Inflation hit a fresh 40-year high in May in a broad advance, raising prospects that Federal Reserve will keep hiking interest rates aggressively for longer.
The consumer price index increased 8.6% from a year earlier, Labor Department data showed Friday. The widely followed inflation gauge rose 1% from a month earlier, topping all estimates. Shelter, food and gas were the largest contributors.
The so-called core CPI, which strips out the more volatile food and energy components, rose 0.6% from the prior month and 6% from a year ago, also above forecasts.
The figures reinforce that inflation is still heated by many measures, and that the Fed — which has committed to half-point hikes at each of its next two meetings, starting next week — will have to maintain that aggressive stance through its September gathering. Record gasoline prices and geopolitical factors threaten to keep inflation high in the coming months, suggesting the Fed will have to pump the brakes on the economy for longer.
Treasury yields jumped, stock futures fell and the dollar rose after the report.
NEW YORK, June 10 (Reuters) – U.S. stocks posted their biggest weekly percentage declines since January and ended sharply lower on the day Friday as a steeper-than-expected rise in U.S. consumer prices in May fueled fears of more aggressive interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve.
Tech and growth stocks, whose valuations rely more heavily on future cash flows, led the decline. Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com Inc and Apple Inc drove losses in the S&P 500.
Following the inflation report, two-year Treasury yields , which are highly sensitive to rate hikes, spiked to 3.057%, the highest since June 2008. Benchmark 10-year yields reached 3.178%, the highest since May 9.
The U.S. Labor Department’s report showed the consumer price index (CPI) increased 1.0% last month after gaining 0.3% in April. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast the monthly CPI picking up 0.7%.
Year-on-year, CPI surged 8.6%, its biggest gain since 1981 and following an 8.3% jump in May. …
“A lesser-known case looks likely to erode another constitutional precedent—Miranda rights.
This case, Vega v. Tekoh, asks whether a person’s federal constitutional rights are violated if a police officer fails to inform them of their rights to remain silent, to be represented by an attorney, and to be protected against self-incrimination whenever the person is subjected to a custodial interrogation by the police. These warnings, known as Miranda warnings after the 1966 Supreme Court case that first prescribed them, have become critical protections against coercive police interrogations and are routinely recited by officers whenever they make arrests or question suspects in custody.”
Former President Donald J. Trump, long known for distancing himself from or tossing aside staff members who contradicted him while he was in the White House, discovered a new target on Friday: his elder daughter.
The morning after the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol played recorded video testimony of his daughter, Ivanka Trump, at its prime-time public hearing, Mr. Trump used his social media website to separate himself from what she had said and to say she was “checked out” during the final days of his administration.
In the testimony, Ms. Trump said she was influenced by a Dec. 1, 2020, statement by William P. Barr, then the attorney general, that there was no widespread fraud that had altered the outcome of the election. She testified that she respected Mr. Barr and “accepted what he was saying.”
… Ms. Trump was a senior adviser in the White House, and she continued to work in the administration until the end. Her colleagues have recalled her being among those urging White House staff members on election night to “fight” even as it became clear that her father would most likely lose. …
(AP) — Donald Trump was told the same thing over and over, by his campaign team, the data crunchers, and a steady stream of lawyers, investigators and inner-circle allies: There was no voting fraud that could have tipped the 2020 presidential election.
But in the eight weeks after losing to Joe Biden, the defeated Trump publicly, privately and relentlessly pushed his false claims of a rigged 2020 election and intensified an extraordinary scheme to overturn Biden’s victory. When all else failed in his effort to stay in power, Trump beckoned thousands of his supporters to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, where extremists groups led the deadly Capitol siege.
The scale and virulence of that scheme began to take shape at the opening House hearing by the committee investigating 1/6. The prime-time hearing was watched by an estimated 20 million people on the TV networks, almost double the number who tuned in to the opening of Trump’s two impeachment trials.
… The House panel investigating the 1/6 attack on the Capitol is prepared next week to reveal more details and testimony about its assessment that Trump was made well aware of his election loss. With 1,000 interviews and 140,000 documents over the year-long probe, it will lay out how Trump was told repeatedly that there were no hidden ballots, rigged voting machines or support for his claims. Nevertheless Trump refused to accept defeat and his desperate attempt to cling to the presidency resulted in the most violent domestic attack on the Capitol in history.
“Over multiple months, Donald Trump oversaw and coordinated a sophisticated seven-part plan to overturn the presidential election and prevent the transfer of presidential power,” Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., told the hearing Thursday night. “Trump’s intention was to remain president of the United States,” she said. …
… McDonald’s restaurants are reopening in Russia this weekend, but without the Golden Arches. After the American fast-food giant pulled out this spring to protest President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, a Siberian oil mogul bought its 840 Russian stores. Because almost all of the ingredients came from inside the country, he said, the restaurants could keep on serving much of the same food. …
… when McDonald’s, which employed 62,000 workers in Russia, announced in March that it was suspending operations because it could not “ignore the needless human suffering unfolding in Ukraine,” one of its Siberian franchisees, Aleksandr Govor, was able to keep his 25 restaurants open. Last month, he bought the entire Russian business of McDonald’s for an undisclosed sum.
On Sunday — Russia Day, a patriotic holiday — he will reopen 15 stores, including the former flagship McDonald’s on Moscow’s Pushkin Square …
The hash browns will go by a Russian name, according to a menu leaked to a Russian tabloid. And, since the secret sauce is proprietary, there will be no Big Mac on offer.
In section V of Chapter 12 of General Theory, then I doubt when Keynes wrote “Of the maxims of orthodox finance none, surely, is more anti-social than the fetish of liquidity, the doctrine that it is a positive virtue on the part of investment institutions to concentrate their resources upon the holding of ‘liquid’ securities’,” that he had ever imagined that vice could be monetized in such a fashion as to yield its returns in the form of a fungible commodity usable as currency. He nailed cryptocurrency to its cross of trafficking narcotics and children as sex slaves nonetheless. Who knows? Maybe there are some blood diamonds in the mix as well.
President Biden on Thursday swatted aside speculation that he would not seek a second term, saying he anticipated running again — while casting doubt on whether “there will be a Republican Party” in 2024 when asked about a rematch against former President Donald J. Trump.
“The answer is yes, my plan is to run for re-election. That’s my expectation,” Mr. Biden said, adding that he was confident that Vice President Kamala Harris would also be on the ticket. …
(This is an old story, from late March of last year. There’s an update to it in the NYT today, but you will have to find it yourself.)
The Supreme Court decided nearly 50 years ago that women had a right to an abortion, with the justices in the majority — some of them conservative, all of them male — specifically highlighting how a lack of reproductive freedom could hamper women’s lives and careers.
“The detriment that the State would impose upon the pregnant woman by denying this choice altogether is apparent,” the justices wrote. “Maternity, or additional offspring, may force upon the woman a distressful life and future.”
In the five decades since then, a body of research has proven those words prescient, showing that the decision has significantly improved the economic prospects of women by increasing their presence in the workforce, boosting their wages, and making it more likely they finish college and less likely they face the financial hardships that often come from an unplanned pregnancy.
But the continuation of those gains is threatened by the likelihood the Supreme Court will overturn Roe in the coming days, ushering in a new reality where abortions will be banned or nearly banned in about half the US states. That possibility threatens the economic gains the Supreme Court majority credited to Roe two decades later, when it wrote in Planned Parenthood v Casey in 1992 that the right to an abortion had helped give women “the ability…to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation.”
If Roe is overturned, experts and advocates said that many women — especially women of color and those with low incomes — will take a significant economic hit, and the nation might as well. Existing state abortion restrictions already cost the economy an estimated $105 billion a year by, among other things, reducing the number of women who are working, according to a study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a nonprofit advocacy group.
“In 50 years we’ve come a long way, but we’re not quite there,” said Leng Leng Chancey, executive director of 9to5, a national organization advocating for economic security for women, particularly those of color. “This is definitely going to set us back a lot.”
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, an economist and former chair of the Federal Reserve, recently warned that overturning Roe “would have very damaging effects on the economy and would set women back decades.”
“It enabled many women to finish school. That increased their earning potential. It allowed women to plan and balance their families and careers,” she told the Senate Banking committee last month, days after the publication of a leaked draft majority Supreme Court opinion in a Mississippi abortion case that would overturn Roe. “There are many research studies … looking at the economic impacts of access or lack thereof to abortion. And it makes clear that denying women access to abortion increases their odds of living in poverty or need for public assistance.” …
Since registering as a Dem in 2020, after many years of supporting Dem candidates in MA as an ‘independent’, and now also regular small contributions to ActBlue, I am bombarded with emails from far off states asking for campaign funds. (I figure that’s where my small contributions should be going.)
Specifically, Arizona & Georgia (Kelly & Warnock.) I have to go on notice that I will not be sending contributions to far-off places, since the Dems have not been able to make effective use of the one-vote-if-there’s-a-tie majority they have now. Does this bode well for November?
The agreement, which falls short of the sprawling changes championed by Democrats, is a significant step toward ending a yearslong impasse over gun reform legislation.
Senate negotiators announced on Sunday that they had struck a bipartisan deal on a narrow set of gun safety measures with sufficient support to move through the evenly divided chamber, a significant step toward ending a yearslong congressional impasse on the issue.
The agreement, put forth by 10 Republicans and 10 Democrats and endorsed by President Biden and top Democrats, includes enhanced background checks to give authorities time to check the juvenile and mental health records of any prospective gun buyer under the age of 21 and a provision that would, for the first time, extend to dating partners a bar on domestic abusers having guns.
The outline, which has yet to be finalized, falls far short of the sprawling reforms that Mr. Biden, gun control activists and a majority of Democrats have long championed, such as a ban on assault weapons and universal background checks. And it is nowhere near as sweeping as a package of gun measures passed almost along party lines in the House last week, which would bar the sale of semiautomatic weapons to people under the age of 21, ban the sale of large-capacity magazines and implement a federal red-flag law, among other measures. …
Some House Democrats, speaking before the deal was formally announced, said they were cautiously optimistic about the new legislative framework.
“I’m disappointed to hear a focus on increased criminalization and juvenile criminalization instead of really having the focus on guns,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, said during a separate appearance on “State of the Union.” “But the background checks provision is encouraging.”
That’s sixty Senators who presumably will vote in favor, the required majority.
If there are no objections among the other 40 Dem Senators that is.
The ten GOP Senators who signed on to this include zero who are up for re-election this year, and the ten Dems included Joe Manchin & Krysten Sinema, so it looks like a done deal (whatever it is), if the House will go along.
“I will not be sending contributions to far-off places, since the Dems have not been able to make effective use of the one-vote-if-there’s-a-tie majority they have now.”
OK, looks like I may have to re-think that decision.
US inflation hit 8.6 percent over the past year, highest rate in 4 decades
Bloomberg via Boston Globe – June 10
Wall St suffers biggest weekly loss since January\
Expected reversal of Miranda requires states to step up on policing
“A lesser-known case looks likely to erode another constitutional precedent—Miranda rights.
This case, Vega v. Tekoh, asks whether a person’s federal constitutional rights are violated if a police officer fails to inform them of their rights to remain silent, to be represented by an attorney, and to be protected against self-incrimination whenever the person is subjected to a custodial interrogation by the police. These warnings, known as Miranda warnings after the 1966 Supreme Court case that first prescribed them, have become critical protections against coercive police interrogations and are routinely recited by officers whenever they make arrests or question suspects in custody.”
Trump Hits Back at Daughter’s Account That She Accepted His Election Loss
NY Times – June 10
Told repeatedly he lost, Trump refused to go
Boston Globe – June 10
McDonald’s Is Back, Moscow Style, as Russian Economy Stumbles On
NY Times – June 10
On Sunday — Russia Day, a patriotic holiday — he will reopen 15 stores, including the former flagship McDonald’s on Moscow’s Pushkin Square …
The hash browns will go by a Russian name, according to a menu leaked to a Russian tabloid. And, since the secret sauce is proprietary, there will be no Big Mac on offer.
(Don’t tell anyone… Ironically, he ‘secret sauce’ is just ‘Russian’ dressing, AKA ‘Thousand Island’ with extra pickle relish added.
McDonald’s Special Sauce
In section V of Chapter 12 of General Theory, then I doubt when Keynes wrote “Of the maxims of orthodox finance none, surely, is more anti-social than the fetish of liquidity, the doctrine that it is a positive virtue on the part of investment institutions to concentrate their resources upon the holding of ‘liquid’ securities’,” that he had ever imagined that vice could be monetized in such a fashion as to yield its returns in the form of a fungible commodity usable as currency. He nailed cryptocurrency to its cross of trafficking narcotics and children as sex slaves nonetheless. Who knows? Maybe there are some blood diamonds in the mix as well.
Biden expects to run for re-election in 2024, and says he has ‘no idea’ whether there will be a Republican Party then.
NY Times – March 25, 2021
(This is an old story, from late March of last year. There’s an update to it in the NYT today, but you will have to find it yourself.)
Overturning Roe v. Wade would set women back decades, damage economy, experts say
Boston Globe – June 11
Since registering as a Dem in 2020, after many years of supporting Dem candidates in MA as an ‘independent’, and now also regular small contributions to ActBlue, I am bombarded with emails from far off states asking for campaign funds. (I figure that’s where my small contributions should be going.)
Specifically, Arizona & Georgia (Kelly & Warnock.) I have to go on notice that I will not be sending contributions to far-off places, since the Dems have not been able to make effective use of the one-vote-if-there’s-a-tie majority they have now. Does this bode well for November?
Senators Reach Bipartisan Deal on Gun Safety
NY Times – June 12
That’s sixty Senators who presumably will vote in favor, the required majority.
If there are no objections among the other 40 Dem Senators that is.
The ten GOP Senators who signed on to this include zero who are up for re-election this year, and the ten Dems included Joe Manchin & Krysten Sinema, so it looks like a done deal (whatever it is), if the House will go along.
“I will not be sending contributions to far-off places, since the Dems have not been able to make effective use of the one-vote-if-there’s-a-tie majority they have now.”
OK, looks like I may have to re-think that decision.