President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

Half the people with an opinion on here clearly have never even looked at the site and would have no clue what they were reading if they clicked on 75 percent of the content.

First, it's clearly not the product of just one person. The best stuff they do relates to credit / derivatives and the person writing that stuff is very sophisticated. He isn't sitting there masturbating about Hunter Biden all day, the way some people who aren't familiar with the site (but are going by something they read) think.

Whoever is behind the site doesn't have the cartoon agenda someone said. Their only agenda is to get clicks, and in that regard, at some point they branched out to include some stuff fringe political stuff that it's really easy to skip over. I don't know what that has meant in terms of monetization for them. What I do know is that it might as well be 2 or 3 different sites, and the bread and butter (about 90 percent of what they post) is widely followed on Wall Street. They frequently include content that has trading desks talking (almost everyone reads it), and they are pretty hooked into what is going on in markets because of it. Because they are anonymous, they have actually done some really fine informal investigative work about some market-driven events that nobody else could figure out.

On macro. ... Someone joked that I think the BLS numbers are always bullshit, regardless of who is president. It's actually kind of the point, not a joke. This isn't the Biden / Trump / Obama / Bush idiocy people want it to be. That site has been doing its thing for what, 10, 11, 12, 13 years? And no, despite how someone characterized it, it is pretty consistent when it comes to two particular things: the monetary and fiscal / macro shenanigans that come out of our government. It hasn't mattered who was president.

On that link from this morning, as I said, either what they distilled from the household survey is true or it isn't, and it was either a pretty big factor this month or it wasn't (the part about a record number of people working 2, 3 jobs that the BLS methodology turns into multiple jobs). This isn't an opinion. I can't say, because I don't know how big a factor it was. I do know that they are all over these numbers every month and while every news site on earth is mindlessly parroting a headline number that gets pulled out of someone's sphincter, I can point to quite a few times that they looked at the actual data (household and establishment) and pointed out HOW and WHY it came from someone's sphincter. Kind of unlike the mealy generalizations from people on here that dismiss everything the site might publish without even being able address the substance of what they're dismissing.

 

I've never actually cared much.

The only stuff I pay attention to on their site is pretty informative. And either they are delivering information or they aren't. That's all I care about.

Supposedly a guy named Tim Backshall edits some of the stuff on their site that I've found really smart, and he did credit derivatives trading in a past life (I'd guess he still does). I honestly don't care if he is a name brand or even who he is if he isn't making it about himself. I just know that when I see something on there explaining what is going on with the yield curve (which is inverted again. ... another reason the full employment narrative is nonsensical on the face of it, FWIW) or credit quality, I am likely to learn something from someone who has a deep understanding of the underlying dynamics of what I am seeing, but don't understand on my own. If you are watching those markets because they impact what you are doing every day, even if you are not directly involved with them, they went from being very stable before the financial crisis, to becoming fairly illiquid as the Fed's bond buying created massive distortions and destroyed price discovery. As a result, people are seeing things that it's difficult to interpret because you can throw out the 500-year playbook you'd have used when those markets traded freely. When someone who is connected to the traders who live in those markets is writing clear commentary that explains the weird things you are watching, and you can't find that kind of information elsewhere on a free website, why wouldn't you just evaluate what you are reading on its merits (what a concept!)?