Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 35. Sunrise is 6:41 and sunset is 4:36 for 9 hours 55 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 67.1 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1975, the 729-foot-long freighter SS Edmund Fitzgerald sinks during a storm on Lake Superior, killing all 29 crew on board.
When reporting of federal economic data resumes (if it should prove reliable when it does):
The return of U.S. economic data when Washington reopens may do little to clear up a macro picture that is clouded by the dash for artificial intelligence and compounded by trade distortions.
Federal Reserve officials are doing their best at the guessing game on what comes next – but it is just that. The more humble in the Fed’s ranks concede that it’s impossible to tell.
Cleveland Fed boss Beth Hammack, a known hawk and a voting member of the Fed’s policymaking council next year, said the AI investment frenzy and related stock price surges complicated matters by creating something of a dual economy, with higher earners and asset holders doing well even as cost-of-living pressures weigh on the rest.
In short, she reckons the Fed is walking a policy high wire and can’t lean much in either direction. “When you see this bifurcation, it’s really difficult for monetary policy,” Hammack told the Economic Club of New York last week.
“Bifurcated economy” is the phrase of the moment.
Consumer price inflation is still well above target and rising, and financial conditions are the loosest in years – but layoffs are rising, in part due to AI adoption.
An economy creating few jobs that is still clocking annualized GDP growth of 4% – at least with the limited data the Atlanta Fed model has to go on – is a fiendishly difficult one to navigate.
How much impact AI is having on the labor market, or how much it will have in the future, remains uncertain. But it’s conceivable that we could see job creation grind to a halt next year, while hundreds of billions of dollars in AI investment boosts top-line GDP and the mounting electricity demand puts upward pressure on prices.
(Charts omitted.)
See Mike Dolan, AI clouds up the economic dashboard, Reuters, November 10, 2025.
These would be conditions of narrow growth, reaching some while leaving many more behind.
In an ordinary environment, of people freely choosing, an economic imbalance like this would lead to political change. Now, as our national environment is under the influence of a populist movement that willingly bears hardship to inflict hardship on others, change will be more difficult, and come only through diligent and determined effort.
Nothing is as surprising as encountering people who are surprised that we’ve a long path before us. The reasonable assumption is that we have many challenging years ahead.
For Whitewater and other communities in Wisconsin, it’s vital that we expand local opportunities, including for housing, to the greatest extent that we are able. As politics grows more nationalized, effective economic uplift will need to be increasingly local.
We will prove to be our own best resource.
Sun blasts pair of powerful X-flares on consecutive days: