WASHINGTON (MaceNews) – The following is Thursday’s status check of developments in the U.S. that can influence economic, health and political outcomes:
The news of the day was pretty routine. Another former White House insider, Olivia Troye, accused President Trump of being a hypocrite and in turn was described by the White House as just another disgruntled former staffer who was let go. Last month’s disgruntled insider, Miles Taylor, told CNN Thursday that while he was at the Department of Homeland Security the president said he did not want migrants with missing toes and funny looking foreheads allowed in the country. And the president, holding another packed night-time MAGA rally in Wisconsin among hundreds of people mostly not wearing masks attacked his favorite targets in addition to his opponent “sleepy” Joe Biden. He said Kamala Harris should never be allowed to be the first woman president via “the back door,” in other words, should Biden die in office. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is “crazy as a bed bug.” Biden himself appeared in a CNN Town Hall held before an audience not only socially distanced, but in their automobiles as in a drive-in movie. It was without the MAGA rally cheering that Trump craves. And Fox News anchors had fun mocking the appearance close to Biden’s home – and complaining that Anderson Cooper didn’t hassle his guest like ABC’s George Stephanopoulos did to the president at Wednesday night’s Town Hall.
The president said he’s sending $11 billion more to farmers in pandemic relief. He’ll deliver next week’s speech to the UN via video from the White House. The Pentagon assured South Korea that when the president told author Bob Woodward he was thinking about withdrawing U.S. troops from its shores, he’s done nothing to follow up. Meanwhile China began more military exercises in the Taiwan Strait, a messaging exercise as Taiwan prepares to buy more American weapons systems.
The president’s tweet saying Republicans should raise the ante on virus relief and go for $1.5 trillion instead of a few hundred billion left even Republicans confused on the timing. Why now, when members of Congress are going back to their home districts and the Sept. 30 deadline for a continuing budget resolution is all that’s top of mind? The fact that Speaker Pelosi – holding out for $2.2 trilllion – and Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin actually spoke to one another this week was taken as a sign of hope for a last-minute virus relief package. The hope was especially fervent among airline executives who visited the White House in the morning to plead for grants to forestall the 30,000 or so layoffs pending, and who are intensely lobbying Pelosi as well.
The morning’s tally of new claims for unemployment benefits showed another 860,000, five times the number before the pandemic. The accumulated total of those receiving benefits was 12.6 million. The week-to-week changes are virtually meaningless compared to the size of the base level. The count of those covered by unemployment insurance misses millions more not insured. Special Pandemic Unemployment Assistance were 14.47 million. Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation covered 1.5 million.
And there was that New York Times article explaining how unreliable are all those numbers which are assembled by the Labor Department but gathered by the individual states with all sorts of data collection problems. So instead of the rigorous standards of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the end product is a haphazard collection of questionable totals.
Speaking of misleading numbers, noted China expert Michael Pettis pointed out Thursday why China’s GDP growth numbers are not really comparable to those in other developed countries. The methodology used is so different, capitalizing what other countries count as expenses, that the growth number is chosen ahead of time, and lending and borrowing calibrated after the fact to meet the target. Pettis is a professor of finance at Beijing’s Peking University and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment and says it’s not that China is faking the numbers, they just have their own system. China’s annual growth, incidentally, is estimated to be a positive number, an outlier in the pandemic era.
Upcoming economic data includes the morning’s current account balance at 8:30a ET, the mid-month consumer sentiment number at 10a and the Baker-Hughes oil rig count at 1p. The current account is the total of a nation’s transactions with the rest of the world, of which trade in goods and services – now running the biggest deficit in a dozen years – is but one component. Like the nation’s reports of anemic productivity growth, the current account is a crucial number that nevertheless never moves markets which prefer to fixate on more ephemeral data. The morning’s story on initial jobless benefit claims, housing starts and the Philly Fed report on regional manufacturing, by Kevin Kastner, is elsewhere on this macenews.com site.
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