L: Jim made it into a Bloomberg article addressing the (stupid) tariffs. You read about his views in a blog last week, but it's nice to see the quote in someone else's article. The article is entitled, "Trump Tariffs Not Such a Big Deal for U.S. Growth, Poll Shows." As a reminder, Jim hated the tariff, but was even more aggravated by the use of Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, making it immune to Congressional action. It's a bad action using a very scary mechanism.
J: On March 9 the BLS dropped several bombshells on analysts and economic forecasters. The first was the totally unexpected news that nonfarm payroll jobs shot up by 313,000 on a seasonally adjusted basis in February from January. That was the biggest one-month increase since July 2016 and was in addition to upward revisions of 15,000 more jobs in December and 39,000 in January. That brought the average for the past three months up to 242,000 a month. That is very strong growth. It was up 2,281,000 such jobs from a year earlier or 1.6 percent. As the chart shows, the total number of such jobs was 145,177,000, yet another record. There were more bombshells in the total employment number
The President used a national security law to "justify" high tariffs on steel and aluminum. This is a very dangerous precedent an
