This Is An Open Thread
Another Week In Hell: Wednesday.
Goldfinger once said, “Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time its enemy action.”
Here we tour the Ninth Circle of Hell Cocytus reserved for those guilty of the most grievous of sins: Treachery
Warning:
“Lo!” … “lo! Dis; and lo! the place
Where thou has need to arm thy heart with strength.”
A man once described hell as a place where there is no reason …
President Shit’s Public Schedule:
| Wednesday, April 2 2025 |
| 9:00 AM In-Town Pool Call Time The White House In-Town Pool |
| 4:00 PM The President participates in the Make America Wealthy Again event Rose Garden Pre-Credentialed Media |
Back on the surface of Earth:
Markets opened today in the red and Ben getting a jump on Friday’s Jobs Report:
There were 7.6 million job openings on the last day of February, down from 7.8 million in January. Looking through the drop-and-rebound in the fall, we’re basically still on the same downward trend we’ve been on for a while. #NumbersDay
— Ben Casselman (@bencasselman.bsky.social) April 1, 2025 at 9:15 AM
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For release 10:00 a.m. (ET) Tuesday, April 1, 2025 USDL-25-0450
Job Openings and Labor Turnover – February 2025
The number of job openings was little changed at 7.6 million in February, the U.S. Bureau of Labor
Statistics reported today. Over the month, hires and total separations held at 5.4 million and 5.3 million, respectively. Within separations, quits (3.2 million) and layoffs and discharges (1.8 million) changed little.This release includes estimates of the number and rate of job openings, hires, and separations for the total nonfarm sector, by industry, and by establishment size class. Job openings include all positions that are open on the last business day of the month. Hires and separations include all changes to the payroll during the entire.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics JOLT
Ben will have to wait to add these numbers to next month’s jobs report:
— Outbreak Updates (@outbreakupdates) April 1, 2025
HHS starts layoffs of thousands of workers across its agencies
As many as 10,000 — one-quarter of the department — are expected to be let goLayoff notices began arriving early Tuesday for thousands of employees of the sprawling Department of Health and Human Services and its subsidiary agencies, with as many 10,000 workers potentially expected to be hit by the cuts, including some of the country’s top health officials.
The range of job losses across institutes and offices reflected the breadth of what HHS does and the role it plays in the U.S., in both the obvious ways and less appreciated ones. The cuts and reorganizations affected people who help approve new medicines, track emerging pathogens, and uncover the secrets held in our DNA. But they also reached those developing safer tobacco policies, trying to reduce injuries, and protecting people who rely on Medicare and Medicaid — as well as the staff who made the agencies operate day to day and aimed to communicate health updates, new recommendations, and policy shifts to the public.
For those staff, Tuesday morning extended the uncertainty they had been dealing with since the Trump administration took office with plans to drastically cut the federal workforce. Emails went out to affected employees around 5 a.m., but some who hadn’t seen the messages showed up to work only to be turned away, realizing they had lost their jobs because their badges weren’t working, multiple sources told STAT. At the Food and Drug Administration’s campus in Silver Spring, Md., security guards instructed fired employees to wait in a line so they could later clean out their offices.
STAT
Reporting from the frontiers of health and medicine
Meanwhile ….
The Fed is scrambling to figure out the impact of Trump’s policies to determine when (or if) it can again cut rates “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could be very clear with a nice road map? That’s not the way monetary policy works,” says Susan Collins of the Boston Fed @nytimes
— Colby Smith (@colbylsmith.bsky.social) April 1, 2025 at 8:29 AM
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Meanwhile within the meanwhile … the Atlanta Fed is tasked with compiling the Fed GDPNow model. Basically, that means:
The growth rate of real gross domestic product (GDP) is a key indicator of economic activity, but the official estimate is released with a delay. Our GDPNow forecasting model provides a “nowcast” of the official estimate prior to its release by estimating GDP growth using a methodology similar to the one used by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.
GDPNow is not an official forecast of the Atlanta Fed. Rather, it is best viewed as a running estimate of real GDP growth based on available economic data for the current measured quarter. There are no subjective adjustments made to GDPNow—the estimate is based solely on the mathematical results of the model.
Atlanta Fed GDPNow
How it’s going:
8 weeks ago +3.9%
4 weeks ago +2.3%
Last week -2.8%
April 1 was -3.7%
An 8 point swing predicted contraction in only 8 weeks. Awesome.
The alternative model forecast, which adjusts for imports and exports of gold, is -1.4%. After this morning’s construction spending report from the @uscensusbureau and incorporation of the available March data into the models’ dynamic factor model, including manufacturing data… https://t.co/BRthOqHXQr pic.twitter.com/nf8SxASkrp
— Atlanta Fed (@AtlantaFed) April 1, 2025
Show more: “… from the Institute for Supply Management (@ism) and measures of consumer attitudes from two surveys, both the standard model’s and the alternative model’s forecasts of first-quarter real final sales to private domestic purchasers growth declined from 1.5% to 0.4%. The next GDPNow update is Thursday, April 3.”
You can view this at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta GDPNow website. The subcomponent chart, along with a changes in subcomponents chart (not shown here) are interactive with each individual subcomponents’ percentages.
How Trump’s fellow travelers are handling their stay in Cocytus:
Show more: “Keep in mind this is a gigantic experiment like we’ve never seen before. On paper it looks great to the President… But keep in mind people have got to come over here and build factories and that takes years. And there is a lot of uncertainty…”
They know Trump is screwing up our economy. They just don’t know how to handle it without losing viewers.
Fox News’ Fox and Friends is self-destructing over Trump’s "Liberation Day" trade war.
— Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) April 2, 2025
They are forced to talk about how much damage the top economists are projecting Trump’s tariffs to cause to our economy.
“Keep in mind this is a gigantic experiment like we’ve never seen… pic.twitter.com/gmIG9JeFtN
Meanwhile, MAGAts are getting their news from some 4-chan/reddit/subreddit/crazy town Russian bot platform from ‘Anonymous, “the internet’s most reliable news source” …
This Is An Open Thread