The Daily Feather — Goya’s Black Paintings and the BLS’s Black Box

In 1819, aged 72, Spanish painter Francisco Goya moved into the Quinta del Sordo (“Deaf Man’s Villa”) on the outskirts of Madrid. Nearly deaf himself from bouts of illness earlier in life, Goya would spend his later years there increasingly closed off from the world and racked by paranoia, hopelessness, and anxiety. These feelings inspired him to paint fourteen murals on the home’s walls, which art historians now call his Pinturas Negras (“Black Paintings”) because of their dark palettes and bleak subject matter. The most well-known of the bunch is Saturn Devouring His Son, which is as bloody and disturbing as the title suggests. (If you aren’t familiar with this painting, Google it and imagine the mental state you’d have to be in to paint that on your dining room wall as Goya did, so it stares back at you each time you sit for a meal). Today, you can find Saturn and the other Black Paintings on display at Madrid’s Museo del Prado.

It was not black, but rather red, that markets saw following Friday’s jobs report release, which posted a better-than-expected gain of 256,000 compared to the 155,000 consensus. Headlines like “December Hiring Smashes Expectations” (Barron’s) and “U.S. Job Growth Ends the Year Strong” (New York Times) helped send major stock indices south by more than 1.5% and the 10-year yield north of 4.75% in Friday’s trading. The supposed good news of strong employment gains stoked fears that a hotter-than-desired economy would leave the Fed cutting rates less, not more.