SCRATCHPAD: 2024-07-24 We: Bill Dudley Joins My Side on Fed Policy; & Biden-Thing Journamalism; & MOAR...

A scratchpad…

A scratchpad…

---

---

Journamalism: The Wall Street Journal, as it has been all my life:

<wsj.com/articles/kamala-harris-would-be…>

---

Economics: Now how did the Fed get into this "the first rate cut/increase needs to be 'consequential', so we guarantee that we will be late to start cutting/raising and then have to play catchup but without making big moves at or between meetings unless we fell we have really screwed the pooch" box in the first place?

What's wrong with saying: "The Fed Funds rate is a control variable, and basic optimal-control tells us that information arrives we move the Fed Funds rate so that the odds are about 50-50 with respect to whether the next move will be up or down"?

The fact that the Fed trapped itself in the first means that for this entire year it has kept rates higher than it really wanted because it could not figure out a way to get them lower without overshooting substantially and making them lower than it really wanted.

It should avoid doing this in the future.

Now, however, there are enough signs of economic deterioration that starting the rate-cutting is likely to get the yield curve configuration to where it should be. And after that the Fed can think about whether to pause, cut, or raise at each meeting without being locked into any single trajectory.

And it is nice to see that Bill Dudley has come around to agreeing with me:

Bill Dudley: I Changed My Mind. The Fed Needs to Cut Rates Now: ‘Waiting until September unnecessarily increases the risk of a recession…. The persistent strength of the US economy [had] suggested that the Fed wasn’t doing enough to slow things down…. Now, the Fed’s efforts to cool the economy are having a visible effect…. Housing construction has faltered…. The momentum generated by Biden’s investment initiatives appears to be fading…. Inflation pressures have abated significantly… 2.6% in May from a year earlier, not far above the central bank’s 2% objective…. Average hourly earnings were up 3.9% in June from a year earlier, compared with a peak of nearly 6% in March 2022…. Historically, deteriorating labor markets generate a self-reinforcing feedback loop… <bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-07-…>

---

Journamalism: I strongly endorse:

Chad Orzel: The Biden Thing: ‘All politics is stupid, and political media is worse…. The last month has really driven home the degree to which the entire enterprise of political media has devolved into nothing but the laziest sorts of theater criticism. Biden’s weakness was based… [on] perceived deficiencies in the job of playing the President on TV…. There’s been essentially no evaluation of anything substantive that Biden has done, just complaints about how he looks while doing it, and next to no acknowledgement that the few things Trump says that seem relatively coherent are horrifying to contemplate as actual policy…. It’s hard not to believe that this… reflects the level of effort… analyzing policy requires listening… parsing… and, you know, learning stuff, whereas “Old man sounds old!” is trivially easy. There’s also a level of naked self-interest on the part of the political media…. From declarations that the only way to redeem the bad debate performance would be to do lengthy sit-down interviews with political reporters to the more recent suggestions that the Biden replacement should be chosen through some farcical process involving Oprah fucking Winfrey hosting town halls, it’s hard not to notice that the common element is political pundits getting a shitload of free material with next to zero effort… just fantasy sports for people with liberal-arts degrees… <chadorzel.substack.com/p/the-biden-thin…>

---

Shakespeare’s J.D. Vance:

WITCHES, dancing in a circle: 
The Weïrd Sisters, hand in hand,
Posters of the sea and land,
Thus do go about, about,
Thrice to thine and thrice to mine
And thrice again, to make up nine.
Peace, the charm’s wound up.

Enter VANCE and ROBERTS, riding through the gloaming.

VANCE: So foul and fair a day I have not seen.

ROBERTS: How far is ’t called to Forres?—What are these,
So withered, and so wild in their attire,
That look not like th’ inhabitants o’ th’ Earth
And yet are on ’t?—Live you? Or are you aught
That man may question? You seem to understand me
By each at once her choppy finger laying
Upon her skinny lips. You should be women,
And yet your beards forbid me to interpret
That you are so.

VANCE: Speak if you can. What are you

FIRST WITCH: All hail, Vance! Hail to thee, Senator from Ohio!

SECOND WITCH: All hail, Vance! Hail to thee, Vice-Presidential Candidate!

THIRD WITCH: All hail, Vance, that shalt be President hereafter!

---

The odds are good—60%? 40%?—that J.D. Vance is going to, come January 21, 2025, be just one 25th Amendment invocation away from the presidency. Given that every single Republican I know thinks that J.D. Vance has the chops to do either (by their lights) a good or excellent job at being president and also that Trump has 0% of the chops, Republican court politics may well become very interesting.

Plus every single Republican I know thinks that Republicans would do better in November’s election if Trump were to (a) decline the nomination in return for (b) promises of a full pardon and (c ) throw this full support behind Vance while (d) continuing to take the Trump Show on the road, to the extent that he is physically and cognitively able to.

Trump is thus, right now, in a very interesting position.

The line is that A-listers hire B-listers, and C-listers hire D-listers.

But what does a C-Lister who has just hired a B-lister with the potential to become an A-lister do?

That is a very uneasy position to be in.

Especially since said C-lister knows that all the B-lister needs is half the cabinet willing to invoke the 25th Amendment, and that not a month passed during his first term in which there were not whispers among the cabinet asking if the time to invoke the 25th Amendment was now.

---

Neofascism: If Trump actually cared about anything other than Trump, he would follow Joe Biden’s example, reject the nomination, and endorse his vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance. And if Professional Republicans actually cared about anything other than their personal career advantage, all of them would be out there, inside and outside, telling Trump plus all and sundry that this would be a good thing for Republican policy causes and for the party for Trump to do. But nobody imagines that any of them are going to do any of that, do they?

Nikki Haley: ‘The first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate is going to be the one who wins this election…

---

May America Stay America: What I am hearing is that Biden is, cognitively, much better off than Trump is, and significantly better off than Reagan was in 1984 when he ran for his second term. But I am also hearing that the decline is real, and that people guess he will be at Reagan-84 levels in a year or two, long before the end of what would have been his second term:

Kamala Harris: ‘On behalf of the American people, I thank Joe Biden for his extraordinary leadership as President of the United States and for his decades of service to our country. I am honored to have the President’s endorsement and my intention is to earn and win this nomination. I will do everything in my power to unite the Democratic Party—and unite our nation—to defeat Donald Trump and his extreme Project 2025 agenda…. Donald Trump said he was going to stand up to Big Pharma and lower the cost of prescription drugs—instead, he bowed down. President Joe Biden and I took on Big Pharma and have capped the cost of insulin for seniors at $35 a month. The contrast is clear… <https://x.com/kamalaharris?lang=en>

---

Neofascism: it was not that Professional Republicans "did not want Trump to win the nomination but failed to mobilize", it was that Professional Republicans did not want Trump to become president again in 2025. But the overwhelming majority of Professional Republicans thought Trump would be the strongest candidate to win the presidency in 2024, and had coattails:

Dan Drezner: Joe Goes: 'A lot of powerful Democrats urged Biden to exit…. Democrats who had actually won elections in the past and had skin in the game for 2024. The contrast with a Republican Party that didn’t want Trump to win the nomination but failed to mobilize in any useful way is constructive…. Biden and his loyal supporters started to sound way too much like Trump supporters did back during the days of the Toddler-in-Chief thread…. I did not like seeing these themes emerge as Biden tried to defend himself… <danieldrezner.substack.com/p/joe-goes>

---

CryptoGrifts: I just made a vanilla twitter account—said my interests were business, science, and technology, following nobody. Here is what it shows me:

Shay Boloor: In the current phase of the AI-driven Intelligence Revolution -- I see the greatest growth potential in $TSLA & $PLTR. While $CRWD & $SNOW are currently my largest holdings -- I plan to gradually reallocate during Q3 to position Tesla & Palantir as my top positions.

AltCoin Daily IO: Can The US Government Destroy x.com/StockSavvyShay?

Jesus Martinez: $MIGGLES Is Going To $1 Billion The Unofficial Coinbase Cat I aped in like $20K x.com/0xJesusMartinez

Leading Report: BREAKING: Sen. Ron Johnson says he has “seen evidence that there may have been two sh**ters” during Trump’s assassination attempt. "We can’t trust the FBI and Secret Service to do an honest and open investigation.”

Amit Is Investing: TRUMP JUST NOW ON ELON MUSK AND TESLA: - Confirms that Elon is giving him $45M per month but notes that Elon never brings up the topic of political donations in their phone calls (he says other people give him $2 and he has to wine and dine them, lol) - Says he is NOT

Amit Is Investing: If you want to know how insane Twitter is: Elon retweeted me once and in my DMs, I got called a n*gger by a neo-nazi and coon by a black Leftist hours apart.

NSF Voyager 2: I am currently 18h 53m 45s of light travel time from Earth (2024:203:000000:2L)

Sensei BR BTC: BREAKING China is about to unban x.com/amitisinvesting ! BULLISH

Fluent in Finance: Most meetings are a waste of time. But there's an easy fix. A leaked email from Elon Musk revealed his 6 tips for productivity.

Jeff Eisenband: When you see someone choose another investment bank over Morgan Stanley

The Skin Doctor 13: RBI governor has warned that since people are increasingly investing in mutual funds over traditional FDs, it could create serious liquidity problems for the banks. If Nirmala ji takes this concern seriously and decides to act to make people switch back to FDs, what would she…

Elira Pendora: good morning to everyone especially Chiitan IKE’S 3D SOON!!!!!!!! YIPPEE

Misterr Crypto: It's approval week for the Spot x.com/FluentInFinance ETF. Get ready

The Dog: The most viral and viewed threads on Twitter about the CrowdStrike incident are all conspiracy nonsense. This one is fucking incredible.

Rover CRC: My next target for x.com/FluentInFinance is $89,000

BitCoin Magazine: JUST IN: The world’s largest x.com/FluentInFinance  conference is only FOUR days away

Misterr Crypto: x.com/misterrcrypto consolidation is not bad. It's part of the process.

Tulsi Soni: Passive income is one of the best ways to build wealth. ChatGPT allows anyone to start building passive income fast. Here are 16 simple proven methods to start earning $10,000/mo with AI

Shah H: some dev rugged a memecoin to get height lengthening surgery these were his final words

Cynical Publius: I’m seeing a lot of fretting and worrying from certain conservative quarters (like Sundance at the Conservative Treehouse) that JD Vance is some sort of Deep State plant because he went to Yale Law School and was a venture capitalist. I want to share some personal experiences

& I had to expand this one to see:

that may allay your fears.

If you listened to my appearance on Ron Coleman’s podcast last week, you know I finally revealed some things about myself that I have thus far been keeping purposely vague—those things give me, I think, a little bit of insight into where JD’s head may be at. I’m a lot older than JD, and I came from a solidly middle class family with two wonderful parents, but some of my experiences mirror his. The day I retired from the Army, I started law school full time. I did not go to Yale, but I went to another of what the legal community calls an elite “Top 14” law school. I then went to work at an “AmLaw 25” law firm, where I worked closely as a corporate law attorney with leading venture capitalists and some of the huge Silicon Valley companies that drive our economy. (Needless to say, 90% of my colleagues and clients were rabid Democrats who assumed that everyone they met, including me, naturally believed what they believed.)

When you go into something truly privileged like this and it’s not where you are born and raised from, you go into it with kind of a starry-eyed expectation that you are putting on Cinderella’s slipper. You are not. You rapidly learn that so, so many of the people who surround you may have high IQs, but their privileged backgrounds and inoculation from the everyday lives of most Americans leave them hopelessly vapid, vain and clueless, and full of ideas that do nothing to help anyone but themselves and people just like them. They often have the racial bigotry of low expectations, and their intellect, training, power and wealth are wielded in a way that is most harmful to our nation.

That’s not to say I have not met many great people and had wonderful, amazing partners along the way (I have)—but taken as a whole that community is essentially a cabal of highly intelligent and wealthy idiots, and they cause massive harm to our nation. I see this now quite clearly, and being part of them never changed me. Instead, it put me on the inside of their cabal and taught me how it works and how to effectively fight it. Sometimes I feel like a double agent, leveraging what I know to work against the horrific vision they have for America—a vision where their wealth and knowledge qualifies them (they think) to tell the rest of us how to live our best lives.

I’m pretty sure JD Vance is the same way. He was inside the “elites” but never became one, and with the knowledge he has he can now effectively combat them.

I could be wrong but I’m pretty sure JD is solid. As a legal colleague of mine who also went into the law after retiring from the Army once told me: “These are some nice people. But they never slept in the dirt.” You don’t forget sleeping in the dirt, and I doubt JD Vance has forgotten it.