Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 79. Sunrise is 7:02 and sunset is 6:20 for 11 hours 18 minutes of daylight. The moon is new this morning with none of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1973, U.S. Vice President Spiro Agnew resigns after being charged with evasion of federal income tax.
The University of Michigan’s longstanding and respected survey of consumers’ sentiments reports yet again a monthly decline in consumers’ confidence:
The University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers was the latest in a series of recent polls to capture the darkening mood among Americans, who are being squeezed by high inflation and borrowing costs. Trump’s approval rating is at the lowest of his political career amid angst over his handling of the economy.
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The University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index dropped to 46.3 this month from 48.1 in September. The third straight monthly decline pushed sentiment close to a record low plumbed in May. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast the index at 47.8.
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The Surveys of Consumers’ measure of consumer expectations for inflation over the next year nudged up to 4.7% from 4.6% in September. Twelve-month inflation expectations have surged from 3.4% in February before the US-Israeli war with Iran started.
Consumers’ expectations for inflation over the next five years rose to 3.5% from 3.4% in September.
See Lucia Mutikani, US consumer sentiment near record low as frustration over economy mounts, Reuters, October 9, 2026.
Consumers recognize adverse conditions when they encounter them. In the same way, one can see a desperate, scrambling economic policy when it presents itself. Trump’s latest effort to reduce soaring diesel prices — a deal with Vladimir Putin — is unlikely to lower prices meaningfully, especially for the Midwest:
Energy policy experts on Friday expressed doubts that a boost in diesel supply from Russia will have a significant impact on oil prices, whether in the U.S. or globally.
“It’s kind of shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic,” said Michael Lynch, distinguished fellow at Energy Policy Research Foundation, a nonpartisan research institution focused on energy and economics.
“If we get diesel from Russia, basically it means that their existing customers are not going to get it and they’ll have to go somewhere else, and that will keep the price basically where it is now,” Lynch said.
And while the White House may be counting on this move to give some relief at the pump for U.S. truckers, ranchers and farmers who have been hit hard by rising diesel prices, that’s not a given.
“The best you could hope for is a tiny dip in prices locally in places like the New York-New Jersey area, Philadelphia maybe,” Lynch said. “It just means that the oil is just going to be shuffled around and it’s not really going to change the price globally or across the U.S.”
See Alex Veiga, Boosting US oil supplies with Russian diesel unlikely to have much impact on prices, experts say, Associated Press, October 9, 2026.
Of course. As with selling red-dye diesel, these are drop-in-the-bucket responses to a market shortage. Note to those who might be supporters of MAGA economics: ‘a drop in the bucket’ means a tiny quantity in a much larger container. (On allowing the sale of red-dye diesel as a futile effort to reduce diesel prices, see Keith Johnson, Trump’s red-dye diesel plan has a major flaw, Foreign Policy, October 6, 2026.)
Another narcissistic complaint from a man who can’t manage basic national policy — Trump veers into Nobel Prize grievances during upstate New York rally: