gehringer_2

You would think that a team that saw Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer win Cy Youngs on their roster would have figured out that successful MLB pitchers should be able to get guys out with the fastball. With that the rest is gravy. Without it, 'the rest' may become a constant struggle.

average car payment hit $700/mo recently. Nuts.

LOL page 7: GDP -0.9, GDI +1.9.

I can't decide about Mize. I don't think he has shown much strength at the mental aspect, but that can change. Bigger problem is that there isn't much swing and miss in his fastball, he has to command it. If TJ stabilizes his elbow it could actually help his command, but either way command remains an unknown coming out of the surgery and for Mize it's especially critical. Bottom line, he hasn't justified being picked over Brady Singer.

two things with Tork - yes the K's obviously, but the other is he needs to get the ball in the air more. Too often when he does barrel up a ball he doesn't get it over an IF's head - seems to make a lot of LD outs.

What? Me worry? https://www.detroitnews.com/story/sports/mlb/tigers/2022/07/27/victor-reyes-detroit-tigers-san-diego-padres-victory/10162621002/

of course there's the rub, and Putin knows it. When he does come to the table you can be sure it will be with all kind of wonderful offers, but only in return for the demilitarization of Ukraine. And of course it's perfectly obvious what the long term Russian play is. You can book that. Don't forget, the Russian's already made and walked away from this deal once with Ukraine - territorial guarantees for the surrender of the Russian nukes in their control after the dissolution of the USSR. We might have forgotten that, but I don't think the Ukrainians have or will. No Ukraine deal with Putin will be worth the paper it's printed on. So the west can't give up any defense prerogatives. A 'deal' will at best formalize an armed standoff. And Russia will have no one to blame but themselves for being a lying POS partner on their previous agreement.

At Yellowstone, the bison are all over the park, you actually can't avoid them. They stand around in the geyser pools right up to and even on the pedestrian path decking. So despite all the rhetoric in the park, the Bison are acclimated to people and you often end up walking withing a few yards of them. Now of course, they do tell you what to look for and you pay attention. If they aren't paying any attention to you fine. If they are, go the other way. And obviously don't directly approach one. Bears and Moose are another matter, esp any kind of brown bear. But they aren't going to be around where people are very often. In the Western parks (Teton/Yellowstone) they will close off large parts of the park to hikers if a bear with cubs is known to be anywhere in the area. But people have always been pretty laissez-faire about black bears in the East. I remember people feeding black bears from the windows of their cars in the Smokey's back in the day. Obviously they've tried to crack down on that kind of thing but clearly with limited success. But with black bear the bigger threat may be to the bear, that you condition it to be a nuisance bear and then it ends up having to be put down.

and the funny part is, conventional wisdom is that it's whoever is in the White House that constantly jawbones the Fed to keep the pedal to the metal all the time for the sake of the next election. But the party in power has lost the White House in 2 out of 3 elections since ZIRP anyway.

yeah - saw another quote that they are supposed to be doing $95B/month by Sept. I'll believe it when I see it. It wouldn't be so bad if it was a mixed portfolio, but since it's mostly/all(?) MBS, you can't just dump all those without driving mortgage rates higher, and there is political pain in that, which means they will want to put it off.

yeah - I think this aptly illustrates the definition of a pose vs a conviction.

Sure. I wrote the K part initially about Carpenter and added Meadows to it without thinking.

Of course it is. She was wrong place, wrong time. I don't know who was giving her advice but any American that didn't get out of Russia when Ukraine was starting to heat up wasn't getting good advice.

He and Carpenter both with pretty dramatic recent reductions in K rate also. SSS anomaly, or something in the water in Toledo?

But if the fed pushes to a yield curve inversion, the demand for short term loans falls, (who needs a short term loan if a long term one is cheaper?), so the effectiveness of the short term rate hikes is undercut. Conveniently enough, a little fiscal contraction could be just the thing, and Manchin's new deal is going to increase corporate and some financial operator's taxes (elimination of carried interest deductions). If that become effective Jan 1 that (and its anticipation) could be contractive faster than anything the Fed does with interest rates before then.

there is a paradox here, which is that the future economic activity rubber really hits the road with longer term rates. Most money committed to expansion of economy activity is longer term. But long term rates are not directly controlled by the Fed. They are based on market expectation for future inflation. So paradoxically, strong action by the Fed that is seen as counter inflationary can actually depress long term rates, and make those very moves less effective at slowing an overheated economy. Right now long term rates are staying stubbornly low. Let's see if they start floating up any starting tomorrow or not. Of course there is also a direct effect on money supply when the Fed raises short term rates, and the Fed has other actions it can take in the bond market that can increase or decrease money supply so they have some levers in spite of the possibility of paradoxical interest rate psychology. But in the short run it is the psychology that matters because money supply moves by the fed take many months to actually effect economic activity for their own sake.

Sadly, a lot of reporting coming out of Russia is to the effect that Putin still believes he is winning and that time is on Russia's side because he will hold out longer than the West will. If that doesn't change, there seems little hope of him agreeing to any acceptable negotiation. There is a line to walk here and of course no-one knows exactly where it is. On one hand, we can argue for a maximalist, faster, stronger response to force Russia into a bad enough position sooner on the hope that gets a serious Putin to the table with less damage to Ukraine. OTOH, you have the argument that maybe you trip Russia into a full mobilization and suddenly make life much more difficult where you could have just bleed him out by calibrating the pressure applied so he just cooks himself like a frog in increasingly hot water and one day the Russian army in Ukraine simply has no fight left. Like any war, no options are risk free, and in ten years we will be able to see all the things we are doing wrong.

I know your trolling a bit here because it's not a very apt comparison. It's not about Putin winning in and of itself. The future of 40 million people don't hang on the balance of what happens to a Russian crook and a stoner (maybe) American minor league roundball player. The reason Putin can't be allowed to win in Ukraine is those 40 million, and the IDK how many million more in Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania & Finland etc., that still have to live next to Russia. The reason it doesn't matter if he wins in this trade is because the 3 people in involved don't matter very much to the world order but do to their families, which is enough.

Toledo pages show Barnes and Norris added today but no removals - so somebody's out.

Tiger rebuild part Deux.

P. Meadows 4/4 HR tonight for Erie. 277/329/477 for July

this is an odd chart. From a Peter Coy column in the NYT. M4 went through a huge weird spike coming out of the pandemic. Supposedly M4 weights cash more heavily so possibly all the recovery money? Whatever. It was both huge and very short term. As Coy noted, if you agree with Milton Friedman than inflation is always and only about money supply, there's a lead. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/27/opinion/gross-domestic-product-income.html

yeah - I was sorry to see that. Figured he was probably a better coach when Tucker was making more.....🤔

LOL - they won't get Romney's vote on carried interest!