Widget Image
Follow PPD Social Media
follow
1,000 Followers
follow
0 Followers
follow
People's Pundit Locals Community
Monday, February 10, 2025
SECTIONS
logo
mobile-logo
HomeStandard Blog Whole Post (Page 495)
Economy

manufacturing-reuters

Surveys gauging manufacturing growth or contraction in Empire State. (REUTERS)

The Empire State Manufacturing Survey, the New York Federal Reserve’s gauge of manufacturing activity in the region, remained in contraction in September. The gauge increased to a reading of -1.99, up from a reading of -2.41 in August.

The results missed the median forecast calling for an increase to -1.00 and labor conditions continued to weaken significantly as both employment levels and the average workweek fell lower. Readings above 0 on the Empire State Manufacturing Survey indicate expansion, while those below point to contraction.

Manufacturing firms in New York State reported a decline in business activity in September. Twenty-two (22%) of respondents reported that business conditions improved over the prior month, but 24% reported that conditions had worsened.

The employment index declined 13 points to -14.3, suggesting that employment levels contracted and the average workweek index posted a similar decline. The work week fell 14 points to -11.6—a sign of retrenchment in hours worked. Both of these indexes reached their lowest levels measured yet in 2016. The prices paid index was flat at 17.0, suggesting that input prices continued to rise at a moderate pace, and the prices received index held steady at 1.8, signaling that selling prices edged slightly higher.

The Empire State Manufacturing Survey, the New

Economy

mid-atlantic-manufacturing-aluminium-raw-materials-reuters

A worker in the mid-Atlantic manufacturing sector works with raw aluminum materials. (PHOTO: REUTERS)

The Manufacturing Business Outlook Survey, the gauge of Mid-Atlantic manufacturing by the Philadelphia Federal Reserve, rose to a 12.8 in September from a 2.0 the month prior. The median economic forecast was calling for a reading of 1.0. However, the subindexes on shipments and employment, were negative and indicate weaker performance than the top line suggests for the sector.

A reading above zero indicates expansion, while those below indicate contraction.

For the first time since August of last year, the index has registered two consecutive positive readings (see Chart 1). While the new orders index improved from -7.2 to 1.4, inventories index declined from -9.2 to -26.2.

Mid-Atlantic Manufacturing Business Outlook Survey

Source: Philadelphia Federal Reserve

The current employment index stayed in negative territory for the ninth consecutive month, but it did gain from -20.0 in August to -5.3 this month. Still, firms reported overall decreases in the average workweek, as the percentage of firms reporting a shorter workweek (23%) topped the percentage reporting a longer workweek (11%).

The Manufacturing Business Outlook Survey covering the

Politics

John-Koskinen-Lois-Lerner-emails

File Photo: IRS Commissioner John Koskinen testifies on Capitol Hill in June 2014 during what became a contentious hearing on the “lost” Lois Lerner emails.

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen has reached a deal with Republicans in the House of Representatives to avoid impeachment for obstruction of an investigation. The House Freedom Caucus, the conservative caucus that used a procedural maneuver to force a floor vote earlier this week, said the development was a victory. They argue Mr. Koskinen intentionally obstructed the probe into the targeting of tea party groups seeking tax exemptions by his agency.

“This hearing will give every American the opportunity to hear John Koskinen answer under oath why he misled Congress, allowed evidence pertinent to an investigation to be destroyed, and defied Congressional subpoenas and preservation orders,” the caucus said in a statement. “It will also remove any lingering excuses for those who have been hesitant to proceed with this course of action.”

Mr. Koskinen and his Democratic allies on Capitol Hill say he did not lie under oath and provided lawmakers all the information he had when he knew about. Nevertheless, he cut a deal that gets rid of the vote on the so-called “privileged” impeachment resolution that was set to take place Thursday. Now, the House Judiciary Committee will consider Koskinen’s impeachment, with the IRS boss expected to testify sometime next week.

While the House can impeach with only a simple majority vote on a federal official, which is the equivalent of an indictment, the U.S. Senate must hold a trial and inevitably needs a two-thirds majority to find said official guilty in order to remove him or her from office.

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen has reached a

Economy

Weekly-Jobless-Claims-Graphic

Weekly Jobless Claims Graphic. Number of Americans applying for first-time jobless benefits.

The Labor Department said Thursday weekly jobless claims rose by 1,000 to 260,000 last week, missing the median forecast calling for 265,000. The prior week was unchanged at 259,000.

The four-week moving average–which is widely viewed as a better gauge–was 260,750, a decrease of 500 from the previous week’s unrevised average of 261,250.

A Labor Department analyst said there were no special factors impacting this week’s initial claims and no state was triggered “on” the Extended Benefits program during the week ending August 27. While this marks 80 consecutive weeks of initial claims below 300,000, the longest streak since 1970, the pool of eligible applicants due to long-term unemployment is also the smallest in decades.

The highest insured unemployment rates in the week ending August 27 were in New Jersey (2.8), Puerto Rico (2.7), Alaska (2.6), Connecticut (2.6), Pennsylvania (2.4), California (2.1), Rhode Island (2.1), Massachusetts (2.0), and West Virginia (1.9).

The largest increases in initial claims for the week ending September 3 were in Illinois (+3,924), Pennsylvania (+1,634), Texas (+1,439), Washington (+1,044), and Ohio (+641), while the largest decreases were in New York (-3,250), Michigan (-2,224), Louisiana (-1,612), Virginia (-799), and Florida (-322).

The Labor Department said Thursday weekly jobless

Economy

producer-price-index-ppi

The Producer Price Index (PPI) reported by the Labor Department Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The Labor Department said the producer price index (PPI) showed prices at the wholesale level were relatively flat in August and missed the median forecast. Economists’ expectations were for a gain of 0.1%.

Prices excluding the volatile food and energy components rose 0.1%, matching the median forecast.

The Labor Department said the producer price

Economy

retail-sales-shopper-reuters

A retail sales shopper in the U.S. (Photo: Reuters)

The Commerce Department reported on Thursday U.S. retail sales fell 0.3% last month, missing economists’ expectations for a decline of 0.1%. Retail sales in the U.S. during the month of July were previously reported to have been unchanged.

Sales were up 1.9% from a year ago, but the report on Thursday showed an downwardly revised 0.1% loss. Excluding automobiles, gasoline, building materials and food services, retail sales fell 0.1% last month after a downwardly revised 0.1% drop in July. This subgroup, the so-called core retail sales, correspond most closely with the consumer spending component of gross domestic product (GDP).

Considering a weak report on manufacturing activity in August and a slowdown in job growth, the retail sales data dashes economists’ hopes of a strong rebound in economic growth in the third quarter (3Q). A report released for the prior quarter showed an abysmal rate of growth and the Atlanta Federal Reserve currently forecasts the economy growing at a 3.3% annualized rate in the third quarter.

Auto sales fell 0.9% in July and sales at service stations fell 0.8%. Sales at online retailers dropped by 0.3% and receipts at sporting goods and hobby stores fell 1.4%.

The Commerce Department reported on Thursday U.S.

Opinion

Donald Trump, holds up his Bible as he speaks during the Values Voter Summit Sept. 25 in Washington (Photo: AP/Jose Luis Magana)

Donald Trump, holds up his Bible as he speaks during the Values Voter Summit Sept. 25 in Washington (Photo: AP/Jose Luis Magana)

In recent presidential years, Catholics and white evangelical Christians joined in favoring the Republican candidate. A key reason was a shared opposition to abortion.

This time, Catholics appear to be deserting the candidacy of Donald Trump, and one can understand why. Trump is the most vulgar, least moral presidential candidate in modern memory — by Christian or any other ethical standards.

But why are 78 percent of white evangelicals reportedly sticking with a mobbed-up casino con man gone six-time bankrupt? How can they support a thrice-married libertine who brags about his genitalia?

Do note that some prominent Christian conservatives are appalled by this alliance. Moral Majority co-founder Michael Farris saw the “pilgrimage” of 1,000 evangelical leaders to Trump Tower as “the end of the Christian Right.”

Farris was not invited. The event was a Trump sales job, not a discussion.

David Cay Johnston offers a full account of Trump’s un-Christian behavior — personally and in business — in his new book, “The Making of Donald Trump.” Though he’s been covering Trump for decades, the Pulitzer Prize winner still expresses shock at the depths of Trump’s moral depravity.

Johnston devotes a chapter to Trump’s vindictive campaign to deny health coverage to his nephew’s desperately ill baby. The candidate’s actions stand out for their satanic cruelty.

In 1999, William Trump was born in crisis. The infant immediately developed seizures; his breathing stopped twice. (He later developed cerebral palsy.) The medical bills to save the infant were enormous.

Fortunately, the patriarch, Fred Sr. (who died days earlier), had provided all family members with health insurance through his real estate business — or so it was assumed. The Trump family lawyer instructed the family health plan to cover “all costs related to baby William’s care.”

Then Donald stepped in. When Fred Sr.’s will was filed in probate court, William’s father, Fred III, learned that his father’s line had been pretty much left out of the estate, leaving Donald and the other siblings all the richer.

Fred Sr. had apparently disapproved of Fred Jr.’s decision to become a pilot and of the flight attendant he married. And Donald had his elderly father’s ear.

William’s parents challenged the will. Donald retaliated by denying the family health coverage.

The New York Daily News queried Trump about William. Donald replied, “Why should we give him medical coverage?”

At a meeting last year with evangelical voters in Iowa, Trump was asked whether he felt bad about William. He responded that he never had a reason to seek God’s forgiveness.

“Why do I have to, you know, repent, why do I have to ask for forgiveness if (I’m) not making mistakes?” Trump said the following day. In reporting on the event, The Christian Post carried the quote and referred to Trump’s “alleged Christian faith.”

“Always get even,” Trump wrote in one of his books. “When you are in business you need to get even with people who screw you. You need to screw them back 15 times harder … go for the jugular, attack them in spades!”

In “An Appeal to Our Fellow Catholics,” 37 leading Catholic thinkers wrote that Trump’s record and campaign “promise only the further degradation of our politics and our culture.” They urged Catholics to reject him.

Trump, meanwhile, has given Christian conservatives almost nothing, not even on the abortion issue. Farris notes that Trump “took at least three conflicting positions on abortion in a 24-hour period.”

Others may explain why people purporting to be socially conservative would back a mocker of morality while portraying Hillary Clinton, a devoted Methodist, as some kind of monster. They may not like Clinton on a number of counts. We get that. But surely, there are convictions worth defending.

In recent presidential years, Catholics and white

Opinion

FBI Director James Comey briefs reporters at a press conference in Washington D.C. (Photo: AP)

FBI Director James Comey briefs reporters at a press conference in Washington D.C. (Photo: AP)

Earlier this week, Republican leaders in both houses of Congress took the FBI to task for its failure to be transparent. In the House, it was apparently necessary to serve a subpoena on an FBI agent to obtain what members of Congress want to see; and in the Senate, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee accused the FBI itself of lawbreaking.

Here is the back story.

Ever since FBI Director James Comey announced on July 5 he was recommending that the Department of Justice not seek charges against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as a result of her failure to safeguard state secrets during her time in office, many in Congress have had a nagging feeling that this was a political, not a legal, decision. The publicly known evidence of Clinton’s recklessness and willful failure to safeguard secrets was overwhelming. The evidence of her lying under oath about whether she returned all her work-related emails that she had taken from the State Department was profound and incontrovertible.

And then we learned that people who worked for Clinton were instructed to destroy several of her mobile devices and to remove permanently the stored emails on one of her servers. All this was done after these items had been subpoenaed by two committees of the House of Representatives.

Yet the FBI — which knew of the post-subpoena destruction of evidence and which acknowledged that Clinton failed to return thousands of her work-related emails as she had been ordered by a federal judge to do, notwithstanding at least three of her assertions to the contrary while under oath — chose to overlook the evidence of not only espionage but also obstruction of justice, tampering with evidence, perjury and misleading Congress.

As if to defend itself in the face of this most un-FBI-like behavior, the FBI then released to the public selected portions of its work product, which purported to back up its decision to recommend against the prosecution of Clinton. Normally, the FBI gathers evidence and works with federal prosecutors and federal grand juries to build cases against targets in criminal probes, and its recommendations to prosecutors are confidential.

But in Clinton’s case, the hierarchy of the Department of Justice removed itself from the chain of command because of the orchestrated impropriety of Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton, who met in private on the attorney general’s plane at a time when both Bill and Hillary Clinton were subjects of FBI criminal investigations. That left the FBI to have the final say about prosecution — or so the FBI and the DOJ would have us all believe.

It is hard to believe that the FBI was free to do its work, and it is probably true that the FBI was restrained by the White House early on. There were numerous aberrations in the investigation. There was no grand jury; no subpoenas were issued; no search warrants were served. Two people claimed to have received immunity, yet the statutory prerequisite for immunity — giving testimony before a grand or trial jury — was never present.

Because many members of Congress do not believe that the FBI acted free of political interference, they demanded to see the full FBI files in the case, not just the selected portions of the files that the FBI had released. In the case of the House, the FBI declined to surrender its files, and the agent it sent to testify about them declined to reveal their contents. This led to a dramatic service of a subpoena by the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on that FBI agent while he was testifying — all captured on live nationally broadcast television.

Now the FBI, which usually serves subpoenas and executes search warrants, is left with the alternative of complying with this unwanted subpoena by producing its entire file or arguing to a federal judge why it should not be compelled to do so.

On the Senate side, matters are even more out of hand. There, in response to a request from the Senate Judiciary Committee, the FBI sent both classified and unclassified materials to the Senate safe room. The Senate safe room is a secure location that is available only to senators and their senior staff, all of whom must surrender their mobile devices and writing materials and swear in writing not to reveal whatever they see while in the room before they are permitted to enter.

According to Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the FBI violated federal law by commingling classified and unclassified materials in the safe room, thereby making it unlawful for senators to discuss publicly the unclassified material.

Imposing such a burden of silence on U.S. senators about unclassified materials is unlawful and unconstitutional. What does the FBI have to hide? Whence comes the authority of the FBI to bar senators from commenting on unclassified materials?

Who cares about this? Everyone who believes that the government works for us should care because we have a right to know what the government — here the FBI — has done in our names. Sen. Grassley has opined that if he could reveal what he has seen in the FBI unclassified records, it would be of profound interest to American voters.

What is going on here? The FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton has not served the rule of law. The rule of law — a pillar of American constitutional freedom since the end of the Civil War — mandates that the laws are to be enforced equally. No one is beneath their protection, and no one is above their requirements. To enforce the rule of law, we have hired the FBI.

What do we do when the FBI rejects its basic responsibilities?

Earlier this week, Republican leaders in both

Politics

Obama-Syrian-Refugees-Behaving-Badly

Barack Obama delivers a statement on the attacks in Paris from the press briefing room on Friday Nov. 13, 2015, left, and a Syrian refugee yells at a Hungarian border guard. (Photos: Pete Souza/WH/Reuters)

WASHINGTON, D.C. (PPD) — President Barack Obama plans to increase the number of refugees accepted into the United States next year to at least 110,000, an increase of some 30% from the number resettled in 2016. Secretary of State John Kerry briefed Congress on Tuesday about the White House decision. Obama’s plan for the 2017 fiscal year, beginning Oct. 1, would accept 110,000 refugees fleeing persecution and conflict throughout the world — a nearly 60 percent increase over the 2015 fiscal year.

The Wall Street Journal reported 40,000 refugees would be authorized from the region of Near East/South Asia, which includes Syria, while another roughly 35,000 refugees would be accepted from Africa and 14,000 refugee are from regions to be determined. The Senate Judiciary Committee was provided a brief by the administration that said the White House “aims to admit a significantly higher number” of Syrians in 2017.

Obama is expected to announce the decision next week during the United Nations General Assembly meeting, despite U.S. despite public opinion. According to a recent survey, roughly half of American voters don’t want to take in any refugees, at all, let alone 100,000. A Rasmussen Reports survey survey found 49% of likely voters say no to any and all alleged Syrian refugees, while 20% said they would only support taking in 10,000 total. Still, 50% said they were opposed to the idea of allowing 10,000 to come to the U.S. in a poll conducted immediately after the president’s first announcement, and just 36% supported it.

“Despite opposition by the American people, a documented link between terrorism and individuals admitted to the United States as refugees, and over $19 trillion in debt, the Obama Administration has committed the United States to admitting 110,000 refugees during Fiscal Year 2017 — a roughly 57 percent increase in the number of refugees the United States admitted as recently as FY 2015, and a roughly 29 percent increase from the Administration’s target for FY 2016,” Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, who chairs the Immigration and the National Interest subcommittee, said in a statement.

The polls are unsurprising when you consider 72% of voters feel that giving thousands of Syrian refugees asylum poses a national security risk to America. That includes 47% who are “Very Concerned.” On the flip side, just 27% don’t share this concern, but that includes only 10% who are “Not At All Concerned.” Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Republicans say they don’t want any refugees from the Middle East relocated to the U.S., which is a view shared by 48% of voters not affiliated with either party and even 40% of Democrats. In fact, few voters in the president’s party want any more than 25,000 new refugees allowed in.

Majorities of voters of all party affiliations are concerned about the national security threat that arises from bringing in Middle Eastern refugees, but Republicans have the strongest concern. Those concerns aren’t exactly unwarranted.

At least one terrorist in the Paris terror attacks in November, 2015 entered the European Union through a popular entry point for so-called Syrian refugees, while a teenage Afghan refugee injured multiple people when he went on a slashing spree using an axe and a knife on a train in Germany last July.

The last year the U.S. resettled such a number of refugees was in 1995 when former President Bill Clinton set the ceiling at 112,000 following the Rwandan genocide. A recent study found the percentage who were Christian Mr. Obama resettled from the region, undoubtedly the most persecuted and displaced subgroup in the refugee population, was less than 1%.

President Barack Obama plans to increase the

People's Pundit Daily
You have %%pigeonMeterAvailable%% free %%pigeonCopyPage%% remaining this month. Get unlimited access and support reader-funded, independent data journalism.

Start a 14-day free trial now. Pay later!

Start Trial

Subscribe