Newt Gingrich is forecasting what could be a historic red wave this November. Read the full story here. .B. Stoddard: The Insurrectionists Are Coming. If the Kevin McCarthy tapes taught us all anything, it’s that the man is game to harbor criminals. And once someone with power does that, what won’t they do? Positioned to be third in line to the presidency nine months from now as speaker of the House, McCarthy will lead a conference of radicals, nihilists, and some people who likely committed federal crimes. Shouldn’t Democrats be talking about this? This is not the same group of Republicans who Democrats defeated in the 2018 midterms. That weak and compromised conference was in Trump’s thrall, but had not yet tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power. Today there are GOP members of Congress who were involved in what January 6th Select Committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin describes as an “orchestrated, premeditated assault on our system of government.” And so Democrats campaigning to defend their majority should warn the people they represent about this fact now, rather than just complaining about it next year.
READ THE REST. A growing number of top-level Biden administration officials are expected to leave their posts in the coming weeks as the White House does its best to buttress Democrats' flagging poll numbers ahead of the midterm elections. Read the full story here. It will be years before Raytheon Technologies can build new Stinger shoulder-fired missiles due to a dwindling supply of weapons parts, the company’s CEO said Tuesday. Read more »  |
Despite a death toll of almost a million, US public life is much as it was APRIL 26, 2022 by Janan Ganesh
Socialists and Les Républicains tempted by alliances to win National Assembly seats APRIL 29, 2022 by Victor Mallet and Leila Abboud in Paris |
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You have to feel sympathy for President Joe Biden's defenders. There is only so much they can do. Read the full story here. |
| How China’s ‘Perfect Storm’ of Economic and Regulatory Headwinds Is Affecting Investors |
 | Against a challenging macroeconomic backdrop, COVID-19 lockdowns and ongoing supply chain bottlenecks, investors are reevaluating their exposure to China. “We are in a ‘perfect storm’ situation where we have a number of economic and regulation headwinds all going against the market at the same time,” Goldman Sachs Research’s Kinger Lau, chief China equity strategist, tells host Allison Nathan on the latest episode of Exchanges at Goldman Sachs.
Coronavirus cases are still elevated. Given the recent uptick in COVID-19 cases, lockdown measures are at their most stringent levels since 2020, explains Hui Shan, Goldman Sachs Research’s chief China economist. “What is really going on right now — what we are seeing tracking daily information and varieties of indicators — is that the number of cases is still very elevated,” Shan says. “But at the same time, the number of places being impacted is declining.”
Do Chinese equities have room to rally? Chinese equites have been under pressure, trading below their historical averages, Lau notes. “China is still trading below our expected fair value and there could be potential for recovery in valuation down the road as long as a global recession could be avoided and some of these risks do not develop into bigger systemic problems.”
Expect slower economic growth. Investors have typically come to expect potential growth rates of 5% to 6% from China, Shan says. “But we think we might be settling into slower growth. Because you are trying to solve the housing access problem, because you're trying to solve your energy security problem or your regulatory objectives, when you're trying to achieve some other goals, there will be costs,” she says. “The costs to us will be slower economic growth.”
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‘No one in Chisinau believed a real war might re-emerge here. That has changed’ APRIL 29, 2022 by Paula Erizanu | | North Carolina: Madison Cawthorn’s Latest Scandal and Republicans Rally to Save a Senate Seat f it seems like North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) has been in the headlines a lot lately, it’s because he has – and not in an “any press is good press” kind of way. Watchdog groups are raising concerns that he may have violated insider trading laws by hyping the “Let’s Go Brandon” cryptocurrency (LGBCoin) on Instagram the day before it announced a sponsorship deal with the NASCAR driver Brandon Brown and its value spiked by 75%. Its value has since dropped to zero, but Cawthorn’s promotion of the coin may indicate that he participated in a pump-and-dump scheme. |
| “This looks really, really bad. This does look like a classic case of you got some insider information and acting on that information. And that’s illegal,” said Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, the government affairs manager for Project on Government Oversight. |
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| | | By way of background, these allegations come as Republicans are calling some of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s investments potential insider trading, and as Democrats and Republicans are working on bills moving through both chambers to restrict how lawmakers can invest their money to avoid insider trading. Back to Cawthorn. The first-term congressman’s first scandal came during his campaign for falsifying key elements of his biography and they haven’t slowed since. There have been several incidents involving the presence of various weapons in places they shouldn’t be, and in March, Cawthorn was pulled over while driving with a revoked license (for the second time). A few weeks later – the scandal that has turned many of his GOP colleagues publicly against him – Cawthorn alleged that multiple members of Congress had invited him to cocaine-fueled orgies. The North Carolina Republican establishment, led by Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), has had enough of Cawthorn’s antics, and through a super PAC aligned with the senator, is spending six-figures on a hard-hitting ad against the freshman representative. Support has consolidated behind state senator Chuck Edwards. “In perpetual pursuit of celebrity, Cawthorn will lie about anything,” declares the ad. The PAC has so far spent $310,000 on the endeavor. Cawthorn’s ballot support has dropped from 52% to 44%, according to internal polling from the Edwards campaign. |
| | | Elsewhere in North Carolina politics, Rep. Ted Budd (R-NC) has emerged as the frontrunner in the US Senate race to fill the seat of retiring Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC). Former Gov. Pat McCrory (R) led the polls for months, but Republicans are coalescing behind Budd, who received a boost to his odds with former President Donald Trump’s endorsement and significant spending by the conservative Club for Growth Action. But, if Budd isn’t able to get at least 30% of the vote to win the nomination outright, the race could go to a primary runoff. |
| “He’s in a pretty good position with a 10-point lead a month before the primary, but you can’t say the race is settled. They also show there’s a pretty big undecided vote out there. It’s like everything in politics. It could change,” said Carter Wrenn, a veteran Republican strategist in North Carolina. |
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| Democrats are backing former state Supreme Court Justice Cheri Beasley in the US Senate race. She has already surpassed any of Republican rivals in the money race — bringing in almost $3.7 million in the first quarter of this year — and hasn’t needed to spend a lot on a primary, making Republicans nervous enough to put differences aside and back a single candidate in an effort to save the seat. Senate Leadership Fund, the main super PAC affiliated with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) announced earlier this month that it booked nearly $28 million in ad reservations for the fall to defend the seat. |
| | | In the current national political environment, it’s an uphill battle for Democrats to win the seat, but they’re hoping that even a slight improvement in Biden’s approval rating, combined with how divisive the Republican Senate primary has been, could give them an advantage this fall. Finally in North Carolina, there are eight Republicans running to represent the state’s newest congressional district – the 13th District. According to FiveThirtyEight, the old district map favored Republicans +38, while the new map is only R+3. Trump has put his clout behind 26-year-old political newcomer Bo Hines. So have Cawthorn and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL). Various groups of Republicans are so opposed to Hines and Trump’s endorsement in this race that they’re actively working in opposition. Outside group, Citizen Advocates for Accountable Government, for example, is working to turn voters away from Hines and have endorsed Johnston County resident DeVan Barbour (which explains the relatively unknown candidate’s price in the market). Other top candidates include former US Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-NC) and attorney Kelly Daughtry, who is the daughter of the former majority leader of the North Carolina House of Representatives. |
|  | Market Data 7 a.m. EDT: Who will win the Republican nomination for the NC-13 House election?
| Will the US Go into Recession? |
 | Can the Federal Reserve slow the U.S. economy enough to bring down inflation without causing a recession? It’s a delicate balance, but there are several reasons that it could be more achievable than in the past, according to economists at Goldman Sachs.
Goldman Sachs Research’s jobs-workers gap is a key metric for this analysis: the difference between the total number of jobs (in other words, employment plus job openings) and the total number of workers, at more than 5.3 million, shows that the labor force is at its most overheated level in postwar history.
Goldman Sachs economists consider this measure a better indicator of labor market tightness than traditional measures because it includes open positions in addition to current employment when gauging labor demand, and because it uses raw data and doesn’t require an estimate of the natural level of unemployment. This measure has shown more statistical significance with wage growth and more accurate recent predictions than standard measures like the unemployment gap or the prime-age employment to population ratio.
While it’s hard to say with precision, the jobs-workers gap needs to shrink by about 2.5 million (roughly 1% of the adult population in the U.S.) in order to cut wage growth from its pace of around 5% to 6% to about 4% to 4.5%, according to estimates by Goldman Sachs Research. That would be consistent with the Fed’s inflation forecast of around 2% to 2.5% for the next two years.
For the Fed, that means damping the outlook for growth just enough to get companies to put some of their expansion plans on hold and close some open positions — but not so much that they slash output and lay off workers. To achieve that goal, growth in gross domestic product would need to slow to about 1% to 1.5% for a year, which is weaker than the (below consensus) 1.9% that Goldman Sachs economists have forecast (fourth quarter, year-over-year).
Read more about how Goldman Sachs Research expects the U.S. to avoid a contraction here. |
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Executive action to cancel $50,000 in student loan debt would increase Black wealth by 40 percent.
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| After servicing New York City’s wealthiest throughout the pandemic, 32,000 residential workers refused to accept a regressive new contract.
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| Our modern societies, top French politicos fear, just might ‘explode’ without one.
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| Russia is acting like an abusive husband in this gendered conflict.
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| A new research database reveals that many donor-advised fund donations take years to make it to the coffers of operating nonprofits.
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US stock futures fall as Apple and Amazon warn of continued pandemic-induces pressures APRIL 29, 2022 by Naomi Rovnick in London and William Langley in Hong Kong Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare says he was blindsided by the AUKUS deal and accused Australian troops of refusing to protect Chinese-built infrastructure during riots. By Anthony Galloway |  |
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As China tightens its “zero-Covid” lockdowns, the world’s economy could get rocked 2020-style | Stark contrast... While Americans fly to spring vacays (legally) unmasked, 26M people in Shanghai are under strict Covid lockdown, policed by robot dogs and drones. China's largest city has been on a monthlong freeze as the government enforces its zero-Covid policy. Last week Shanghai reported three Covid deaths, the first official fatalities of an outbreak that’s infected about 400K people since March. Despite a near-zero death rate and falling cases… - China’s doubled down on the harshest measures since the pandemic began: it’s sending all Covid-positive patients in Shanghai to quarantine centers, regardless of symptoms. It’s also amping up mass testing and tracing.
- Some residents are running out of food and water as clogged ports and closed roads crush supplies. It's illegal to leave home to get groceries, and food-delivery drivers are overstretched. The food crisis has sparked clashes between residents and police.
A city 3X the size of NYC... Shanghai accounts for a 10th of China's exports, but now the world's busiest port is at a virtual standstill. It’s hurting China: spending fell last month and unemployment hit the highest level since early in the pandemic. It’s also rippling across the global economy, disrupting everything from corporate profits to the ETA of your Shein order: - Pricey shipping: The cost to export a container is 5X higher than pre-pandemic, and air freight rates have doubled.
- Deflated earnings: Nearly a fifth of S&P 500 companies get at least 5% of their business from China, and half of US companies in China have reduced their annual sales estimates.
- Crushed output: Tesla, Volkswagen, and iPhone-assembler Pegatron are among the manufacturers that’ve had to shut down plants during the lockdown.
|  | THE TAKEAWAY |
| It could be worse than 2020… at least economically. That’s because the world’s been relying more on Chinese products since the pandemic started. China’s shares of global exports surged to 15.4% last year, the highest in a decade. Read: China’s lockdowns will likely have an even greater impact on inflation and global growth than they did the first time around. We close out with the following #RandomThoughts:
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