Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will see intermittent afternoon and evening thunderstorms with a high of 85. Sunrise is 5:16 and sunset is 8:33 for 15 hours 17 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waning crescent with 27.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1999, in the Kosovo War, NATO suspends its airstrikes after Slobodan Milosevic agrees to withdraw Serbian forces from Kosovo.
The greatest trick that Whitewater’s special-interest men ever pulled was convincing anyone, even themselves, that they had any credible economic insights to offer.1 They have been the champions of Trump’s losing ideas.2 It’s been hocus pocus all the way down. Yet again, one sees how much damage their candidates and their outlook have inflicted on American consumers:
U.S. inflation accelerated for a third-straight month in May amid a stalemate in negotiations to end the war with Iran, likely keeping interest rate cuts from the Federal Reserve at bay.
The Consumer Price Index report rose 4.2 percent in May from a year earlier, new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed on Wednesday. That is up from a 2.4 percent annual increase before the conflict in the Middle East started in February and is the fastest pace since April 2023. Over the course of the month, overall prices jumped 0.5 percent.
Energy prices drove the bulk of the increase in May. Once those were stripped out alongside food prices, the “core” index rose 2.9 percent on a year-over-year basis, a 0.1 percentage point decrease from April’s annual rate. Core prices rose 0.2 percent for the month.
Energy costs have been spilling into categories where they make up a large chunk of the ultimate price tag, including food and airline fares. For the Federal Reserve, which will vote next week on whether to change interest rates, the most important question is whether stickier categories like manufactured goods and services — the core inflation — are also being affected.
The war in the Middle East is not the only factor pushing prices up. The data center boom has created demand for the memory chips that go into nearly all consumer electronics, reversing a long slide in the cost of technology. And a persistent drought has thinned out production of some crops and livestock, especially beef.
See Lydia DePillis, Inflation Jumps as Iran War Intensifies Price Squeeze, New York Times, June 10, 2026.
_____
- These gentlemen are their own sad, small-town version of the Usual Suspects. ↩︎
- Look at what was never going to age well: ↩︎
_____
Upcoming posts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, Outcome-Driven Argumentation, and a New Ethics Ordinance.
How the Iran war is disrupting the global supply chain: