Retirement is looking a lot better organized than it did a week or two back. I’m starting to catch up on things and soon, the long-held projects list will be ripe for attack.
In the meantime, “dangerous flooding” didn’t show up in our part of Texas overnight. A measly 0.75-inch in the gauge. Our weather is about a clone of Hilo, Hawaii for the day. What we don’t have is a hurricane Rachel trying to spin up southwest of Cabo.
On the Atlantic side, still an unusual lack of storms year. Odds are low that the latest disturbance, a few hundred miles northeast of the D.R. will amount to anything.
Did Jobs Hit +90,000?
See for yourself: (no)
Both nonfarm payroll employment (+29,000) and the unemployment rate (4.2 percent) changed little in September, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment in all major industries changed little over the month.
Household Survey Data
Both the unemployment rate, at 4.2 percent, and the number of unemployed people, at 7.1 million, changed little in September. The unemployment rate has remained in a narrow range of 4.1 percent to 4.3 percent since March.
This is one of those “Yes, we want no bananas” kinds of numbers. Yes, hiring is good. But softness keeps a Fed rate hold in the most likely column – and that could rally markets. Yeah – weird financial logic – but don’t look at me. Instead look at this:
Eventually, someone besides us will decide that jobs were really up – strongly in the database number. +406,000 and the market will panic and drop. But selling the low-ball number to get the market up? My head hurts!
News Compressor: ON
The biggest overnight news flow change isn’t oil. Brent is down a shade, so markets were up early in futures trading. What has changed is the world’s hardware picture.
The U.S. is sending another carrier toward the Middle East. The USS Theodore Roosevelt is headed that way along with the Makin Island amphibious group and thousands more sailors and Marines. Depending on deployment timing, that could put three American carrier strike groups in the region.
Carriers aren’t diplomatic notes. You don’t move that much floating air power halfway around the world because everyone has agreed to behave. Remember our talk about an “October surprise”? Look at the calendar. Odds: 85%. The Middle East military posture is hardening faster than the diplomatic language suggests.
Then there’s Russia.
Putin now says if Russia’s Kaliningrad territory is threatened, Moscow would consider using the whole range of weapons in its arsenal. Reuters specifically notes that includes nuclear weapons, and Russia had already warned NATO that an attempt to cut off the Baltic enclave could trigger nuclear use. That’s worth reading twice.
We now have the United States moving enough naval power toward Iran to make another major strike option very real, while Russia is publicly putting the nuclear card on the table over Kaliningrad.
Pressure point to watch in the EU is teens rioting in France over teacher shortages, overcrowding, deteriorating school conditions and education funding, with roughly 400 schools closed and violent clashes in multiple cities.
Two different theaters. Two nuclear powers. Same week.
Meanwhile, Back at the Gas Pump…
Reader Ray’s note on where the money’s going on prices is worth a read. But we also notice diesel was averaging $6.3726 nationally in the early Triple A reading. That’s up roughly 72 percent from a year ago.
Here’s where yesterday’s BlinkLab observation gets interesting.
Gulf physical flows have actually been improving. Yet China has suspended October fuel-product exports beyond Hong Kong and Macau, Russia has restricted diesel exports, and Europe is discussing emergency diesel and crude-stock releases. Brent actually slipped below $100 earlier as those reserve-release discussions hit the market.
In other words: War can cool while the bill keeps arriving.
The event clock may be slowing while the consequence clocks are multiplying. Nothing overnight argues strongly otherwise.
Inside Pages
Treasury yields backed away from Thursday’s ugly levels ahead of today’s employment numbers. Markets get a breather, but the bond problem didn’t disappear overnight. Temporarily stabilizing. Odds of a rate hike at month-end are down in the 25% zone. Supports the rally case but keep a stopwatch handy.
Ethiopia and Eritrea have moved from another African shooting story toward a diplomatic rupture, with the African Union now trying to keep the thing from spreading. Escalating regionally.
The Philippines-China confrontation around Batanes remains alive while Taiwan sits right next door. Nobody has fired the starter pistol, but an awful lot of people are standing around the track. Holding elevated.
AI infrastructure financing is becoming its own species of financial engineering as companies contemplate tens of billions in borrowing, chip leasing and special-purpose vehicles. Cheap intelligence apparently requires breathtakingly expensive plumbing. Accelerating. Though we do laugh at how many (alleged) media are suddenly discovering building AI plant and equipment involves playing all kinds of tax angles.
How much school do you need to miss to overlook that angle?
Ballistics of the Future
We will launch another “Over-the-Horizon” ‘cleanroom’ scan of what’s up ahead. If your expectations are well-tuned:
- Markets could still go either way, depending on inflation impact craters. Next speed bump is the month-end Fed meeting.
- The calendar says Netanyahu needs a big win before Israel’s elections. Similarly, Trump needs help, too, or the power structure in D.C. will flip decidedly liberal in January.
- The winter ahead looks warmer and drier for the top half of the country, but cooler and wetter from the square states south to the Gulf.
Hedging bets on how to play life now involves watching rates (going up), employment (holding on based on AI), and avoiding new financial nooses, if you can. Which brings me to?
Around the Ranch: Yardening
49,000 Square Miles of Inedible Carpet, and We Mow It on Purpose.
Pappy Ure always said “Question how smart someone is if they fertilize a lawn causing themselves more effort to mow…”
NASA counted the lawns. The United States has about 128,000 square kilometers. That is 49,000 square miles, call it 31 million acres if you want the conservative cut. The one people round to “the size of Texas,” is closer to 40 million acres and 63,000 square miles.
Either makes our point: Lawns are the largest irrigated crop in the country. Bigger than irrigated corn. We just don’t eat it. Seriously. I sit out in the woods writing books like Downsizing and still, the weed-n-feed flies off the shelves. Damnedest thing I ever saw.
We call the corrective action “yardening.” Not landscaping. Not “foodscaping,” which sounds like a magazine that wants to sell you raised beds at $400 a corner. Yardening is what happens when you look at the front grass, do the calorie math, and put a row of something edible where the mower used to make its Saturday sermon. Beans. Squash. A run of potatoes. Collards, if you have the sense God gave a goat. The lawn stays where the kids actually run and where the septic field does not want a tiller. The rest of it goes to work.
The idea that a house ought to sit on a “green area rug” was one of those stupid shows of wealth.
In England, a shaved park around the manor said the owner could afford to take land out of grain and let sheep do the mowing. Grass, on that scale, was a balance sheet you could see from the drive. No fences in the view, no cabbage patch spoiling the prospect, deer and tenants kept at a polite distance. Thomas Jefferson saw it, liked it, and tried to grow the same carpet at Monticello. George Washington bought English grass seed in 1785 and put in a bowling green at Mount Vernon.
Most homes before the Civil War still had a flower patch in front and the actual food out back, which is the arrangement any animal with a brain would pick. Then the mowers got cheap, the public got mobile, and houses moved out of town onto lots where the big lawn replaced the alley garden.
Of course, *now* the *back of the house* is gone, too — replaced with a pool or “water feature” (with no fish growing), a “BBQ entertaining area,” and a sauna.
Which, collectively, is called “Progress?”
After 1945 the whole thing locked in. Levittown and its copies sold the lawn as the membership card.
So, are we crazy? On the evidence, yes of course. But it is a specific kind of crazy. Status crazy.
We spend on the order of $30-plus billion a year keeping a crop at a height of three inches, and the harvest is a bag of clippings. Old slow Joe had it out for gas BBQs, but exsqueeze me: the mower burns gasoline to fight a plant that wants to be a meadow. The fertilizer runs off -killing O2 in the Gulf. The pollinators get a green desert. And the payoff, most weeks, is that the neighbor does not think you have let yourself go.
The sales proposition shouldn’t fly: “Psst! Buddy! Buy this half million worth of housing and keep $75,000 of land cost useless so you can run up additional ego bills…”
Golf courses and ball fields can keep their turf; people use those. Take the residential slice, and take half of that – call it 15 million acres. Rewild (sort of) as food.
The United States harvests something like 4 million acres of vegetables in a normal year. A serious pass at the front lawn is not a cute supplement. It is a second vegetable industry, distributed, uninsured, and located where the mouths already are.
And it doesn’t put the yard service companies out of business. In fact, with many new arrivals from elsewhere—who may know growing better than we do—they become experts at local food production. Not just power edger operators.
So, ahead in my newly launched “spare time” I will be turning the tractor forks down, hand sowing rows, and trying (as an experiment) to see how much food we can pull in. We will do some additional fencing to keep deer from the brassicas (deer salad: broccoli, cabbage, kale, collards and friends).
Deer stay clear of alliums like onions and garlic. So, when the visiting herd of a dozen comes through (deer season refugees) we may have a chance to get an emergency food prep program going that doesn’t have a specific shelf life.
Something I’ve been chewing on.
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