Attention to the Unseen

Reuters reports: Fitch downgraded the U.S. credit rating due to fiscal concerns, a deterioration in U.S governance, as well as political polarization reflected partly by the Jan. 6 insurrection, Richard Francis, a senior director at Fitch Ratings, told Reuters on Wednesday. In a move that took investors by surprise, Fitch downgraded the United States to AA+ from AAA on Tuesday, citing fiscal deterioration over the next three years and repeated down-to-the-wire debt ceiling negotiations that threaten the government’s ability to…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: Florida’s agricultural and construction industries say they are experiencing a labor shortage because a new immigration law that took effect July 1 is leading migrant workers to leave the state. The law, signed in May by Florida Gov. and GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, seeks to further criminalize undocumented immigration in the state. It makes it a third-degree felony for unauthorized people to knowingly use a false identification to obtain employment. Businesses that knowingly employ…

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Politico reports: For the past three years, low-income workers have made historic gains in wages even after inflation, reversing the trend of advances for upper-income workers and stagnating pay for laborers that dominated the previous four decades, according to a POLITICO analysis of data from the U.S. Labor Department. The gains were the product of a series of dramatic changes in the structure of the labor market and government policies to aid the economy during the pandemic. Fueled by the…

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The Washington Post reports: At the beginning of every workday, from his second-floor office in the U.S. Treasury Department, Dave Lebryk starts his morning looking at a color-coded dashboard tracking the most critical operations of the largest payment system in the world. More than $6 trillion flows out of the Treasury every year in payments, salaries and purchase orders, and more than $5 trillion flows in, mostly through tax collections and fees. Lebryk’s job is to make sure that these…

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Dennis Aftergut writes: Lest you have any doubt, the three exclamation points are Trump’s. You could be excused for thinking he wants a default. He loves chaos. But he also has a purely self-serving reason to seek an economic catastrophe. You don’t need to be a stable genius to know that a bad economy typically hurts the incumbent in a presidential race. And Trump is desperate to get the immunity from prosecution that being elected president would provide him. He’s…

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Robert Reich writes: If House Republicans refuse to raise the limit on the amount of money America may repay on what it owes — the deceptively named “debt limit” — they might force the United States to default, pushing interest rates into the stratosphere and shaking the world economy. President Biden rightfully says that raising the so-called debt ceiling should not be negotiable. After all, Democrats joined Republicans during the Trump administration to raise it three times, even as Trump…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: In recent months, markets have been laser-focused on every scrap of economic data for evidence on whether inflation is coming down or a recession is approaching. Unfortunately, that data suffers from a growing problem: reduced responses from the people whose activity it seeks to measure. “There’s more data than there has ever been in the history of the world,” said Torsten Slok, the chief economist of Apollo Global Management Inc. “But the Fed has a…

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