August 22 2024

1 Fed Expected to Cut Interest Rates in September
2 Job Growth Revised Down by 28% (818k jobs)
3 NFL Concussion Settlement Falls Short: Players Denied Crucial Dementia Evaluations
4 Election roundup: RFK to drop out, endorse Trump; bulletproof campaigning; DNC riot control
5 The Marriage of State and Tech: How the Information Revolution is Redefining Power
8/22/1991 Communist hardliners’ coup against Gorbachev fails in USSR

Traveling, no podcast or heartland citizen journal 8/21-22

1 Fed Expected to Cut Interest Rates in September

Two years ago, Jerome H. Powell took the podium at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s annual conference at Jackson Hole in Wyoming and warned America that lowering inflation would require some pain. On Friday, Mr. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, will again deliver his most important policy speech of the year from that closely watched stage. But this time, he is much more likely to focus on how the Fed is trying to pull off what many onlookers once thought was unlikely, and maybe even impossible: a relatively painless soft landing.

NYT

Bond traders are taking on a record amount of risk as they bet big on a Treasury market rally fueled by expectations the Federal Reserve will embark on its first interest-rate cut in more than four years. The number of leveraged positions in Treasury futures has risen to an all-time high ahead of the central bank’s annual economic symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which will commence on Thursday. At the event, Fed Chair Jerome Powell will speak and provide more insights into the central bank’s monetary policy path for the rest of this year.

Bloomberg

Article Source: Bloomberg, NYT

2 Job Growth Revised Down by 28% (818k jobs)

The U.S. economy added far fewer jobs in 2023 and early 2024 than previously reported, a sign that cracks in the labor market are more severe — and began forming earlier — than initially believed. On Wednesday, the Labor Department said monthly payroll figures overstated job growth by roughly 818,000 in the 12 months that ended in March. That suggests employers added about 174,000 jobs per month during that period, down from the previously reported pace of about 242,000 jobs — a downward revision of about 28 percent.

Article Source: NYT

3 NFL Concussion Settlement Falls Short: Players Denied Crucial Dementia Evaluations

When the NFL agreed to settle lawsuits filed by thousands of former players alleging football left them with brain disease, the top lawyer for players promised a “state of the art” evaluation, paid for by the league, that would quickly connect players with care at the critical early stages of dementia, when treatment can help ease a patient’s suffering. “It’s the best of the best,” Christopher Seeger, one of the nation’s leading class action attorneys, said in June 2017 at a meeting with former players. But the settlement’s dementia evaluation was operating behind best practices the day it opened in 2017, a Washington Post investigation found. And the quality gap between the settlement’s evaluation and a state-of-the-art examination for dementia has only widened since, leaving thousands of former players with assessments that fall far short of the sophistication promised by their top lawyer. “It’s shocking to me that that’s not part of their evaluation,” James Castle, a neurologist and assistant professor at Rush Medical College in Chicago, said of MRIs. “This is a critical test.” The Post has spent more than a year investigating the settlement, reviewing thousands of pages of records relating to efforts by more than 100 former players to qualify for benefits and interviewing dozens of lawyers, doctors, former players and their families. In January, a Post report revealed how the settlement’s unique definition for dementia has saved the NFL hundreds of millions. The Post also documented administrative failures that left some players waiting years — and, in two cases, dying — before they could get paid. In examining the settlement’s evaluation process, The Post identified two common brain imagining technologies — MRI and amyloid PET (positron emission tomography) — whose exclusion probably has saved the NFL tens of millions in medical costs alone, according to expert estimates.

Article Source: WaPo

4 Election roundup: RFK to drop out, endorse Trump; bulletproof campaigning; DNC riot control

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is planning to drop out of the presidential race by the end of this week, sources familiar with the decision tell ABC News. Sources tell ABC News that Kennedy plans to endorse Donald Trump – but when asked directly by ABC News if he will be endorsing the former president, Kennedy said, "I will not confirm or deny that.”

ABC    

Former President Donald Trump held his first outdoor rally since the attempted assassination on his life in Pennsylvania, and a wall of bulletproof glass protected him at the podium in Asheboro, North Carolina. The rally came on the same day that a bipartisan congressional task force looking into the July 13 shooting is set to meet with the FBI about the agency's investigation into the deadly shooting.  

Fox News

Article Source: ABC, Fox News, X

5 The Marriage of State and Tech: How the Information Revolution is Redefining Power

The information revolution is also driving the state and the corporate sector together. Increasingly, the gathering, storage, and exploitation of information is joining money as a critical element of the power of states. Information today plays a growing role as the basis of military power, of the economic strength that makes military power affordable, of a viable arms industry, and of both defensive and offensive cybersecurity capabilities. Given the strategic importance of the information sector, and the reality that only profitable private firms can support the huge investments required to build a sophisticated tech innovation culture that can allow a given state to compete, states cannot avoid taking a strong interest in the health and prosperity of a domestically based tech sector (or at least a friendly foreign one). Nor can they view with indifference the success of businesses based in hostile or unreliable countries. Both business and government leaders are today discovering something that Hamilton could have told them has long been true: economic policy is strategy, and vice versa. The combined effects of the information revolution, the massive mix of investment and regulatory activism by governments in the energy complex involved in the fight against climate change, and the continuing impact of the regulatory changes introduced in the wake of the financial crisis have brought the corporate world and the American state into intimate contact. The role of economic and technological competition in the contest with China reinforces the marriage between the White House and Wall Street. The libertarian right will be disappointed that the nexus exists and that it will inexorably deepen. The anticorporate left will be pained to realize that states will choose, of necessity, to use their economic and political clout to strengthen rather than check Big Tech. In the current era of geopolitical competition, Washington is going to worry more about whether its leading tech companies are strong enough and well resourced enough to stay ahead of their Chinese rivals than about whether U.S. tech companies are becoming too big. Future presidents are more likely to push back against European Union efforts to impose heavy antitrust fines on U.S. tech companies than to impose similar rules at home. The question of whether a given tech company is a loyal and reliable partner for Washington will matter more to the U.S. government than whether the company is too big or too rich. That reality, in turn, will drive large tech companies to seek a modus vivendi with the state.

Article Source: Foreign Affairs, Walter Russell Mead

8/22/1991 Communist hardliners’ coup against Gorbachev fails in USSR

The August 1991 coup attempt in the Soviet Union was a critical event in the final months of the USSR that hastened its collapse. It took place from August 19 to August 22, 1991, when a group of hard-line Communist Party members and government officials, known as the State Committee on the State of Emergency (GKChP), attempted to seize control from Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.

Sources

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/22/business/economy/jerome-powell-fed-jackson-hole.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb; https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-20/bond-traders-amassing-historic-level-of-risk-on-rate-cut-bets

2. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/21/business/economy/us-jobs-economy.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb

3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2024/08/20/nfl-concussion-settlement-mri-alzheimer/

4. https://abcnews.go.com/US/rfk-jr-plans-drop-presidential-race-end-week/story?id=113028999; https://www.foxnews.com/us/trump-rallies-nc-behind-bulletproof-glass-first-outdoor-event-since-assassination-attempt

5. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/return-hamiltonian-statecraft-walter-mead