Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 64. Sunrise is 5:16 and sunset is 8:32, for 15 hours, 16 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 96.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Plan & Architectural Review Commission meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1954, Joseph N. Welch, special counsel for the United States Army, lashes out at Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Army–McCarthy hearings, giving McCarthy the famous rebuke, “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
In the Wall Street Journal, Nick Timiraos writes of the uncertain economic conditions ahead:
Three risks loom large.
• First, the U.S. labor market has been in an uneasy equilibrium where companies aren’t hiring but are reluctant to fire workers that they hustled to find three or four years ago. Like a beach ball that shoots skyward after being held underwater, joblessness can quickly jump once companies decide demand is too soft to keep those workers.
“It starts with one large firm. Then competitors might say, ‘Well, listen, we have to do the same,’ ” said Gregory Daco, chief economist at consulting firm EY.
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• Second, consumers could finally push back against rising costs, forcing companies to tighten their belts.
Delinquency rates on consumer debt have been on the rise for a year, raising fears that deteriorating finances for low-income borrowers could lead to a more pronounced slowdown in consumer spending.
For the housing market, the spring sales season has been a bust. The U.S. market now has nearly 500,000 more sellers than buyers, according to real-estate brokerage Redfin. That is the largest gap since its tally began in 2013. Home prices could fall 1% this year, said Redfin economist Chen Zhao.
“The market has been at rock bottom for the last 2½ years and there was some hope that we’d get a little bit of a turnaround this year. And it’s just actually been worse than expected,” said Zhao.
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• Third, financial-market shocks or abrupt sentiment changes remain a wild card. The Fed reduced short-term interest rates by 1 percentage point last year, providing a measure of relief to borrowers with credit cards or variable-rate bank loans.
See Nick Timiraos, The U.S. Economy Is Headed Toward an Uncomfortable Summer (‘Companies are freezing hiring and investment to deal with shifting tariff policies. Even Trump doesn’t know what Trump will do next’), Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2025.
Escaped zebra airlifted back to its owner: