1) Oops! We Thought the Fed Was LOWERING Interest Rates

We see a similar upward movement with the Treasury's 30-year bond. 
Mortgage rates were supposed to fall, but those rates are headed north too, hitting 6.6% this week and making monthly payments on a new home less affordable.
 

Why is this happening? One answer is that even though the CPI rate was down in September, inflation has risen sharply in the last two weeks (This rise was not reflected in the inflation number released this morning). 

The commodity index that we showed last week is now up 9% since the Fed rate cut. 

There's a useful economic lesson here. The Fed doesn't have some magical fairy dust it can sprinkle over the economy to make it grow faster. We know this revelation may be unsettling to some of our Wall Street friends who believe the opposite. Markets should and ultimately do determine interest rates – not the wizards at the Fed.

The Fed should simply keep the dollar stable in value and inflation rates low.  Leave the financial markets alone.
 

2) Sierra Club's "Dirty Truth" – There is NO Green Energy Transition

So this raises an awkward question for the Biden team: how do you spend hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars and not move the needle at all? What kind of "investment" is that?  
 

3) The Longshoremen Declare War on the Machines

Just think of how many farm jobs today if only no one had invented the tractor!

That’s the same logic of the International Longshoremen's Association, who, with White House help, won big in their three-day port strike. Its members got a 62% raise over six years.  

But that’s not the end of the story and they may not be done with their threats to shut down the eastern seaboard.  Another crippling strike could begin after a cooling-off period ends on January 15. 

What’s their next grievance: automation!  Harold Daggett, the 78-year-old ILA president, tells his members.  "Someone has to get into Congress and say, 'Whoa, time out.' This world is going too fast for us. Machines got to stop."

He's backed up by Senator Bernie Sanders who says: "Billionaires in the shipping industry must not be allowed to get even richer by replacing port workers with robots."

Next thing you know kitchen help in restaurants will protest electric dishwashers and the typewriter operators' unions will try to ban PCs.  
 

The United States has prided itself on being the technology capital of the world.  But thanks to this kind of union resistance, we have some of the least modern and efficient ports in the industrialized world. The World Bank's annual ranking of trade gateways rates the Charleston port 53rd most efficient in the world. And that’s the highest-ranked port in the country! Part of this is due to union work rules and part is due to substandard automation.

Ironically, while the union boasted that 50,000 of its members were on strike, only half of that number actually work in the ports. The other 25,000 collect royalties NOT to work, under an agreement struck when the union opposed a previous round of technological change: containerization.
 

When we last updated you on the never-ending school crisis in Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson had demanded that Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez resign. Why? Because he refused to fund teacher union demands for salary increases, by taking out $300 million in high-interest-rate loans. Now the entire school board has resigned in opposition.
 

5) There Are Some Things Hurricane Victims Just Won't Buy – No Matter How Desperate 

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