Five men cleared of rape charges sued former President Donald Trump on Oct. 21, arguing he defamed them with comments he made at a recent presidential debate.
Trump said during the September debate with Vice President Kamala Harris that the so-called Central Park Five “pled guilty” and that they “badly hurt a person” and “killed a person, ultimately.”
The new suit, filed in federal court in Pennsylvania, states that those remarks are defamatory because the five men were never accused of nor convicted of killing anyone.
The plaintiffs say Trump made the comments negligently, either with the knowledge that they were false or with reckless disregard as to their falsity.
“Defendant Trump’s conduct at the September 10 debate was extreme and outrageous, and it was intended to cause severe emotional distress to Plaintiffs,” the suit states.
Juries in 1990 convicted Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron Brown, and Korey Wise of rape and other charges. They had pleaded not guilty, after they admitted to participating in a night of criminal activity, including assault and robbery, in Central Park on April 19, 1989.
Some of the then-teenagers said they had assaulted or sexually touched a jogger Trisha Meili and implicated others in raping her.
The five, two weeks after their confessions, had recanted their statements, saying that they were allegedly coerced by police into giving false confessions in the case.
Matias Reyes, a convicted rapist, a decade later confessed to raping Meili on the evening of April 19.
Investigators confirmed the details offered by Reyes.
Prosecutors told a state court the convictions against the five males should be vacated, because their confessions linking the five to related crimes were obtained under duress after hours of questioning and without the presence of their guardians or legal counsel.
A judge in 2002 vacated the five men’s convictions based on the newly discovered evidence.
A New York Police Department report later concluded that while DNA and other evidence supported Reyes’s story, there was “nothing but his uncorroborated word that he did so alone.” It said that the men “more likely than not” took part in Reyes’s assault of Meili.
“The new DNA evidence … does not assist in determining whether the defendants were present during the attack on the jogger,” it said.
Trump, who paid for an advertisement in 1989 calling for the five to be put to death, was responding during the debate after Harris highlighted his involvement with the case.
“This is the same individual who took out a full-page ad in The New York Times calling for the execution of five young Black and Latino boys who were innocent, the Central Park Five,” she said.
Trump then offered his response and said that Harris “has to stretch back years, 40, 50 years ago because there’s nothing now.”
In 2019, when asked if he would apologize to the five men, Trump told reporters that “They admitted their guilt.”
Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump’s campaign, told news outlets that the filing “is just another frivolous election interference lawsuit filed by desperate left-wing activists in an attempt to distract the American people from Kamala Harris’s dangerously liberal agenda and failing campaign.”
McWeaponized: CDC Unveils E.coli Outbreak In Quarter-Pounders, Day After Trump Photo-Op
There’s no such thing as coincidence in Washington…
A day after former President Trump ventured into a McDonalds during a campaign stop, cooked some fries, and handed out some food to more-than-happy customers in a photo-op that went very viral (in a good way), the CDC issued a statement announcing an E. coli outbreak linked to McDonald’s Quarter Pounders has left one person dead and caused 10 hospitalizations.
There are 49 cases across 10 states, with most illneses in Colorado and Nebraska (not where president Trump was)…
E. COLI OUTBREAK: CDC is investigating 49 illnesses in 10 states linked to McDonald’s Quarter Pounder hamburgers. If you ate a Quarter Pounder hamburger from McDonald’s and have severe symptoms of E. coli, contact your healthcare provider. https://t.co/g87itkupCQpic.twitter.com/gHzUKCnTi9
“This is a fast-moving outbreak investigation. Most sick people are reporting eating Quarter Pounder hamburgers from McDonald’s and investigators are working quickly to confirm which food ingredient is contaminated,” the CDC’s alert said.
“McDonald’s has pulled ingredients for these burgers, and they won’t be available for sale in some states,” the CDC said.
“McDonald’s reported to CDC that it has stopped using fresh slivered onions and quarter pound beef patties in several states,” the CDC said.
The announcement of the outbreak sent MCD shares down 10% in the after-market (before bouncing back a little)…
The timing of the sudden share-price-crushing contagion comes after McDonald’s corporate office dared to actually accept and welcome ‘hitler, stalin, and mussolini’ into their fast-food joint.
In an email to employees that was seen by The Epoch Times, the company said that its “brand has been a fixture of conversation this election cycle” and that “we’ve not sought this” but is a “testament to how much McDonald’s resonates with so many Americans.”
“McDonald’s does not endorse candidates for elected office and that remains true in this race for the next President,” McDonald’s said in the statement, dated Oct. 21. “We are not red or blue—we are golden.”
The company said that Trump’s visit to a Pennsylvania McDonald’s location was handled locally by a franchise operator.
“Upon learning of the former President’s request, we approached it through the lens of one of our core values: we open our doors to everyone,” the company said.
And, in case you thought we over-reached here, this is how the New York Times decide to cover this Trump photo-op…
Yes, that is right – they allegedly asked MCD employees if Trump did a good job!?
When it was time to bag the order, he asked a woman at the drive-through what they did when a customer wanted more salt.
“I love salt,” he said, as he shook some onto golden potatoes.
Then, after spilling some, he paused to throw some over his shoulder in a nod to superstition, a seconds-long gesture that would have most likely been unappreciated by efficiency-loving managers had Mr. Trump been any other employee.
And remember, Kamala worked there too… according to a friend…
Finally, nothing would shock us more than if Jack Smith stepped in to probe Trump’s cleanliness…
Mexico is the leading consumer of soft drinks in the world with an average consumption of 163 litres per person per year – 40% more than the US in second place. Child and adult obesity are off the charts.
Yesterday (Oct. 21), while Donald Trump was causing a stir by donning a McDonald’s uniform for the cameras and frying some fries, Mexico’s new Secretary of Public Education, Mario Delgado, announced the launch of a new nationwide program that is unlikely to be replicated north of the border any time soon. The goal of the program, titled “Vida Saludable” (Healthy Life), is to improve the nutrition and overall health of Mexican school children amid an epidemic of child obesity and diabetes.
The program, enacted by the now-former AMLO administration on September 29, has four main pillars: prevent the sale of ultra-processed food and sugary drinks in school settings; promote the consumption of natural drinking water through the provision of water fountains; train educators in healthy nutrition; and promote sports and physical activity. The Claudia Sheinbaum government, still in its maiden month in office, has said it will also train the heads of school cooperatives to sell fruits, vegetables and seasonal foods.
A Six-Month Deadline
“Vida Saludable” will become mandatory for all state schools at all levels of the national education system on March 29. Schools will have just six months to end all sales of foods and drinks that have at least one health warning label from their snack stands, or their administrators could face steep fines.
Of course, many children bring food from home, but the government says it has no intention of sanctioning parents who put junk food in their children’s lunchboxes. Instead, it will focus on explaining the harmful effects of these foods and the importance of eating a balanced diet.
Implementing “Vida Saludable” is likely to be difficult, however. At most of Mexico’s 255,000 public schools, free drinking water is not available to students. Since 2020, only 4% of them have managed to install drinking fountains. There are also doubts about how the government will enforce the ban on the pavements outside schools, where vendors set up stalls of goods to sell to kids at breaktime. This being Mexico, one can expect a lively black market in comida chattara to spring up in many schools. Enterprising students will no doubt get rich.
Nonetheless, drastic steps are necessary to combat Mexico’s soaring levels of child obesity and diabetes. An estimated 5.7 Mexican million children between the ages of 5 and 11 and 10.4 million adolescents between the ages of 12 and 19 are overweight or obese. In addition, an estimated 7 out of 10 schoolchildren and 5 out of 10 adolescents are physically inactive, which further aggravates the country’s public health crisis.
Mexico’s secretary of education blames these trends on the “high consumption of sugars”, the lack of physical activity and the food policies of previous governments, driven primarily by the profit-maximising needs of the food industry:
“In the neoliberal era they were not concerned about this situation — on the contrary, the sale of these products was promoted and there were even campaigns against hunger promoted by the companies that produce these junk foods. The neoliberal model turned rights such as education, health and food into merchandise.”
The Role of NAFTA
In Mexico, obesity reached epidemic proportions after it joined NAFTA with the United States and Canada in the early 1990s, making processed food more easily available. As the New York Times reported in a 2017 investigation, the commercial opening of North America turbocharged the growth of convenience stores and US-owned fast food restaurants on Mexican soil. In addition, trade liberalisation allowed “cheap corn, meat, high-fructose corn syrup, and processed foods” from the United States to flood into Mexico.
Diets quickly changed as many people, particularly those on lower incomes, replaced largely healthy traditional staples (corn tortilla, frijoles, Jamaica Water…) with highly processed alternatives (hotdogs, nuggets, sodas…). Granted, prior to NAFTA Mexico was already home to a burgeoning junk food industry, but what came after was on a whole different scale.
Mexico is now the leading consumer of soft drinks in the world with an average consumption of 163 litres per person per year — 40% more than the US in second place, with 118 litres, according to a 2022 study from the University of Yale. Incredibly, there is one state in the country that consumes Coca Cola in per-capita volumes five times higher than the national average and 32 times higher than the global average: Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest state.
“It is the epicentre of the epidemic of soft drink consumption,” Dr. Marcos Arana, a researcher at the Salvador Zubirán National Institute of Medical Sciences and Nutrition, toldBBC Mundo:
Soft drinks are already an essential part of daily life in this state, especially in the Los Altos region of Chiapas, where the majority of its population is indigenous and rural…
“The availability and advertising of something so cheap is so great and omnipresent in Chiapas in the face of vulnerable populations that they have created an addiction that is seen as a necessity,” Arana says.
“Residents told me that before the road to Tenejapa arrived, there was no diabetes or cardiovascular problems there. That all began when the road arrived in town and the soft drinks, the chips…”, says Jaime Page Pliego, anthropologist and co-author of the study.
Local organizations such as the Centre for Training in Ecology and Health for Peasants (CCESC), which Arana directs, point to the “aggressive” commercial practices of soft drink companies and the easy accessibility of their products in the area as the main drivers of this excessive consumption.
“Coca-Cola is the most available product in Los Altos, you have to walk the farther to buy tortillas or anything else. The number of points of sale is excessive, without any control, and with prices reduced by up to 30%,” says Arana.
As sugar consumption in Mexico has soared, waistlines have exploded. In the past 20 years the number of obese and overweight people has tripled, with a staggering 75% of the population and 35% of the child population now overweight. In addition to obesity, the change in diet has contributed to diabetes becoming the second leading cause of death, after heart disease and ahead of cancer. In 2016, a state of epidemiological emergency was declared in the country due to the high rates of obesity and diabetes.
Food Labelling, Bans on Cartoon Food Packaging…
“Vida Saludable” is not the first step Mexico’s government has taken to try to improve Mexicans’ food habits. In October 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the AMLO government passed one of the strictest food labelling laws on the planet. From that date, all soft drinks cans and bottles, bags of chips and other processed food packages must bear black octagonal labels warning of “EXCESS SUGAR”, “EXCESS CALORIES”, “EXCESS SODIUM” or “EXCESS TRANS FATS” — all in big bold letters that are impossible to miss.
Today, more than half of Mexican food and beverage products have a nutritional warning label — more than any other country in Latin America. The government also banned cartoon food packaging aimed at children.
Mexico has prohibited cartoon mascots on unhealthy food aimed at kids. See the difference? pic.twitter.com/JYgmDh9fLu
Big Food lobbies tried to block both of these measures, of course — just as they will no doubt try to block “Vida Saludable”. The Interamerican Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property and the Mexican Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property complained that food labelling was unconstitutional and violated the provisions that Mexico had signed at the international level such as the North American Free Trade Agreement — a tactic that has apparently been used in other jurisdictions where food labelling laws have been passed.
For almost four years the lawsuits dragged on. Of the more than 100 injunctions filed by companies like Coca-Cola Femsa, PepsiCo, Group Bimbo, Hershey’s, Santa Clara, Herdez, Alimentos del Fuerte, Nutrisa and McCormick, three reached the second chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN), which, to its credit, ruled – by unanimous vote – that front-of-pack labelling for food and non-alcoholic beverages is a valid measure that protects people’s health and consumers’ right to information.
The first country in Latin America to really begin tackling the public’s addiction to junk food, sugary drinks and ultra processed foods was Chile. In 2016, it passed a strict food labelling law. Like Mexico, it has also also limited cartoon food packaging, prevented schools from selling unhealthy foods, restricted TV adverts, and banned promotional toys. Over the next two years, sugary drink sales in Chile fell by 23%. According to one study, the labels reduced the likelihood of people choosing sugary breakfast cereals by 11% and sugary juices by almost 24%.
As I wrote in 2020 for WOLF STREET, it was one of the worst possible nightmares for the junk food industry. The fact that Chile, with its population of around 20 million people, was doing it was bad enough. The prospect of something similar transpiring in Mexico, a country with a population almost seven times larger than Chile and that consumes more processed food than any other country in Latin America and more soda on a per-capita basis than any country on the planet, unnerved global food and beverage companies:
The United States, EU, Canada and Switzerland, home to some of the world’s biggest food companies, tried to pause or derail the new legislation. But to no avail. The arrival of Covid-19, which has proven to be particularly lethal to people with three comorbidities — obesity, diabetes, and hypertension — has strengthened the government’s case and resolve.
The [government’s labelling laws] have raised concerns that [it] is overstepping its bounds. The business lobby group Coparmex said that banning the sale of junk food and sugary drinks to minors represents a frontal attack on commercial freedom and freedom of choice. It will also have serious economic consequences for businesses in the retail sector. But those consequences are dwarfed by the economic and health impact of widespread obesity.
Since 2020, many other countries in Latin America have introduced strict front-of-package food labelling laws, including Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Colombia. According to the Mexican online news website Sin Embargo, the labelling legislation in Mexico has had two main visible effects: the first is the reformulation of products by companies such as Bimbo, Nestlé and Kellogg’s, in an attempt to lower the concentration of ingredients that have excess sugar, fat or sodium. The second is the testimonials of consumers who claim to have reduced their consumption of products that bear health warnings on their packaging.
A study published in June in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity suggests that the policy appears to be bearing fruit (pun intended). The study’s authors asked people aged 14 or over to self-report any perceived changes in their shopping habits a year after the food labelling law came into effect. More than a third of young people and almost half of adults said the labelling system had led them to reduce their purchase of various unhealthy foods. In addition, adults who reported higher water intake and lower consumption of sugary drinks said the main reason for this decision was food labelling.
Is it any surprise that the junk food industry spent years furiously lobbying in Mexico’s Congress to block the introduction of strict and clear front-of-package food labels, and once they were finally introduced spent another four years trying to get them overturned? The lobbies will no doubt try to do the same with Mexico’s “Vida Saludable” program, just as the US’ corn and GMO lobbies are using ISDS to try to prevent Mexico from banning the use of GMO corn for direct human consumption. It is no easy task for a country to mend its eating ways these days, especially if its direct neighbour is the US of A.
OpenAI just raised $6.6 billion, the largest venture-capital funding of all time, at a $157 billion valuation. Oh, and the company will lose $5 billion this year and is projecting $44 billion in losses through 2029.
We are bombarded with breathless press releases. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicts that “powerful AI” will surpass human intelligence in many areas by 2026. OpenAI claims its latest models are “designed to spend more time thinking before they respond. They can reason through complex tasks and solve harder problems.” Thinking? Reasoning? Will AI become humanlike? Conscious?
I hate to be the one to throw it, but here’s some cold water on the AI hype cycle:
Moravec’s paradox: Babies are smarter than AI. In 1988 robotics researcher Hans Moravec noted that “It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility.” Most innate skills are built into our DNA, and many of them are unconscious.
AI has a long way to go. Last week, Apple AI researchers seemed to agree, noting that “current LLMs are not capable of genuine logical reasoning; instead, they attempt to replicate the reasoning steps observed in their training data.”
Linguistic apocalypse paradox: As I’ve noted before, AI smarts come from human logic embedded between words and sentences. Large language models need human words as input to become more advanced. But some researchers believe we’ll run out of written words to train models sometime between 2026 and 2032.
Remember, you can’t train AI models on AI-generated prose. That leads to what’s known as model collapse. Output becomes gibberish.
Current models train on 30 trillion human words. To be Moore’s Law-like, does this scale 1000 times over a decade to 30 quadrillion tokens? Are there even that many words written? Writers, you better get crackin’.
Scaling paradox: Early indications suggest large language models may follow so-called power-law curves. Google researcher Dagang Wei thinks that “increasing model size, dataset size, or computation can lead to significant performance boosts, but with diminishing returns as you scale up.” Yes, large language models could hit a wall.
Spending paradox: Data centers currently have an almost insatiable demand for graphics processing units to power AI training. Nvidiagenerated $30 billion in revenue last quarter and expectations are for $177 billion in revenue in 2025 and $207 billion in 2026. But venture capitalist David Cahn of Sequoia Capital wonders if this is sustainable. He thinks the AI industry needs to see $600 billion in revenue to pay back all the AI infrastructure spending so far. Industry leader OpenAI expects $3.7 billion in revenue this year, $12 billion next year, and forecasts $100 billion, but not until 2029. It could take a decade of growth to justify today’s spending on GPU chips.
Goldman Sachs’s head of research wrote a report, “GenAI: Too much spend, too little benefit?” He was being nice with the question mark. Nobel laureate and Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Daron Acemoglu thinks AI can perform only 5% of jobs and tells Bloomberg, “A lot of money is going to get wasted.” Add to that the cost of power—a ChatGPT query uses nearly 10 times the electricity of a Google search. Microsoft is firing up one of the nuclear reactors at Three Mile Island to accommodate rising power needs. Yikes.
I’m convinced AI will transform our lives for the better, but it isn’t a straight line up.
DotCom Bust Comparison
That may be one of the best researched and link-annotated short articles ever.
It reminds me of all the click-counting and ad revenue hype in the DotCom bust.
Ad revenue from clicks eventually came, but from Google in 2004, not Gemstar in 2000. Does anyone even remember Gemstar (GMST)?
During the technology boom of the late 1990s, investors fell in love with Gemstar-TV Guide International Inc. The Los Angeles-based company seemed to hold the key to the futuristic world of interactive television, just as Internet portals like Yahoo became the gateway to the Web.
Gemstar’s patented on-screen program-guide technology was expected to be vital to viewers navigating their way around an increasing array of TV channels and cable services.
The stock fell hard after the dot-com crash, from a high of $107.43 in March 2000 to a low of $2.36 in September 2002.
We also had Excite@Home, Lycos, Global Crossing, Enron, and countless names I don’t even remember, most of which went bankrupt.
The Excite@Home headquarters sat empty for five years before Stanford finally bought it in 2007 and turned it into an extension of its outpatient medical clinic.
Irrational Exuberance
In 1996, then Fed Chair Alan Greenspan was in on it. Greenspan correctly warned of “Irrational Exuberance” in a televised speech.
“Clearly, sustained low inflation implies less uncertainty about the future, and lower risk premiums imply higher prices of stocks and other earning assets. We can see that in the inverse relationship exhibited by price/earnings ratios and the rate of inflation in the past. But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?”
Greenspan Becomes a True Believer
However, by 2000, Greenspan became a true believer.
Fed minutes show that right at the peak of the DotCom bubble and a big stock market collapse, Greenspan’s big worry was the economy was overheating due to the productivity miracle.
Worried about a Y2K crash, the Fed pumped the economy like mad accelerating the bubble.
The Fed’s Role in the DOTCOM Bubble
Acting in misguided fear of a Y2K calamity, the Fed stepped on the gas with unnecessary liquidity, having previously stepped on the gas to bail out Long Term Capital Management in 1998.
And after warning about irrational exuberance in 1996, Greenspan embraced the “productivity miracle” and “dotcom revolution” in 1999. Mid-summer of 2000 Greenspan believed his own nonsense, and right as the dotcom bubble started to burst, he started to worry about inflation risks.
The members saw substantial risks of rising pressures on labor and other resources and of higher inflation, and they agreed that the tightening action would help bring the growth of aggregate demand into better alignment with the sustainable expansion of aggregate supply. They also noted that even with this additional firming the risks were still weighted mainly in the direction of rising inflation pressures and that more tightening might be needed.
Looking ahead, further rapid growth was expected in spending for business equipment and software. … Even after today’s tightening action the members believed the risks would remain tilted toward rising inflation.
How could Greenspan have possibly been more wrong? Over the next 18 months CPI dropped from 3.1% to 1.1%, the US went into a recession and capex spending fell off the cliff.
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan says he wouldn’t be surprised if U.S. bond yields turn negative. And if they do, it’s not that big of a deal.
WSJ: Bubbles can’t be defused through incremental adjustments in interest rates, Mr. Greenspan suggested. The Fed doubled interest rates in 1994-95 and “stopped the nascent stock-market boom,” but when stopped, stocks took off again. “We tried to do it again in 1997,” when the Fed raised rates a quarter of a percentage point, and “the same phenomenon occurred.” “The human race has never found a way to confront bubbles,” he said.
Mish: The truth of the matter is the Fed (and in particular Greenspan) has embraced every bubble in history, adding fuel to every one of them. Let’s consider the last two bubbles. ….
I count 26 links in this post. Undoubtedly a record.
Returning to the top …
“OpenAI just raised $6.6 billion, the largest venture-capital funding of all time, at a $157 billion valuation. Oh, and the company will lose $5 billion this year and is projecting $44 billion in losses through 2029.”
Polymarket Is Singlehandedly Moving The Entire US Bond Market
Online betting exchange Polymarket has not only taken the attention space by storm, rapidly becoming one of the most downloaded Apple apps…
The mainstream lost its monopoly over media. Now it’s losing its monopoly over polls, prediction markets and shaping public opinion as trust shifts to independent new entities pic.twitter.com/wnyyck4ebB
… it is also quickly becoming a key driver behind the world’s largest and most liquid bond market.
According to Bloomberg’s Masaki Kondo, Polymarket has become instrumental in setting at least the near-term price signals not only for the $28 trillion marketable US Treasury markets, but also for FX markets: that’s because both Treasuries and the Mexican peso appear to be pricing in a rising probability of Donald Trump winning the US presidential election, as indicated by Polymarket, while ignoring traditional polls which for the most part still show Kamala in the lead.
As Bloomberg chart below shows, the benchmark 10Y yield has been closely tracking the spread in the perceived odds of a vote victory between Trump and Kamala Harris. This difference has now surpassed 30% points, according to the latest data from Polymarket, with Trump seen as a odds-on favorite, and where Polymarket competitors such as Kalshi and PredictIt now also show almost identical odds albeit with a notable delay behind Polymarket, which has emerged as the undisputed leader in the online betting space.
In FX, USDMXN has also been tracking the Polymarket spread higher.
In the last few months, it’s striking that the 10-year yield has traced the Trump odds according to Polymarket — an offshore market that may be over-influenced by a few large bettors, but which seems to be driving opinion on Wall Street.
… is a Pavolian response to what happened last time Trump won. Indeed, bond trader memory may still be fresh as the 10-year yield soared almost 80bps in about a month after Trump’s last victory in November 2016.
Granted, one can argue that “this time is different”, as the jump in yields back then was in part driven by the start of the Fed’s tightening cycle while the direction of Fed policy is the opposite now (even if paradoxically yields have surged since the Fed cut rates), but the kneejerk reaction to a market that is now aggressively pricing in a Trump presidency (see “Wall Street Going “All-In On Trump“) is clearly there.
Incidentally, a Trump win leading to higher yields would also underscore our observation made back in June, that a resilient US economy, one where deficits will only grow, will prevent the central bank from cutting interest rates as fast as a slowdown in inflation would suggest. Moreover, for the Mexican peso, Trump’s proposed tariffs on imports is seen as a major negative.
Then again, that may just be the first leg of the trade: the second one will be when yields tumble because, as Michael Hartnett warned, the outcomes of the election will be two: i) the next trade war with China will be deflationary and ii) the result of the election will see a big drop in government spending and thus, inflation.
For now however, keep an eye on how fast and how high yields will rise along with odds of a Trump presidency, and when stocks will finally notice the ongoing rout in the bond sector. For some clues on the latter, Goldman trader Ryan Sharkey warns that historically, a 2 standard deviation move in US 10 yr yield, equivalent to around 60 bps today over a month, is when equity market returns start to get hit.
As Goldman concludes, given we’ve moved 46bps MTD, this simple rule of thumb argues that a move towards 4.30% is where things would get tricky for stocks: speed of the move matters and keep an eye on real yields.
Beauty Slowdown Hits L’Oreal As Sales Miss On China Consumer Woes
ADR Shares of French cosmetics giant L’Oréal fell nearly 5% after third-quarter sales missed analysts’ expectations, as tracked by Bloomberg. The slowdown in sales was primarily attributed to worsening consumer sentiment in China.
L’Oréal – home to brands including Giorgio Armani Beauty, L’Oréal Paris, Maybelline New York, Garnier, NYX Professional Makeup, and many more — booked sales of 10.28 billion euros ($11.12 billion) for the third quarter. Like-for-like sales increased 3.4%, missing the Bloomberg Consensus estimate of 5.88%.
“As anticipated, global beauty market growth has been normalizing throughout the year. In the developed markets, this has been driven by a gradual easing in pricing after two years of strong inflation; despite that, underlying market trends remain robust in Europe, and North America – as well as in emerging markets. The situation in the Chinese ecosystem has become even more challenging, but we believe in the future of this market and hope that the governmental stimulus will help improve consumer confidence,” L’Oréal CEO Nicolas Hieronimus wrote in a statement.
Here’s a snapshot of third-quarter earnings (courtesy of Bloomberg):
Here’s more from the beauty company on dismal consumer sentiment across China:
“In mainland China, the beauty market – already negative in the second quarter – continued to deteriorate, impacted by low consumer confidence.”
ADR shares were down about 4% in early afternoon trade in New York. Shares have tumbled in a bear market on the year, down 23%.
Around noon Tuesday, Bloomberg quoted CEO Hieronimus as saying he hopes Beijing’s latest stimuli bazooka will be enough to lift souring consumer sentiment amid a worsening downturn in the world’s second-largest economy.
Kamala Harris held a “town hall” meeting Monday, giving those in attendance a chance to ask questions and testing her mettle when it comes to being put on the spot.
Not really.
It was all fake and scripted.
The reality of the situation was unintentionally exposed by Maria Shriver, the moderator of the event in Royal Oak, Michigan.
Shriver had to inform an audience member that they couldn’t actually ask any real questions at Kamala’s town hall because they were all scripted and handed to Harris beforehand.
🚨 The host admits the audience can’t actually ask questions at Kamala’s fake “town hall” with Loser War Hawk Liz Cheney because the questions are “pre-determined” pic.twitter.com/kccAaN1D5M
“We have some pre-determined questions and hopefully I will be able to ask some questions that will be in your head,” Shriver told the person.
🚨 The host admits the audience can’t actually ask questions at Kamala’s fake “town hall” with Loser War Hawk Liz Cheney because the questions are “pre-determined” pic.twitter.com/kccAaN1D5M
Kamala is asked what she would do to help bring Russia’s war in Ukraine to an end.
She spends five minutes rambling and lying about President Trump and never actually answers the question — because she HAS NO PLAN. pic.twitter.com/kouxzoGvi4
KAMALA: “There was a phrase that I’ll paraphrase that basically politics ends at the, at the, at the sea line — at the, at the, you know, at the boundaries of our country.”
(The phrase you’re looking for is “politics ends at the water’s edge,” Kamala) pic.twitter.com/B6fr73a8L0
To top it all off they sat war obsessed RINO Liz Cheney next to her.
Kamala (sitting next to warmongering failure Liz Cheney): “Isolationism is not insulation. It will not insulate us from harm in terms of our national security.”
These are the platitudes that neocons like Liz Cheney use to justify failed regime change wars.
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“This Is War”: Musk Responds To Bombshell “Kill Twitter” Plot Involving UK Advisors To Kamala Harris
Elon Musk has responded to a bombshell report by journalists Paul Thacker and Matt Taibbi which reveals that a the UK’s Center for Countering Digital Hate – which is advising the Kamala Harris campaign, aims to “kill Musk’s Twitter”.
The British are coming, to meddle in our elections!
In an explosive leak with ramifications for the upcoming U.S. presidential election, internal documents from the Center for Countering Digital Hate—whose founder is British political operative Morgan McSweeney, now advising the Kamala Harris campaign—show the group plans in writing to “kill Musk’s Twitter” while strengthening ties with the Biden/Harris administration and Democrats like Senator Amy Klobuchar, who has introducedmultiple bills to regulate online “misinformation.”
Senator Klobuchar’s office did not respond to request for comment.
The documents obtained by The DisInformation Chronicle and Racket show CCDH’s hyperfocus on Musk — “Kill Musk’s Twitter” is the first item in the template of its monthly agenda notes dating back to the early months of this year.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate is the anti-disinformation activist ally of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, and a messaging vehicle for Labour’s neoliberal think tank, Labour Together. Both the CCDH and Labour Together were founded by Morgan McSweeney, a Svengali credited with piloting Starmer’s rise to Downing Street, much as Karl Rove is credited with guiding George W. Bush to the White House.
The CCDH documents carry particular importance because McSweeney’s Labour Together political operatives have been teaching election strategy to Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, leading Politico to call Labour and the Democrats “sister parties.” CCDH’s focus on “Kill Musk’s Twitter” also adds to legal questions about the nonprofit’s tax-exempt status as a 501(c)(3) organization.
Both The DisInformation Chronicle and Racket have sent multiple, extensive questions to CCDH’s current CEO Imran Ahmed, another British political operative tied to McSweeney’s Labour Together. Despite repeated requests for comment, Ahmed has refused to respond.
In the last two months, the Washington Post and Politico, among others, have run a series of features about British advisors from Labour Together rescuing the distressed political damsel that is the Harris/Walz campaign. Politico casts McSweeney as the “election mastermind” who first helped Keir Starmer defeat leftist Jeremy Corbyn to become the head of Labour, all the way to Starmer’s “landslide” win over Conservatives to become Prime Minister this past July, implying that McSweeney and his team can perform a similar miracle for Harris.
McSweeney is an ascendant figure, having just been promoted to Starmer’s Chief of Staff in something of a palace coup after the abrupt resignation of longtime Labour fixture Sue Gray. McSweeney is lionized, not just for a Carville-style rightward tilt within the party, but for mastery of fundraising and dark money, having reportedly pulled a host of new wealthy donors to Labour in the last two years.
After 25 years of the “special relationship” being essentially “one-way traffic,” with Washington politicos advising the Brits, the Democrats “now believe they actually have something to learn from Labour,” as Politico explained. Democrats will supposedly learn from Labour’s tactical brilliance. For example, Starmer countered former Conservative PM Rishi Sunak’s accusations of being soft on immigration by promising to “smash the criminal boat gangs” bringing migrants across the English channel.
The Stateside dispatch of Labour personnel has been depicted in British media as a self-interested gambit to keep America’s war machinery closely aligned with Israel and Ukraine, and billions of American defense dollars flowing in both directions.
However, these are only the visible parts of the British invasion. McSweeney’s Labour Together has been operating in the U.S. for several years through CCDH.
The Starmer/Labour Together formula for regaining power in the U.K. relied heavily on CCDH’s aggressive efforts to deplatform rivals on the Left and Right by lobbing accusations of bigotry, misinformation, and other misdeeds. As reported in Tabletand Racket, one of CCDH’s successesinvolved silencing Starmer’s critics on the left by leading a boycott of advertisers for news sites like the left-leaning Canary, on the grounds that its pro-Palestinian takes were anti-Semitic.
McSweeney has been praised for convincing Starmer that “he needed to sacrifice party unity to demoralize the far-left faction,” as Politico put it.
In the U.S., a now-defunct CCDH offshoot called Stop Funding Fake News led multiple successful boycotts of media figures across the spectrum, from Zero Hedgeduring the BLM riots to The Federalist. The formula often involved collaborating with a mainstream media outlet to level an accusation of bigotry, followed by a pressure campaign against advertisers to shut off revenue to the target.
“CCDH went directly after us and he worked with Google when they briefly suspended all advertising on Zero Hedge, our primary source of revenue then,” recalls Zero Hedge editor Tyler Durden, noting that the boycott came after CCDH worked with NBC on an article depicting them as racist for claiming damage from BLM riots was under-covered. Similar tactics led to demonetization of The Federalist, whose apparent crime was a June 3, 2020 piece called, “The Media Are Lying to You About Everything, Including the Riots.” Like Zero Hedge, The Federalist criticized mainstream coverage of BLM protests, including calling not-yet-fired CNNanchor Don Lemon a “not very bright man.”
This is nothing new: this is precisely how the mainstream left tried to demonetize and destroy ZH years ago and almost succeeded. https://t.co/hQ2BifRgNV
“NBC News colluded with a foreign left-wing group in an attempt to destroy us because it disagrees with our political commentary and media criticism,” The Federalist editor Mollie Hemingway told The Wall Street Journalat the time.
Now, CCDH’s growing Washington office is working on similar plans to “kill” the online presence of Democratic rivals like Musk by attacking X’s advertising revenue, a tactic first perfected in London against The Canary. CCDH is also laying the foundation for broader regulatory changes in the direction of platform censorship.
“60 meetings on the Hill,” reads one CCDH task assignment from early 2024. “Meeting with 16 congressional offices over the next two weeks to give updates on the Elon lawsuit,” reads another, referring to Musk’s since-dismissed lawsuit against CCDH accusing it of manipulating data to make a case for proliferation of hate speech on X.
CCDH also held meetings with federal legislators while pushing for “change in USA” toward a censorious proposal it calls the “STAR framework,” which would create an “independent digital regulator” that could “impose consequences for harmful content.” STAR’s core concepts are similar to Europe’s just-instituted Digital Services Act and Britain’s even more stringent Online Safety Act, which puts the national media regulator Ofcom in charge of determining fines for uncooperative platforms.
The latter law has been the basis for Starmer and Ofcom threatening Musk with “strong action” in the wake of this summer’s riots, which the UK claims were fueled by disinformation.
That the CCDH is pushing STAR in the US is obvious from its agenda notes. Equally clear however is that the group held those meetings while its senior officials wondered if they were violating lobbying laws. “Question on lobbying — if it is anything that Congress could have a vote on, it counts as lobbying,” reads one note from a January meeting. “Question on lobbying. Imran needs that to be checked, and if necessary register a c4 ASAP,” reads a later note in February.
CCDH gained tax-exempt status by registering as a 501(c)(3) organization in the US in 2021, but the IRS says “an organization will be regarded as attempting to influence legislation if it contacts, or urges the public to contact, members or employees of a legislative body for the purpose of proposing, supporting, or opposing legislation.” In some instances, it appears the group is cognizant of that line.
“Understanding our limitations… as a 501c3,” was another part of discussions last January. Nonetheless, the group repeatedly scheduled multiple meetings with legislators to discuss pushing STAR and other proposals, with Ahmed and others openly talking about pushing for legislation and how CCDH’s work “will help us inch towards our goal of regulatory action”:
It’s crucial to understand that CCDH, Labour Together, and Keir Starmer’s Labour Party exist as a single package, with McSweeney at the helm. No political operative in the Western hemisphere is more in demand than Starmer’s “Rasputin,” regularly hailed as a genius. Much like Rove, however, the McSweeney reputation is built more on mudslinging and character assassination than insight into voter needs. Canary-style efforts and boycotts have already begun in the U.S.
McSweeney’s Labour Together colleague Imran Ahmed opened a CCDH office in DC three years ago and began working with American journalists to suppress dissent and enforce narratives friendly to Democrats and the Biden/Harris administration.
The CCDH was also a character in the Twitter Files, notably organizing a letter from State Attorneys General to the platform seeking to ban the so-called “Disinformation Dozen” over Covid-related content, a group that included Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
“I hope you will take decisive action to prevent them from endangering people’s safety any longer,” wrote Imran Ahmed in a July 2020 email to Twitter, while forwarding the “The Disinformation Dozen” report.
“The Disinformation Dozen” report coincided nicely with a Biden administration campaign to beat back American fears of the COVID vaccine and was referenced by White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki in a warning that social media companies should censor the accounts.
“There’s about 12 people who are producing 65% of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms,” Psaki claimed, citing the CCDH’s work. Three years later the truth finally caught up with Ahmed’s misinformation. In recent months, Forbes, The Independent, and The Guardian have all issued corrections to articles on CCDH’s 2021 report noting that Facebook investigated CCDH’s allegations and found them baseless and without proven methodology.
According to documents provided to both publications along with interviews with CCDH whistleblowers, an invitation-only conference held this past summer in Washington underscores the group’s priorities. Attendees at CCDH’s private event included a slew of liberal groups now organizing against Musk including a senior advisor at the White House, a Democratic Party staffer in the office of Congressman Adam Schiff, Biden/Harris State Department officials, Canadian MP Peter Julian (recently tweeted “Boycott all advertisers on Twitter”) and Media Matters for America (a Democratic party-aligned watchdog now locked in a lawsuit with Musk).
The second annual CCDH priority on the document reads, “Advertising focus.” This likely references the group’s apparent strategy of publishing reports that claim Musk allowed hate to proliferate on X, followed by efforts to drive away the company’s advertisers.
In his soon to be released book “THE FRAUD: Keir Starmer, Labour Together, and the Crisis of British Democracy,” investigative reporter Paul Holden spends multiple chapters documenting Ahmed’s work during his time in the UK and says CCDH’s activity was appalling. “Ahmed abused the concept of disinformation to attack political opponents, based largely on unfounded claims,” he says.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate invented the “advertising focus” tactic to destroy political enemies back in London. CCDH’s campaign involved constant claims of antisemitism thrown at the Canary to drive away the news site’s advertising and tank their funding. “Bye bye birdie! Hyper-partisan fake news website The Canary is on its last legs!” tweeted British TV host and CCDH campaigner, Rachel Riley, celebrating a 2019 crash in Canary’s advertising.
At the time, Riley and others affiliated with CCDH and a coordinating group called Stop Funding Fake News (SSFN) claimed that CCDH and SFFN’s membership had to remain anonymous for fear of retribution and hate. But the Canary later exposed both groups as fake grassroots organizations that were actually political campaigns operated by Labour Together and Imran Ahmed.
Until the Canary revealed Ahmed as the man running CCDH, he remained in the shadows. Once exposed, Ahmed admitted to running CCDH since its beginning although he gets the date wrong. McSweeney started the group in 2018, but Ahmed claims on his CV to have been its leader since 2017. Ahmed’s CV was provided by a whistleblower.
McSweeney and Ahmed kept much of Labour Together’s political shenanigans hidden from public view, but former Guardian editor Anushka Asthana has dredged up bits and pieces of McSweeney’s rise to power in a recently published book Taken As Red, an excerpt of which appears on the Guardian website:
One of McSweeney’s obsessions was the Canary, an alt-left website that had seemed to appear from nowhere and grown to a peak of 8.5m hits a month. Moreover, Corbyn supporters trusted the site equally to the Guardian, their other favourite source of information. And so McSweeney had an aim – to schmooze the Guardian and kill the Canary. “Destroy the Canary or the Canary destroys us,” he told the Labour Together MPs.
Canary editors riffed off the former Guardian editor’s book excerpt, noting with irony that McSweeney’s CCDH helped kill off their advertisers by laundering fake claims of antisemitism against them …. through the Guardian. Indeed, a later investigation by the media regulator IMPRESS found nothing the Canary published was antisemitic.
“However, what McSweeney did achieve was to tarnish the Canary’s reputation,” the Canary added. “Of course, he also achieved his ultimate goal of destroying Corbyn’s leadership and getting Keir Starmer into power.”
Nobody understood how McSweeney funded his campaign to beat Labour’s left and run his CCDH’s campaign against the Canary, but The Telegraph disclosed some hints earlier this year. During McSweeney’s tenure at Labour Together, the group failed to declare over £700,000 in campaign donations from millionaire venture capitalists and businessmen.
Fresh from success at destroying the Canary and the Labour left, Imran Ahmed brought the CCDH campaign to the States in 2021. And the group has continued to operate as it has in the past: a dark money political campaign that dances around legalities while hiding the names of employees and donors. As reported in Tablet, U.S. tax records show that Ahmed collected $1.47 million in donations in 2021.
Although CCDH does not disclose donors, $1.1 million of that money came from one anonymous donor, meaning almost 75% of CCDH’s funding in their first year. A whistleblower says that CCDH’s management told staff that this initial bolus of funding came from Aleen Keshishian, a Hollywood agent for actor Mark Ruffalo, who promotes Imran Ahmed on X. Keshishian sits on CCDH’s board, and CCDH employees are reminded to treat her nicely.
Another Keshishian client, the singer and actress Selena Gomez, has also apparently provided secret funding to CCDH, although that donation has not been disclosed publicly until now.
Aleen Keshisian did not respond to repeated requests for comment from The DisInformation Chronicle and Racket.
Subsequent reports in this The DisInformation Chronicle and Racket series will contain more information about the emerging theme of cooperation between Hollywood figures and censorship advocacy groups like the CCDH.
Journalist Paul Holden, who put together the “U.K. Files” docs here, reported earlier this year that CCDH’s 2021 submission to the IRS for tax-exempt status claimed CCDH was operating as a registered charity in the U.K.
Neither Ahmed nor his attorneys responded to questions about his false paperwork filed with the IRS. We then ran the documents past tax attorney Dean Zerbe, who authored the tax code reform that governs American nonprofits. Zerbe said he hoped the IRS would take a “hard look” at CCDH for submitting false information to gain nonprofit status.
Many of CCDH’s current staff remain hidden, but one of Ahmed’s most critical employees is Callum Hood, CCDH’s head of research. Like Ahmed, Hood has never fully disclosed his ties to the Labour Party’s conservatives who sought to drive Corbyn from power. On his LinkedIn page, Hood lists the Center for Countering Digital Hate as the only job he has ever held. However, sources in London have provided much of Hood’s background. Like Imran Ahmed, he staffed a member of the Labour Party’s conservative wing.
“This was a political project from the beginning by Labour Together that hid its political origins, which is especially ironic as it’s created its own exercise in fake news and disinformation, Holden says. “It’s extremely disturbing that Imran has influence in the US, considering his key aim is to censor speech he disagrees with.”
NEXT: The DisInformation Chronicle and Racket give an insider’s account of the internal chaos and secret money fueling CCDH, one of the most prominent and respected groups for the Censorship Industrial Complex.
More Kamala Plagiarism Uncovered As Scandal Widens
Earlier this month Kamala Harris was busted plagiarizing sections of her book on crime, after Austrian “plagiarism hunter” Dr. Stefan Weber found numerous sections lifted from Wikipedia, news reports, and other sources.
Now, it’s been revealed that Harris also plagiarized pages of Congressional testimony from a Republican colleague in 2007. In 2012, she plagiarized a fictionalized story about sex trafficking and presented it as a real case, according to Free Beacon journalist Aaron Sibarium.
She also lifted roughly 80% of her testimony before the House Judiciary Committee in support of a student loan repayment program.
On April 24, 2007, Harris testified before the House Judiciary Committee in support of a student loan repayment program. Virtually her entire testimony about the program was taken from that of another district attorney, Paul Logli of Winnebago County, Illinois. pic.twitter.com/FmJX5KBu8z
Both statements cite the same surveys, use the same language, and make the same points in the same order, with a paragraph added here or there. They even contain the same typos, such as missing punctuation or mistaken plurals.
The passages are some of the most striking cases in which Harris, a former senator and state AG, appears to have plagiarized in her capacity as a government official, lifting large chunks of texts from other attorneys—and in one case from Wikipedia—without attribution.
The examples have not been previously reported and range from paragraphs to pages. Several appear in reports that Harris published as California attorney general, a post she held for six years and has made a centerpiece of her campaign.
With just two weeks to go until Election Day, the new examples could undercut key parts of the Harris campaign’s message as it navigates a tightening race.
Harris has sought to portray herself as the candidate of honesty and integrity, in part by touting her record of prosecuting child sex crimes.
But as California attorney general, she didn’t just copy boilerplate language without attribution. In one of the lengthier passages reviewed by Free Beacon, she lifted a fictionalized story about a victim of sex trafficking—and presented it as a real case.
In the 2012 report on human trafficking, she copied a paragraph from Wikipedia. pic.twitter.com/aZDGAtei4K
Let’s discuss some new polls, pollster accuracy, polling bias, the economy, and a reader question on Nate Silver.
AtlasIntel poll clip from Tweet, checkmark added
Silver Bulletin Comments on Three New Trump-Favorable Polls
🕒 Last update: 1:45 p.m., Sunday, October 20. The data continues to be pretty negative for Kamala Harris. There are now three recent high-quality national polls that show Donald Trump leading — a difficult circumstance for Harris, given Democrats’ Electoral College disadvantage — and her edge in our national polling average is down to 1.7 points. National polls don’t influence the model that much, and the race remains basically a toss-up, but it’s not hard to think of reasons that Trump could win.
Former President Trump is ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris in the presidential contest 50%-48%, according to a new Fox News national survey. That’s a reversal from last month, when Harris had a narrow advantage.
Harris, however, is ahead by 6 points among voters from the seven key battleground states (within the margin of error for that subsample), and the candidates are tied at 49% each among voters in close counties (where the Biden-Trump 2020 margin was less than 10 points). Trump’s advantage comes from a larger share in counties he won by more than 10 points in 2020 (64%-35%) than Harris has in counties Biden won by more than 10 points (58%-39%).
That raises the question of whether the Democrat could win the Electoral College while losing the national popular vote. In 2000 and 2016, it was the GOP candidate who lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College.
That’s certainly an interesting, if not outright shocking set of polls that has Trump ahead nationally but trailing in battlegrounds. Seriously?!
Former President Donald Trump overtakes Vice President Kamala Harris and now enjoys a two-point lead, 49% to 47%, in the TIPP tracking poll. The data from the seventh release of the 23-day TIPP tracking poll shows the underlying change in the momentum. Recognized by The Washington Post in 2020 as the most accurate national presidential poll, TIPP continues to bring you the latest insights on the race.
The WaPo report did not include an evaluation of AtlasIntel. People are still debating what went wrong in 2020.
Finally, here’s how the most prolific pollsters fared in the general election. The best-performing pollster was AtlasIntel! Second was Trafalgar!
Yeah, they incorrectly had Trump winning a few states, but they were close on the margins, and that’s the better metric.
Note: I no longer embed Tweets because X embeds are broken and randomly display on WordPress. This appears to be an X issue, not a WordPress issue.
Polling Error in 2020
Accuracy in 2020 Comments
The Hungarian Conservative notes: “The most accurate pollster nationally in the United States in the last two election cycles has been Atlas Intel. In 2020 the public opinion research firm overestimated Biden by 0.2 points. In 2022 they overestimated the GOP by 0.3 points in the generic Congressional ballot. Impressively, in both cycles, they got the final results within a few tenths of a point.“
AtlasIntel Comments: “AtlasIntel had the best performance across all pollsters of the 2020 US Presidential Election with an average error of 2.01p.p. Our final national-level poll showing Biden with a 4.7 p.p. advantage is likely to be the single most precise estimate of the US popular vote. AtlasIntel also conducted the most precise polls across all pollsters for the states of Michigan and North Carolina. In all states polled by AtlasIntel, results fell within the margin of error of our estimates. The AtlasIntel average error was not only lower than that of other pollsters, but also lower than that of polling averages and model-based polling aggregators.”
Reader Comments
Accuracy in 2020 does not imply accuracy in 2022 but it does explain why many of my readers distrust Nate Silver, then 538 and now the Silver Bulletin.
One reader asked “Why do you keep referring to Nate Silver?”
The key reason I refer to Silver is that he explains in detail what he is doing and why. Everyone is free to make their own adjustments and I do.
Silver has Trafalgar with a 2.7 percent Republican bias. What if Trafalgar is correct?
It makers sense to me to rate pollster bias and weight polls by sample size.
However there is certainly a question as to whether Silver has Pollster Bias all wrong.
Might I suggest accuracy is the best way to determine if a pollster is “biased”? After all Trafalgar was the second most accurate in 2020.
Pennsylvania Polls
AtlasIntel Influence
Note the influence Silver gave AtlasIntel. This makes sense to me. The reason, or at least one of them, is sample size.
One of my readers commented that Silver should not weight the polls but average them. I disagree. In general, the larger the sample, the more accurate the poll.
AtlasIntel had a huge sample size of 2,048 likely voters. The NYT/Siena poll only had 857 likely voters.
Morning Consult had 1,395 likely voters. Silver rates Morning Consult as having a Democrat bias of 1.2 percentage points. That means to Silver that Trump is ahead in Pennsylvania.
Returning to TIPP Insights
A growing sense of economic dissatisfaction looms large. The TIPP Tracking Poll shows that 53% of Americans feel worse off now compared to their situation pre-COVID. Democrats are the most optimistic, with 51% saying they’re better off, but 68% of Republicans report being worse off. Independents largely mirror the national mood, with 55% feeling the pain. This dissatisfaction is a headwind for Harris, which Trump could exploit.
Growing Economic Dissatisfaction
Does “growing economic dissatisfaction” sound familiar? It should. It has been my repeated theme since February, weighted to renters (young voters and blacks).
Nate Silver Seriously Lags
On October 12, I asked How Much of a Political Lagging Indicator is Nate Silver?
Economists say wages are now rising faster than the CPI. That’s not true for those who rent or wish to buy a house.
Trump fell way behind after a disastrous debate with Harris. That momentum ended a month ago.
People are again asking “Am I better off than 4 years ago?”
If you own stocks or refinanced your house at 3.0 percent, you likely are better off. And that’s a big majority. But that’s not who will decide the election. And it is a big part of why Harris is struggling.
Trump, not Harris is the candidate of change.
The economy is not as good as economists claim. People are suffering, especially Black and young voters, and those traditional Democrat votes are breaking hard for Trump.
That is what the Fox News, TIPP Insights, and AtlasIntel polls all suggest. And it’s what I have been saying all year.
