really know how bad it gets since it seems anyone who reports real numbers is getting fired. Fun times!
But wasnt JPow's slow reaction to initial inflation one of the main problems to begin with? Although the data was signaling rising inflation he kept saying it's "transitory". Now he says we need to look closely at the data which is what he should have done in the first place.
The data then wasn't quite so clear or simple. Supply chains were hosed so transitory seemed reasonable at the time along with dealing with pandemic after effects. Of course hindsight is 20/20, but when it became clear the inflation was beyond supply chain issues they pivoted hard and got things back under control.
That is, like, ninth on the list of things Powell is concerned about. The Trump administration is literally trying to put fed officers in jail to purge the department. Powell himself faces an essentially fake allegation of perjury over (I'm not kidding) his testimony about a building renovation, though it seems they may have walked that back for now after Trump personally tried to make the accusation at a press conference and stated it incorrectly.
Worry about one's legacy being tarnished is a very not-banana-republic kind of thing.
I fixed housing prices by moving to a place that was completely deregulated then building a shack for $60k. Deregulate and you can make things very cheap even with barely building anything, because the replacement cost to build another livable house is far lower, so now current home owners are bidding against cheap competition.
The actual problem is that voters in municipalities are overwhelmingly homeowners, and their home is overwhelmingly the golden-goose of their wealth, so they do everything possible to protect that, including voting for town leaders who will weaponize regulations to make new builds near impossible.
Right, and we managed to destroy that where I live. Deregulated ("opt-out") houses don't get a certificate of occupancy, so you cannot easily get a mortgage, or easily get insurance. So the house is essentially highly valuable to you but not worth a lot to anybody else. We have no real incentive to regulate because the whole structure of the house paperwork makes it pretty much impossible to use as a goose egg.
What did you actually end up avoiding that would cost so much? Architect/plans/structure permitting? Minimum space/setbacks? Grid hookups? Merely skipping inspections, or did you skimp on actual code compliance?
Also curious where you're at, if you don't mind my asking. The biggest blocker I see here is the concentration of job markets into metropolitan areas (near the centralized money troughs).
One thought that comes to mind is if you could keep remodeling/adding on, and eventually get it to a place where it could get a CoA and become a bubble-worthy house. Kind of an incremental self-mortgage. Not that I don't personally wish to see the bubble smashed to a million pieces, but as long as it isn't, then it is still an attractor.
Minimum space/setbacks? avoided square foot requirements, but there were required setbacks that were legally meaningless since they were smaller than the road easements.
Grid hookups ? yes
Merely skipping inspections, or did you skimp on actual code compliance? skipped inspections and code compliance was not checked.
Have you done any analysis of your biggest sources of savings?
It sounds like the main cost savings was the square foot requirement? Literally just building less structure?
Then maybe followed by grid hookups, the cost of which would have been higher due to being in a less-developed area with cheaper land? With alternatives these days, grid hookups shouldn't really be required for any house, but the state walks on individuals with all the care of a human walking on ants.
Of course there's also the builder overhead, in that professional developers are making a profit based on what the market is willing to pay over the actual cost to build (due to cheap money loans).
To be clear by "code compliance" I meant building things still to code such that they would pass a hypothetical inspection, as opposed to "good enough works for me". Like for example I'd guess that an electric kitchen range will work just fine off of a 12-2 NM. The code has a large margin of safety because over time problems tend to multiply. I tend to do a lot of DIY electrical (legal here), but I make sure to follow the NEC so that an unexpected inspector would have a harder time declaring it "unsafe", so insurance doesn't have any argument that the work was derelict (not that this really matters), and primarily because I accept that I've got unknown unknowns and I don't want to die in a house fire.
Everything is as close to code as possible. I wouldn't wire a range 12-2 willingly but then again I wouldn't hesitate to use one on a 12-2 and then put a 20 amp breaker on it if I had to, and only use one or two burners at a time until I figured out what I could get away with without tripping the breaker :) The NM-B I use is rated for temps well above the steady-state temp at the breaking amperage so the normal 20% derate wouldn't be much a concern.
Not having plans meant I was able to figure out how to do everything, including framing etc on the fly. This made it possible to do the project without having to know everything up front which in my mind would be pretty much impossible for a newcomer. I did not even know how I was going to frame the roof until the walls were already framed.
I believe pretty much everything on my house meets code but it was almost entirely built to the absolute IRC minimum.
I believe part of the savings are the fact I took a lot of risks a builder would never take or at least not without a premium, including buying an unproven well share that worked out perfectly and saved me $~50k over havign to drill my own, doing all my own utility extensions ( DIY underground 200 amp power extension and water main are big ones), and buying unproven land without utilities. It took me 6 months to even get electric connected and it was fortunate I was an electrical engineer who was able to work with the power engineers to get a solution to get power for cheap. I worked with the utility to get exempted from their inspections too so they let me wire the secondary side service entry myself and install the service entry hardware myself.
The lack of inspections though are what made it all possible, because I was able to work a day job and do work on the house on nights/weekends and not have to quit my job to be around during the day for a bunch of inspections.
Square footage definitely a big one. The width of the house was the max size of off-the-shelf dimensional lumber so I was able to build the entire house with no engineered lumber and no load bearing structures anywhere in the interior of the perimeter of the house. I also used 6" grouted cmu foundation which is extremely rare (well normal in latin america) but meets code.
But the biggest savigns were probably just that I was able to do everything DIY without worrying about it getting inspected and then having to do it all over again because an inspector disagreed with something. If it were inspected I probably would have had to hire someone to help me.
Completely not true and in fact dangerously (willfully?) misleading.
Housing is much more complicated than supply and demand - for a start houses are not fungible. Local conditions are extremely important.
A lot of high house prices is due to financial engineering - for example long mortgage periods at low interest rates. Just one of many mechanisms to make the rich richer by making the poor poorer. Any momentary affordability benefit is soaked up by higher prices, and those mortgages have to be paid off for longer with much higher total payments.
High house prices are also caused by demand elasticity - things like AirBnB, 2nd, 3rd, 4th homes for the super rich, and housing as a place to park funny money (regardless of whether the house is actually being used to home people) mean that normal people can't compete with this non-home demand.
That's not true, not if your regulations are sufficiently strict.
For instance, if you tax second homes (or third homes, or homes not occupied at least 8 months out of the year, or whatever specific condition you want to use) at 100% of the value per year, you're going to end the purchase of empty real estate to park money, without directly affecting ordinary middle-class people who just want a place to live.
Unfortunately, such a measure would be politically untenable—frankly, even in the 2024 environment, and exponentially moreso now.
> For instance, if you tax second homes (or third homes, or homes not occupied at least 8 months out of the year, or whatever specific condition you want to use) at 100% of the value per year
Many locales already charge much higher yearly property taxes on homes not owner occupied [1]. Where I used to live my property taxes were ~2k/year or closer to 10k/year if not owner-occupied. Of course most of that increase will just end up passed on to renters.
Well, I think there are two slightly different things we're talking about here:
1) Homestead exemptions, where the extra tax is on properties that are not owner-occupied
2) Taxing vacancy, where the extra tax is on properties that are unoccupied more than a certain amount of the year. (This is the one I was describing.)
Both are worth considering; both have their own pros and cons.
Correct, you do that by building more housing, which naturally makes investments in property less appealing.
There is no other approach. You can follow these paths of taxing, regulating, minimum waging, but none of them create more houses and all of them just push the same air around the inflated balloon.
Eliminating AML controls would probably help. Real estate is a haven asset to exchange value away from the grips of a tightly controlled and monitored banking system, although this is something normally transparent to the middle class.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if interest rates went up 10% tomorrow, housing prices would have to come down if people wanted to actually sell their homes.
I think the biggest challenge you will come up with then, is that if interest rates go up 10% you also just increased their opportunity cost to exchange a house up 10% interest for current owners, and now you have to buy them out of the differential between the ZIRP loan they got and the new interest rate to make it worth their time to sell it.
The 30 year mortgage on ZIRP basically created a ratched effect that locked up the market for 30 years, the only way to unlock it I can think of is to drastically reduce the cost to build a house, you don't even need to hardly even actually build any, just force the hand of current owners by making the replacement cost radically lower.
Housing prices would come down (although many sellers would back out, crushing supply), but mortgage payments would skyrocket. Interest rates and housing is kind of like squeezing a balloon. Building new homes is like letting air out.
They managed to nearly kill inflation without sending the economy into a recession. Housing prices were also slowing though tariffs and increased construction costs are not helping.
No this is an attempt to shift the burden of taxation to the middle class and poor. It is a consumption tax pure and simple. If you tax everything like sneakers and toothpaste the tax burden shifts to the middle class and poor because a billionaire can make income 100 times larger than a middle class person but he does not use a hundred times as much toothpaste and does not buy 100 times more sneakers.
This of course will depress consumption which will seriously damage the economy but the current administration just does not have the brains to consider these effects.
Furthermore, the immigrant chasing is seriously reducing jobs openings. This seems quite the opposite from the intended effect. But it is done so chaotically and with such cruelty that it is flat out destroying businesses rather than allowing them to hire citizens to replace illegal immigrants.
Most people don’t want the jobs done by immigrants—not at the pay levels that the immigrants are willing to take. This idea that getting rid of the “illegals” frees up jobs for locals is complete rubbish.
If you really want to free up jobs for locals, get rid of the HB1 program.
Ron Vara's book actually outlines a whole bizarro universe where devaluing USD constitutes a strength, from some idea that the best way to compete with China is by putting ourselves where China was 30 years ago. So yes, an outright goal of theirs is to weaken USD. I have no idea if they earnestly believe this nonsense, or if they are just getting paid by our adversaries to sell it to the public.
It occurred to me that tariffs are really a backdoor way of introducing consumption tax (aka sales tax, VAT, etc). It has been a conservative policy goal for many years, as the conservatives believe that income tax penalizes entrepreneurship, but the politics make it virtually impossible to switch to because consumption tax is regressive, and it is a huge change. The tariffs debate and the general political atmosphere created a misdirection: voila, we have both income and consumption tax! The next development will be the politicians discovering to their horror the high levels of taxation, and abolishing the income tax. Brilliant!
You should have. The last time around, the price of oil literally went negative. And these gremlins had four years to prepare all the ways they were going to break things this time around.
Overarching goal seems to be increasing the ratio of capital to labor.
Labor is decreased by launching immigrants down the garbage shoot.
Capital increase by tariffing foreign goods which hypothetically might spur domestic production investments.
Labor being rare relative to capital should increase employment.
But really, no guarantee the capital doesn't just flee to the other 95% of the world where they can import capital equipment needed to make stuff for much cheaper, create a cascade effect, and gut the USA even worse. Especially since we have absolutely no clue what the tariffs will be 1/5/10 years from now.
>But really, no guarantee the capital doesn't just flee to the other 95% of the world where they can import capital equipment needed to make stuff for much cheaper
To do that though requires security/stability, supporting infrastructure, and favorable trade policy. For many years that meant China, but this is obviously changing. SE Asia still fits the bill but is under the spectre of expansionist CCP and shrinking US influence. Few places in the world now have the combination above as well as minimal worker protections and low wages as the poor interior of the US south and midwest.
This makes no sense. Capital increase? The tariffs just generate government revenue. It's not like the money supply is expanding. It's being paid by US citizens and businesses. The money supply is dropping, not increasing.
It shows about $100 billion in tariff revenue growth since May, '25. Interestingly your chart shows an overall growth of $232 billion in the same date range. IOW if both charts are right the slight majority of overall supply is coming from somewhere other than tariffs (though tariffs are adding a lot). I wonder where that money is coming from?
Capital used for domestic production. The theory with tariffs is that companies will move capital investments stateside rather than exporting those investments and then importing the final product. The theory anyways.
That will never happen because (1) the Trump Administration has created nothing but uncertainty by making illegal changes to tariff policy via executive order and changing their mind literally several times per week and (2) they have also made imports of raw materials prohibitively expensive, meaning that it's still cheaper to produce overseas and pay the tariff.
This paragraph from the article is probably a bigger story than the August headline:
> August’s job report also included a downward revision to June, which showed the US economy lost 13,000 jobs that month. It’s the first negative employment month since December 2020, and it brings to an end what was the second-longest period of employment expansion on record.
> Antoni graduated from St. Charles Borromeo Seminary with a Bachelor of Arts.[3] He then graduated from Northern Illinois University with a Master of Arts[3] and later a doctorate in economics in 2020
How can someone get a doctorate in economics when they studied "Bachelor/Master of Arts"?
It’s not unusual for social sciences, including economics, degrees to be styled as “of Arts” (the original form for both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees); newer forms like (“of Science”), except for specifically professional degrees, are affectations which may or may not denote any substantive difference (some universities have different colleges with different core requirements independent of degree, that offer BS/MS vs BA/MA degrees, others simply offer only one style for any given major despite similar core requirements.)
Some universities might only offer one despite having a few programs in fields where it is more common for degrees to have the opposite style; at one time, e.g., this was true of Caltech which only issued BS degrees for undergrad though there were one or two majors with very few undergraduate degrees issued in fields where BA would be more common at other institutions.
His Master of Arts is in economics. His master's thesis was "Fiscal Triumvirate: Examinations of Federal Deficit Spending and Interest Rates, State-Level Taxation and Domestic Migration, and the Irrelevance of State Credit Ratings to Investors".
So his background in economics probably got him into an economics PhD program.
> So his background in economics probably got him into an economics PhD program.
And his thesis seems to be the only paper he has ever published (unless you count any contributions to Project 2025?). He has one citation to his name, compared to the previous BLS commissioner:
> In reality, Antoni’s “education and vast experience” boils down to one scholarly citation of his Northern Illinois University dissertation on fiscal policy—from the Texas Public Policy Foundation in 2021, during the time that Antoni worked there. McAntarfer’s own research, The Wall Street Journal found, earned 1,327 citations.
No clue. The college where he got his bachelor only has theology and philosophy, so he doesn’t even have a bachelors in economics.
Also, this is his PhD thesis. It’s mind-boggling to me that this is apparently doctorate-worthy, I personally find this lacking even for a bachelor thesis:
To steelman this, it isn't abnormal for people to get a Bachelors in one thing and a masters or phd in another. Typically the school makes them do some pre-requisite courses for a foundation as part of the masters. I know someone for example with an english degree and a masters in data science, who had to take a couple additional statistics and programming courses, and another person with a math undergrad and a masters in electrical engineering that basically had to take circuits, E&M, and electronics (so a good chunk of the EE undergrad) before starting graduate courses.
“of Arts” comes from the Liberal Arts, the seven traditional fields covered in medieval universities, the Bachelor of Arts being the basic degree in medieval universities, the Master of Arts being the subsequent degree which also conferred the qualification to teach the liberal arts, and after those degrees were doctoral degrees in the “higher faculties” of Law, Medicine, and Theology.
While no longer using the Trivium and Quadrivium comprising the traditional Liberal Arts as the sum of the programs, the name of the degrees has been retained widely, and used for degrees in almost any field of study, even while some institutions also offer Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees with other styles (particularly “of Science”). There is no consistent meaning or differentiation to the “of Arts” or “of Science” styles, though they may have signify institution-specific differences in curriculum at some institutions.
I was under the impression that your graduate degrees didn't have to be related to undergrad at all, but I know nothing about these corners of higher education.
I know a big 4 strategy consultant who has a bachelor and master degree in business who, for some reason, could only get a phd position at our local university of agriculture/brewery/bio-technology and wrote a pointless thesis about a sustainability topic he had zero interest in to get his stupid phd title.
Now he is earning breath taking amounts of money by churning out power point documents so I guess his path was correct.
I think the name of the degree (BA/MA etc.) is mostly related to what university or department it is conferred by. For example, if you finish your master studies in Chemistry at the University of Vienna, you get a Master of Arts.
> How can someone get a doctorate in economics when they studied "Bachelor/Master of Arts"?
As opposed to Bachelor/Master of Science, I presume?
If that's the case it because "<degree> of Arts" and "<degree> of Science" don't actually mean what a majority of people think they do.
In the US there is no inherent difference between BA and BS in fields that most people would think of as sciences (hard or social). What degree a given set of coursework earns is entirely up to the school. All of the following exist in the wild:
• BS is the only choice. (Caltech, for example. Even English majors--and yes, there is an occasional English major at Caltech--end up with a BS).
• BA is the only choice. UC Berkeley is an example in this category for math and physics.
• Both are offered, with identical coursework and requirements. You can have whichever you want. Some will even for a small fee give you two diplomas, so you can use whichever seems appropriate for the situation.
• Both are offered, from the same department, with different in-major coursework and aims. One may be aimed toward students aiming to go into research, and one toward those aiming to go into teaching, for instance.
• Both are offered, from different departments. For example, UC Berkeley's College of Letters and Sciences offers a BA in chemistry, and the College of Chemistry offers a BS in chemistry. Computer science can be taken at Berkeley in the College of Letters and Science for a BA, or in the College of Engineering for a BS.
• Both are offered, with the same in-major coursework, but differ in out-of-major requirements. So, the BA and BS would require the exact same science and math courses, but the BA has specific breadth requirements to produce a well rounded education, whereas the BS lets you take pretty much what you want as long as you satisfy the math and science requirements and any general requirements of your school.
Note: since this has "--"s and a list, I suppose I should mention that starting at "In the US" it is a copy/paste (with a minor tweak) of something I wrote many years ago when the question of BA vs BS came up, long before LLMs arrived. :-)
There's a bunch of advantages to high unemployment. It reduces inflation. You get to champion a bill to introduce a new stimulus package (whether or not it gets accepted, you look good). A rate cut means stock boosts which politicians/the rich and corporations like. It makes it easier for employers to hire (bigger pool to choose from), wages lower, and it tamps down on those pesky "union agitators" as everyone is fearing for their livelihood more. All the downsides are long-term and affect individuals more than corporations or politicians.
The Federal Reserve operates under a "dual mandate" from Congress to promote maximum employment and stable prices (low inflation). As unemployment rises, the Fed will lower interest rates to stimulate investment (increase employment opportunities).
If AI is the cause, it will only stimulate investment in more AI and accelerate the layoffs though. And because they don't have other tools, looks like this is exactly what they are going to do. Investment tends to concentrate massively at the festest-growing trend which this time is just replacing workers with AI.
Which will deepen the hole, until we crest over the AI peak of inflated expectations, bottom out in the trough of disillusionment, and start creeping up the slope of enlightenment. The next 12 months should be worsening unemployment, more rate cuts, higher AI stock prices. Once we bottom out in disillusionment (or companies run out of AI capital), the stock will plummet again, AI companies will die off, unemployment reduces, and rates return to previous levels.
That's the "exists-in-a-vacuum" picture anyway. Stimulus, tariffs, a new war, or some other bullshit will change the results.
That really just feels like they're operating with the mandate to keep the cost of labor low, and the main way to do that is by not paying people enough.
"The same influx of immigrant workers that helped fill job openings also dampened wage pressures across the affected industries and states. At the industry level, sectors with some of the highest immigrant workforce growth, such as construction and manufacturing, saw the sharpest deceleration in wage growth (specifically, average hourly earnings) from 2021 to 2023."
Maybe I should expand it to say it sounds like they're under a mandate to keep people more-or-less economically stuck.
They need to keep employment high and keep prices stable. Their main lever for controlling these two things is the prime interest rate. They kept that rate low for a long time. Capital now thinks that being able to get money for cheap is the norm. If it can't get money for cheap, well, that's a problem, because capital's mandate is to get more capital.
If you're being incentivized to keep prices low and employment high by this institution, while also trying to accumulate capital for yourself, you are more likely to employ people at lower wages in order to keep prices low instead of taking the hit in reduced capital accumulation to employ people at higher wages while keeping prices low. Furthermore, any sort of sane prime interest rate now seems high to capital, so that additional cost is also factored in as why costs must rise and wages must drop to keep the accumulation rate of capital as high as possible.
Is there anything wrong with accumulation of capital? In and of itself, no, but when you have people with net worths in the hundreds of billions of dollars making the decisions on how to allocate resources for their own continued benefit, well, you get a reduction in economic returns for the rest of the economy.
Simply put, when the economy is in the shitter, the federal reserve lowers interest rates. When the economy is doing well, interest rates tend to go up.
Then we went through a decade of stupidly-low interest rates in the 10s, while the economy was doing decently well.
Maybe it was because of low interest rates. Though then you could argue capital just doesn't want to have to pay the price of operating in a borrowing environment where the average person can go down to the local bank, get a 90 day CD at 5-ish percent, and have a nice guaranteed source of steadily-growing rainy day cash, which, in turn, makes it less likely that they'll gamble it on stocks and bonds that capital holds most of its wealth in.
Just as with social media and trust within society, destroying the credibility of US government economic statistics may be the intention. When nothing is trustworthy then lots of upsides may become available to exploit. And everything becomes deniable.
When we were kids, my dad felt like he was always the last one to buy into the stock market. He would buy, it would peak, and then it would crater.
I was gonna buy in when the tariff shock hit, but it started to rebound before I got in. The 40% rise since then feels so irrational (though it's "only" 20% if you ignore the tariff shock).
I feel like I'm about to be my dad - watch the whole climb going "it's gotta come down, right?", capitulate at the top, and then have the bottom fall out.
How much are you timing when to buy vs buying in little bits continuously? If you just buy a set amount per month your cost will balance out better I think
>When we were kids, my dad felt like he was always the last one to buy into the stock market. He would buy, it would peak, and then it would crater.
But if your dad bought and held when you were a kid he'd be up 1000% now. You simply cannot time the market, ever. But over time, "stocks go up" is pretty much guaranteed. The people in charge won't let it not be.
You don't have to "believe". If you can find data that indicate that the dollar has devalued 40% (or even 20%) since "Liberation" Day, I'd like to see it.
Ideally, you'd set your asset allocation some time ago, and you'd mostly be in or out already, with surplus income going in every paycheck (or so). You only sell when you shift your asset allocation or need money for something, and you adjust your allocation (and risk profile) depending on your future needs.
It's good to have some humility and accept the market is smarter than you. The best price you're going to get is today. Every next day it's going to be more expensive by daily (risk free rate + equity risk premium) +/- variance you are not able to predict.
Maybe some people are able to predict it but it's not you.
Apart from the infamous timing the market, there are two adages to keep in mind - the stock market is not the economy and markets can remain irrational for a long time.
The whole tariff cycle has been irrational move. The tariffs were supposedly "removed" even when it was not - there was always a 10% default tariff. Maybe everyone is expecting a rate cut due to this tariff madness.
1. Tariff uncerainty. Businesses love instability and inability to plan ahead
2. Mass adoption and prioritization of AI
3. Bullying and trying to take over the fed by the executive
4. Large scale downsizing of the government workforce
5. Government contract cuts, which trickle down to the private sector in multiple ways
The executive branch is at war with the world and the middle and lower class of the US. They’re not even doing many favors for the upper class, the decisions aren’t even helping them a lot of the time
FWIW we aren't really seeing any layoffs/downsizing/robot-onshoring due to AI yet. If anything the huge datacenter construction/deployment boom fueled by the AI race is helping the economic numbers.
Rate cuts are priced in at about 100% for a 1/4 point. It might go up for a 1/2 point, but that may also signal fear which could have the opposite effect. I think it's hard to say at this point.
Nvidia said that they saw weakness in the upcoming months due to companies overextending themselves on AI-related spend. Meta has frozen AI-related hiring. Most AI startups have also paused hiring. AI funding went from "say AI and get $100m" to a parched desert in the space of about 4 weeks. There was a well-publicized MIT study about it 2 weeks ago that found most companies saw little to no benefit from AI, and now non-tech companies are not only no longer bragging about AI in their marketing materials, they're actually cutting back or eliminating their AI spend.
Tech sector is very frothy at the moment with bloated staffing. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.
Big tech has been doing slow layoffs and would be surprised to see much bigger rounds soon as shops shut down unprofitable projects and expect those left to do more with less. The use of RTO and other means to force folks out has squeezed out what’s gonna get squeezed out so now expect a shift to just flat layoffs.
Some of the big tech companies have so many people that frankly aren’t needed. A ton of folks hired into vaguely defined “AI” roles doing “solutions” and product management nonsense that is ripe to be blown up the second the current hype slows just a bit.
Heading into a period where that needs to get cleaned up. It’s not going to be via “AI” (although that’s the PR spin) but just old fashion slash and burn.
Boomers are the worst. When I was young, the older generation (Boomers' parents, my grandparents) was more inclined to vote Democrat, primarily to protect social security and labor unions, not necessarily for themselves, but for future generations. They grew up without any of these protections, so they knew how bad things could get. But ever since the Boomers stopped being hippies, their attitude was, "Fuuck everyone else. I'm getting mine." And, IMHO, Reagan was just a symptom of the real problem: Boomer selfishness.
I think this is one of the biggest problems with the US. It seems like it is by design and is very sad. Other nations with mandatory voting seem to have done much better fighting against both extremism and the otherwise overwhelming influence of older voters. Voter suppression isn't an option in these places.
I don't trust Americans to understand how ranked choice voting actually works, given the education level of most voters here. Not to mention there's probably some way they'll bastardize it and transform it into something even worse.
Be careful what you wish for, ranked choice often gives you the “not bad” result at expense of a better but relatively unknown one. Unless an option really stands out, ranked choice can really backfire.
Specifically young brown and black men (huge swing when young white men had hardly any swing) Old White women were the only voters who went more for Harris than Biden.
As a whole brown and black men were still more likely to have voted for Harris than Trump, even though a larger share of them went for Trump this time around
Sorry liberals, but it's a bad idea to assume that a predominantly catholic conservative minority will ever be reliable voters for you. Democrats will need to among other things stop being pro choice to ever recover the latino vote.
> Older voters are more likely to have voted for Trump, but also young men.
Ah, but boomers are not just old voters. Boomers are also owners and sponsors of faux news that has brainwashed the young men into thinking that maga cares about them - only to get their votes and then revert to serving the billionaire overlords.
The generational issue here is that the old people are actively brainwashing and sabotaging the youth - even outside voting.
> And still if young people cared enough they could have voted and made a difference, but they did not.
Young people do care but they expect older people to care about the next generation - in a functional society that is. If the young were taught right from childhood that the elders are sabotaging them, they will show up - and it will be bad for the boomers lying to them constantly.
> "I'm not voting because <strange expectations about other people doing it for me>." sounds absolutely absurd.
It is a mistake on the younger generation's part to expect sanity from elders - this is the reality that they are not taught as kids. That's why we have geriatric pedophiles ruling the country. And this will not change because the geriatric pedophiles are trying their hardest to destroy education in large swathes of the country.
> We're on our second Trump administration now, but someone assumed someone else would vote the way they wanted for them?
Yes, because that someone was likely a kid 8 years ago - literally could have been 10 year olds. They don't have the knowledge, education, experience that a 70 year old boomer has. And the 70 year olds are making sure the misinformation continues so that the newly minted 18 year old votes against their own interests.
This is literally the southern republican playbook. You don't need to buy my argument. You only need to accept that boomers have sabotaged for far longer before the 18 year old even had a chance to cast the first vote.
Ah, it happened way earlier than that—it was their fervor for Reagan that caused us to mortgage our future for a short-term boom. You can tie so many of our current problems (debt addiction, outsourcing, vanishing of pensions, busting of unions, deregulation—basically, prioritizing the health of the market over american workers) directly to this phenomenon.
MAGA is basically the attempt to continue to be in denial about this.
Ironically, reagan had a large number of policies that are now considered to the left of the democratic party—it took two parties agreeing to be in pro-corporate economic lockstep to fuck us over. Such is the risk when you only differentiate parties over culture wars.
This is "bad reporting", in my view, because it (intentionally) baits readers into drawing sweeping conclusions ("Trumps policies have been a complete disaster, I knew it!") from very little data and small effect sizes.
This happens a ton on both sides of the political spectrum and I hate it.
On the topic itself:
If you want to bring formerly offshored industries back at scale (a overall dubious plan in my opinion), then high unemployment is a good starting point because it helps avoid labor shortages and price spikes in unrelated industries.
But what CNN reports is too small to have much of an effect on that.
This strikes me as overly simplistic and optimistic.
The real world is not a zero-sum-game where if someone loses someone else wins.
Macroeconomics in today's world is an interconnected hot mess where I wouldn't dare to infer much except for that simple cause and effect chains surely do not work.
What you deduce might be true in an otherwise stable and sunny economic climate, but we're far from that.
- Trumps active hand in messing with the US economy (Going on an immigrant (labor) hunt, firing a FED governor and threatening Powell, buying into Intel, imposing tariffs coughed up by an LLM)
- Unprecedented amounts of money are being singularly invested into "AI" and not much else
- Consumer prices for Americans as a compound combination of tariffs and an expected weaker dollar if interest rates go down aren't playing well with peak unemployment
Taking that all in, comparatively to only a couple of months ago, this setup is by far not the most desirable investment climate in the US for foreign investment.
And while bringing back offshored industries sure sounds nice on paper, I'm wondering how that's gonna play out with a) historically high CoL in the US leading to b) higher wages required for the supposed high quality jobs coming back leading to c) high prices to purchase said goods.
I'm being a bit facetious here, but if the actual plan is to bring back comparatively low-wage, labor intensive industries to the US, then I think high unemployment at the start of the process is exactly what you want; otherwise, you will cannibalize existing industries for the required labor, inflating prices for everything.
I do not think that doing this is a good idea, especially not at scale, and I believe that the tariff incentives as they currently stand are insufficient to achieve this anyway (but "sufficient" increases to tariff levels are unpalatable and infeasible).
I believe in zero-sum economics, I.E, I don't believe that there can be a "global market crash", all crashes have an equal and opposite effect somewhere else. I'm expecting to hear that jobs are booming in some other countries. In fact, there is data on this.
Those of you who experienced Silicon Valley at its height, I hope that this means we get to experience the next iteration of that, even if it's somewhere random on the planet.
>I believe in zero-sum economics, I.E, I don't believe that there can be a "global market crash", all crashes have an equal and opposite effect somewhere else. I'm expecting to hear that jobs are booming in some other countries. In fact, there is data on this.
Yeah this isn't right. Changing policy can reduce the value of assets across the board, everywhere. It's very possible. The money just disappears because those assets are no longer worth the same in the new environment. Sometimes everyone loses.
> Changing policy can reduce the value of assets across the board, everywhere
If the value of everything changes uniformly, what difference does it make? If I can sell an ounce of gold and buy 1,000 gallons of milk, what does it matter if I briefly have $1,000 or $10,000 in my bank account while accomplishing this trade?
AI is the smoke screen companies are using to cut costs because they see things slowing down (tariffs and the general admin causing enormous uncertainty), and many are still recovering from all the over hiring during COVID.
What a nice self-fulfilling prophecy some people have here. Hype AI as a job killer, execs become convinced of the tech before any real results are delivered, use it as excuse for layoffs, something something job numbers, "SEE?? AI!"
"Through July, DOGE said it has saved taxpayers $52.8 billion by canceling contracts, but of the $32.7 billion in actual claimed contract savings that POLITICO could verify, DOGE’s savings over that period were closer to $1.4 billion."
You think $1.4B makes sense, when the crazy contracts they've cancelled are easily way over that? Also, politico is not an authoritative source of information. They're rated as a left-leaning organization, known to be wrong, often.
So you hate Elon and the exposure of massive corruption DOGE has uncovered. It doesn't take much to add up the value of the insane contracts DOGE has thankfully cancelled.
"...boosted expectations that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates in September to stimulate the economy"
The new unemployment rate is 4.3% That's above the Fed's 4% target for full employment, but not all that high above it.
By contrast, inflation is about 3% -- a full percentage point above the target of 2%, and 50% higher.
Lowering target rates is supposed to lower unemployment and raise inflation. Once you hit full employment, additional money for wages increases money supply without increasing product supply.
The Fed, of course, has more precise models than I've just described. But these numbers suggest to me that the Fed should leave rates as they are; they aren't any kind of emergency or pending emergency. The market is at or near record highs; it doesn't need its bubble expanded.
I know the the Fed is under political pressure because politicians like soaring stock markets. And the pressure is now verging on threats. But it still seems unlikely that the Fed will cave quite so soon when the numbers say to do just the opposite.
Well, apparently the market disagrees. Futures are now pointing to a 100% chance of at least a 25 basis point cut at the next meeting, and the chance of a 50 basis point cut went from 0 to 11.6%: https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/interest-rates/cme-fedwatch...
I think the market is being irrational. But you know what they say about that.
What do they say about that?
On one hand, it's beyond clear by now that these numbers are always much more optimistic than usual. We just say June and July revised down to negative 10,000 or so. And even then those jobs are inflated by gig work that can barely make ends meet.
On the other hand, I don't think hyper inflation is the solution to the recession we are seemingly heading towards at this rate. Seems like something is going to give. Sadly doesn't seem to be the billionarires being taxed properly./
> What do they say about that?
"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent".
> What do they say about that?
The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
Central Bank interest rate setting has a long lag time. You need to turn the wheel 12-18 months before the car turns.
I'm curious, if we eliminated the central bank and let interest rates float with private banks, would it have a similar lag time? Seems like it might let the market adjust faster and match supply and demand for loans better.
The Fed's job is to act counter to the trends. As the saying goes, their job is to take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going.
Their goal is to keep the economy steady, rather than maximally responsive. Their mandate is for a stable business environment, and incidentally stable employment. They were established to counter the boom-and-bust cycle we saw throughout the 19th century, with bank panics every few years.
Looks like they've been doing a bad job.
They've created a pretty massive destabilization bust of the dollar, with a massive unrecovered crash since the inception of the fed [0].
Not long after the fed's inception, there was massive GDP destabilization[1], and then further boom-and-bust cycles.
Unemployment cycles circa before/after fed don't look terribly different either, especially if you exclude war time. In fact there was a pretty terrible boom-bust cycle about 20 years after the fed's inception. [2]
Which all does have me double checking all of this. We're getting long lag times, one giant bank bust in slow motion except distributed across all of us with USD going to zero, and even after the fed was created an awful great depression which some economists have theorized the fed even made worse.
Moving back to the response time -- it was a genuine question. I have no idea. Maybe the fed speeds up response by having an endless ability to quantitatively ease. Or maybe it acts like a big flywheel.
[0] https://www.oftwominds.com/photos2012/Dollar-value1776-2008a...
[1]. http://visualeconsite.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/Re...
[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/US_Unemp...
> Looks like they've been doing a bad job.
Historically the last few decades have been the most stable in recorded history:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moderation
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession#United_States
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...
> They've created a pretty massive destabilization bust of the dollar, with a massive unrecovered crash since the inception of the fed [0].
The "bust of the dollar" is a valid critique if you keep your dollars literally under your mattress or literally buried in the ground. As Nick Maggiulli observed in 2022:
> Hot take: This is a good thing.
> No currency should be able to buy the same basket of goods over very long timespans through hoarding. If you want to retain the purchasing power of your money, it should participate in society via investment.
* https://twitter.com/dollarsanddata/status/159265180975079833...
A follow-on from Barry Ritzholtz:
> Nick is right: Cash is a medium of exchange, not a store of value.
> Leave assets in dollars since 1913, your investing incompetency cost your estate/foundation a 99% loss. Invest cash in stocks, real estate, or other risk assets + your returns are up more than 10,000%.
* https://twitter.com/Ritholtz/status/1593227389156622336#m
Just putting your money into T-Bills would have kept up with inflation.
If it behaves like gas prices, then they will travel one direction instantaneously and the other direction only after months of profit are accrued. Generally most markets selling tangible goods shift prices rapidly only to the benefit of sellers; one can expect interest rates to behave accordingly.
Sure, which is why they were already on track to cut again as inflation was coming down. That was until Trump through his tariff grenade into the mix causing the fed to take on a wait and see approach.
If both claims are true - unemployment rate is only 0.3% above the target AND unemployment rate is the highest in 4 years - then the only logical conclusions can be that either the unemployment rate has been exceptionally stable in the last years (or there was too little unemployment?), or 0.3% is in fact a significant deviation despite the number appearing small.
It's the former. The unemployment rate for the previous four years was pretty good and quite stable.
0.3% is not a large deviation. Here's historical data:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
During recessions, the number goes to around 10%. That's where it was in the wake of the 2007 crash. It fell pretty much consistently after that -- except for an enormous but short surge during COVID lockdowns. It bottomed out around 3.5% -- below the Fed target, and they raised rates to try to fix that.
I understood Powell in Jackson Hole that the FED is dropping the 2% inflation target.
"The ELB is not binding anymore." https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CI3o6hi3zF0&t=808s&pp=2AGoBpAC...
Goodbye middle class wealth I guess...
With the current data we have there's simply no good policy reason to cut interest rates.
Inflation is either staying elevated or slightly increasing. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/29/pce-inflation-report-july-20...
The jobs reports are bad, yes, but cutting interest rates is not gonna have any effect there. Companies are actively trimming their workforce or not hiring for macroeconomic/policy reasons like tariffs that have nothing to do with the FED. There simply isn't any meaningful connection between unemployment and rate cuts. No executive is sitting around waiting for a .25 rate cut to hire a bunch of employees when all the other economic data is flashing red. Hell, even the FED themselves say this and point out correctly that lowering interest rates to "help" employment doesn't work especially in an elevated inflation environment.
"When discussing this trade-off, it is important to emphasize that, since the stagflation of 1970s, the consensus position among macroeconomists is that loose monetary policy can easily lead to high inflation without persistent gains in lowering unemployment rates. Therefore, a guiding principle of post-1980s monetary policy has been that it should not be used to try to achieve permanently higher employment." https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/economic_b...
But of course, we have already passed through the authoritarian looking glass and the Trump regime doesn't even bother to lie badly about their justifications at this point. Trump wants lower interest rates therefore they should happen. Anything else is noise.
I think rates are simply too high and they are going to come down due to political and public pressure.
Why do you think rates are simply too high? They do not seem high by historical standards: https://www.macrotrends.net/2015/fed-funds-rate-historical-c...
Let's be honest: the trouble here is that both of those numbers are wrong.
They have been changing and adding exceptions to the basket of goods measuring inflation for many years now.
Unemployment statistics have a long series of problems that have to do with considering who is counted.
The current administration is actively putting pressure on the staff publishing these numbers and replacing key stats people.
You gain a competitive power advantage through information asymmetry. It comes at great cost to the overall economy but it seems to be too juicy for politicians to ignore at this point.
You are utterly wrong, and you can easily read about it and find the process behind all of the numbers. The current administration just hates facts that go against their narrative and so are installing yes-men to give the "facts" they want them to give.
there is a lot of half correct and half in-correct information in this thread. it might be worth reading some of the articles im linking
the high-level facts are
1.) unemployment and number of available jobs is bad right now, and inflation never got back down to 2% after covid. So Powell made the announcement to lower interest rates. this effect will raise inflation, but create more jobs - which is the correct and more important thing to focus on right now
on top of this, tariffs are making things worse for the average american. based on what powell is saying, the current estimates claim the tariff's alongside the planned increase in inflation will lead to about a 20% increase in prices for the average consumer, but this one time 20% increase is better than having no jobs!
2.) the government has been overestimating the amount of available jobs for 10+ years. A large part of why this is happening is because of the gig economy
an example of what I mean is if you sign up to be an uber driver, uber registers you, the driver, as its own company with US government. this kind of thing is fine for uber, but the government doesn't count you becoming an uber driver as 1 new job - they were counting it as roughly 7 newly available jobs. this is because each new company created in the US roughly brings on 7 employees. larger private financial institutions were correcting for this, but the department of labor statistics hasn't corrected for this. this means banks and private institutions have had better data than the government on the job market for years and were calculating that in to the stock market
3.) to add another layer of confusion, the government calculates the unemployment rate by counting the number of US citizens that file for unemployment checks, but many people found it easier/faster to get a gig economy job in between full time jobs - rather than waiting a 1+ month(s) to get on unemployment checks. this means that the number of people who are unemployed is way higher/worse than what the government is reporting. what this means is that method used to count available jobs AND unemployment are wildly wrong - there are less available jobs and more people unemployed by about 5-7x what was reported this summer.
On top of that, if you look at states where there are stricter/more requirements to become an uber driver, it actually shows the unemployment rate in those states is much higher than expected. the avg unemployment rate amongst these states are probably more accurate to how bad the unemployment situation is in the US overall
4.) the current US administration has fired a lot of employees, which has led to even worse labor statistics/estimates compared to previous years
5.) trump specifically has actually caused a lot of confusion for the average person trying to understand this year's US economic status because we use to have quarterly checkins in June, but as of the past 2 years we've been doing it in July. The way the government tracks important economic indicators starts with the US gov announcing their initial stats, but these numbers often over estimate; so the US gov will often have a large correction the following month
trump this year has been making claims like, "this is the best GDP we've seen in July of recent years!" but of course it's the best because he is intentionally doing the comparison wrong
to ELI5 what I mean, June 2024 had the over estimates stats and the US government would correct them in July 2024. but now in 2025, July is the month with over estimate, and August will be the month we correct the estimates
what we should be doing is comparing august 2025's GDP with July of 2024's GDP. doing so would show you that GDP is not better, but essentially stagnant
trump and his administration are intentionally not doing the comparison correctly for better sounding headlines
[0] dept of labor statistic report- https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf
[1] Deep Dive: The US Jobs Market Is Much Weaker Than it Appears - https://www.financialsense.com/blog/20854/deep-dive-us-jobs-...
EDIT - typos
Okay, so there will be rate cut soon and the USD will become even weaker, right? Then with those tariffs, which are consumption tax on imports, will become even more pronounced as US added value part will be smaller percentage of the overall final price tag. So everything will be quite expensive if people still have money to pay, if not the margins and as a result the profits of businesses will go down.
Is this an attempt to reduce the infamous American consumerism? Also maybe force companies to build more in US but wouldn't that require strong immigration as the unemployment is actually still quite low and those who lost jobs wouldn't be plug-n-play employees for manufacturing jobs that didn't exist before.
I think your assumption that there's even a plan is pretty optimistic
Perhaps a concept of a plan?
> the USD will become even weaker
You imply that it is already weak, but this doesn't seem to bear out considering current vs historical exchange rates.
The DXY is down 10% YTD
https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/TVC-DXY/?utm_source=goog...
You have the chart in front of you, yet you cherry pick to confirm your bias. Look at the entire chart. The DXY is at a higher level than it has been for most of it's history (going back the the 1960s). Yes, it's down 10% this year. Guess what? It was up 22% in 2022, putting it at an extremely high level. There is nothing unusual about the dollar's strength at the moment. That could change given that the current administration is hell bent on destroying faith in the US, but as of right now, there's not much of a reaction.
Markets react to differences not historical averages.
The US did quite well economically compared to the rest of the world when dealing with COVID and its aftermath. So some reversion to the mean should be expected, but the timing here suggests it’s policy changes responsible for these trends.
It's weak compared to the last 3 years but sure, USD has seen weaker times.
https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/index/dxy/download-dat...
Just eyeballing the all-time chart there, it looks like ~30 of the last 39 years had similar or lower levels. So the "even weaker" = "an increase in existing weakening" reading is supported while "even weaker" = "an increase in existing weakness" is not. Presumably the former was the intention.
Right, based off this phrasing I was expecting USD to be at 5-year lows compared to JPY, CHF, EUR, RMB, BRL, etc. but that does not seem to be the case
> current vs historical exchange rates.
This depends entirely on the time frame you're looking at. The dollar is certainly weaker now than it was at the beginning of the year.
Trump is a populist president elected on the back of disparaged unemployment-belt blue collar workers.
That's why he hates fentanyl (these places have insane opiate use rates), that why he loves coal (symbolic of the "great days"), that's why he hates immigrants (undercutting wages), why he hates china (that's were the factories went), and that is why he loves tariffs (American manufacturing protectionism).
Watch a video showcasing what West Virgina is like today, listen to what the people who live there say, and you can totally understand what Trump is trying to do, and why these people treat him like a messiah.
I'm not saying Trump is a messiah, or a good leader, or that the people in west virgina (or categorically adjacent places) are level headed. But simply that his plan is coherent if you put yourself in the shoes of the people who are clinging to the past and were left out of the future.
Completely agree. And anti-immigration policies are suprisingly popular even in non-blue collar circles, because you can sell it as "fighting foreign cultural influence", and a lot of people (globally) are quite convinced that their culture/values are superior (this is true across the political spectrum, too, however lots of groups will only admit to this indirectly).
ironically west virginia is being screwed by its own elites, the coal and other large corporations, not some foreigners
Coherent like tarifs on everything, including resources, without legislation to bolster local manufactoring. Or how do his tax cuts fit in the big picture of the good'ol days? Or the dismantlement of public infrastructure? IMO, those 3 things are the bigges impacts he made and they are all negative.
Sorry, but this justification of trumps actions sounds delusional. The only thing that interests him is spineless loyalty to serve his will and looking like the toughest guy at the top of his incompetent boot lickers.
It's an explanation, not a justification.
Damn if that's your work account I'd love to read what your other accounts say. This is the most coherent picture of what that guy is doing that I've ever read.
Which sucks, because I know people like Biden tried to pave a way to the future for folks like those in West Virginia by migrating jobs from coal to solar and stuff like that, but I can imagine how that went over.
This is an attempt to do repeat what countries like Turkey like tried. They often think cut interest rates -> increase demand -> better employment.
But often they find that combination of worsening inflation and unemployment matched with cutting interest rates is a bad situation to be in. There is often no good way to come out of this. You end up in a cycle of : High unemployment -> cut rates -> employment improves but causes hyperinflation -> increase rates to cool markets -> high employment.
Blunt tariffs is playing a large part. and once Jerome Powell leaves and replaced by a crony is when the real problem will start.
Received wisdom of central banking is to worry more about inflation than the economy, so leave rates be. Or increase if inflation gets worse.
JPow has to be annoyed. He was about to stick the perfect soft landing after killing inflation, then Trump showed up and through a tariff grenade into the economy. And, ironically, the fed was already on track to cut rates until the tariff nonsense. Now when rates are cut it's going to be because we're heading into a self inflicted recession instead of the soft landing we were headed towards before. The growing worry now is stagflation again with rising prices and slowing economy. I guess one bright spot is that we won't really know how bad it gets since it seems anyone who reports real numbers is getting fired. Fun times!
But wasnt JPow's slow reaction to initial inflation one of the main problems to begin with? Although the data was signaling rising inflation he kept saying it's "transitory". Now he says we need to look closely at the data which is what he should have done in the first place.
The data then wasn't quite so clear or simple. Supply chains were hosed so transitory seemed reasonable at the time along with dealing with pandemic after effects. Of course hindsight is 20/20, but when it became clear the inflation was beyond supply chain issues they pivoted hard and got things back under control.
That is, like, ninth on the list of things Powell is concerned about. The Trump administration is literally trying to put fed officers in jail to purge the department. Powell himself faces an essentially fake allegation of perjury over (I'm not kidding) his testimony about a building renovation, though it seems they may have walked that back for now after Trump personally tried to make the accusation at a press conference and stated it incorrectly.
Worry about one's legacy being tarnished is a very not-banana-republic kind of thing.
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What perfect landing? For whom? The house market prices have to be destroyed.
Neither the fed or congress can do any quick fix for housing prices (and the fed can't really do anything).
There are only two ways (yes, it's a real life binary system) to lower housing prices.
1.) Build more housing
2.) Make an area less desirable to live in.
That's it. There is nothing else besides those two.
I fixed housing prices by moving to a place that was completely deregulated then building a shack for $60k. Deregulate and you can make things very cheap even with barely building anything, because the replacement cost to build another livable house is far lower, so now current home owners are bidding against cheap competition.
The actual problem is that voters in municipalities are overwhelmingly homeowners, and their home is overwhelmingly the golden-goose of their wealth, so they do everything possible to protect that, including voting for town leaders who will weaponize regulations to make new builds near impossible.
Right, and we managed to destroy that where I live. Deregulated ("opt-out") houses don't get a certificate of occupancy, so you cannot easily get a mortgage, or easily get insurance. So the house is essentially highly valuable to you but not worth a lot to anybody else. We have no real incentive to regulate because the whole structure of the house paperwork makes it pretty much impossible to use as a goose egg.
What did you actually end up avoiding that would cost so much? Architect/plans/structure permitting? Minimum space/setbacks? Grid hookups? Merely skipping inspections, or did you skimp on actual code compliance?
Also curious where you're at, if you don't mind my asking. The biggest blocker I see here is the concentration of job markets into metropolitan areas (near the centralized money troughs).
One thought that comes to mind is if you could keep remodeling/adding on, and eventually get it to a place where it could get a CoA and become a bubble-worthy house. Kind of an incremental self-mortgage. Not that I don't personally wish to see the bubble smashed to a million pieces, but as long as it isn't, then it is still an attractor.
>What did you actually end up avoiding that would cost so much?
(yes means yes it was avoided)
Architect/plans/structure permitting? yes yes partially yes (rubber stamp permit)
Minimum space/setbacks? avoided square foot requirements, but there were required setbacks that were legally meaningless since they were smaller than the road easements.
Grid hookups ? yes
Merely skipping inspections, or did you skimp on actual code compliance? skipped inspections and code compliance was not checked.
AZ, area with lots of stable jobs
Have you done any analysis of your biggest sources of savings?
It sounds like the main cost savings was the square foot requirement? Literally just building less structure?
Then maybe followed by grid hookups, the cost of which would have been higher due to being in a less-developed area with cheaper land? With alternatives these days, grid hookups shouldn't really be required for any house, but the state walks on individuals with all the care of a human walking on ants.
Of course there's also the builder overhead, in that professional developers are making a profit based on what the market is willing to pay over the actual cost to build (due to cheap money loans).
To be clear by "code compliance" I meant building things still to code such that they would pass a hypothetical inspection, as opposed to "good enough works for me". Like for example I'd guess that an electric kitchen range will work just fine off of a 12-2 NM. The code has a large margin of safety because over time problems tend to multiply. I tend to do a lot of DIY electrical (legal here), but I make sure to follow the NEC so that an unexpected inspector would have a harder time declaring it "unsafe", so insurance doesn't have any argument that the work was derelict (not that this really matters), and primarily because I accept that I've got unknown unknowns and I don't want to die in a house fire.
Everything is as close to code as possible. I wouldn't wire a range 12-2 willingly but then again I wouldn't hesitate to use one on a 12-2 and then put a 20 amp breaker on it if I had to, and only use one or two burners at a time until I figured out what I could get away with without tripping the breaker :) The NM-B I use is rated for temps well above the steady-state temp at the breaking amperage so the normal 20% derate wouldn't be much a concern.
Not having plans meant I was able to figure out how to do everything, including framing etc on the fly. This made it possible to do the project without having to know everything up front which in my mind would be pretty much impossible for a newcomer. I did not even know how I was going to frame the roof until the walls were already framed.
I believe pretty much everything on my house meets code but it was almost entirely built to the absolute IRC minimum.
I believe part of the savings are the fact I took a lot of risks a builder would never take or at least not without a premium, including buying an unproven well share that worked out perfectly and saved me $~50k over havign to drill my own, doing all my own utility extensions ( DIY underground 200 amp power extension and water main are big ones), and buying unproven land without utilities. It took me 6 months to even get electric connected and it was fortunate I was an electrical engineer who was able to work with the power engineers to get a solution to get power for cheap. I worked with the utility to get exempted from their inspections too so they let me wire the secondary side service entry myself and install the service entry hardware myself.
The lack of inspections though are what made it all possible, because I was able to work a day job and do work on the house on nights/weekends and not have to quit my job to be around during the day for a bunch of inspections.
Square footage definitely a big one. The width of the house was the max size of off-the-shelf dimensional lumber so I was able to build the entire house with no engineered lumber and no load bearing structures anywhere in the interior of the perimeter of the house. I also used 6" grouted cmu foundation which is extremely rare (well normal in latin america) but meets code.
But the biggest savigns were probably just that I was able to do everything DIY without worrying about it getting inspected and then having to do it all over again because an inspector disagreed with something. If it were inspected I probably would have had to hire someone to help me.
Completely not true and in fact dangerously (willfully?) misleading.
Housing is much more complicated than supply and demand - for a start houses are not fungible. Local conditions are extremely important.
A lot of high house prices is due to financial engineering - for example long mortgage periods at low interest rates. Just one of many mechanisms to make the rich richer by making the poor poorer. Any momentary affordability benefit is soaked up by higher prices, and those mortgages have to be paid off for longer with much higher total payments.
High house prices are also caused by demand elasticity - things like AirBnB, 2nd, 3rd, 4th homes for the super rich, and housing as a place to park funny money (regardless of whether the house is actually being used to home people) mean that normal people can't compete with this non-home demand.
We could go on.
Cool.
But the only fix is to build more houses.
Regulate all you want. You'll just end up with shadow markets and loopholes.
That's not true, not if your regulations are sufficiently strict.
For instance, if you tax second homes (or third homes, or homes not occupied at least 8 months out of the year, or whatever specific condition you want to use) at 100% of the value per year, you're going to end the purchase of empty real estate to park money, without directly affecting ordinary middle-class people who just want a place to live.
Unfortunately, such a measure would be politically untenable—frankly, even in the 2024 environment, and exponentially moreso now.
> For instance, if you tax second homes (or third homes, or homes not occupied at least 8 months out of the year, or whatever specific condition you want to use) at 100% of the value per year
Many locales already charge much higher yearly property taxes on homes not owner occupied [1]. Where I used to live my property taxes were ~2k/year or closer to 10k/year if not owner-occupied. Of course most of that increase will just end up passed on to renters.
[1] Look up 'homestead exemptions'.
Well, I think there are two slightly different things we're talking about here:
1) Homestead exemptions, where the extra tax is on properties that are not owner-occupied
2) Taxing vacancy, where the extra tax is on properties that are unoccupied more than a certain amount of the year. (This is the one I was describing.)
Both are worth considering; both have their own pros and cons.
You can create LLCs that own the homes. You can rent the home to a friend one night a year so it's an actual business.
The ways to get around something like that are fractal and lead to dumb wasteful whack-a-mole legislation.
So to actually fix the problem, you just build more housing.
You can also reduce housing demand by making it less attractive as an investment or store of value (basically decreasing demand).
There are lots of approaches that go that route, like decreasing wealth inequality or suitable taxation.
Correct, you do that by building more housing, which naturally makes investments in property less appealing.
There is no other approach. You can follow these paths of taxing, regulating, minimum waging, but none of them create more houses and all of them just push the same air around the inflated balloon.
But taxing investment homes does, because it incentivizes the divestment of houses. Investment homes account for 20%+ of the market.
Whether this adds pressure to rental market depends on how many SFH renters convert to buyers - we certainly would be buying at modestly lower prices.
Eliminating AML controls would probably help. Real estate is a haven asset to exchange value away from the grips of a tightly controlled and monitored banking system, although this is something normally transparent to the middle class.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if interest rates went up 10% tomorrow, housing prices would have to come down if people wanted to actually sell their homes.
I think the biggest challenge you will come up with then, is that if interest rates go up 10% you also just increased their opportunity cost to exchange a house up 10% interest for current owners, and now you have to buy them out of the differential between the ZIRP loan they got and the new interest rate to make it worth their time to sell it.
The 30 year mortgage on ZIRP basically created a ratched effect that locked up the market for 30 years, the only way to unlock it I can think of is to drastically reduce the cost to build a house, you don't even need to hardly even actually build any, just force the hand of current owners by making the replacement cost radically lower.
Housing prices would come down (although many sellers would back out, crushing supply), but mortgage payments would skyrocket. Interest rates and housing is kind of like squeezing a balloon. Building new homes is like letting air out.
They managed to nearly kill inflation without sending the economy into a recession. Housing prices were also slowing though tariffs and increased construction costs are not helping.
No this is an attempt to shift the burden of taxation to the middle class and poor. It is a consumption tax pure and simple. If you tax everything like sneakers and toothpaste the tax burden shifts to the middle class and poor because a billionaire can make income 100 times larger than a middle class person but he does not use a hundred times as much toothpaste and does not buy 100 times more sneakers.
This of course will depress consumption which will seriously damage the economy but the current administration just does not have the brains to consider these effects.
Furthermore, the immigrant chasing is seriously reducing jobs openings. This seems quite the opposite from the intended effect. But it is done so chaotically and with such cruelty that it is flat out destroying businesses rather than allowing them to hire citizens to replace illegal immigrants.
Most people don’t want the jobs done by immigrants—not at the pay levels that the immigrants are willing to take. This idea that getting rid of the “illegals” frees up jobs for locals is complete rubbish.
If you really want to free up jobs for locals, get rid of the HB1 program.
Hang on a minute, the tariffs mask the devaluation of the USD from actors within the economy?
Ron Vara's book actually outlines a whole bizarro universe where devaluing USD constitutes a strength, from some idea that the best way to compete with China is by putting ourselves where China was 30 years ago. So yes, an outright goal of theirs is to weaken USD. I have no idea if they earnestly believe this nonsense, or if they are just getting paid by our adversaries to sell it to the public.
It occurred to me that tariffs are really a backdoor way of introducing consumption tax (aka sales tax, VAT, etc). It has been a conservative policy goal for many years, as the conservatives believe that income tax penalizes entrepreneurship, but the politics make it virtually impossible to switch to because consumption tax is regressive, and it is a huge change. The tariffs debate and the general political atmosphere created a misdirection: voila, we have both income and consumption tax! The next development will be the politicians discovering to their horror the high levels of taxation, and abolishing the income tax. Brilliant!
Consumption taxes being “right wing” is very American. In Europe most countries have 20-25% VAT.
> Is this an attempt to reduce the infamous American consumerism?
Ngl I didn't expect degrowth emissions reductions from this administration. But I can dig it.
You should have. The last time around, the price of oil literally went negative. And these gremlins had four years to prepare all the ways they were going to break things this time around.
Trump is a real estate guy. His real estate is worth more with high inflation and low interest rates ( like in 1970)
See: Volcker shock.
> Trump is a real estate guy.
I mean, these days it seems like he's more of a meme coin guy. [1]
"New crypto token boosts Trump family's wealth by $5 billion"
1. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-wlfi-world-liberty-financ...
Yeah, but he still has the perspective of 50 years ago.
He still thinks banks and a strong dollar works against him. While everyone else got more rich, he went bankrupt.
Weakening USD was and is still part of Trump's plan. Paying the deficit back with a weak dollar while raking in tariff revenue.
That's just because a weak dollar helps real estate owners with leveraged debt ( the real cost of debt shrinks)
When do we start paying back the debt? The US is still borrowing to pay its expenses.
Overarching goal seems to be increasing the ratio of capital to labor.
Labor is decreased by launching immigrants down the garbage shoot.
Capital increase by tariffing foreign goods which hypothetically might spur domestic production investments.
Labor being rare relative to capital should increase employment.
But really, no guarantee the capital doesn't just flee to the other 95% of the world where they can import capital equipment needed to make stuff for much cheaper, create a cascade effect, and gut the USA even worse. Especially since we have absolutely no clue what the tariffs will be 1/5/10 years from now.
>But really, no guarantee the capital doesn't just flee to the other 95% of the world where they can import capital equipment needed to make stuff for much cheaper
To do that though requires security/stability, supporting infrastructure, and favorable trade policy. For many years that meant China, but this is obviously changing. SE Asia still fits the bill but is under the spectre of expansionist CCP and shrinking US influence. Few places in the world now have the combination above as well as minimal worker protections and low wages as the poor interior of the US south and midwest.
This makes no sense. Capital increase? The tariffs just generate government revenue. It's not like the money supply is expanding. It's being paid by US citizens and businesses. The money supply is dropping, not increasing.
> It's not like the money supply is expanding.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this chart is pretty much only up...
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
Here's another chart that shows just basic tariff revenue:
https://www.politico.com/interactives/2025/trump-tariff-inco...
It shows about $100 billion in tariff revenue growth since May, '25. Interestingly your chart shows an overall growth of $232 billion in the same date range. IOW if both charts are right the slight majority of overall supply is coming from somewhere other than tariffs (though tariffs are adding a lot). I wonder where that money is coming from?
> I wonder where that money is coming from?
Interest rates are still high. That's why Trump is at war with the Fed.
Capital used for domestic production. The theory with tariffs is that companies will move capital investments stateside rather than exporting those investments and then importing the final product. The theory anyways.
That will never happen because (1) the Trump Administration has created nothing but uncertainty by making illegal changes to tariff policy via executive order and changing their mind literally several times per week and (2) they have also made imports of raw materials prohibitively expensive, meaning that it's still cheaper to produce overseas and pay the tariff.
This paragraph from the article is probably a bigger story than the August headline:
> August’s job report also included a downward revision to June, which showed the US economy lost 13,000 jobs that month. It’s the first negative employment month since December 2020, and it brings to an end what was the second-longest period of employment expansion on record.
Don't worry, it'll all be sunshine and roses when the new commissioner is confirmed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.J._Antoni
From Wikipedia:
> Antoni graduated from St. Charles Borromeo Seminary with a Bachelor of Arts.[3] He then graduated from Northern Illinois University with a Master of Arts[3] and later a doctorate in economics in 2020
How can someone get a doctorate in economics when they studied "Bachelor/Master of Arts"?
It’s not unusual for social sciences, including economics, degrees to be styled as “of Arts” (the original form for both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees); newer forms like (“of Science”), except for specifically professional degrees, are affectations which may or may not denote any substantive difference (some universities have different colleges with different core requirements independent of degree, that offer BS/MS vs BA/MA degrees, others simply offer only one style for any given major despite similar core requirements.)
Some universities might only offer one despite having a few programs in fields where it is more common for degrees to have the opposite style; at one time, e.g., this was true of Caltech which only issued BS degrees for undergrad though there were one or two majors with very few undergraduate degrees issued in fields where BA would be more common at other institutions.
His Master of Arts is in economics. His master's thesis was "Fiscal Triumvirate: Examinations of Federal Deficit Spending and Interest Rates, State-Level Taxation and Domestic Migration, and the Irrelevance of State Credit Ratings to Investors".
So his background in economics probably got him into an economics PhD program.
> So his background in economics probably got him into an economics PhD program.
And his thesis seems to be the only paper he has ever published (unless you count any contributions to Project 2025?). He has one citation to his name, compared to the previous BLS commissioner:
> In reality, Antoni’s “education and vast experience” boils down to one scholarly citation of his Northern Illinois University dissertation on fiscal policy—from the Texas Public Policy Foundation in 2021, during the time that Antoni worked there. McAntarfer’s own research, The Wall Street Journal found, earned 1,327 citations.
* https://archive.is/https://www.thenation.com/article/politic...
No clue. The college where he got his bachelor only has theology and philosophy, so he doesn’t even have a bachelors in economics.
Also, this is his PhD thesis. It’s mind-boggling to me that this is apparently doctorate-worthy, I personally find this lacking even for a bachelor thesis:
https://huskiecommons.lib.niu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...
To steelman this, it isn't abnormal for people to get a Bachelors in one thing and a masters or phd in another. Typically the school makes them do some pre-requisite courses for a foundation as part of the masters. I know someone for example with an english degree and a masters in data science, who had to take a couple additional statistics and programming courses, and another person with a math undergrad and a masters in electrical engineering that basically had to take circuits, E&M, and electronics (so a good chunk of the EE undergrad) before starting graduate courses.
Other agree:
* https://old.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/1n23ixd/ej_an...
It's more concerning he got his PhD only 5 years ago and is somehow considered qualified for this job now.
Look, he IS also a veteran. To be specific, a meme war veteran, but it has to count for something.
At this point I'm honestly impressed that he has a relevant PHD _at all_.
"Of Arts" just means an art, not necessarily "Art".
You can get a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science or a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science at my alma mater, albeit from different colleges.
Maybe that art was the art of economics, which seems to be more subjective than actual painting.
“of Arts” comes from the Liberal Arts, the seven traditional fields covered in medieval universities, the Bachelor of Arts being the basic degree in medieval universities, the Master of Arts being the subsequent degree which also conferred the qualification to teach the liberal arts, and after those degrees were doctoral degrees in the “higher faculties” of Law, Medicine, and Theology.
While no longer using the Trivium and Quadrivium comprising the traditional Liberal Arts as the sum of the programs, the name of the degrees has been retained widely, and used for degrees in almost any field of study, even while some institutions also offer Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees with other styles (particularly “of Science”). There is no consistent meaning or differentiation to the “of Arts” or “of Science” styles, though they may have signify institution-specific differences in curriculum at some institutions.
I was under the impression that your graduate degrees didn't have to be related to undergrad at all, but I know nothing about these corners of higher education.
That's correct. If you can convince a doctoral program to take you, you can get a PhD in it.
I know a big 4 strategy consultant who has a bachelor and master degree in business who, for some reason, could only get a phd position at our local university of agriculture/brewery/bio-technology and wrote a pointless thesis about a sustainability topic he had zero interest in to get his stupid phd title.
Now he is earning breath taking amounts of money by churning out power point documents so I guess his path was correct.
If they are pointless power point documents about topics he has zero interest in, then it may have been good training...
Yeah, one of my friends in college got his BA in Rhetoric & Communication and was accepted directly into a Physics Ph. D. program.
His M.A. was in Economics. Not that, as others have pointed out, you need to have a bachelors or M.A. in the same field as your Ph.D.
I think the name of the degree (BA/MA etc.) is mostly related to what university or department it is conferred by. For example, if you finish your master studies in Chemistry at the University of Vienna, you get a Master of Arts.
> How can someone get a doctorate in economics when they studied "Bachelor/Master of Arts"?
As opposed to Bachelor/Master of Science, I presume?
If that's the case it because "<degree> of Arts" and "<degree> of Science" don't actually mean what a majority of people think they do.
In the US there is no inherent difference between BA and BS in fields that most people would think of as sciences (hard or social). What degree a given set of coursework earns is entirely up to the school. All of the following exist in the wild:
• BS is the only choice. (Caltech, for example. Even English majors--and yes, there is an occasional English major at Caltech--end up with a BS).
• BA is the only choice. UC Berkeley is an example in this category for math and physics.
• Both are offered, with identical coursework and requirements. You can have whichever you want. Some will even for a small fee give you two diplomas, so you can use whichever seems appropriate for the situation.
• Both are offered, from the same department, with different in-major coursework and aims. One may be aimed toward students aiming to go into research, and one toward those aiming to go into teaching, for instance.
• Both are offered, from different departments. For example, UC Berkeley's College of Letters and Sciences offers a BA in chemistry, and the College of Chemistry offers a BS in chemistry. Computer science can be taken at Berkeley in the College of Letters and Science for a BA, or in the College of Engineering for a BS.
• Both are offered, with the same in-major coursework, but differ in out-of-major requirements. So, the BA and BS would require the exact same science and math courses, but the BA has specific breadth requirements to produce a well rounded education, whereas the BS lets you take pretty much what you want as long as you satisfy the math and science requirements and any general requirements of your school.
Note: since this has "--"s and a list, I suppose I should mention that starting at "In the US" it is a copy/paste (with a minor tweak) of something I wrote many years ago when the question of BA vs BS came up, long before LLMs arrived. :-)
An insurrectionist recommended by Bannon, go figure
A critique of his thesis:
* https://old.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/1n23ixd/ej_an...
What's interesting is that Trump should be happy with a weak labor market, as it helps him with that interest rate on debt problem he seems to have.
There's a bunch of advantages to high unemployment. It reduces inflation. You get to champion a bill to introduce a new stimulus package (whether or not it gets accepted, you look good). A rate cut means stock boosts which politicians/the rich and corporations like. It makes it easier for employers to hire (bigger pool to choose from), wages lower, and it tamps down on those pesky "union agitators" as everyone is fearing for their livelihood more. All the downsides are long-term and affect individuals more than corporations or politicians.
Huh, how does a weak labor market reduce interest?
The Federal Reserve operates under a "dual mandate" from Congress to promote maximum employment and stable prices (low inflation). As unemployment rises, the Fed will lower interest rates to stimulate investment (increase employment opportunities).
If AI is the cause, it will only stimulate investment in more AI and accelerate the layoffs though. And because they don't have other tools, looks like this is exactly what they are going to do. Investment tends to concentrate massively at the festest-growing trend which this time is just replacing workers with AI.
Which will deepen the hole, until we crest over the AI peak of inflated expectations, bottom out in the trough of disillusionment, and start creeping up the slope of enlightenment. The next 12 months should be worsening unemployment, more rate cuts, higher AI stock prices. Once we bottom out in disillusionment (or companies run out of AI capital), the stock will plummet again, AI companies will die off, unemployment reduces, and rates return to previous levels.
That's the "exists-in-a-vacuum" picture anyway. Stimulus, tariffs, a new war, or some other bullshit will change the results.
That really just feels like they're operating with the mandate to keep the cost of labor low, and the main way to do that is by not paying people enough.
Can you explain how the Fed is keeping the cost of labor low, and what they should do to help folks paid enough? I'm not sure I see the connection.
> Can you explain how the Fed is keeping the cost of labor low...
The Fed calls workers being able to push for significantly increased salaries an "overheated labor market".
https://www.kansascityfed.org/research/economic-bulletin/ris...
"The same influx of immigrant workers that helped fill job openings also dampened wage pressures across the affected industries and states. At the industry level, sectors with some of the highest immigrant workforce growth, such as construction and manufacturing, saw the sharpest deceleration in wage growth (specifically, average hourly earnings) from 2021 to 2023."
Maybe I should expand it to say it sounds like they're under a mandate to keep people more-or-less economically stuck.
They need to keep employment high and keep prices stable. Their main lever for controlling these two things is the prime interest rate. They kept that rate low for a long time. Capital now thinks that being able to get money for cheap is the norm. If it can't get money for cheap, well, that's a problem, because capital's mandate is to get more capital.
If you're being incentivized to keep prices low and employment high by this institution, while also trying to accumulate capital for yourself, you are more likely to employ people at lower wages in order to keep prices low instead of taking the hit in reduced capital accumulation to employ people at higher wages while keeping prices low. Furthermore, any sort of sane prime interest rate now seems high to capital, so that additional cost is also factored in as why costs must rise and wages must drop to keep the accumulation rate of capital as high as possible.
Is there anything wrong with accumulation of capital? In and of itself, no, but when you have people with net worths in the hundreds of billions of dollars making the decisions on how to allocate resources for their own continued benefit, well, you get a reduction in economic returns for the rest of the economy.
Simply put, when the economy is in the shitter, the federal reserve lowers interest rates. When the economy is doing well, interest rates tend to go up.
That's the way it used to work.
Then we went through a decade of stupidly-low interest rates in the 10s, while the economy was doing decently well.
Maybe it was because of low interest rates. Though then you could argue capital just doesn't want to have to pay the price of operating in a borrowing environment where the average person can go down to the local bank, get a 90 day CD at 5-ish percent, and have a nice guaranteed source of steadily-growing rainy day cash, which, in turn, makes it less likely that they'll gamble it on stocks and bonds that capital holds most of its wealth in.
It indicates that the cost of capital might be too high to justify investing, so you can reduce it in order to spur investment (like during ZIRP).
Federal reserve looks at unemployment rate when deciding whether to lower interest rates.
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Just as with social media and trust within society, destroying the credibility of US government economic statistics may be the intention. When nothing is trustworthy then lots of upsides may become available to exploit. And everything becomes deniable.
When we were kids, my dad felt like he was always the last one to buy into the stock market. He would buy, it would peak, and then it would crater.
I was gonna buy in when the tariff shock hit, but it started to rebound before I got in. The 40% rise since then feels so irrational (though it's "only" 20% if you ignore the tariff shock).
I feel like I'm about to be my dad - watch the whole climb going "it's gotta come down, right?", capitulate at the top, and then have the bottom fall out.
How much are you timing when to buy vs buying in little bits continuously? If you just buy a set amount per month your cost will balance out better I think
Time in the market vs timing the market
Dollar cost averaging is the way.
Diamond hands is the way. Just keep holding!!!
> Diamond hands is the way. Just keep holding!!!
You’re mocking a well known, risk adverse market investment strategy.
Because an even more well known, even more risk adverse market investment strategy is right in front of you. BUY AND HOLD!
If you're not renetech/a HFT company, you might as well give up on ever finding reliable arbitrage/alpha. You're not a market maker or market mover.
>When we were kids, my dad felt like he was always the last one to buy into the stock market. He would buy, it would peak, and then it would crater.
But if your dad bought and held when you were a kid he'd be up 1000% now. You simply cannot time the market, ever. But over time, "stocks go up" is pretty much guaranteed. The people in charge won't let it not be.
I believe USD has devalued by a comparable amount since Liberation Day, so a big portion of that is the USD falling relative to stock.
Edit: https://www.morganstanley.com/insights/articles/us-dollar-de...
You don't have to "believe". If you can find data that indicate that the dollar has devalued 40% (or even 20%) since "Liberation" Day, I'd like to see it.
From memory, I think it was something like 10% since Liberation Day.
Ideally, you'd set your asset allocation some time ago, and you'd mostly be in or out already, with surplus income going in every paycheck (or so). You only sell when you shift your asset allocation or need money for something, and you adjust your allocation (and risk profile) depending on your future needs.
It's good to have some humility and accept the market is smarter than you. The best price you're going to get is today. Every next day it's going to be more expensive by daily (risk free rate + equity risk premium) +/- variance you are not able to predict.
Maybe some people are able to predict it but it's not you.
Remember that assets rise to counter inflation. So if the market believes there will be inflation, it will naturally rise to counter that.
People are trading dollars for shares to shelter from the dollar losing value.
Stop trying to time it. Auto invest weekly/monthly and never look at the balance.
Apart from the infamous timing the market, there are two adages to keep in mind - the stock market is not the economy and markets can remain irrational for a long time.
The whole tariff cycle has been irrational move. The tariffs were supposedly "removed" even when it was not - there was always a 10% default tariff. Maybe everyone is expecting a rate cut due to this tariff madness.
This is why you dollar cost average. Buy every month, be in it for the long haul.
Trying to time the market is futile unless you have insider information. Then it's illegal.
He sounds like the fictional 'Bob' and likely made out like a bandit, assuming he held.
https://www.wealthmorning.com/2023/09/15/648774/meet-bob-the...
Time in the market beats timing the market.
for the first time in four years, the number of available jobs was lower than the number of job seekers
Oof. This sounds particularly bad, not just for the economy, but for workers, no?
Mission accomplished then.
Not surprising.
1. Tariff uncerainty. Businesses love instability and inability to plan ahead 2. Mass adoption and prioritization of AI 3. Bullying and trying to take over the fed by the executive 4. Large scale downsizing of the government workforce 5. Government contract cuts, which trickle down to the private sector in multiple ways
The executive branch is at war with the world and the middle and lower class of the US. They’re not even doing many favors for the upper class, the decisions aren’t even helping them a lot of the time
> 2. Mass adoption and prioritization of AI
FWIW we aren't really seeing any layoffs/downsizing/robot-onshoring due to AI yet. If anything the huge datacenter construction/deployment boom fueled by the AI race is helping the economic numbers.
It means the federal reserve will do a rate cut soon. Stock market goes down and then up.
- high unemployment means the fed will do a rate cut, so markets go up
- low unemployment means the economy is booming, so markets go up
hmmm... the more I learn about the stock market, the more I believe in the limits of human understanding
The rate cut is already completely priced in. Also, almost every market crash has started with a rate cut. It's a sign of economic distress.
Rate cuts are priced in at about 100% for a 1/4 point. It might go up for a 1/2 point, but that may also signal fear which could have the opposite effect. I think it's hard to say at this point.
Won't the stock market go only up, if interest rates are cut?
(For the avoidance of doubt, I'm not saying this is either a good or bad thing)
I think the claim is that it will go down because of the bad news, and that the rate cut will depend on that happening first.
Fair point, thanks.
Rate cuts are probably already priced in.
Heat death of the universe is priced in.
So much winning!
AI hype is fading too, I think around mid 2026 stocks will crash
> AI hype is fading too
Source?
I see it growing in my business.
what business? if your sector isn't tech, then it's just a lagging indicator
AMD AI NeoCloud
Shovels sell best the day of the crash.
If OP is right in their mid 2026 assessment, you’re still on the way up.
Cat is out of the bag, AI is not magically going away. The need for compute is endless.
The need for democratized compute is our niche, and the need for decentralized compute (AMD) is largely unrealized.
Of course AI is not magically going away. It was never here to begin with.
You see the hype even growing??
Yes. AI utility is growing at an ever increasing rate. It is becoming more and more useful. That utility drives hype.
Nvidia said that they saw weakness in the upcoming months due to companies overextending themselves on AI-related spend. Meta has frozen AI-related hiring. Most AI startups have also paused hiring. AI funding went from "say AI and get $100m" to a parched desert in the space of about 4 weeks. There was a well-publicized MIT study about it 2 weeks ago that found most companies saw little to no benefit from AI, and now non-tech companies are not only no longer bragging about AI in their marketing materials, they're actually cutting back or eliminating their AI spend.
You're obviously bearish. I'm not. My own anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise to the things you're pointing out.
I personally get benefits from consuming AI in my own life. I willingly pay for the service. I'm excited to watch it progress and improve.
On the business side, our customer base and usage is growing. We mostly service businesses building useful AI utility.
I'm totally excited to watch this play out however it goes.
>Source?
The AI gooners who lost their virtual girlfriend/boyfriend when GPT-5 came out, and wouldn't shut up about how awful GPT-5 was for a week.
Tech sector is very frothy at the moment with bloated staffing. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.
Big tech has been doing slow layoffs and would be surprised to see much bigger rounds soon as shops shut down unprofitable projects and expect those left to do more with less. The use of RTO and other means to force folks out has squeezed out what’s gonna get squeezed out so now expect a shift to just flat layoffs.
Some of the big tech companies have so many people that frankly aren’t needed. A ton of folks hired into vaguely defined “AI” roles doing “solutions” and product management nonsense that is ripe to be blown up the second the current hype slows just a bit.
Heading into a period where that needs to get cleaned up. It’s not going to be via “AI” (although that’s the PR spin) but just old fashion slash and burn.
Like and subscribe!
Clearly Biden's fault.
And Obama's.
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Boomers are the worst. When I was young, the older generation (Boomers' parents, my grandparents) was more inclined to vote Democrat, primarily to protect social security and labor unions, not necessarily for themselves, but for future generations. They grew up without any of these protections, so they knew how bad things could get. But ever since the Boomers stopped being hippies, their attitude was, "Fuuck everyone else. I'm getting mine." And, IMHO, Reagan was just a symptom of the real problem: Boomer selfishness.
Older voters are more likely to have voted for Trump, but also young men.
And younger voters simply don’t vote as much…
I find the generational bait pretty hard to buy into when some generations can’t be bothered to even vote…
> And younger voters simply don’t vote as much…
I think this is one of the biggest problems with the US. It seems like it is by design and is very sad. Other nations with mandatory voting seem to have done much better fighting against both extremism and the otherwise overwhelming influence of older voters. Voter suppression isn't an option in these places.
Agreed, although I’d also like to see ranked choice voting and thus more options.
Just two options from two insular parties sucks.
I don't trust Americans to understand how ranked choice voting actually works, given the education level of most voters here. Not to mention there's probably some way they'll bastardize it and transform it into something even worse.
It has worked out in local elections in some places. I think rank your favorites is pretty intuitive.
Be careful what you wish for, ranked choice often gives you the “not bad” result at expense of a better but relatively unknown one. Unless an option really stands out, ranked choice can really backfire.
I’ll take not bad vs all or nothing.
RCV will struggle to gain adoption because it hurts the Republican Party.
Indeed, 11 Republican-controlled states have legislation that bans any use of RCV in elections at any level within those states.
Specifically young brown and black men (huge swing when young white men had hardly any swing) Old White women were the only voters who went more for Harris than Biden.
As a whole brown and black men were still more likely to have voted for Harris than Trump, even though a larger share of them went for Trump this time around
Nope - you are wrong, at least for Hispanic men!
Hispanic Men went 50% Trump, 48% harris - https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/voting-patte... (page 3, first chart)
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/voting-patte...
Sorry liberals, but it's a bad idea to assume that a predominantly catholic conservative minority will ever be reliable voters for you. Democrats will need to among other things stop being pro choice to ever recover the latino vote.
> Older voters are more likely to have voted for Trump, but also young men.
Ah, but boomers are not just old voters. Boomers are also owners and sponsors of faux news that has brainwashed the young men into thinking that maga cares about them - only to get their votes and then revert to serving the billionaire overlords.
The generational issue here is that the old people are actively brainwashing and sabotaging the youth - even outside voting.
Few people own media outlets.
I’m old, nobody who owns a media outlet listens to me because of my demographic status.
And still if young people cared enough they could have voted and made a difference, but they did not.
> And still if young people cared enough they could have voted and made a difference, but they did not.
Young people do care but they expect older people to care about the next generation - in a functional society that is. If the young were taught right from childhood that the elders are sabotaging them, they will show up - and it will be bad for the boomers lying to them constantly.
"I'm not voting because <strange expectations about other people doing it for me>." sounds absolutely absurd.
We're on our second Trump administration now, but someone assumed someone else would vote the way they wanted for them?
I don't buy it.
> "I'm not voting because <strange expectations about other people doing it for me>." sounds absolutely absurd.
It is a mistake on the younger generation's part to expect sanity from elders - this is the reality that they are not taught as kids. That's why we have geriatric pedophiles ruling the country. And this will not change because the geriatric pedophiles are trying their hardest to destroy education in large swathes of the country.
> We're on our second Trump administration now, but someone assumed someone else would vote the way they wanted for them?
Yes, because that someone was likely a kid 8 years ago - literally could have been 10 year olds. They don't have the knowledge, education, experience that a 70 year old boomer has. And the 70 year olds are making sure the misinformation continues so that the newly minted 18 year old votes against their own interests.
This is literally the southern republican playbook. You don't need to buy my argument. You only need to accept that boomers have sabotaged for far longer before the 18 year old even had a chance to cast the first vote.
You could also say Trump won because Biden ran.
You could also say Biden won because Trump damaged America the first time around.
How far back do you want to go? Or do you want to talk about how people got complacent because things under Biden were generally good?
Ah, it happened way earlier than that—it was their fervor for Reagan that caused us to mortgage our future for a short-term boom. You can tie so many of our current problems (debt addiction, outsourcing, vanishing of pensions, busting of unions, deregulation—basically, prioritizing the health of the market over american workers) directly to this phenomenon.
MAGA is basically the attempt to continue to be in denial about this.
Ironically, reagan had a large number of policies that are now considered to the left of the democratic party—it took two parties agreeing to be in pro-corporate economic lockstep to fuck us over. Such is the risk when you only differentiate parties over culture wars.
I was just listening to 1981 song/poem "B Movie" by Gil Scott Heron about electing Ronald Reagan and found it sadly very timely.
> The idea concerns the fact that this country wants nostalgia
> They want to go back as far as they can--
> Even if it's only as far as last week
> Not to face now or tomorrow, but to face backwards
The Republican party has long held reactionary politics. You can barely describe them as conservative on most issues anymore.
40 years since Reagan. That's quite a "short term boom".
Well, whatever length you want to perceive it as, it's certainly not a sustainable way to run a country. Except into the ground.
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The greatest thing the rich ever did was convince the poor that the even poorer was stealing their money/jobs.
You seem to be from the past.
The trump administration supports vast H1B immigration.
Source?
You got sources for any of that?
Fear.
>Half of all job gains under Biden went to illegal immigrants
No they didn't, stop blindly parroting Trumpist propaganda. Biden was growing the economy, and Trump cratered it. Deal with it.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/17/politics/fact-check-donald-tr...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2024/07/21/emplo...
I also note that your "fact check" is talking about immigrants, not illegal immigrants.
This is "bad reporting", in my view, because it (intentionally) baits readers into drawing sweeping conclusions ("Trumps policies have been a complete disaster, I knew it!") from very little data and small effect sizes.
This happens a ton on both sides of the political spectrum and I hate it.
On the topic itself:
If you want to bring formerly offshored industries back at scale (a overall dubious plan in my opinion), then high unemployment is a good starting point because it helps avoid labor shortages and price spikes in unrelated industries.
But what CNN reports is too small to have much of an effect on that.
These same numbers come out and are reported on every month. It would be more conspicuous not to report on the August numbers.
> then high unemployment is a good starting point
This strikes me as overly simplistic and optimistic. The real world is not a zero-sum-game where if someone loses someone else wins.
Macroeconomics in today's world is an interconnected hot mess where I wouldn't dare to infer much except for that simple cause and effect chains surely do not work.
What you deduce might be true in an otherwise stable and sunny economic climate, but we're far from that.
- Trumps active hand in messing with the US economy (Going on an immigrant (labor) hunt, firing a FED governor and threatening Powell, buying into Intel, imposing tariffs coughed up by an LLM)
- Unprecedented amounts of money are being singularly invested into "AI" and not much else
- Consumer prices for Americans as a compound combination of tariffs and an expected weaker dollar if interest rates go down aren't playing well with peak unemployment
Taking that all in, comparatively to only a couple of months ago, this setup is by far not the most desirable investment climate in the US for foreign investment.
And while bringing back offshored industries sure sounds nice on paper, I'm wondering how that's gonna play out with a) historically high CoL in the US leading to b) higher wages required for the supposed high quality jobs coming back leading to c) high prices to purchase said goods.
I'm being a bit facetious here, but if the actual plan is to bring back comparatively low-wage, labor intensive industries to the US, then I think high unemployment at the start of the process is exactly what you want; otherwise, you will cannibalize existing industries for the required labor, inflating prices for everything.
I do not think that doing this is a good idea, especially not at scale, and I believe that the tariff incentives as they currently stand are insufficient to achieve this anyway (but "sufficient" increases to tariff levels are unpalatable and infeasible).
I believe in zero-sum economics, I.E, I don't believe that there can be a "global market crash", all crashes have an equal and opposite effect somewhere else. I'm expecting to hear that jobs are booming in some other countries. In fact, there is data on this.
Those of you who experienced Silicon Valley at its height, I hope that this means we get to experience the next iteration of that, even if it's somewhere random on the planet.
>I believe in zero-sum economics, I.E, I don't believe that there can be a "global market crash", all crashes have an equal and opposite effect somewhere else. I'm expecting to hear that jobs are booming in some other countries. In fact, there is data on this.
Yeah this isn't right. Changing policy can reduce the value of assets across the board, everywhere. It's very possible. The money just disappears because those assets are no longer worth the same in the new environment. Sometimes everyone loses.
> Changing policy can reduce the value of assets across the board, everywhere
If the value of everything changes uniformly, what difference does it make? If I can sell an ounce of gold and buy 1,000 gallons of milk, what does it matter if I briefly have $1,000 or $10,000 in my bank account while accomplishing this trade?
I would suggest that 1929 is a pretty decent example of a global crash.
Economics can be positive sum, zero sum, or negative sum, depending on the situation.
But in this instance, if the US is removing itself from the global scene, there may in fact be booms in other places.
> I would suggest that 1929 is a pretty decent example of a global crash
How so? Did no one gain from it?
I know a lot of people, especially those in the industry, don't want to deal with this, but this was the year of "AI agents".
I'm not sure what else you'd expect.
AI is the smoke screen companies are using to cut costs because they see things slowing down (tariffs and the general admin causing enormous uncertainty), and many are still recovering from all the over hiring during COVID.
Is there much to indicate the losses are due to AI.
I see a lot of stories but not a lot to make it clear if that is the case.
I usually see it claimed with legit job numbers, but then very iffy connections to AI.
Not really, this was just on the front page of this site:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45129267
What a nice self-fulfilling prophecy some people have here. Hype AI as a job killer, execs become convinced of the tech before any real results are delivered, use it as excuse for layoffs, something something job numbers, "SEE?? AI!"
I think we have to remember all the beneficial job cuts:
DOGE savings: ~$205B, ~$1,273 per taxpayer.
DOGE direct layoffs: ~68K, total federal departures ~178K; corresponding to savings of ~$1.15M per departure.
"Through July, DOGE said it has saved taxpayers $52.8 billion by canceling contracts, but of the $32.7 billion in actual claimed contract savings that POLITICO could verify, DOGE’s savings over that period were closer to $1.4 billion."
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/12/trump-doge-contract...
Great stuff!
You think $1.4B makes sense, when the crazy contracts they've cancelled are easily way over that? Also, politico is not an authoritative source of information. They're rated as a left-leaning organization, known to be wrong, often.
Yes. Nearly everything they said they canceled either didn’t happen at all or the contract had ended before they canceled it.
Wait, some people actually believed the numbers doge put out? Why? Do you also believe that tesla FSD will be available ten years ago?
So you hate Elon and the exposure of massive corruption DOGE has uncovered. It doesn't take much to add up the value of the insane contracts DOGE has thankfully cancelled.
Calling out well-known liars for their persistent lies is not hate.
You hate Elon. Got it. But that's irrelevant to tens upon tens of billions that DOGE has saved in insane contracts.
Is this a parody of someone who still believes the $200bn number?
lmfao