Daily Archives: 6 May 2019

Favorable Jobs Report, Therefor Cut Interest Rates?

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That’s the latest push, this time by Vice President Mike Pence.  He’s as wrong, though, as President Donald Trump, for all that he’s more genteel in his push.

There’s no inflation happening here. The economy is roaring. This is exactly the time not only to not raise interest rates, but we ought to consider cutting them[.]

Pence made this remark on the heels of Labor’s employment report announcing strong job growth, rising wages, and 3.6% unemployment.

No.  Interest rates where they are aren’t hindering our economy; on the contrary, they’re still a tad low.  Our economy is flourishing for a number of reasons, one of which is that interest rates are approaching more natural levels, not being held at below free market rates.  “Natural” here is defined in terms of the Federal Reserve’s legislated mandate—to maintain stable prices and low unemployment—and the Fed’s long-held optimal stable pricing goal of 2% inflation.

Cutting rates on the basis of a favorable jobs report (and one not entirely favorable: the labor force participation rate fell for the second straight month, and that rate is a factor in calculating the headline unemployment rate) would be a mistake.  Instead, the Fed should move its benchmark rates to levels consistent with its 2% inflation goal and then sit down, be quiet, and accept that the economy and employment rates will be noisy around that level (or any other level).

Animal spirits, after all, are hormonal, but within surprisingly broad ranges, they keep correcting back.

Censorship Continued

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The Poynter Institute, an organization that masquerades itself as a…watchdog…built a list of what it claimed to be unreliable news outlets and then urged censorship through boycotting these offending outlets. “Unreliable,” mind you, was determined by Poynter personnel.  Then they got caught, and they’re claiming to have withdrawn their list.

Here are two critical clues to the nature of their list. One is [emphasis added]:

…initially released a list of more than 500 “unreliable” news outlets purportedly “built from pre-existing databases compiled by journalists, fact-checkers, and researchers around the country.”

Even those purported researchers were carefully unnamed.

And this one:

The index was created with the help of an employee for the Southern Poverty Law Center.

That’s by itself is a fatal condemnation.

From those two clues, it’s clear that the Poynter Institute got exactly what it was looking for.  It just got caught, like the Ezra Klein’s JournoList of a few short years ago.

Do we have, though, any reason to believe the list actually has been scrapped? Or is it merely being better hidden? Like that JournoList. This is, after all, a long-established member of the NLMSM.  The Managing Editor of Poynter, Barbara Allen, had this about that in her statement:

[W]e are removing this unreliable sites list until we are able to provide our audience a more consistent and rigorous set of criteria. The list was intended to be a starting place for readers and journalists to learn more about the veracity of websites that purported to offer news; it was not intended to be definitive or all encompassing

In other words, they’ll be back with a more effectively disguised version of their attempt at censorship, a censorship goal made plain by her next sentence. A starting place for readers and journalists to learn more about the veracity of websites, indeed. A “starting place” written by journalists and JournoList members who will define for us “veracity,” because we’re too stupid to recognize it on our own.

And not intended to be definitive….  Yewbetcha.