They are still scrabbling around the monkey cage hurling feces

It is Monday morning and we are, perhaps, reaching high-tide in reaction to the late Friday dump of the Mueller report concluding, as many of us did soon after the original hypothesis was formulated, that there was no there, there. No collusion. No obstruction.

On the left, predictably, there are frantic scribblings to redeem this fantasy which they have pushed for more than two years. On the right, there is, not surprisingly jubilation, effectively a nationwide "I told you so."

There are murmurings that we should now investigate the actual collusion which does seem to have occurred, as revealed by the Mueller investigation. The collusion between members of the unsuccessful Clinton campaign, the outgoing Obama administration, and, most critically, a very large number of actors among the leadership of the DOJ, the leadership of the FBI, and the leadership of the various intelligence services, especially the CIA and the NSA. A collusion to at least subvert if not overturn the results of our election.

I agree. The Russians, the Chinese and others have always and will always try and interfere with our elections and we need to take actions to prevent that. But it appears to me that the greatest threat to our state occurred from within. No one was guarding the guardians. The Mueller investigation has made it quite clear that we had politically motivated spying and legal charges made selectively against individual American citizens. We had a systemic abrogation of due process, rule of law, equality before the law. All for sordid partisan purposes.

I doubt it was an orchestrated collusion, just an emergent order of large numbers of people in the right circumstances to form small groups with similar illegal and immoral purposes. We'll see. It appears to me that James Clapper, John Brennan, Andrew McCabe, James Comey, and many of their immediate reports along with at least Power and Rice (for their unmasking of American citizens) all committed multiple and material illegal actions with the goal of undermining the incoming administration. Hopefully we will get an investigation into this because I view it as by far the greater threat to our Republic - the repurposing of common civic institutions for partisan purposes.

Rather than dwell on Mueller and the politics though, what is striking to me is the consequences of this on the media whose reputation is already down there with the lowest of the low. How does the mainstream media recover its role as a valued Fourth Estate after having now been shown to have spent two and more years peddling the proverbial fake news?

Across the headlines and the journalistic tweets, it is not even apparent that they want to redeem themselves. There is denial, there is parsing, there is labored hair-splitting. A pillar of their critical theory faith and of their partisan belief system has been shown to not exist. Not that it was weak or rotten. It never existed.

There are a couple of principled exceptions. Glenn Greenwald, no John Bircher, is excoriating mainstream journalism for their deliberate deceptions. Matt Taibbi, another solidly center left journalist is similarly taking his brethren to task. But they are a distinct minority. Most mainstream media journalists seem not to view this as an alarm for reform of their practices but a mere inconvenience in their role as the resistance.

Looking at the New York Times, this morning, you can see all the subtle and not so subtle spinning going on.

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The Mueller report has been unalloyed great news for Trump (and the nation) and yet every above the fold headline is a desperate clutching at straws. An Olympic swimming pool of water just got dumped on their smoldering autumnal fire of damp collusion leaves and now they are trying to find embers to fan.

Of course the opinion pieces see no good news in the discovery that there was no sinister subversion of democracy by the Trump campaign.

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No subtle spinning there. They are desperately whacking the dead horse as hard as they can.

But again, the danger of their perverted worldview is not solely in all the spinning and dancing and yodeling of their critical theory battle cry.

The danger is in how their postmodernist worldview infects everything else, especially reporting on the real news (which they eventually get around to.)

On the front page, lower down, there is

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Hmmm. I follow the economic news pretty closely. What bad economic news was there out of the US on Friday? I don't recall anything.

Sure, I am deeply concerned about the run up of the national debt but hardly anyone else is and it barely gets covered in the media. Sure, we are going to have another recession anywhere from six to thirty-six months from now. But that isn't new news. So what was the negative economic news on Friday. Follow the link to the article and the headline changes from a focus on bad news in the US and Europe to Global Stocks Fall as Pessimism Continues. Its a global thing, not a US thing. Almost feels like they were compelled to spin at least something negative on the front page with which to tar Trump.

But still, what was the negative news in the US?

Global markets mainly fell on Monday, setting the stage for a lower opening on Wall Street as investors digested a spate of bad news from the United States and Europe.

Japan led the decline, though stocks fell broadly across Asia. The downturn carried over into European markets, but some indexes shed their losses through the day. Futures that allow investors to bet on the direction of the American stock market suggested that Wall Street would fall when trading started.

Chinese officials over the weekend signaled their eagerness to strike a deal with the Trump administration to bring the trade war between the two countries to an end — the sort of thing that has sometimes cheered markets in the past. But investors on Monday were still grappling with a signal from the United States on Friday that the world’s biggest economy faces the threat of falling into recession.

Ahh. We are getting close. There was something on Friday that signaled a recession. Going to that link, we get to Stocks Fall as Bond Market Flashes a Recession Warning. OK, that is real news. Not that the markets are down (or up). They are always down or up. The news is the yield-curve inversion.

The bond market smells a recession. On Friday, stock investors caught a whiff, too.

Economic forecasters and Wall Street traders have been watching for months as interest rates on long-term United States government bonds have dropped toward the rates on short-term debt.

Investors normally demand higher yields to buy longer-term bonds, and when those long-term yields decline it can signal a slowdown in economic growth.

On rare occasions, long-term yields can actually fall below yields on short-term bonds — a “yield curve inversion” in the parlance of the markets. Such unusual occurrences have preceded every recession over the last 60 years.

And it happened on Friday.

The inversion followed a sharp decline on yields on long-term Treasury bonds this week after the Federal Reserve decided on Wednesday to leave interest rates unchanged and signaled that it was unlikely to raise rates through the end of 2019.

But a round of dour economic data from Europe actually pushed the measure into inverted territory. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note tumbled to 2.44 percent Friday, its lowest level since January 2018. That was just below the 2.45 percent yield on three-month Treasury bills.

Now that is real news, interesting news and it did happen on Friday. And I missed it.

Why? Because it isn't particularly predictive, as the article goes on to point out.

There are many different ways to measure the yield curve. On Wall Street, many analysts look at the difference between yields on two-year and 10-year Treasury notes, which has not yet inverted.

But research from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco has cited the yield difference between three-month Treasury bills and 10-year Treasury notes — which inverted Friday — as the most reliable predictor of recession risk.

Traders in the stock market picked up on the downbeat signal. The S&P 500 had been climbing despite a recent drop in bond yields, effectively shrugging off the decline as further evidence that the Fed would keep rates low for the foreseeable future. Keeping rates low has been a good thing for stocks over the past 10 years.

But on Friday, the S&P 500 fell 1.9 percent, as stock market investors grew concerned about the outlook for economic growth. It was the second-worst drop for the market this year. The Nasdaq composite index fell 2.5 percent.

Experts on interpreting the predictive power of the yield curve cautioned that a single day of an inverted yield curve doesn’t necessarily mean the economy will tumble into recession.

Campbell Harvey, a Duke University finance professor whose research first showed the predictive power of the yield curve in the mid-1980s, stressed that an inversion must last, on average, three months before it can credibly be said to be sending a clear signal. If that does occur, history shows that the economy will fall into a recession over the next nine to 18 months.

But even with the yield curve’s track record for predicting recessions, Professor Harvey emphasized that there was no such thing as certainty in economic forecasting.

“A model is just a model,” he said. “It’s not an oracle. It helps us forecast the future, but it might at any point fail.”

So the actual expert on this says that the yield curve needs to be inverted for three months before it begins to serve as a valid signal. The NYT leverages a 0.1% inversion for a single day into an article on an anticipated recession and then into proclaimed bad US economic news on its front page. Talk about a mountain out of a molehill.

You can't help but feel they needed something negative on the front page to counter all the positive Trump news and this is what they came up with. So on the very day they ought to be rebuilding their brand reputation for truthful and quality reporting, they are still scrabbling around the monkey cage hurling feces.

We need a functioning and credible fourth estate. It is hard to see any signs that we will be moving back to one anytime soon.