What’s going on guys?

First, a funny note. I’ve produced so many podcasts (like 7 ish in the last 36 hours) that I lost track and talked about the Bloomberg $20k report on this one again, even though I touched on it yesterday too. Apologies for that - and thank goodness this is an experiment. The meat of it anyway is the discussion of the Tiananmen Square anniversary and interpretations of the job report.

Thanks for checking it out!

NLW

The Daily Down - 6.4.20

Topic 1: 31st Anniversary of Tiananmen Square

There are two reasons that this is a notable reference point. The first has to do with China’s continued push to absorb Hong Kong back into the mainland. A traditional demonstration was banned but a smaller version happened anyway, in defiance of the order.

The second has to do with the historical analogy to major questions of how governments interact with protestors.

This created an extra layer to the debate about whether the New York Times should have run Tom Cotton’s article advocating for harsher treatment of protestors.

Ben Hunt argues that, when it comes to parallelism, what we should be watching for is the erasing of history.

Topic 2: What to make of the Jobs report?

The US jobs report came out and, instead of the expected loss of 8.3M jobs (which would have put the unemployment rate at nearly 20%), there were apparently a gain of $2.5M jobs - the biggest jump in history.

Markets reacted quickly to the positive news, although not everyone is convinced. Some focus on the fundamentals of the numbers listed:

Others pointed out a mischaracterization in the survey that could have increased the unemployment rate by 3%.

I'm certainly not rooting for this to be wrong. I would like nothing more than a V-shaped recovery for actual jobs and the real economy. I do tend to agree with Kevin here, however, that if anything this raises the stakes of the next set of reports.

Thanks for reading!

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