The Federal Reserve is back on its bullshit. In this economy??
 

• A new report released Thursday shows that the United States job market continues to show signs of unexpected strength despite more than one year of interest-rate increases, which the Federal Reserve only halted temporarily in June. The report led to a broad sell-off on Wall Street, once again raising the question of “How good can our financial system be if Wall Street freaks out when people aren’t losing their jobs?” 
   

• Minutes from the Federal Reserve’s  June meeting show that some board members pushed to raise rates again by one-quarter of a percentage point. Twelve of the board’s 18 members also signaled that they might again raise interest rates at least twice before the year is out, beginning as soon as this month. The Fed’s key interest rate currently sits at a 16-year high, and inflation has fallen accordingly, now to a rate below wage growth, but it still remains above the Fed’s arbitrary two-percent target. 
   

• Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has said that his agency has “a long way to go” to bring inflation to the two-percent goal, with the current rate hovering around 4 percent, down from 9.1 percent in June 2022. The Fed is tasked with raising borrowing costs enough to reduce inflation, without creating a labor-market recession. Nevertheless, the Fed’s staff economists have continued to predict a “mild recession” later this year.

What has this meant for average consumers? Well, as you can probably guess, it’s not good.
 

• High interest rates coupled with stubbornly high prices on market-based goods and decades of wage stagnation that predate this bout of inflation create obvious problems for average Americans that are only just starting to ease. On Thursday, the average rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage hit a staggering 7.2 percent, its peak since early November. Great stuff, unless you’re a millennial who thought you might finally be able to afford a house!
   

• The vast majority of American homeowners have mortgage interest rates below four or even three percent, meaning that those people are less likely to move since they would have to give up their low rates, and first-time buyers are, as ever, shit out of luck. Soaring mortgage rates are a contributing (but not sole) factor in the current critical shortfall in homes for sale, with new listings 20 percent behind last year’s pace. 

The Federal Reserve’s oft-cited dual mandate is to advance the goals of full employment and price stability simultaneously. But it is, as ever, more attuned to the latter than the former, such that even with inflation down dramatically, Fed officials want to resume rate hikes even if it means triggering a recession. Alternatively, we could address the other factors keeping inflation sticky like corporate greed, and supply and immigration bottlenecks, but the Fed can’t do those things. Congress, u up?

In February and March of 2022, the crew of the cable ship CS Dependable laid underwater fiber-optic cable leading to the U.S. naval base on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. The ship is owned by SubCom, a cable manufacturer born out of a Cold War project to spy on Soviet submarines. This New Jersey-based business is playing an unexpectedly major role in the race between the United States and China to control advanced military and digital technologies. As part of a wide-ranging Reuters investigation, two company employees and two Navy staffers reported that SubCom is the sole undersea cable contractor for the United States military, laying internet and surveillance cables across the ocean floor.


It suggests a much different corporate ethos than you’ll find in the company’s public-relations materials, which highlight its work with tech giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta. Presented with Reuters’ findings, a spokesperson for the Navy’s Pacific Fleet confirmed the existence of new high-speed undersea internet cable leading to Diego Garcia, its first acknowledgement of the project. Undersea cables transmit 99 percent of all transcontinental internet activity, including stock-market transactions and classified military information, so it has become central in the U.S.-China tech race. Beijing and Washington have traded accusations of tapping undersea cables as a means of espionage or carrying out cyberattacks.  

The UAE pledged $15 million towards rebuilding the Jenin refugee camp on Thursday after a two-day offensive became the most deadly Israeli military operation in the West Bank in almost 20 years. 

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg announced  progress toward addressing Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s objections to Sweden joining the alliance, but some gaps still remain and talks will resume on Monday. 

Disgraced former president Donald Trump’s aide Walt Nauta pleaded not guilty on Thursday to helping Trump steal and conceal classified documents from the White House. 

New York City Mayor Eric Adams claimed that he has been carrying around the photo of his friend and fellow NYPD Officer Robert Venable in his wallet since Venable’s death in the line of duty in 1987. A new report suggests that he only just began carrying the picture and his staff was tasked with making it look old and worn by crumpling it up and staining it with coffee(!!!). Quite simply, nobody is doing it like him!

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg launched a knockoff of Twitter to lure customers away from the platform that Twitter CEO Elon Musk has ruined. Within 24 hours of launch, 30 million users signed up for the “Threads” app. “Sitting quietly with your own feelings” remained stagnant at zero subscribers. 

A new U.S. Geological Survey study found that nearly half of all faucets in the United States likely contain PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals.” The good news just keeps on comin’!

According to a new statement from Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko Wagner mercenary group leader—and Russia’s Yosemite Sam—Yevgeny Prigozhin is back in Russia after an initial deal allowed Prigozhin and his fighters to avoid prosecution for last month’s failed mutiny. A St. Petersburg businessman reportedly confirmed Prigozhin’s presence in Russia, saying that he returned home to retrieve money and weapons seized by Russian security forces. But apart from the word of one unidentified St. Petersburg businessman, Lukashenko’s claim about Prigozhin’s whereabouts has yet to be verified. It is also unclear if Prigozhin’s return to Russia would violate a deal promising amnesty for him and his troops. Much about that deal remains opaque, and the Kremlin has deliberately downplayed the fact that Prigozhin has allegedly sidestepped punishment for a mutiny while other Putin critics have been subjected to severe prison sentences, exile, and in some cases extrajudicial killings. Lukashenko told reporters he does not believe Putin will order a hit on Prigozhin, which, we have to say, doesn’t make us feel particularly reassured.

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The White House announced tentative support for studying solar radiation modification—a process of blocking sunlight from hitting the Earth’s surface in order to combat global warming by quickly cooling the planet—but acknowledged that the idea is in its most nascent stages, and much about it is still unknown. 

The Biden Administration is expected to propose new regulations against “junk” health-insurance plans on Friday, a long-awaited remedy to Trump’s expansion of the inadequate health plans that undermine Obamacare. 

The U.S. Women’s Open is finally getting some respect from the golf world, and is now underway at Pebble Beach, one of the world’s best courses, for the first time. Can’t believe I just said something nice about golf.