Mar 21, 2023 2:13:06 GMT c said:

Because when you talk about the treasury printing money or US deficit these are political matters :dunno:

And if you want to talk about private debt the average person may be a few thousand in debt. With buy, borrow and die, billionaires are billions in debt. Even if all of the middle and lower class stopped using debt, very little would change.

Fun numbers:  The top 1% holds 4.6% of all debt.  The bottom 50% have only 36% of the debt.  Want to reduce debt you are not going to do shit starting at the bottom when the top 10% hold 30% of the debt in the US.

The Deficit is a Political matter
Treasury printing money is NOT a political matter

It is however a potential response to poor political decisions.
Government spending has a direct impact on inflation.


None of what I have written in my last 6 or 7 posts is anything about government policy.
Now I am going to start.

The lack of will of all politicians to oversee hard economic times is leading to the timebomb in the US financial system.
The system is broken and nobody will have an honest conversation with people about how economics work.
Doesn't matter whether you are Communist, Capitalist or a Theocracy there are certain inescapable economic truths as there are unavoidable laws of physics.

The US Treasury is part of the administration, which is a political matter as the Treasurer and key positions are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

Also any change to the fiscal system in the US needs to be driven by laws otherwise you remain in the status quo. People will not just change their behavior. Banks are driven profit so they create and sell debt. Investors are driven by profits, so they buy debt to profit from it. Wages are low so people need to rely more and more on debt to buy houses, cars or pay for medicine.

Changing any of this will require changing laws, as economic planning has always been driven by laws. And in the US, passing of laws is political, as is managing fiscal policy. We know people are driven by self-interest. Modifying this behavior needs laws.

Also given multiple theories of economics exists, even following which branch of economics to follow is influenced by political beliefs. And selecting one to follow will depend on who is selecting it, which again, on a country level in the US, requires Congress and the administration making it political.

You expect everyone to magically change their behavior but that has never happened. Let's say the bottom 90% of America does pay off all their debt. Banks will take that cash and and lend it to the top 10% so they can buy more assets, or invest themselves in more assets. Then they will sell the top 10% that debt as an investment, which other banks will also buy as an investment themselves. What changes?

LMAO. This just popped up on my youtube.  This is a quick survey into what iNCY is talking about for the last two years across a bunch of threads.  Covers how we got into this current mess by the people involved in it, and why we are fucked now.  As if you even been remotely following our debate on this, it is very disturbing to see just how bad things were, and how little they really thought about the long term effects of their actions.

And kind of shows the middle ground between me and iNCY .  By not really thinking about the consequences of policies the feds were using, and how Wall Street would react, the feds from Obama to Biden made bad decision after bad decision that then fucked the American people and led to the current inequality problems.   

Makes it pretty clear too quantitative easing and stimulus payments all backfired horribly giving short term effects and long term harm to normal people, as the banks and investors slowly funneled the money to themselves.

Also related to the broader talk, we judge the economy often by the jobs market. Well it is turning out that many of the US jobs are added, but hiring managers have no intention of filling them. WSJ looked into it, and of 1000 hiring managers a third admitting to having jobs they do not plan to fill, and 25% having jobs listed for more than 4 months. Hiring managers say they are up incase someone quits to fill the job fast or simply to placate workers who feel overworked.  

This holds, the US labor market may not be as good as it looks overall, and all sector data would be unreliable and invalid.

www.wsj.com/articles/that-plum-job-listing-may-just-be-a-ghost-3aafc794

I can tell you this is 100%.

There are jobs, but they aren't being filled by choice. I have long delays on my day to day purchases for work and it's always delayed at the 'factory' level. Most of these factories are in the US and citing material shortages, but also labor shortages. From my POV both seem like a way for the company to increase their profit margin. Keeping both lean so they can create supply and demand. For instance one brand I am having an issue with is called Rosemount. These are all made from one factory. You can purchase through different distributors, but they are all made in one place so the 'factory' knows they have us by the short and curlies, because they know they are the only swinging dicks who make these and because these are a spec'd in item, we have little to no recourse.

Conversely, you have the 'factory' and other jobs saying 'no one wants to work'. Meanwhile, we have people screaming there's no jobs. We've spoken about this before at length. Which is true? Probably a little of Column A and a Little of Column B though I don't understand it from the employee POV. I sure as hell couldn't afford not to work.

In the US the top corporations have incredible amounts of stuff in warehouses leading to a storage shortage in the US for smaller companies, and very high rates get storage space. Small companies basically cannot afford to have excess supply now and large companies seem to think at some time in the future they can unload their hoards for massive profit, rather than discount it to clear it all out.

And companies simply will not pay enough to attract people to fill openings. People are crying no one wants to work, when Amazon is paying people a few dollars more to work as robots in a warehouse. There is no problem with people not wanting to work in the US, the problem is people will not take shit jobs over better jobs. Also if you expect people to keep working for you, you need to give them reasonable wages or they will quit to work for someone who will pay them more.

Interest rates up .25%. I can hear investors screaming right now.

This is an interesting one, with the bank issues the Fed has decided to release capital, so while it is raising interest rates...





So much for Quantitive Tightening...

So US is on a path to possible declare the FDIC, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Federal Reserve and SEC unconstitutional. Case moving through the courts that will determine if the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is constitutional or not. The logic used in this case, also applies to all of the other economic groups as they are all independently funded outside of Congressional appropriations.

House GOP already stating they will not fund the CFPB, and likely will move to not fund the rest of these groups as they seek to move towards greater deregulation, and move everything to Congress where whether these groups exist or not, and their powers, will be up for congressional debate annually.

slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/03/trump-judges-debating-crash-economy.html

Deutsche Bank at risk of collapse today.

Also now UBS is twice the size of Switzerland's GDP, and employs 5% of the country's population. They fail and the risk is cataphoric and would destroy the country. US investors pushing for it to be broken up.

And the trend is emerging that countries with one or two top banks are at extreme risk now as if those banks go under so does the country and potentially their economic allies too.  Also many are far too big to bailout by the countries that host them.

Mar 24, 2023 15:51:08 GMT c said:

cataphoric

TIL a new word.

Wow that is a real word too. TIL.

Lobbys out in force and corporate dems are demanding this last rate hike be the last. Keep threatening that millions of jobs will lost. And while jobs are being cut in tech, interviews with people are saying tech is completely filled with redundancy and people were being paid without a job to do outside of waiting for a project that never comes.

Mar 22, 2023 15:35:31 GMT iron maiden said:

I can tell you this is 100%.

There are jobs, but they aren't being filled by choice. I have long delays on my day to day purchases for work and it's always delayed at the 'factory' level. Most of these factories are in the US and citing material shortages, but also labor shortages. From my POV both seem like a way for the company to increase their profit margin. Keeping both lean so they can create supply and demand. For instance one brand I am having an issue with is called Rosemount. These are all made from one factory. You can purchase through different distributors, but they are all made in one place so the 'factory' knows they have us by the short and curlies, because they know they are the only swinging dicks who make these and because these are a spec'd in item, we have little to no recourse.

Conversely, you have the 'factory' and other jobs saying 'no one wants to work'. Meanwhile, we have people screaming there's no jobs. We've spoken about this before at length. Which is true? Probably a little of Column A and a Little of Column B though I don't understand it from the employee POV. I sure as hell couldn't afford not to work.

The ideas that there are no jobs is garbage, I have travelled all over the place recently and there are unfilled vacancies everywhere.
It's more of a case that people's job expectations and skill sets are not relative to the market.

Just because 20,000 people did degrees in communications, doesn't mean there's going to be 20,000 jobs out there.
We are making a mistake in not right sizing college degrees to the reality of the workforce.

I have mentioned before that they should encourage companies to take on cadets and train them at their tax deductible cost, that way the people match the market.
They employ you and you do one year of grunt work, then they send you to college and you work in your holidays. Once qualified you have to work for the company for a couple of years or inherit all your college debt.

The largest group of jobs that needs workers, across almost all industries, is unskilled labor. College is meaningless in that regard. College helps with communication skills and problem solving they can bring to these jobs, but people will take anyone who shows up at this point.

Also need highly skilled workers, but to get them we need to completely redo education as the math gate is the block. Science generally needs Calc I, Calc II, Multivariate Calc and true Linear Algebra to start. Generally kids entering college was pre-calc at the most. Getting these four classes into grade school will require making serious cuts though as you will need 45 minutes extra a day for basically 8 years to sequence through them. But getting more people in this pool is what countries will need to do if they want to do cutting edge innovation or manufacturing.

Cadet system will not work for BA students in the US due to our labor laws, and MA and PhD students it simply is not feasible for, since you are also working for the school full-time. Generally master and PhD students start arcing for their jobs while in college though, matching research to companies. Usually they also intern when they are all but dissertation. I know MetaMetrics took two of my classmates after their defended.

Also the cadet system for highly skilled labor would assume someone knows at 18 what they want to do in their 30's, as PhDs are 10 years of college usually. Then usually two to four more as a postdoc.  That is a long ass time to be paying someone to train up for a future job, you are not even sure they will be able to complete.

I'm talking about entry level positions, but don't let me stop you from going ahead and spouting nonsense.

The idea of hiring someone with an MA who had never worked is crazy. I'd prefer someone with a mix of experience and education.

I literally addressed them first. They do not need college. Take them in and train them from high school. No need to send them for college and put out 100k plus, just teach them the exact job skills they need.

MA's with no experience are usually from means or on scholarship. Otherwise to get funding you teach or research for your field. And to get qualified to do these you generally need to have experience outside of normal classes. No one wants to be taught by a former classmate, and research skills need to be learned somewhere.

Exception is business school, but the top students there intern every summer. A business student with no experience is a massive red flag. Little dude that was my roommate did Goldman and Bank of America as two of his, and he was passed up by the major firms when it came job time.


But changing the education system is almost impossible as the second you open it up, everyone will chime in, and everyone wants something different. We got here not because it is a the best system, but it was the best system we could get parents to accept. College came along the same way, but became a fight between different stakeholders with businesses moving away from defining objectively what they wanted, leading to more general education over technical education as those stakeholders were more vocal about what they wanted.

Reporting are whirling that the commercial real estate bubble's time is coming. Basically everything is over-inflated in value, backed by banks and not currently being used as many corporations cut costs by cutting their commercial office space and letting people work from home.

Market is at 20 trillion dollars and demand for this space is not likely to return any time soon.  Moreso if you mix in AI rapidly consuming the old office jobs.

Economist is concerned about greedflation, surprised that execs are squeezing every last dollar they can get (lol), worries that people will revolt against capitalism if it continues.

fortune.com/2023/04/05/end-of-capitalism-inflation-greedflation-societe-generale-corporate-profits/?showAdminBar=true

I been seeing this sort of story more and more. Major investors are getting concerned as the more core inflation rises the less discretionary spending people have, and entire sectors could start to fail in the near future.

They are also terrified this is turning a generation of kids into democratic socialists who will unionize and reverse the last few decades of tax cuts. As a start.

It's not 100% yet, but inflation might be the thing to finally kick the soda habit...

May 16, 2023 19:41:29 GMT @ness said:

It's not 100% yet, but inflation might be the thing to finally kick the soda habit...

You gotta move down to store brand first.

May 16, 2023 19:59:33 GMT Gyro LC said:

May 16, 2023 19:41:29 GMT @ness said:

It's not 100% yet, but inflation might be the thing to finally kick the soda habit...

You gotta move down to store brand first.

I might tap into my inner jugaloo with some Faygo again, but I'm trying to balance it out with more water as well.

I'll drink radiator water before I'll ever drink generic soda.

Most I do not find that bad. But would never drink generic cola. 

If you got a local walmart Ness their water flavor packs are pretty good if you did want to move off soda and some have caffeine.    

This is an interesting article about the UK

www.news.com.au/finance/economy/australian-economy/could-take-decades-horror-recession-warning-facing-australia-after-12-brutal-interest-rate-rises/news-story/08844abe567d06e1dd38f4756bbbe9f4

The UK has some unique challenges but I think this is where the world economy is heading. Interest rates don't hit a high enough percentage of the economy to drive a change in spending.
It hits a small percentage of the population devastatingly hard, but that's not enough.

As I keep saying, the issue is the money already on the system... Once you flood the bath, turning off the tap doesn't drop the water level.

BCC says no recession risk, just slow growth.  IMF says the same.

Bull market now in the US as most believe no recession here either due to steady job growth, consumer confidence and spending.

Growing concern about the high cost of debt.
Many companies became highly leveraged because money was cheap and the economy pumping, now the return is not there and rates keep climbing.

Similar issues for governments and institutions.
Inflation isn't shifting and there is not a hint of talk about rates dropping.

This is why Warren can crew want to start breaking up large businesses. Create competition which is a huge from overleveraging.

And inflation down in the US. By all real accounts Bidenomics working very well to bring down inflation and continue to grow the US post covid recovery in terms of jobs and GDP.  Still near historic low levels of unemployment.  Of course these are democrat jobs and democrat GDP so some claim record numbers are bad.

Investor who accurately predicted ‘08 housing crash bets $2.5 billion on 2023 Wall Street catastrophe

www.news.com.au/finance/economy/world-economy/investor-who-accurately-predicted-08-housing-crash-bets-25-billion-on-2023-wall-street-catastrophe/news-story/f3b5af9d1745323eb1860ddbd10487dd