Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 73. Sunrise is 5:18 AM and sunset 8:37 PM for 15h 19m 15s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 51.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM. The Whitewater School Board goes into closed session shortly after 5:15 PM, to resume into open session at 7 PM.
On this day in 1918, Allied forces under John J. Pershing and James Harbord defeat Imperial German forces under Wilhelm, German Crown Prince in the Battle of Belleau Wood.
Casey Quinlan asks Wage growth remains high, jobs are steady and inflation is falling so why are people worried?:
Economists have been predicting a recession for months, but the labor market has remained resilient, wage growth is higher than before the pandemic, and inflation continues to drop, now at 4% compared to 9.1% in June of last year. Despite this good news, consumers don’t feel confident about the future, according to the consumer confidence index, which is at a six-month low.
The consumer confidence index fell to 102.3 in May from 103.7 in April. The present situation index, which shows how consumers feel about current conditions in business and labor, dropped to 148.6 from 151.8, and the expectations index inched down to 71.5 from 71.7. According to the Conference Board, an economic research and business membership organization that releases the index, an expectations index below 80 is associated with a recession within the next year. People aged 55 or older were especially pessimistic about the economy. The next consumer confidence survey results come out on June 27.
“The technical term for the type of economy that we’re in now is weird,” said William Hauk, associate professor of economics at the University of South Carolina. “On the one hand, there’s a lot of very good news. We have a very low unemployment rate, really almost historically low at this point. The job market is doing well. At first, coming out of the pandemic, some people were concerned that the low unemployment rate was driven in part by low labor force participation. But that’s really kind of caught up to where it was in pre-pandemic terms.”
The simple explanation is that the economy is one of only several concerns people now have. The Clinton campaign in 1992 emphasized that their focus was on the economy (‘it’s the economy, stupid’).
That was then, this is now. Americans have more worries than simply economic ones (namely heightened legal, political, and cultural concerns). In this way, the economy isn’t merely the economy: people have disparate, significant concerns that make even bright spots look dim.
A robotic raspberry teaches machines how to pick fruit: