Ten Thousand Commandments! Biden/Harris Regulations Cost Families $15,000+ (17% Of Household Income) … And More To Come! (Yellen Wants $78 TRILLION To Combat Climate Change)

Regulate! Regulate! Dance to THEIR music!

According to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Biden/Harris heaped droves of regulations on American families in the amount of $15,000 per family.

Here is a breakdown of the annual cost of regulations:

And “China” Kamala (ChiKam) plans even MORE regulations!

  • Federal regulation’s total compliance costs and economic effects are at least $2.117 trillion annually in Ten Thousand Commandments’ estimate, and almost certainly higher.
  • An October 2023 National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) report models regulatory compliance at $3.079 trillion annually.
  • US households pay on average $15,788 annually in a hidden regulatory tax, which consumes 17 percent of income and 22 percent of household expenses.
  • These outlays exceed expenditures on health care, food, transportation, entertainment, apparel, services, and savings. Only the costs of housing, which stand at $24,298 annually, exceed regulation.
  • The higher NAM figure implies $22,962 per household, or 31 percent of the household expense budget.
  • The regulatory tax of $2.117 trillion rivals individual income tax costs estimated at $2.328 trillion for 2023 and stands at nearly four times the corporate income tax of $546 billion.
  • The NAM cost figure of $3.1 trillion annually would exceed the sum of both ($2.9 trillion).
  • If it were a country, US regulation would be the world’s 10th-largest economy, ranking behind Canada and ahead of Italy.
  • If we exclude the US economy from the list, the US regulation economy would be the ninth largest, still behind Canada and ahead of Italy.
  • The 10.34 billion hours Washington says it took to complete federal paperwork in 2022, according to the Information Collection Budget, translate to the equivalent of 14,883 human lifetimes.
  • The tally of final rules for 2023 stood at 3,018, which is the second-lowest count since at least 1976.
  • On the other hand, the Federal Register containing those rules surged to 89,368 pages, the second-highest tally on record and a 12 percent rise over 2022.
  • Although we have fewer new rules, they appear to be broader in scope.
  • During calendar year 2023, agencies issued 3,018 rules, whereas Congress enacted 68 laws. Thus, agencies issued 44 rules for every law enacted by Congress.
  • This Unconstitutionality Index—the ratio of regulations issued by agencies to laws passed by Congress and signed by the president—underlines how much agency lawmaking has replaced that of elected officials. The average ratio over the past 10 years is 23 rules for every law.
  • Since the Federal Register first began itemizing final rules in 1976, 217,565 have been issued. Since 1993, when the first edition of Ten Thousand Commandments appeared, agencies have issued 120,475 final rules.
  • A 2023 draft consolidated version of the White House Report to Congress on the Benefits and Costs of Federal Regulations caught up on fiscal years 2020–2022. The report for 2023 has still not been released.
  • A total of only 31 “major” rules had both benefits and costs quantified, and these add $13 billion to the annual regulatory cost bill; another 56 rules with costs but not benefits quantified add another $46 billion to annual costs.
  • Employing our lower estimate, regulatory burdens of $2.1 trillion amount to nearly 8 percent of US gross domestic product (GDP), reported by the Commerce Department at $27.36 trillion in 2023.
  • The NAM regulatory figure implies 11 percent of GDP.
  • Regulatory costs stand at over 60 percent of the level of corporate pretax profits of $3.523 trillion.
  • The NAM figure would take that to over 80 percent.
  • When regulatory costs of $2.1 trillion are combined with federal outlays of $6.135 trillion, the federal government’s share of the $27.36 trillion economy reaches at least 30 percent. State and local spending and regulation add to these costs.
  • Until April 2023, a subset of each year’s 3,000-plus rules was deemed economically significant, referring to annual economic effects of $100 million or more. Biden’s Executive Order 14094 (“Modernizing Regulatory Review”) eliminated that category and initiated a higher $200 million Section 3(f)(1) Significant category.
  • In the year-end 2023 edition of the twice-yearly Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions, 69 federal departments, agencies, and commissions present 3,599 regulatory actions flowing through the pipeline as follows:
  • 2,524 rules in the active (prerule, proposed, final) phase
  • 431 recently completed rules
  • 644 long-term rules
  • Of the 3,599 regulations in the fall 2023 Unified Agenda’s pipeline, 304 are Section 3(f)(1) Significant category rules (which implies at least $60 billion in economic impact), as follows:
  • 233 rules in the active (prerule, proposed, final) phase
  • 41 completed rules
  • 30 long-term rules
  • Despite his own higher $200 million threshold, high-significance rules in the Biden pipeline outnumber the Bush, Obama, and Trump years when the lower $100 million threshold applied.
  • Major rules as defined in the Congressional Review Act leave a $100 million threshold intact despite Biden’s executive order. The Government Accountability Office database contains 76 finalized major rules for 2023. The Biden average exceeds those of Bush, Obama, and Trump.
  • Final rules affecting small business appear to be mounting and could generate calls for reform. Biden’s three years have averaged 870 rules annually in the Federal Register affecting small business, compared with 694 and 701 for Obama and Trump, respectively.
  • Of the 3,599 rules and regulations in the fall 2023 Unified Agenda pipeline, 690 affect small businesses; of those, 370 required an official “regulatory flexibility analysis.”
  • Biden-era mandates affect state and local governments at heights not seen in over a decade. Rules in the Unified Agenda pipeline affecting state governments stand at 507, while rules affecting local governments stand at 349.
  • The five most active rule-producing executive branch entities in the Unified Agenda—the departments of the Interior, the Treasury, Transportation, Commerce, and Health and Human Services—account for 1,497 rules, or 42 percent of all rules in the pipeline. The five most active independent agencies account for another 318 rules.
  • From the nation’s founding through 2022, more than 15,635 executive orders have been issued. Biden issued 24 executive orders in 2023, well below his peak 77 of 2021. Biden’s presidential memoranda continue to outstrip the average of recent predecessors.
  • Public notices in the Federal Register always exceed 22,000 annually, with uncounted guidance documents and other proclamations that hold potential regulatory effect among them, whereas other guidance documents issued do not appear in the Federal Register at all. In 2023, 23,197 notices were issued. There have been 714,563 public notices since 1994 and over a million since the 1970s.

DC bureaucrats are out of control. Treasury Secretary Yellen calls for $78 TRILLION to tackle climate change. So to quote The Carpenters, they’ve only just begun to regulate.

How The Fed Destroyed The US Yield Curve (10Y-3M Slope Went From +227 Basis Points On May 6, 2022 To -118 Basis Points On July 26, 2024) Over 2 Years Of Downward Sloping Yield Curve

The Fed is the destroyer.

Up until 2022, the US Treasury yield curve behaved normally. In fact, as late as May 6th, 2022, the US Treasury 10Y-3M yield curve was at +227 basis points. Denote by the orange line in the following chart. That date corresponded with peak Fed balance sheet.

Then the massive spending by Biden/Harris/Congress hit the fan and inflation soared. The Fed counter attacked by raising rates and began scaling back their balance sheet. The 10Y-3M yield curve has been negative ever since.

What Is The Fed Doing? Mortgage Rates Up 102% Since 2022 As The Fed Still Has A Long Way To Go In Shedding Its $2.4 TRILLION MBS Holdings

What’s it going to be? Mortgage rate increases or balance sheet (MBS) reductions?

Since the Covid outbreak in early 2020, The Fed went wild with rate cuts and massive and unpredented balance sheet expansion.

Let’s look at The Fed’s puchase of agency MBS and mortgage rates. From 2020 2022, The Fed continued to buy agency MBS. But in 2022, all hell broke loose as The Fed went crazy RAISING rates, but slowly began unwinding their balance sheet. The result? Mortgage rates began to climb. In fact, the US conforming mortgage rate for 30 years has risen 102% since early 2022. The Fed is only slowing unwinding their MBS holdings.

Despite the struggles in the residential housing market, the COMMERCIAL mortgage market is a trainwreck.

What will The Fed do?? After all, nothing from nothing beats nothing.

Cacklenomics! Buying Conditions For Houses Hits All-time Low (High Mortgage Rates + High Home Prices)

Cacklenomics strikes again!

The University of Michigan consumer survey revealed that buying conditions for housing just hit an all-time low.

High house prices and high mortgage rates aren’t helping.

Purchase loan demand keeps dropping.

US Yield Curve Is Least Inverted 2 Years (Signal Of Impending Fed Rate Cut)

Shape of things. Thw Fed will likely cut rates shortly helping the flagging mortgage market

The US Treasury yield curve, of Jay Powell and The Blackhearts, .js the least inverted in 2 years, signalling an impending Fed rate cut.

The Fed loves manipulating interest rates!

US New Home Sales Fall In June As Homebuyer Confidence Crashes To Record Low (Biden/HarrisNomics or Cacklenomics)

From Zero Hedge.

After a disappointing dump in existing home sales in June, new home sales just confirmed the slowdown, dropping 0.6% MoM (notably below the 3.4% MoM expected) and also saw a major downward revision in May from -11.3% MoM to -14.9% MoM. That leaves new home sales down 7.4% YoY…

Source: Bloomberg

That shift dragged the new home sales SAAR down to 617k – basically unchanged since 2016…

Source: Bloomberg

While the median new home price rose in June, it remains below the median existing home price…

Source: Bloomberg

It appears the homebuilder subsidy fad is wearing off as mortgage rates show no signs of easing significantly…

Source: Bloomberg

Of course, none of this should be a surprise as homebuyer confidence has collapsed to an all-time record low…

Source: Bloomberg

Will cutting rates help?

Probably not. Bidenomics is now called Harrisnomics (or Cacklenomics) since Harris as VP was the tiereaker in the US Senate. So, she holds some responsibility for the outrageous, wasteful spending in Washington DC.

Something Stupid! Biden Proposes Rent Control Of 5% Annual Cap Rent Increases

President Biden was expected yesterday to propose a cap of 5% on annual rent increases for tenants of major apartment landlords, and he did. Whether it can happen is something else.

As the White House communicated on Tuesday, the administration is looking for Congress to pass legislation for landlords with more than 50 units in their portfolios, that being the proxy for institutional owners, although it would also affect private investors, family offices, and others that might own at least that many units. According to administration calculations, the total pool would cover 20 million rental units.

The law would then give landlords a choice. They could either restrict annual rent increases to no more than 5% a year or they would forfeit the ability to take fast depreciation of rental housing. There would be an exception for new construction or “substantial renovation or rehabilitation.”

So, Biden is dusting off the old Jane Fonda/Tom Hayden Santa Monica, CA rent control scheme.

I am guesing that this will not pass the House, but will probably pass in the Confederacy of Dunces: the US Senate.

What the Short-Term Treasury Market Says about Rate Cuts (Powell Says the US Really Needs to Fix the Unsustainable Deficit)

Goodbye cruel world!

Thursday, when the CPI report was released with a month-to-month reading of -0.056% (rounded to -0.1%), the six-month Treasury yield dropped by 8 basis points, and on Friday by another 2 basis points, to 5.23%. That combined 10-basis-point drop was a significant and visible 2-day move.

It brought the 6-month yield just a tad below the lower end of the Fed’s target range for the federal funds rate (5.25-5.50%), and below the effective federal funds rate (EFFR), currently 5.33% (blue in the chart below):

So the 6-month yield is now pricing in one rate cut within its 6-month window, more heavily weighted toward the first two-thirds or so of that window, after having already wrongly done so at the beginning of this year.

Back in late November through January, the 6-month yield had also priced in a rate cut within its 6-month window. By February 1, the yield had dropped to 5.15%, a sign the market was certain that there would be a rate cut at the March FOMC meeting.

But the market was wrong. Instead, we got a series of ugly inflation readings for January, February, March, and April, and there still hasn’t been a rate cut.

By March and April, with ugly inflation readings accumulating, rate cuts within the 6-month window of the 6-month yield were taken off the table.

May had provided a much softer inflation reading. And with Thursday’s CPI report of June, a rate cut within the 6-month window of the 6-month yield, weighted toward the first two-thirds of the window, was back on the table.

But the shorter-term Treasury yields are not pricing in a rate cut within their shorter windows. The shorter yields didn’t move much since the CPI report, and all were near the upper end of the Fed’s policy rates (5.5%), and all were above the EFFR (5.33%):

  • 1-month yield: +1 basis point to 5.47%
  • 2-month yield: +2 basis points 5.52%
  • 3-month yield: -3 basis points to 5.43%
  • 4-month yield: -5 basis points to 5.41%

In other words, the Treasury market is not expecting a rate cut in July at all, but sees a good chance of a rate cut in September, not as strong a chance as they saw in late January, when they saw a rate cut with near certainty by March that never came.

The three-month yield is not seeing any rate cuts within the first two-thirds of its window. No rate cut in July, and the September 18 FOMC meeting statement is beyond the first two-thirds of the window and has less impact on the current three-month yield:

The market for the 2-year yield has been wrong all along.

The 2-year Treasury yield demonstrates how wrong the Treasury market has been all along about the Fed’s rate hikes and rate cuts: it expected far fewer and smaller rate hikes than what the Fed eventually did. And then without ever rising to the level that would price in the actual rates that the Fed has held for nearly a year, it started pricing in rate cuts before the Fed even stopped hiking rates.

So back in April 2022, the two-year yield was about 2.5%. Now, today, 2.5% sounds like a lousy yield, but back then – after 15 years of near-0% interrupted by a few years of higher yields that maxed out at around 2.4% in 2019 – 2.5% sounded pretty good, and the market thought that was getting pretty close to the Fed’s terminal rate.

In February 2022, before the Fed’s rate hikes started, Goldman Sachs predicted that the Fed would hike seven times in 2022, each by 25 basis points, and then in 2023 three times by 25 basis points each, one hike per quarter, to reach a terminal target range for the federal funds rate of 2.5-2.75% by Q3 2023.

The Fed ended up doing more double that, and by July 2023.

So the 2-year Treasury note that sold at auction in April 2022 with a coupon of 2.5% and with a yield close to that sounded like a good deal, and we, being part of the Treasury market, nibbled on some too. Two years was as long as we went. The rest of our Treasuries are T-bills.

Those 2-year notes matured in April 2024, and we got paid face value, and we earned about 2.5% in interest each year over those two years. The entire market was wrong – and so were we. The Fed would raise to 5.25-5.5% by July 2023, more than double the yield we received, and its rate is still there, and the yields of our two- three- and four-month T-bills have by far outrun our 2-year note.

The 2-year yield closed at 4.45% on Friday. The market never once came even close to betting that the Fed would hold rates above 5% for long, and they’ve been above 5% for over 14 months. And the 2-year yield has been below the EFFR for almost the entire time since January 2023, having turned into the Doubting Thomas.

The market was wrong about the Fed’s rates, and all 2-year notes that were bought at auction and that matured in 2024 or will mature in 2024 were a lousy deal. Buyers would have been better off with a series of short-term T-bills that stick closely to Fed’s actual policy rate — rather than follow market projections.

Someday, the market is going to get the rate-cut bets right. But it will only take a few more lousy inflation readings for the rate cuts to get moved further into the future. On Friday, the PPI showed up with red-hot services inflation, now delineating a clear U-Turn in December. Producers that pay those higher prices for services will try to pass them on, and so they may ultimately filter into consumer prices and higher inflation readings over the next few months. Or if producers cannot pass on the higher costs of services, their margins will get squeezed.

Inflation is unpredictable. Once inflation has broken out in a big way, as history shows us, it tends to come in waves and tends to dish up nasty surprises. And it already has dished up nasty surprises multiple times so far, including each of the first four months of this year.

Powell Says the US Really Needs to Fix the Unsustainable Deficit

Going Down! US Producer Prices Rise At Fastest Pace In 15 Months As Services Costs Soar (Buying Conditions For Housing Hit All-time Low!)

We’re going down!

After May’s MoM deflationary impulse (thanks to a plunge in energy costs), June was expected to see a modest 0.1% rise (and we have seen energy prices starting to rise again). Sure enough, headline PPI printed HOT at +0.2% MoM (and May was revised higher), pushing the YoY print up to 2.6% (well above the 2.3% expected)…

Source: Bloomberg

That is the highest PPI since March 2023.

Core PPI rose by 0.4% MoM (double the 0.2% exp), sending the YoY price rise up by 3.0% (also the hottest since March 2023)…

Source: Bloomberg

The jump in PPI was driven by a resurgence in Services costs as Energy remains deflationary (for now)…

Source: Bloomberg

The June rise in the index for final demand can be traced to a 0.6-percent increase in prices for final demand services. In contrast, the index for final demand goods decreased 0.5 percent

Perhaps worse still, the pipeline for PPI (intermediate demand) is accelerating…

Source: Bloomberg

On the housing side, buying conditions for housing tanks to all-time low.

Inflation Slows To 3.0%, But Shelter Still Rising At 5.2%, Electricity Up 4.4% (Core Prices Continue To Rise And Have Never Been Higher)

Are you ready? You can tell an election is on the radar since inflation numbers are settling down for the most part. According to the BLS, overall inflation fell slightly in June to 3.0%.

Shelter CPI is up 5.14% YoY as M2 Money growth has been rising slowly … again.

Core CPI also ‘missed’, rising just 0.1% MoM (vs +0.2% exp), dragging the YoY Core CPI down to +3.27% – its lowest since April 2021…

Source: Bloomberg

Goods deflation also dominates core prices disinflationary trend…

We do note that Core consumer prices have still not seen a single monthly decline since Bidenomics began.

Core consumer prices are up just under 18% since Bidenomics began (+4.9% per annum) – that is dramatically higher than the 2.0% per annum Americans experienced under Trump…

Core consumer prices have never been higher.

The much-watched SuperCore CPI rose on a MoM basis but declined (back below 5.0%) on a YoY basis (but obviously remains extremely elevated)…

Source: Bloomberg

Transportation Services are seeing prices fall…

Finally, we can’t help but get a sense of deja vu all over again here. What if… The Fed cuts (because bad – recession – data), Biden loses (because dementia), and inflation re-accelerates (just like in the 80s)…

Source: Bloomberg

Challenger job cuts in construction we the highest since 2008 putting downward pressure on wages.