Mordor coming to life here in Jackson Hole.

So proud of my amazing wife Karen Dukess and her new novel Welcome to Murder Week on sale today! Amazon calls it one of June’s best mystery, suspense and thriller books.

Is this a Taco Tantrum? A reminder that for every one US worker who makes steel, 80 fabricate steel products. The result will be to raise steel prices domestically to the tariffed price. And there will likely be net job losses. Trump will likely have to raise car tariffs.

Come on down to Central Park today at 4:30 for my band’s annual benefit for @riverkeeper.org to help clean up the Hudson. Two sets of Grateful Dead music from the Stella Blue’s Band and lots of fun people dancing for a great cause.

The agreement with China has not only cut tariffs, it has also restored summer vacation for Fed watchers. The first cut, which had been priced in for July, has now moved to September. July had been priced with a 69% cut probability, which now 42%. All subsequent cuts have been pushed ahead.

More soft data on a hard landing. Upper income Americans (>$100k income) are more worried about their jobs and income and paying debts than they've been since the pandemic. (From the NY Fed). These worries still haven't shown up in much real spending or jobs data.

“Even without further escalation of tariffs, the policies already in effect threaten to offset the benefits of the promised tax cuts,” according to a new post released today by the Tax Foundation.”

taxfoundation.org/blog/trump-t...

Torsten Slok of Apollo graphs how the earnings outlook has deteriorated since Liberation Day April 2.

Ftr, while the President said “there was no exception” for tech on Friday, the Customs document calls it an “exception.” Which is all quite exceptional. (Thanks to @mbandman.bsky.social for the link.)

I guess there wasn’t an exception for tech, or maybe there. I dunno

Manufacturing could lose more than 1m jobs by trying to bring back mfr jobs w/ tariffs...if there's a recession. The chart shows avg mfr job losses of 10.5% after recessions, compared with 3.9% for the private sector minus mfr. A recession could wipe out 1.2m mfr jobs, 500k at the low end. 1/2

Here’s what the White House said the tariffs rates are and what they really are. Kind of funny. Courtesy of the Cato institute.

Watch how the admin treats Vietnam, which has offered to reduce tariffs on the US. But the US trade deficit w/ Vietnam has more than doubled since 2019 to $122b as companies moved mfr from China in response to tariffs. So it’s doubtful trade deficit would improve much even if tariffs were zero.

A chart showing how much optimism Pres Trump has squandered in the stock market. Both Nasdaq and S&P now down since the election after hitting all-time highs.

…Could have nothing to do with dei or a lot. Maybe we’ve reached some structural limit on how low the gap can get or that further progress is possible. But throwing DEI out before understanding is perhaps reckless.

Maybe before we throw out DEI we might try and understand whether it played a role in the black-white unemployment rate gap dropping to an historic low of around 2.4%. It’s been there for most of the past year and has been low during most of the Biden presidency….