Making a little data dashboard for my website and the second row here, I dunno, the last year and a half are kind of wild.
Mike Konczal
@mtkonczal.bsky.social
Econ person. VP of Policy and Research, @economicsecurityproject.org. Former NEC. #Rstats, Team Macro, dad, Chicago Guy. newsletter.mikekonczal.com
But it's different now that I'm poor (from child care) and aging.
Good time to plug Factory Settings, a Substack about the actual challenges of launching the CHIPs Act by those who did it. (Fairly certain this wasn't a constraint.) www.factorysettings.org
Factory Settings | Substack
How to update the default settings of government, by former CHIPS Program Office leadership. Click to read Factory Settings, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.
factorysettings.org
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 3w agoTrump on the CHIPS Act: "If you weren't transgender, you didn't qualify. So they'd get the money, they'd look all over for transgender people to run the company."
It's very weird to not center a win on an issue you are getting clobbered on.
Sahil Kapur@sahilkapur.bsky.social · 4w ago• Trump says he “will not sign” the housing bill to “protest” failure of SAVE act. • He also says he won’t veto—it passed with over 90% support in both House and Senate; it becomes law tomorrow if he does nothing. • Rare affordability W that Republicans wanted to celebrate.
New post: I think I've finally gotten my AI process as a policy and economics researcher in place, and between HTML dives into research, git diffs on edits, and elaborate rehearsals on arguments, I wanted to share it all with you here. /1 newsletter.mikekonczal.com/p/the-econom...
What I’ve Been Doing With AI so Far in 2026
Learning git to escape the permanent underclass.
newsletter.mikekonczal.com
Go read Mike’s piece if you haven’t already: open.substack.com/pub/mikekonc...
Kevin Warsh’s Press Conference Collides Into 30 Years of Michael Woodford
The new Fed chair argued that the Fed should stop reflecting markets back at themselves. Forgotten debates show how this leads to confusing, indeterminate results.
open.substack.com
This feels a lot like the indeterminacy problem that @mtkonczal.bsky.social wrote about last week. It’s not clear to me how a price stability pledge can reduce inflation risks without the Fed explaining how exactly it intends to do that.
Nick Timiraos@nicktimiraos.bsky.social · last mo.Kevin Warsh won't say whether the Fed should entertain a rate hike this month, but he argued inflation risks have already eased on his watch. That's proof, he says, that markets grasp his price-stability pledge without being told the Fed's next move. www.wsj.com/economy/cent...
Team Macro data question: consensus view is that the January 2026 changes to the CES net birth/death model are *not* a driver of the recent increase in CES job numbers, correct? (Yes I know there's a webpage, yes I know I can point the AI at it, but I want to hear from all you brilliant people.)
Computer people: why doesn't VS Code allow for: git diff --word-diff in their git interface? Specifically the word-diff part. I understand people did not think IDEs would be used for long-form writing (by people who don't want new lines for each sentence) but it's a small add?
Slaughter belongs in the anti-canon, a decision so egregiously wrong it has zero precedential value and is self-discrediting. It is not a plausible reading of a constitutional ambiguity, it is constitutionalizing the structure of an autocracy.
As for Cook - like Learning Resources, the basic rule here is the UET doesn’t apply when business interests don’t want it to. That’s it.
I don’t have much to say about Slaughter, and honestly I think we do too much justice to the Roberts Court by treating its opinions like serious judicial reasoning. But I will say that it’s striking how openly the court treats congressional oversight as somehow antithetical to democratic government
OMFG. I cannot begin to describe my gasp at how Roberts & co decided to go all in on LOST CAUSE theory & insist that the Reconstruction Congress did Confederate sympathizer President Andrew Johnson wrong by attempting to keep him from destroying Reconstruction www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...
There are two ways to read this: The civil service is gone, or Slaughter is just a sloppy opinion by a Supreme Court on a mission.
Nick Bednar@nicholasbednar.bsky.social · last mo.One early comment: I am VERY concerned with the fact that the majority is seemingly not delineating between principal officers, inferior officers, or employees. (I've read the syllabus, I'm on page 5, and I did a quick CTRL-F). I don't know WHAT that means yet, but it can't be good.
Hmmm. Claude Code in the terminal is unmatched but I feel Gemini is my go-to for web browser questions.
Real cunning of history that Ruy Teixeira, a Maoist during their joint NAM days, is now at AEI while John Judis, never quite as doctrinaire a leftist, is a member of DSA. johnbjudis.substack.com/p/can-the-de...
Can the Democratic Party become Democratic Socialist?
Socialism, DSA, and the Recent Elections
johnbjudis.substack.com
Morning thoughts on the substance of the ROAD Act and the politics of Trump opposing it. newsletter.mikekonczal.com/p/a-good-hou...
A Good Housing Bill and Trump's Bad Affordability Politics
Signing even a symbolic housing bill would buy Trump some breathing room. The ROAD Act is much more substantive than that.
newsletter.mikekonczal.com
John Roberts' Constitution forbids any attempt to proactively ameliorate racial discrimination and racial inequality, but permits open racial discrimination as long as there is a facially neutral explanation available, even if it isn't remotely plausible. This, my friends, is "Colorblindness."
I'm not keeping up as much as I should, is there a general macro consensus (real) consumer spending is slowing, and was slowing even before Iran?
Chris Hughes did a really great consideration of Alan Greenspan for us. The obits all say he was a libertarian who left the market to its own devises. No! He deliberately used government to reward financial innovation—and then used bailouts when it falled. This set the stage for financial crisis.
Greenspan Was the Creator of His Own Disaster - The American Prospect
The former Fed chair, who died at the age of 100 this week, deliberately engineered financial markets to be faster and looser. Then they blew up.
prospect.org
President Trump says he is cancelling the housing bill signing until Congress passes the SAVE America Act. The Truth Social post comes literally while the House GOP leadership is on stage for their weekly presser touting the bill.
1/ We're thrilled to announce that @mtkonczal.bsky.social has been promoted to Vice President of Policy and Research at Economic Security Project. 🎉
Warsh was far more hostile to communications and expectations than I, well, expected. He brought up arguments debated in the 1990s through mid-00s; they are so taken for granted in academic macroeconomics his assault might blindside the consensus. 1/2 newsletter.mikekonczal.com/p/kevin-wars...
Kevin Warsh’s Press Conference Collides Into 30 Years of Michael Woodford
The new Fed chair argued that the Fed should stop reflecting markets back at themselves. Forgotten debates show how this leads to confusing, indeterminate results.
newsletter.mikekonczal.com
New: Fed governor Lisa Cook has spent more than $1 million defending herself in the wake of Trump's attempt to fire her, a filing shows. The Supreme Court could rule on her case as soon as today.
Trump bid to fire Fed's Lisa Cook cost her more than $1M in legal, security costs: Filing
A financial disclosure from Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook details large legal and security expenses
cnbc.com
Well deserved! R is, of course, essential for many statisticians and others across research fields (including my own work, every day) It is also one of the greatest open source software successes of all time, maintaining high standards and quality while enabling innovation for more than 25 years
The R Foundation@r-foundation.bsky.social · 2mo agoThe 2026 Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics has been awarded to the R Project. #RStats www.rousseeuwprize.org/2026
Great overview of what Ned, Becky and I were trying to accomplish with out housing report, and how it ideally lands in the current political landscape. (It was also a fun project to work with Ned too!)
Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff.bsky.social · 2mo agoA Roadmap for U.S. Housing Policy publiccomment.blog/p/a-roadmap-...
