Matthew B

"Americans with four-year college degrees now comprise a record 25% of total unemployment" - @boes.bsky.social www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Global Water Cycle ‘Erratic’ in 2024, Leading to Floods, Drought Global water supplies are becoming less reliable, leading to dangerous floods, droughts and threats to agriculture, the United Nation’s weather agency said in a new report.

"A record hot year driven by climate change contributed to unpredictable river flows and rainfall in 2024 ... Last year almost two-thirds of global river basins had water levels either significantly above or significantly below normal values" www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

"Since the Israel-Hamas war began two years ago, development within Area C has grown five times faster than at any period over the past 20 years, driven largely by new settlements" (www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...)

The case against the ‘climate realists’ In their new book, two prominent eco-Marxists examine just how reasonable it is to think we can ‘solve’ environmental breakdown without changing the w...

"The realists, it transpires, have merely swapped wishful thinking about humanity’s ability to kick its fossil fuel habit for magical thinking about our ability to upend the laws of physics and chemistry" www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/7105...

Wall Street Is Divided Over Whether Immigration Is Behind US Hiring Slowdown Wall Street economists disagree on what’s behind a sharp slowdown in US job growth, highlighting a divide that is central to the broader outlook for the economy.

The shock jobs report divided Wall Street into two camps: One that sees a plunge in hiring as not much to worry about because it reflects an immigration crackdown reducing labor supply, and another that views it more as a more concerning sign of waning labor demand www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

In Q1 and Q2 of 2025, U.S. business investment in computer equipment registered the biggest back-to-back increases since 2000. Excluding computer equipment, business investment actually fell in Q2. Underscores the extent to which the AI boom is sucking up capital (www.bloomberg.com/news/article...)

U.S. consumers are pulling back on discretionary services spending. Outlays on transportation services, food services and accommodation, financial services and other services—a category that includes net foreign travel—all fell in May, extending weakness in Q1 (www.bloomberg.com/news/article...)

Number of unemployed Americans up for four straight months, longest streak since 2009 sherwood.news/markets/numb...
(h/t @boes.bsky.social)

Market-based core PCE price index rose 2.2% in the 12 months through March, marking the smallest increase in four years (www.bloomberg.com/news/article...)

US Economists Say Recession Risk Is Still High After Trump Pivot Wall Street economists maintained their forecasts for a sharp slowdown in US economic growth and warned recession risk is still elevated despite the Trump administration’s decision this week to delay ...

Investors are pricing in less recession risk after Trump's pivot on tariffs. Economists are not www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

"Given the already elevated tariff rates, the GDP impact of further increases cannot be linearly extrapolated. For instance, a 2000% tariff would likely have no greater effect on trade flows than a 1000% tariff"

Several banks slashed U.S. economic forecasts Friday. UBS said they "expect U.S. imports from the rest of the world fall more than 20% over our forecast horizon, mostly in the next several quarters, bringing imports as a share of GDP back to pre-1986 levels" (www.bloomberg.com/news/article...)

"South Korea, Japan, India, Thailand, and in the Middle East, Israel, could dangle U.S. arms purchases as bargaining chips in a push to whittle down the Trump administration's reciprocal tariffs," Bloomberg Intelligence aviation and defense analysts say

hello! Let me have it

U.S. nonfinancial corporate profit margins widened in the fourth quarter to the highest levels in more than three years, suggesting companies may have plenty of room to absorb higher costs from tariffs without passing them onto consumers (www.bloomberg.com/news/article...)

Migrant Crackdown Fears Are Skewing Jobs Picture, Goldman Sachs Says A Goldman Sachs analysis suggests that heightened immigration enforcement under the Trump administration may be discouraging foreign-born workers from participating in government surveys used to prepa...

"The number of immigrant respondents to the survey declined moderately in the first two months of 2025 ... consistent with early signs that a crackdown on unauthorized immigrants may have made some immigrants reluctant to participate"—Goldman on the jobs report www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Cost of groceries excluding eggs fell in February by the most since 2020, according to this morning's CPI report (www.bloomberg.com/news/article...)

Hedge Fund Built on Energy Bets Says ‘Clean Is Dead for Now’ Less than a year after launching a hedge fund dedicated to the green energy transition, its founder says there’s currently no financial gain to be had from investing in renewable power.

Three horsemen of the climate apocalypse: "Against a barrage of political headwinds in the US, a war-fueled energy crisis and stubbornly high interest rates ... the S&P Global Clean Energy Index has lost 20%, a period during which the S&P 500 Index gained 16%" www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

New housing under construction in the U.S. fell again in January, putting it back below the 2006 peak for the first time since August 2021 (www.bloomberg.com/news/article...)

This from @skandaamarnath.bsky.social's CPI preview turned out to be pretty apt (today's report showed core goods prices excluding used cars did indeed fall in December, and now markets are back to pricing in one or more rate cuts in the first half of 2025)

Fed officials are homing in on "market-based" inflation, which strips out a bunch of imputed prices like portfolio management fees, is much closer to their 2% target than the more widely-followed "core" measure, and hasn't turned higher in recent months (www.bloomberg.com/news/article...)

The amount of time it's taking to find a job in the U.S. is on the rise again, with 40% of the unemployed now in search mode for at least 15 weeks. That kind of number was rare before the 2008 crisis. "Knowledge workers" in particular appear to be struggling (www.bloomberg.com/news/article...)

Rising stock prices are really starting to have a substantial impact on the Fed's preferred inflation gauge via the portfolio management and investment advice services component of the index (www.bloomberg.com/news/article...)

Lost my phone this weekend and am now locked out of my twitter