Initial Jobless Claims Refuse To Blink Amid Increasingly Fragile Labor Market Signals

Housing Starts & Permits Plunge In August As Homebuilder Confidence Nears COVID Lows On the back of another tumble in homebuilder confidence (though still a long way from homebuyer confidence)... ...building permits were expected to decline in August (while starts were expected to rebound from July's big plunge). However, both Starts and Permits dropped MoM, dramatically worse than expected (Starts -2.6% MoM vs +6.7% MoM exp, Permits -2.7% MoM vs -1.5% MoM exp) On a SAAR basis, Starts at back near post-COVID lows while Permits are holding in a four year range... The details...

While the administration continues to downplay the possibility of boots on the ground in Iran, large numbers of US ground troops continue to conspicuously arrive in the Middle East, with over 3,500 additional troops reported by Central Command (CENTCOM) to have arrived Saturday. A substantial majority of the new arrivals were US Marines aboard the […]

Phoebe Gates & Co-Founder Caught In The Cookie Jar: Slack Logs Contradict Phia's '24-Hour Bug' BS When Bloomberg first caught Phia - the AI "personal shopping assistant" co-founded by Bill Gates' daughter Phoebe Gates and climate-activist-turned-founder Sophia Kianni - claiming affiliate commissions on sales it had nothing to do with, the company's ham-fisted damage control was a Silicon Valley classic: an unfortunate software bug, discovered "within the last 24 hours" - and of course it was 'fixed immediately.'  Except that's total bullshit.  According to a follow-up investigation published Tuesday, they knew about...