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Weather: Sunny, with a high near 69. Thursday Night: Mostly clear, with a low around 48.
- Daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
- Drought conditions here. (What is the Keetch-Byram drought index?).
- Check today’s tides in Daytona Beach (a few minutes off from Flagler Beach) here.
- Tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here.
Today at a Glance:
Drug Court convenes before Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols at 10 a.m. in Courtroom 401 at the Flagler County courthouse, Kim C. Hammond Justice Center 1769 E Moody Blvd, Bldg 1, Bunnell. Drug Court is open to the public. See the Drug Court handbook here and the participation. agreement here.
The Flagler Beach City Commission meets at 5:30 p.m. at City Hall, 105 South 2nd Street in Flagler Beach. Watch the meeting at the city’s YouTube channel here. Access meeting agenda and materials here. See a list of commission members and their email addresses here.
Evenings at Whitney Lecture Series hosted by the University of Florida Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience at 6 p.m. Tonight: “Locomoting in a turbulent world,” Dr. Mimi Koehl. When microscopic organisms swim in the ocean, they are also carried by turbulent ambient currents that often move faster than the tiny creatures can locomote. Studies of swimming and chemotaxis by microorganisms are usually conducted in still water, whereas large-scale studies of microorganism transport by ambient flow treat them as passive particles. How does the interaction between a microorganism’s swimming through the water and its transport and rotation by turbulent ambient flow affect where it travels through the habitat, what are the environmental signals it encounters along the way, and how do its behavioral responses affect where it goes? This free lecture will be presented in person at the UF Whitney Laboratory Lohman Auditorium, 9505 Ocean Shore Boulevard, in St. Augustine. Those interested also have the option of registering to watch via Zoom live the night of the lecture. Go here to register for this month’s lecture. See previous lectures here.
Flagler Beach United Methodist Church Food Pantry: Flagler Beach United Methodist Church‘s food pantry is open today from 9:30 a.m. to noon at 1500 S. Daytona Ave, Flagler Beach. The church’s mission is to provide nourishment and support in a welcoming, respectful environment. To find us, please turn at the corner of 15 Street and S. Daytona Ave, pull into the grass parking area and enter the green door.
Model Yacht Club Races at the Pond in Palm Coast’s Central Park, from noon to 2 p.m. in Central Park in Town Center, 975 Central Ave. Join Bill Wells, Bob Rupp and other members of the Palm Coast Model Yacht Club, watch them race or join the races with your own model yacht. No dues to join the club, which meets at the pond in Central Park every Thursday.
The Palm Coast Democratic Club holds its monthly business meeting at noon at the Flagler Democratic Party Headquarters in City Marketplace, 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite C214, Palm Coast. This gathering is open to the public at no charge. No advance arrangements are necessary. Call (386) 283-4883 for best directions or (561)-235-2065 for more information. For further information, please contact Palm Coast Democratic Club’s President Donna Harkins at (561) 235-2065, visit our website at http://palmcoastdemocraticclub.org/ or Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/groups/palmcoastdemclub/permalink
Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn, at Athens Theatre, 124 North Florida Avenue, DeLand. 7:30 p.m. 386/736-1500. Tickets, Adult $37 – Senior $33 Student/Child $17. Book here. Celebrate the magic of Christmas with Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn—a heartwarming holiday treat packed with show-stopping dance numbers, dazzling costumes, and a treasure trove of timeless tunes. When Broadway performer Jim leaves the bright lights behind for a quiet Connecticut farmhouse, he ends up transforming his home into a seasonal inn, open only on the holidays. But with love in the air, rivalries heating up, and performances for every festivity, the holidays get a lot more exciting than he ever imagined. Featuring 20 beloved Irving Berlin classics—including “White Christmas,” “Happy Holiday,” “Blue Skies,” and “Cheek to Cheek”—this delightful musical delivers all the laughter, romance, and seasonal sparkle of a Christmas card come to life. Presented through special arrangement with Concord Theatricals.
‘Annie,’ at Limelight Theatre, Limelight Theatre, 11 Old Mission Avenue, St. Augustine. 7:30 p.m. The beloved musical about the optimistic orphan who captures hearts (and maybe even saves a billionaire). Perfect for families and the holiday spirit. Book here. (Note: all Sunday matinees are sold out, but there is a wait list you may join.)
‘Greetings,’ A Christmas Comedy, Daytona Playhouse, 100 Jessamine Blvd., Daytona Beach. 7:30 p.m. Box office: (386) 255-2431. tickets, $15 to $25. A comedy about a young man who brings home his Jewish atheist fiancée to meet his very Catholic parents on Christmas Eve. With the inevitable family explosion comes an out-of-left-field miracle that propels the family into a wild exploration of love, religion, personal truth, and the nature of earthly reality.
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center: Nightly from 6 to 9 p.m. at Palm Coast’s Central Park, with 57 lighted displays you can enjoy with a leisurely stroll around the pond in the park. Admission to Fantasy Lights is free, but donations to support Rotary’s service work are gladly accepted. Holiday music will pipe through the speaker system throughout the park, Santa’s Village, which has several elf houses for the kids to explore, will be open, with Santa’s Merry Train Ride nightly (weather permitting), and Santa will be there every Sunday night until Christmas, plus snow on weekends! On certain nights, live musical performances will be held on the stage.
Notably: In case you feel closed in. From Statista: “While Asian nations tend to have more compact urban spaces, countries like the United States and Russia lean more towards urban sprawl even in very big cities, resulting in a lot of exaggerated soil sealing in these areas. While China houses 12,000 people per square mile and India does as many as 28,000 on average, these figures are just around 3,300 in the U.S. and 6,600 in Russia. However, due to China’s and India’s large population numbers, their share of the globe’s large urban spaces with more than 500,000 inhabitants is 19 percent and 11 percent, respectively, also leading to the coverage of a lot of natural surface with buildings, roads and other potentially harmful obstructions. In the U.S. and Russia, these figures stand at 8 percent and 4 percent. Japan, known for its large and dense urban cityscapes, only houses around 10,000 people per square mile on average in its large urban conglomerations, which make up 1.7 percent of the globe’s total. Brazil and Mexico surpass this at 12,000-13,000, as do Nigeria (15,000) and Iran (18,000). Other countries with very dense large urban spaces are Colombia (38,000), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (40,000) and finally a country known for its extra dense cities, Bangladesh (55,000).”
The Live Calendar is a compendium of local and regional political, civic and cultural events. You can input your own calendar events directly onto the site as you wish them to appear (pending approval of course). To include your event in the Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
December 2025
Separation Chat: Open Discussion
The Circle of Light A Course in Miracles Study Group
January 2026
Flagler Beach United Methodist Church Food Pantry
Flagler County Drug Court Convenes
Story Time for Preschoolers at Flagler Beach Public Library
Model Yacht Club Races at the Pond in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
First Friday Garden Walks at Washington Oaks Gardens State Park
Friday Blue Forum
First Friday in Flagler Beach
Free Family Art Night at Ormond Memorial Art Museum and Gardens
For the full calendar, go here.
The English never seem to have cared much for mere instrumental virtuosity, but they have always maintained excellent church choirs. They do so today. Perhaps the climate had something to do with this. The Italians have given us greater individual singers, virtuosi with voices against which no northerner could hope to compete. The language itself had undoubtedly a lot to do with this. Vocal cords, accustomed to handle a tongue like the Italian, which sings itself whether you are proclaiming that la donna è mobile or merely buying a package of cigarettes, will lend themselves much more easily to a noble aria than the vocal cords of someone born in the frozen north and accustomed to handle Dutch or Finnish.
–From Hendricks van Loon’s The Arts (1935).
Ray W. says
On July 2, 2024, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas released a study on the macroeconomic impact immigrants have on the national economy.
Here are a few bullet points derived from the study.
– By incorporating previously unavailable migration data into “the government’s economic and fiscal outlook”, a better focus emerges about high levels of migration.
– “The labor force in 2033 will be larger by 5.2 million people, mostly because of higher net migration, according to [Congressional Budget Office[ CBO estimates. As a result of the immigration surge, GDP will be higher by about $8.9 trillion and federal tax revenues by $1.2 trillion over the 2024-2034 period. Deficits will be lower by $900 billion.”
– The foreign-born labor force grew at a rate of 2.2 percent per year from 2000 to 2019. Had that growth rate continued from 2020 to April 2024, 900,000 fewer immigrants would have entered the country, as of the end date of the study.
– “This jump in ready-to-work immigrants has boosted population, labor force and job growth in the post-pandemic economy. Estimates from the Hamilton Project suggest higher immigration boosted payroll job growth by 70,000 jobs per month in 2022 and by 100,000 jobs per month in 2023 and so far in 2024. The upper end of the range of job growth has doubled to 200,000 from 100,000 jobs per month absent the surge in immigration.”
– “It’s not unusual for immigration to account for high shares of job growth. Before the pandemic, from 2010 to 2019, the share of job growth attributable to immigration averaged 45 percent.”
– “The jump in jobs, along with immigrant’s consumption of goods and services in the United States, also bolsters GDP growth. According to the Hamilton Project study, higher immigration has contributed about 0.1 percentage points to GDP growth annually in 2022 and 2023 and is projected to do so again in 2024.”
– “The effect on inflation, meanwhile, could be neutral on average. Higher immigration represents a labor supply shock, which should be disinflationary. But immigrants are also consumers and add to aggregate demand. While certain sectors that extensively depend on immigrants should see costs and prices fall – for example, landscaping and child care – the population influx could put upward pressure on rents and house prices, particularly in the short run before new supply can be built.”
Here is how the study concludes:
“If immigration normalizes, it will return to rates that are insufficient to sustain the type of economic growth the U.S. is accustomed to. The nation is in a sort of demographic autumn, and winter is coming. The retirement of the baby boomers and overall aging of the workforce, as well as low and falling birth rates mean population growth will become entirely dependent on immigration by 2040, as deaths of U.S.-born will outpace births.
“Because economic growth depends on labor, capital and productivity, growth in these factors will set the speed limit of the economy. While technological advances and incentives for investment will contribute to productivity growth, immigration will be vital to propping up labor force growth.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
The study reveals that the top rate of job growth had become 200,000 per month with higher immigration, as opposed to a top rate of job growth of 100,000 per month with normal immigration. These additional newly-created jobs drive GDP growth, consumption, which accounts for 70% of growth, tax revenues, and more.
If immigration were framed as an economic argument, the answer would be fairly simple. But immigration is not framed as an economic argument, is it? It is framed as a political argument, with the Great Replacement Theory at its center. The political currency of the day has resurrected “shithole” countries as an epithet and immigration from Norway and Sweden as an aspiration.
The current administration just told European leaders that they were destroying a continental legacy through immigration policies, as if the European legacy is hatred for the other.
Ray W. says
Reuters reports that the Feds Open Market Committee voted yesterday to reduce the “benchmark policy rate” by 25 basis points, or 0.25%.
The twelve member FOMC voted 9-3 to cut. Two members voted to leave the rate as it was. One member voted to cut the rate by 50 basis points, or 0.5%.
In a statement released after the vote, the FOMC wrote, in part:
“In considering the extent and timing of additional adjustments to the target range for the federal funds rate, the Committee will carefully assess incoming data.” The reporter described this language as consistent with signalling a pause in future policy actions.
Said Michael Rosen, chief investment officer at Angeles Investments:
“The statement emphasized weakness in the labor market as the principal rationale for the 25-basis-point cut, and this detail is what the market has picked up on, suggesting the Fed could continue easing policy, even though expectations for easing in 2026 haven’t changed with one 25 basis point priced in.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
It bears reminding FlaglerLive readers.
The Fed has a central body, plus 12 regional banks. The FOMC consists of seven governing members from the central Fed, plus the president of the New York City regional bank, by which eight of the 12 voting seats are always filled. The 11 other regional bank presidents rotate into and out of the FOMC to fill the remaining four of the 12 voting seats. All 19 leaders attend Fed policy meetings, but only 12 of the 19 get to vote. A simple majority vote carries the argument. This meeting’s decision was reached on a 9-3 vote.
I continue to argue that the Fed is operating with relative myopia, what with months of “gold standard” statistical data lost, perhaps forever lost, due to the government shutdown. Important jobs data hasn’t been released since September’s data. Likewise, GDP data remains unknown for the third quarter. Inflation data is gone, too, though I suppose it can be inferred from data that will be published in January.
President’s Trump’s true tariff imposition took place in early August. Before that, tariffs were imposed, then paused, then reimposed at different rates, then paused again as the government attempted to negotiate more than 150 trade deals.
On August 7th, Trump’s “reciprocal” country-specific tariffs finally took root. The normal lag time between tariff imposition and tariff impact is months in duration, sometimes longer. With the lost economic data from the shutdown, we may not know the true inflationary impact of Trump’s August 7 country-specific “reciprocal” tariffs until sometime early next year.
As an aside, the reason that Jerome Powell is called the Fed Chair is that he chairs the FOMC meetings; he does not control the outcome. He cannot veto a vote he doesn’t believe necessary. His role is persuasion, not command.
When Trump calls Fed Chair Powell “Too Late Powell”, it shows a gross misunderstanding of how the Fed works. Powell is only one of 12 votes.
When in 2022 economists began arguing that the Fed should start raising lending rates as Trump’s spending spree began kicking up inflation, and as Biden’s spending spree began adding to Trump’s spending spree, the FOMC continuously voted to hold the lending rate at zero percent.
Many economists now argue that the Fed waited too long to raise lending rates. But, it wasn’t Powell holding back the sought-after rate increases, it was 19 of the best economic minds in the country discussing as a committee what to do, followed by voting by 12 of those experienced and educated economic minds.
Does the FOMC make mistakes? Most assuredly. Did the 19 underestimate the complexity and extent of the damage caused by the pandemic and the impact of spending by Trump and Biden? Apparently so, in hindsight.
Ray W. says
According to an Associated Press story, an American Statistical Association report prepared by outside experts finds that “the ranks of U.S. government statisticians have been gutted in the past year due to layoffs and buyouts.” When coupled with “diminished funding” and “attacks on independence”, per the report, the loss of so many statisticians “puts at risk the data used to make informed decisions.”
Wrote the reporter, “[o]ne agency lost 95% of its staff.” Others have lost between 25% and 33 1/3% of their staffs. Many of the lost employees have years of institutional knowledge that cannot easily be replaced.
The reporter spoke with Nancy Potok, a former U.S. chief statistician who served during the first Trump administration and who worked on the study. She said:
“Things are getting a lot worse. … It’s kind of dropping off a cliff there and in a really dire situation.”
A statistician unaffiliated with the report, Beth Jarosz, vice president of the Association of Public Data Users, said:
“The statistical system is still functioning, but the threats are very serious. … There are staffing reductions, contracted services that have been reduced. We’re seeing that showing up in the cancellation of data products, the reduction in data collection on things like consumer prices.”
When asked about the potential for political influence on economic statistics , a Trump administration spokesman, Mark Calabria, said:
“Everything in government is embedded in politics and is embedded in accountability. … So these kinds of debates about independence and accountability, they’re oranges and apples to some extent. … What you have is wanting to make sure that the data gives you the right answer.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
Mr. Calabria’s backwards thought is an example of everything that is wrong with political manipulation of economic data. One does not ever “make sure” that data gives you the “right answer.” The data is what it is, and it can not be changed without consequences. There is no right and wrong in the data, unless one allows politics to poison the data.
In other words, it is one thing to release good data and then politicize it after it is issued. It is another thing entirely to “make sure” to politicize the data itself before it is issued. Garbage in, garbage out.
Laurel says
And the blonde/grey baby brat exclaimed “I got an oil tanker, so now we can play USA pirates! We can show the world what assholes we have become.”
Ray W. says
Fortune reports that, after more than 10 months of tourism data are in “[f]rom Washington State to northern New England, American businesses that have long depended on Canadian visitors are seeing traffic dry up – and with it, a crucial source of revenue.”
A Congressional committee of long standing (since 1946) shared a new economic report with Fortune.
The Joint Economic Committee (JEC) – Minority, charged with documenting U.S. economic conditions, detailed a “sharp drop” in Canadian tourism.
From January 2025 to October 2025, the passenger count at the U.S.-Canadian border is down nearly 20%, year-over-year. In some states, the downturn is as much as 27%.
The reporter asserts that Canadian tourists have long been among the most important of all classes of international visitors.
Said Shirley Hughes, president and CEO of Visit Fargo-Moorhead:
“These are more than numbers; they represent missed revenue for local businesses, reduced hotel demand, and fewer dollars supporting jobs and investment in our community.”
Echoed Elizabeth Guerin, owner of the Fiddleheads gift shop in Colebrook, N.H.:
“Being only eight miles from the border, normally Canadians make up anywhere from 15% to 25% of visitors. Now, I can probably count the number of Canadian visitors on one hand. I’m just trying to plug along and keep my nose above the waterline.”
Said Scott Osborne, president and co-owner of Fox Run Vineyards in Penn Yan, New York:
“The drop in visits from Canadian tourists has had a noticeable impact on our bottom line. With Canadians making up about 10% of our business, fewer cross-border travelers mean fewer tastings, tours, and wine sales – a ripple effect that touches our entire operation, underscoring how important cross-border tourism is to our business model.”
Commented Kevin Coleman, executive director of Seafest in Bellingham, Washington:
“Since March of this year, we have not only seen Canadian traffic drop drastically, by we have also seen a drop in our number of attendees at our festival this year in late September. We knew that after March, we could not rely on our Canadian business because of fear at the border and lack of understanding of what is happening with tariffs and Canada drawing a strong line of promoting Canada first.”
According to Christa Bowdish, owner of Waterbury, Vermont’s Old Stagecoach Inn:
“This is long-lasting damage to a relationship, and emotional damage take time to heal. While people aren’t visiting Vermont, they’ll be finding new places to visit, making new memories, building new family traditions, and we will not recapture all of that.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
I argue again. Once one loses market share, it may prove difficult to get it back. OPEC+, starting in April of this year, began flooding the crude oil marketplace in order to try to regain market share lost during OPEC+’s years of starving the marketplace of crude oil in order to manipulate prices in its favor.
Ray W. says
The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) just completed a two-day gathering to vote of Fed lending rate policy. The FOMC meets eight times a year. After each meeting, the Fed Chair speaks on the issues raised during the meeting.
Yesterday, Fed Chair Jerome Powell expressed concerns raised by Fed staffers about the possibility that official statistics might be “drastically” overstating recent hiring levels by as many as 60,000 jobs per month.
If that figure is accurate, that means that instead of the economy adding an average of 40,000 jobs per month since April, the true picture of the jobs marketplace is a reduction of 20,000 jobs per month since April.
Said Fed Chair Powell:
“It’s a complicated, unusual, and difficult situation, where the labor market is also under pressure, where job creation may actually be negative.”
According to the reporter, the Labor Department will release next week the jobs figures for October and November, plus it will likely revise numbers from monthly jobs reports before October.
One of the problems, per the reporter, is that surveyed business owners are simply taking longer to hand in monthly jobs surveys, making it more difficult to accurately determine actual jobs added or lost. Another issue is that the monthly jobs surveys do not reach “brand-new companies” or “companies no longer in business”, a statistical process known as the “birth-death model”, which forces government statisticians to estimate or guess at the actual number of jobs created or lost.
Wrote the reporter:
“The difficulty with the birth-death model is just one among a handful of problems the BLS has faced in delivering accurate economic statistics on time, as is complicating the Fed’s job as it tries to steer an economy facing dual challenges of elevated inflation and rising unemployment.
“A falling number of timely responses to the labor surveys has increased the scale of a different set of monthly job-stats revisions, required after some companies hand in their payroll numbers late. A yearslong budget crunch and staffing shortages have also weighed on the agency’s capabilities. And, most recently, the extended government shutdown that ended in November set the agency’s work back by more than a month.”
Make of this what you will.
Ray W. says
An NBC NEWS report just in is that a Norfolk, Virginia, grand jury for the second time in seven days has declined to indict Letitia James on allegations of mortgage application fraud.
An earlier and third effort by a different federal prosecutor resulted in charges filed against Ms. James, but the charges were dismissed by the trial judge because, in the judge’s findings, the prosecutor had been unlawfully appointed to her position.
I do not claim that this will be the end of the federal government’s attempts to indict her.
Make of this what you will.
Jim says
Well, MAGA can love their Orange Monster if they want. It seems he can do no wrong nor tell a lie too big to upset them in any way. But for the rest of the world, watching the “president” receive a “peace award” from a soccer league that is always plagued by corruption was hardly impressive. In fact, it just showed how pitiful Trump is and how desperate he is for people to kiss his ass. I watched some of the lowlights from the presentation and Trump was definitely excited to get it. He couldn’t wait to put the little ribbon with the shiny disk around his neck. I guess he didn’t win any awards in high school and needed the experience.
It’s a shame to have such a little person in charge of this country. It’s an embarrassment to watch him when he has visitors. If they flatter him and kiss his butt, he’s so happy it’s hilarious. But God forbid a female reporter ask him a legitimate question. Then, the little guy gets all mad and feels he has to talk to them as if they’re the one with the problem. He says “X” one day and “-X” the next day as if there is no video/audio of what he’s done. (But then, it could just be that Trump is slipping so badly mentally [and physically] that he doesn’t even remember what he said.) But none of this bothers MAGA.
But enough of that…. We need to get on with invading Venezuela and deposing their president, Nicolás Maduro. Then we can move on to Columbia and do the same. But I don’t want to see the USA support Ukraine in their fight with Russia. No sir. Let’s follow Trump’s path and give Russia whatever they want and blame Ukraine for daring the want to survive as a free country. But, again, MAGA is okay with that as well because we don’t want any country to have more freedoms than we used to have….
Ray W. says
According to a Markets Insider story, a small number of Wall Street analysts are concluding that a decade of malaise may be settling onto the S&P 500.
First, the foundational position.
The S&P 500 had three straight years of greater than 15% growth, to the extent that the forward price-to-earnings ratio now trades at around 27, well above the 5-year-average range of 19.5-25.4. Second, since 2022, the S&P 500 is up 90%. Third, since the emergence of the American economy out of the Great Recession in 2009, there has been a long “secular bull market.”
Bank of America issued an investor note foreseeing the S&P 500 “shedding 0.1% over the next decade, declaring:
“Even for the next year, the math of history is tough: average returns for the S&P 500 after 3 years of [greater than] 15% growth are 2.3ppt lower than the average annual return. Investors may need GDP & EPS surprises to avoid a seventh ‘lost decade.'”
Torsten Slok, Apollo’s chief economist, told the reporter:
“The historical relationship between the S&P 500 forward P/E ratio and subsequent 10-annualized returns shows that investors should expect to get zero in return in the S&P 500 over the coming decade.”
Last month, Goldman Sachs analysts projected that the U.S. market would come in last place compared with markets in Europe, Japan, Asia, and other emerging markets, writing that the S&P 500 will gain some 6.5% per year over the next 10 years, with US valuations declining about 1% per year.
The Goldman Sachs analysts wrote:
“If the profitability and/or valuations of the largest companies falter, unless another cohort of ‘superstars’ emerges, returns for the broad market will likely be hampered as today’s largest stocks fall back to earth.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
I am no economist. At best, I am a curious student.
I have lived through 10 recessions.
I have not forgotten the naysayers in 2021 who all but proclaimed that America would crash into recession after the Trump stimulus money and the early portion of the Biden stimulus money that had been thrown mostly into the demand side of the economy was expected to overheat the economy.
Over three years then passed without the American economy ever landing, much less crashing into recession. What really happened was that the American economy slowly descended into a nearly fully repaired economy. Both The Economist and The Wall Street Journal opined that President Trump came into office inheriting an economy that was “the envy of the world.”
I am not ready to equate today’s American economy with Japan’s of the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, when an overheated Tokyo commercial real estate market collapsed, resulting in a 10-year term of economic malaise that is now called “The Lost Decade.”
As an aside, I found a Japanese researcher’s study on the possible reasons for why it took so long for Japan to emerge from the Lost Decade.
He writes:
“Turning finally to policy recommendations that target the supply side, Hayashi and Prescott’s (2002) findings imply that subsidies to inefficient firms and declining industries should have been discontinued since they presumably lower the overall rate of productivity growth. Such a policy would have brought about an improvement in government finances in addition to enhancing productivity growth and hence would have killed two birds with one stone.
“Now that the Japanese economy is staging a modest recovery, there may no longer be any need for stimulative fiscal and monetary policies, but at the very least, the Japanese government should be very cautious about tightening either fiscal or monetary policy until the economy has fully recovered to prevent the economy from slipping back into recession.”
Yes, today’s shedding labor market is consistent with what many economists expected were the Trump administration to begin deporting larger numbers of immigrant workers. Numerous studies report a direct link between removing immigrants and job losses among American workers.
Yes, I suspect that too much money is chasing too few investment opportunities. I am aware of the stories about the S&P 493, with only seven S&P 500 companies emerging as superstars, carrying the other 493 on their backs.
Ray W. says
The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, per Reuters, “urged Washington to prevent Chinese government-backed automakers and battery manufacturers from opening U.S. manufacturing plants, warning the industry’s future is at stake.”
General Motors, Ford, Stellantis, Toyota, Volkswagen, Hyundai, and others, sounded the alarm. Congress and the Trump administration need to act.
In the Alliance’s statement that was delivered to the House for a hearing on Chinese vehicles, it was declared that “[n]o amount of investment by automakers and battery manufacturers operating in the U.S. can counter a China that is enabled by subsidies to chronically oversupply around the world. This is a recipe for dumping that Congress and the Trump Administration must prevent from happening inside the U.S.”
Republican John Moolenaar, chair of a select House committee on China, said that President Biden’s late-term executive order placing “prohibitions” on Chinese-connected vehicles should be codified into law, adding:
“In just five years, China has gone from a minor exporter to the world’s largest auto exporter, shipping 6 million vehicles abroad last year at below market prices that U.S. and allied automakers cannot match. … With massive subsidies, control over raw materials and supply chains and a predatory regulatory regime, Beijing has turned its auto industry into a tool of the state.”
Make of this what you will.
Skibum says
What has soccer in general, or FIFA more specifically, got to do with any legitimate peace deal anywhere in the world? Not a damn thing, that’s what! One might have mistaken the ridiculous and horribly choreographed “FIFA Peace Prize” presentation for a Comedy Central sketch, except that Americans who viewed that spectacle on TV were not laughing with them, we were all laughing AT them for even daring to go through with such an outrageous farce.
I’m not sure which is more unbelievable and incomprehensible… that the governing body of soccer gives out peace prizes?! Or that the orange terror in the WH who is personally involved in so many intentional and unconscionable UN-PEACEFUL acts of violence here and abroad, including murder on the high seas and openly threatening and antagonizing other world leaders, is somehow a worthy candidate to receive a peace prize from any entity whatsoever?!
FIFA just de-legitimized their organization with that charlatan fool of an organization president doling out an obscene and unwarranted, kiss ass “prize”. I am quite sure that fiasco has pissed off hoards of soccer fans all over the world as well.
The truth of the matter is that the only peace deal the convicted felon fraudster in the WH has ever successfully negotiated was most likely a “peace” of ass from a paid prostitute.
Sherry says
The FIFA leadership has now started an ethics investigation over this debacle. FIFA is “supposed” to be politically neutral. . . LOL! “Ethics, We Don’t Need No Stinking Ethics”. . . Right Maga? Right??
Tony Mack says
Trump is a convicted felon and like many crime bosses, he specializes in extortion:
To Wit…Federal prosecutors in the U.S. moved to drop charges in a long-running international soccer bribery case on Tuesday, days after President Donald Trump received the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize.
The news has prompted scrutiny online, though there is no evidence of any connection between the award and prosecutors’ move to dismiss the charges.
A spokesperson for the Justice Department told Newsweek in an emailed statement: “These prosecutions are not consistent with the current prosecutorial priorities of the United States, which direct the Department of Justice’s resources into Making America Safe Again.”
Trump is a criminal…it’s what they do…