U.S. jobless claims graph on a tablet screen. (Photo: AdobeStock)
Initial jobless claims fell another 8,000 to a seasonally adjusted 196,000 for the week ending April 6, the lowest level since October 4, 1969. During that week, weekly jobless claims came in at 193,000.
The 4-week moving average fell by 7,000 to 207,000, the lowest level for the average since December 6, 1969 when it was 204,500.
The consensus forecast for the week was looking for a gain to 211,000. Last week, weekly jobless claims fell to the lowest level since December 6, 1969.
Prior
Revised
Consensus
Range
Actual
New Claims – Level
202K
204K
211K
210K – 215K
196K
4-week Moving Average – Level
213.50K
214.00K
207.00K
New Claims – Change
-10K
-8K
-8K
That level had been cited as the benchmark low in previous reports under this administration–here, here and here–but it was the first time it mirrored 202,000. Now, it has fallen below it, indicating a very strong labor market.
The advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was unchanged at a very historically low 1.2% for the week ending March 30.
The advance number for seasonally adjusted insured unemployment during the week ending March 30 fell 13,000 to 1,713,000. The 4-week moving average was 1,734,500, a decrease of 11,000 from the previous week’s revised average.
No state was triggered “on” the Extended Benefits program during the week ending March 23.
The highest insured unemployment rates in the week ending March 23 were in Alaska (2.8), New Jersey (2.5), Connecticut (2.4), Rhode Island (2.4), California (2.2), Massachusetts (2.2), Montana (2.2), Illinois (2.0), Minnesota (2.0), and Pennsylvania (2.0).
The largest increases in initial claims for the week ending March 30 were in Illinois (+1,297), Arizona (+338), New York (+325), Oregon (+311), and Wisconsin (+262), while the largest decreases were in Texas (-2,055) Pennsylvania (-1,377), California (-1,304), Arkansas (-1,044), Missouri (-591), and New Jersey (-591).
Live Blog Updates: WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange Guilty of Breaching Bail
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange physically removed from the Ecuadorian Embassy. (Photo: Screenshot)
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been arrested after being expelled from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he had been held up for nearly 7 years.
Live Blog Updates Below Story
The police claim the justification was a court warrant dating back to 2012.
Ecuador President Lenín Moreno claimed his government withdrew asylum status for Mr. Assange due to “repeated violations of international conventions and daily-life protocols.” It came almost seven years after he sought refuge.
Police in London said in a statement Mr. Assange has been taken into “custody at a central London police station where he will remain, before being presented before Westminster Magistrates’ Court as soon as is possible.”
British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt thanked President Moreno for the decision, posting on Twitter that Assange “is no hero and no one is above the law.”
Julian Assange is no hero and no one is above the law. He has hidden from the truth for years. Thank you Ecuador and President @Lenin Moreno for your cooperation with @foreignoffice to ensure Assange faces justice
While many media outlets are reporting the justification for the warrant and his arrest being a sexual assault charge, it is not the case.
Mr. Assange, 47, has been effectively imprisoned in the Ecuadorian Embassy for more than 6 years in an effort to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he was wanted to sex crimes, or to the United States (U.S.).
The former dropped the charges, while the latter has pursued him.
As People’s Pundit Daily (PPD) previously reported, a sealed court filing for an unrelated case indicated the U.S. charged the WikiLeaks founder. The court filing from a federal prosecutor in Virginia mentions the anti-secrecy advocate’s name twice.
In the first reference, the prosecutor wrote that the charges and arrest warrant “would need to remain sealed until Assange is arrested in connection with the charges in the criminal complaint and can therefore no longer evade or avoid arrest and extradition in this matter.”
In the second reference, the prosecutor said that “due to the sophistication of the defendant and the publicity surrounding the case, no other procedure is likely to keep confidential the fact that Assange has been charged.”
He will likely be extradited to the U.S. for publishing classified military and diplomatic cables through WikiLeaks. The U.S. has sought to prosecute Mr. Assange for publishing a video the anti-secrecy group described as “depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters news staff.”
That refers to secret video footage of one U.S. air crew falsely claiming to have encountered a firefight in Baghdad and laughing at the dead after launching an air strike that killed a dozen people, including two Iraqis working for Reuters news agency.
Chelsea Manning, the former U.S. army analyst who was imprisoned for seven years for disclosures to WikiLeaks, was recently arrested again after refusing to testify against WikiLeaks before a federal grand jury.
Maxine Waters, D-Calif., Chairwoman of the House Committee on Financial Services, embarrassed herself during a hearing with chief executives from some of the nation’s largest banks.
After lecturing that “several of these institutions are simply too big to manage their own operations,” she asked “what are you guys doing to help us with these student loans?”
JPMorgan Chase (^JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon had to inform the chairwoman of the House Finance Committee the federal government took over student loans in 2010.
Attorney General William Barr said in testimony before a U.S. Senate committee on Wednesday he does “think spying did occur” in the 2016 election.
The attorney general’s bombshell admission came during a hearing before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies. It follows a hearing Tuesday morning before the House Appropriations Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Subcommittee.
I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal,” Mr. Barr said in a back and forth exchange with Senator Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., who asked if he believed the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) spied on members of the Trump campaign.
“I think spying did occur. Yes, I think spying did occur,” he responded. “But the question is whether it was predicated, adequately predicated.”
The week was Mr. Barr’s first appearance before lawmakers since he released “principle conclusions” summarizing the findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The bombshell four-page letter to lawmakers stated there was no collusion “despite multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign.”
“The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” Mr. Barr wrote.
Justice Department (DOJ) Inspector General Michael Horowitz has been investigating the Obama Administration’s conduct relating to the genesis of the Russia probe.
“I think it’s clear from the text messages we’ve talked about that he had as we say here, a bias state of mind,” Mr. Horowitz said in his testimony before Congress in June 2018. He was referring to Peter Strzok, the now-fired former head of counterintelligence at FBI.
As People’s Pundit Daily (PPD) first reported in March 2017, and has repeatedly reported since, officials at FBI and DOJ used the cover of a counterintelligence investigation to spy on members of the Trump campaign.
Attorney General William Barr appears before the House Appropriations Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Subcommittee on April 9, 2019.
Heavily-redacted documents used to justify the FISA warrant application to spy on Carter Page confirmed crucial details of the memo largely prepared by Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., then the Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI).
That includes the allegation that the FBI and DOJ relied upon the infamous and now discredited dossier put together by former MI6 British intelligence agent Christopher Steele.
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) allows intelligence agencies to collect information on foreign targets abroad. However, as PPD also previously reported, it has been “routinely” abused and misused to spy on domestic targets, including President Trump, his associates and other U.S. citizens.
Numerous reports and witness testimony indicates the FBI even attempted to plant confidential informants within the campaign’s circle during the investigation code-named Crossfire Hurricane.
Worth noting, the code-name for the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server for classified information was Midyear Exam.
Mr. Strzok and his lover Lisa Page both worked on the Democrat-dominated team assembled by Special Counsel Mueller. They were fired before members of Congress conducting oversight and the media learned of the content of the messages.
That hearing in June covered conduct during the Clinton email investigation. But Mr. Horowitz testified he was “more concerned” with conduct surrounding the Russia probe.
At the hearing on Tuesday, Attorney General Barr revealed he would put together a team to investigate and take action if necessary.
A recent Rasmussen Reports survey found 51% of likely voters believe it is likely senior officials at the Justice Department (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) broke the law in their effort to stop Donald Trump from winning the presidency.
That includes 36% who believe it’s very likely. That compared to 50% and 32%, respectively, when they first asked voters this question in February.
Mr. Barr insinuated there is good reason for a majority to hold such views.
“I believe there is a basis for my concern,” he said. “But I’m not going to discuss it.”
NASA Astrophysics Director: Supermassive Black Hole Image Captured Decades Ahead of Schedule
Scientists on Wednesday revealed the first-ever image of a black hole that was taken by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT).
EHT is actually an international network of radio telescopes. The achievement comes decades ahead of schedule and the discovery confirms key elements of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
“This is an amazing accomplishment by the EHT team,” said Paul Hertz, director of the astrophysics division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Years ago, we thought we would have to build a very large space telescope to image a black hole.”
“By getting radio telescopes around the world to work in concert like one instrument, the EHT team achieved this, decades ahead of time.”
The extraordinary image depicts the shadow of the supermassive black hole in the center of Messier 87 (M87), an elliptical galaxy roughly 55 million light-years from Earth.
An “event horizon” is the point of no return for a black hole, an extremely dense object from which no light can escape due to gravity. While a black hole cannot be viewed, the hot material surrounding it can be as a bright disk.
It is against the disk’s bright backdrop that a black hole appears to cast a shadow. The black hole at the center of M87 is 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun. Capturing an image of its shadow took eight ground-based radio telescopes located around the globe, all working in concert as if they were one telescope the size of our entire planet.
“X-rays help us connect what’s happening to the particles near the event horizon with what we can measure with our telescopes,” said astronomer Joey Neilsen of Villanova University in Pennsylvania, who led the Chandra and NuSTAR analysis for the EHT’s Multiwavelength Working Group.
Previously, space telescopes at NASA studied a jet made of particles traveling near the speed of light, which extend more than 1,000 light-years away from the center of M87. Those particles shoot out at high energies from close to the event horizon.
The EHT was in part designed to study the origin of this jet. Matter in the jet referred to as HST-1 was discovered by Hubble astronomers in 1999, and scientists have observed an known cycle of brightening and dimming.
Coordinating with EHT, Chandra, NuSTAR and Swift–as well as NASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) on the International Space Station–also looked at the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy (Sagittarius A).
“Scheduling all of these coordinated observations was a really hard problem for both the EHT and the Chandra and NuSTAR mission planners,” Neilsen said. “They did really incredible work to get us the data that we have, and we’re exceedingly grateful.”
Sadly, it’s not because I have money to protect. Instead, I’m motivated by a desire to protect the world from “goldfish government.”
Simply stated, politicians have a “public choice” incentive for never-ending expansions of government, even if they actually understand such policies will lead to Greek-style collapse.
Speaking at a recent conference in Moldova, I explained why tax competition is the best hope for averting that grim outcome.
In my remarks, I basically delivered a results-based argument for tax competition.
Which is why I shared data on lower tax rates and showed these slides on what politicians want compared to what they’ve been pressured to deliver.
There’s also a theoretical side to the debate about tax competition and tax havens.
In a 2013 article for Cayman Financial Review, I explained (fairly, I think) the other side’s theory.
…there also has been a strain of academic thought hostile to tax competition. It’s called “capital export neutrality” and advocates of the “CEN” approach assert that tax competition creates damaging economic distortions. They start with the theoretical assumption of a world with no taxes. They then hypothesize, quite plausibly, that people will allocate resources in that world in ways that maximise economic output. They then introduce “real world” considerations to the theory, such as the existence of different jurisdictions with different tax rates. In this more plausible world, advocates of CEN argue that the existence of different tax rates will lead some taxpayers to allocate at least some resources for tax considerations rather than based on the underlying economic merit of various options. In other words, people make less efficient choices in a world with multiple tax regimes when compared to the hypothetical world with no taxes. To maximise economic efficiency, CEN proponents believe taxpayers should face the same tax rates, regardless of where they work, save, shop or invest. …One of the remarkable implications of capital export neutrality is that tax avoidance and tax evasion are equally undesirable. Indeed, the theory is based on the notion that all forms of tax planning are harmful and presumably should be eliminated.
And I then explained why I think the CEN theory is highly unrealistic.
…the CEN is flawed for reasons completely independent from preferences about the size of government. Critics point out that capital export neutrality is based on several highly implausible assumptions. The CEN model, for instance, assumes that taxes are exogenous – meaning that they are independently determined. Yet the real-world experience of tax competition shows that tax rates are very dependent on what is happening in other jurisdictions. Another glaring mistake is the assumption that the global stock of capital is fixed – and, more specifically, the assumption that the capital stock is independent of the tax treatment of saving and investment. Needless to say, these are remarkably unrealistic conditions.
Since economists like numbers, I even created an equation to illustrate whether tax competition is a net plus or a net minus.
Basically, the CEN argument is only defensible if the economic inefficiency associated with tax minimization is greater than the economic damage caused by higher tax rates, plus the damage caused by more double taxation, plus the damage caused by a bigger public sector.
Needless to say, honest empirical analysis will never support the CEN approach (as even the OECD admits).
That being said, politicians and special interests are not overly sympathetic to my arguments.
On Liberty Never Sleeps, Tom breaks down the myth of the “Southern Strategy”, and why it’s being drummed up once again to use as a weapon against the GOP.
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People count money at Macy’s Herald Square store during the early opening of the Black Friday sales in the Manhattan borough of New York, November 26, 2015. (Photo: Reuters)
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) gained 0.4% in March seasonally adjusted (SA) after rising 0.2% prior, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. On a 12-month basis, the all items index is up 1.9% before seasonal adjustment.
The consensus forecast was 0.3%, ranging from a low of 0.2% to a high of 0.5%.
Prior
Consensus
Range
Result
CPI – M/M
0.2%
0.3%
0.2% to 0.5%
0.4%
CPI – Y/Y
1.5%
1.8%
1.7 % to 2.1%
1.9%
CPI less food & energy- M/M
0.1%
0.2%
0.2% to 0.2%
0.1%
CPI less food & energy – Y/Y
2.1%
2.1%
2.0% to 2.2%
2.0%
The energy index rose 3.5% in March, representing roughly 60% of the total SA gain. The gasoline index rose sharply and the electricity index also gained, while the natural gas index declined.
The index for all items less food and energy rose 0.1% in March, matching the month prior. indexes for shelter, medical care, new vehicles, recreation, education, and tobacco all increased in March, while indexes for apparel, used cars and trucks, and airline fares all fell.
The all items index rose 1.9% for the 12-month period ending March, up from the 1.5% increase for the period ending February.
The index for all items less food and energy gained 2.0% on the 12-month. The food index was up 2.1% year-over-year, its largest 12-month increase since the period ending March 2015. The energy index fell 0.4% on the year.
Graphic concept of Israeli voters in a line crowd silhouette behind an Israeli flag voting for an election. (Photo: AdobeStock)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has all but won a historic fifth term, after more than 97% of the votes resulted in a 10-seat lead over the left. The roughly raw 10,000-vote lead is highly likely to grow as the outstanding vote is largely military and pro-Likud.
Almost all of the minor right-wing parties have already said they will recommend to Israeli President Reuven Rivlin that he choose Prime Minister Netanyahu to form the next ruling coalition.
Party
Seats Won
Vote Share
Likud
35
29.2
Kahol Lavan
35
29.2
Shas
8
6.7
UTJ (United Torah)
6
6.7
Hadash-Ta’al
6
5
Israeli Labor Party
6
5
United Right
6
4.2
Yisrael Beiteinu
6
4.2
Kulanu
4
3.3
Meretz
4
3.3
Ra’am Balad
3
3.3
Gesher
0
0
Magen
0
0
New Right
0
0
Zehut
0
0
Other
0
0
In the right-wing bloc, the parties that made it into the Knesset are Likud (35), Shas (8), United Torah Judaism (6), United Right (6), Yisrael Beiteinu (5) and Kulanu (4).
Technically, Avigdor Lieberman, who leads Yisrael Beiteinu, has yet to announce who he will recommend. A minimum of 60 Knesset seats are required to form a coalition government.
Still, Kulanu, the Union of Right-Wing Parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism have won a total of 25 Knesset seats. With Likud, they have the necessary 60 seats.
At the moment, Gesher, Zehut, and Hayamin Hehadash failed to meet the 3.25-percent threshold to enter Knesset. However, Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked of Hayamin Hehadash–which currently have 3.14% of the vote–believe the remaining military vote could put them over.
In the left-wing bloc, the parties that made it into the Knesset are Kahol Lavan (35), Hadash-Ta’al (6), Israeli Labor Party (6), Meretz and Ra’am Balad, or United Arab List-Balad (3).
Attorney General William Barr is scheduled to testify before the House Appropriations Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Subcommittee at 9:30 a.m. EST.
The grilling Tuesday morning on Capitol Hill will be his first appearance before lawmakers since he released a 4-page letter summarizing the findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
While the hearing is scheduled to cover the Department of Justice Budget Request for Fiscal Year 2020, Democrats intend to use it to grill him over the conclusion there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, as well as no charges on obstruction of justice.
Subcommittee Chairman José Serrano, D-N.Y., will question and attempt to cast doubt on Attorney General Barr’s actions in his prepared opening remarks.
“In extremely quick fashion, you turned a 300-plus page report into a 4-page letter that supposedly summarized [Mueller’s] findings,” Rep. Serrano will say, according to a sample of the statement released by his office.
Hearing Witnesses
Attorney General William P. Barr (opening statement below)
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