SAR #16158

We are innocent only in the sense of not yet being found guilty.

Crystal Balls: Bernie's momentum in California is likely to crash on the rocks of deliberate vote suppression on large portions of the newly registered “independents.” Some California poll workers have been told to give "provisional" ballots to all independent voters in Tuesday’s primary. Ho hum.

Whether Reporting: Whether the May jobs report was disappointing, a disaster, or “not hugely out of line”, depends on the flavor of economic reporting you prefer. Here's the Dragnet version: In June there were 38,000 jobs created (with the working age population rising by 205,000), and April's job gains were revised down by 37,000 and March's by 22,000, which nets out to a loss of 21,000 jobs. That's a lot lower than the 200,000 a month job creation pace of the last two years. More worrisome is the 21,000 decline in temporary jobs, continuing a downward trend that started six months ago. Temps are the first hired, first fired. The claim that 14 million jobs have been created since Wall Street tanked the economy in 2007 would be more impressive if the population hadn't grown 16.5 million in the same time. We're not keeping even, even if unemployment dropped to 4.7% in May – mostly because 484,000 of last month's unemployed have “left the labor force.” If the other 7.4 million “officially” unemployed wander off to live on their savings, unemployment will have reached 0.0%.

Quote: “Americans need to pay attention to the fact that “their” government is a collection of crazed stupid fools likely to bring vaporization to the United States and all of Europe.” Paul Craig Roberts

Downward Spiral: The Stanford University student who raped an unconscious woman (vide Vanderbilt) was given a modest sentence because incarceration would have had “a severe impact on him.” Farther north, University of Michigan officials tried to delay an FBI investigation into sexual assault on their campus. The foreign minister of Austria – Hitler's homeland – says that refugees should be rounded up and interned in concentration camps “held offshore,” like the Australians do.

Headliner: “If the Economy Is Sinking, Policy Makers Are Far From Prepared.” Remind me again when our policy makers were ever prepared for bad news. Except for Deutsche Bank, which says the economy “could enter recession as soon as the second half of this year."

Trend Watching: While real wages keep dropping, the price of houses keeps increasing.

Decimal Pointedly: The effective return on 10-year German bonds is 0.07% and France's are at 0.414% and both countries have negative Y/Y CPI growth. Anybody, anywhere, know how to play this game?

Pointing The Way: Tree infested Norway is striving to reach zero deforestation and planning to “completely ban all petrol powered cars by 2025.” Today a quarter of their cars are electric.

Built In Excuse: As we all know dieting is rarely effective, doesn’t reliably improve health and likely does more harm than good. Your brain has a pretty firm idea of what your weight is going to be, and that carries a lot more weight than your doctor's opinion.

Porn O’Graph: What went up, coming down.

A Parting Shot: