The American economy gained 661,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate declined from 8.4 percent to 7.9 percent. Obviously this performance can’t be judged by our usual standards, but when you put it on a chart it’s obvious that we’re no longer making up very many of the jobs lost in March and April:

Unsurprisingly, earnings were flat. In fact, accounting for inflation, earnings fell about 1 percent. I’ll have more details later in the morning.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through October 1. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

The catastrophe in Argentina has turned out to be even worse than we thought. Health authorities discovered about 3,000 COVID-19 deaths that hadn’t been recorded, which sent the overall death toll rocketing upward. Meanwhile, authorities in France are “considering” a new lockdown but apparently need to ponder the data a little further first. I don’t get this. France’s case rate has been soaring for the past two months and their death rate started increasing three weeks ago. What more do they need to know?

Holy shit:

As too many Americans have done this year, @potus & I are quarantining at home after testing positive for COVID-19. We are feeling good & I have postponed all upcoming engagements. Please be sure you are staying safe & we will all get through this together.

— Melania Trump (@FLOTUS) October 2, 2020

I guess this puts to rest any questions about future debates.

Snark and politics aside, I wish them a speedy recovery. I don’t want Trump as my president, and obviously there’s some irony here given the terrible job he’s done of managing the pandemic, but I don’t wish the coronavirus on him or anyone else.

This has been a bit of a dispiriting week, so let’s mark its approaching end with a little bit of ordinary beauty to wash the bad taste out of our mouths. How about a pretty little buttercup? Will that help?

The Wall Street Journal regurgitates concerns about growing debt today, promising 14 charts that tell the story. It’s a weird collection of charts, though, one that seems almost determined not to show debt levels in their simplest form. So here they are. First, corporate debt:

This does not look especially scary. Now here’s household debt:

Again, not very scary. In the case of both corporate and household debt, it doesn’t do to just show raw levels or BBB bond issuance or median income. The simplest view is to look at total debt as a percentage of something that accounts for the fact that everything is growing, not just debt. In the case of corporations, debt-to-equity levels are the usual way of gauging things. In the case of households, debt as a percentage of income is the most revealing. Both are at historically low levels.

In the case of corporate debt, you could also look at debt as a percentage of GDP, and that does indeed show steady growth over the past few years—although it’s basically just following the trendline of the past few decades. Still, that might be a modest warning sign.

Overall, though, it’s hard to see debt as a huge problem at the moment. The one exception might be state-level government debt, although that’s declined over the past few years from a post-recession high of 27 percent of GDP back down to a more manageable 17 percent of GDP. That headroom will come in handy, since tax revenues have cratered during the COVID-19 pandemic and Republicans in Congress seemingly have no desire to help out.

Bottom line: There are lots of things to worry about these days, but overall debt levels probably don’t make the top ten. What does make the top ten, as usual, is assistance aimed specifically at people whose incomes have been hit the hardest by COVID-19. We should worry a lot more about that and a lot less about economy-wide debt levels.

Personal income dropped again in August:

To provide a bit of context, I’ve included the trendline for income through the end of 2019 and then extended it through August. It shows that income in August is about what it would have been if there had been no pandemic and no special assistance. When we get the September numbers we’ll know if income is finally dropping below the trendline or if it levels out.

Consumer spending shows exactly the opposite trend. It dropped significantly when the pandemic hit and has been rising ever since. But it’s still below the trendline, meaning that we’re all spending less than we would be if the pandemic had never hit.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through September 30. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Wednesday is crash day for me, so I’ve been asleep for the past five hours. Naturally, then, I’m curious: Has President Trump managed to denounce the Proud Boys yet? Let’s take a look:

Q Mr. President, can you explain what you meant last night when you said that the Proud Boys should “stand back and stand by”?

THE PRESIDENT: I don’t know who the Proud Boys are. I mean, you’ll have to give me a definition, because I really don’t know who they are. I can only say they have to stand down, let law enforcement do their work….But again, I don’t know who Proud Boys are. But whoever they are, they have to stand down. Let law enforcement do their work.

Nope, no denouncement there. Just a feeble claim that he’s never heard of a widely known violent neo-fascist group whose members zealously support him. (Trump has played this game for years.) This has prompted a few Republicans to criticize Trump, but most of them are still remaining silent. On the other hand, apparently Jake Tapper has finally had enough:

After Trump spox @TimMurtaugh kept talking over him, @jaketapper boots him off his program, saying, “You know what? I’m not Chris Wallace. Thank you, Tim!” pic.twitter.com/bL0KvLAs3p

— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) September 30, 2020

34 days to go.

Today the Lakers take on the Miami Heat in the first game of the NBA finals, and what better way to mark the occasion of their return to greatness than a tribute to the Showtime Lakers of the 1980s? These statues of Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul Jabbar, along with several others, are installed outside of Staples Center, where the Lakers should be playing tonight. Instead, in these perilous times, they’ll be playing in the Disney World bubble.

Even for Donald Trump, it was a surreal moment last night when he refused to condemn violent white supremacist and militia groups. “Give me a name,” he demanded. “The Proud Boys,” Joe Biden answered. But instead of condemning them, Trump gave them a big boost: “Proud Boys—stand back and stand by.” It was an obvious call to rally these agitators, who have assaulted people in the streets from New York City to Portland, for possible post-election violence, and they couldn’t have been happier about it:

Within minutes, members of the group were posting in private social media channels, calling the president’s comments “historic.” In one channel dedicated to the Proud Boys on Telegram, a private messaging app, group members called the president’s comment a tacit endorsement of their violent tactics. In another message, a member commented that the group was already seeing a spike in “new recruits.”

It’s now been 12 hours since the debate, and so far Republicans seem to be either staying quiet about this or trying to twist Trump’s words to make them sound harmless. “I heard it differently,” said Chris Christie. And with that, a party that has shamed itself for the past four years falls even further into the abyss.