We are Not Even Thinking About Thinking
At Least Until 2023
Crazy thoughts surface about 2023. So apparently they are thinking, but 2023 does not count.
That’s good, because interest rates will be nowhere near 3% in 2023.
How Press Conferences End
https://twitter.com/NorthmanTrader/status/1270800860738707463
Asset Bubble Business Doing Fine
https://twitter.com/NorthmanTrader/status/1270791904565891074
Clock is Ticking
Competition
Got Gold?
What is the Stock Market Pricing In?
Question Repeated
Got Gold?
Mish
You can relax a little by the knowledge that the ECB has nothing better, either. And Europe is stuck with that champagne socialist for ten years. By then, the revolution will be over.
There accrues no benefit to “us” from the misery of others.
If America back then had “nothing better, either,” Russians and Eastern Europeans would still be stuck under the Soviet boot. And the Chinese would still be starving trying to grow rice in Tibet, just becasue Mao had once said that Chinese people grow rice.
What’s unprecedented today, is there are no bright spots (Aside from Afghanistan, but the dupes seem to have been successfully indoctrinated enough to not recognize those guys are the true heirs to Jefferson et al. I do recognize they may be overdoing the whole revolution a generation thing a bit, but at least they’ve got the right idea….). Even once-were bright spots like Hong Kong and Singapore, are increasingly ran by and for nothing but Free Shit Army party members “making money of their homes,” and hence entirely dependent on totalitarian jackboots stealing every penny of that “money” from their ever dwindling populations of anyone bothering to try doing and creating something.
So Americans can’t simply look abroad at how much better things are working in country X, hence aspire to be like them, the way Russians/East Europeans and Pre Deng Chinese could wrt America. Since by now, the whole planet is nothing but a Soviet style wasteland, almost entirely devoid of any redeeming qualities whatsoever.
I read a great comment the other day by an investment guru…best I had read in a long time. Simple and profound.
“Math is math. Math is impervious to bullshit.”
Yellen’s brilliance was to raise FFR once by .25 percent and then retire. Powell’s mistake was to raise the FFR .25 percent once a quarter and tank the stock market. Once a year might have worked. We will never know. QEInfinity.
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I’m running 50% cash, 50% bullion and mining stocks this year….I’m up on the bullion and mining stocks for the year. That was my “genius” way of trying to hedge for the unknown…lol
You could have done a lot worse
Yep. Right now I’m up around 10% YTD while my friends still in the DJIA are down around 10%. I need the cash pile/reserves anyway for my small business even though I’d like to move the ratio a tad higher in bullion/mining stocks. I think Marc Faber said it best when he said that in times of stagflation that most everyone loses money, it’s just that some lose less than others.
We really are in the endgame of this huge ponzi scheme. It’s like the USSR in the 1980s, where everybody paying attention knew the system couldn’t last and the numbers were phony, yet they stayed the course anyway.
Last time we hit ZIRP it took the Fed seven years to raise rates. This time I fully expect they will never raise again, that it’s to be ZIRP or NIRP until the bitter end.
The American public needs to wake up because they took exactly the wrong lesson from 2008, that fraud doesn’t matter and the country will always be okay. To paraphrase Ving Rhames, not only is this not okay, it’s pretty far from okay.
A “new” tool? What?
These guys have always had a tool belt with nothing but hammers and all they see are millions of nails.
And they will keep right on knocking them down as things come apart at the seams.
If they were ever “thinking about thinking about” anything, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
You also need at least some traces of a brain, in order to be able to “think” about anything.
And even the tiniest traces of brain, precludes falling for the idiocy that any central bank can even possibly serve any useful purpose at all.
Ever hit black ice driving fast on the freeway? When you can feel juuuuussst a little slippage, and it makes you queasy. When the slightest twitch of the wheel or tap of the brake will unleash the laws of physics, and involve you in an episode of violence proportional to your mass and velocity.
When the only rational course of action is to surrender to fate.
This is where the fed is right now. There is no decision to even ponder. There is only clenching, and hoping we make it to another patch of dry road.
“A “new” tool? What?”
Maybe they mean a new Fed Chairman. 😉
Next up is a democrat House, Senate, and President!
I got gold.
How could it be worse?
UI
Deficit rose $100 billion in a single day lol which means NIRP has to happen and soon,ZIRP will never work in a world of monthly trillion dollar plus deficits.This year you’re knocking on the door of 35 tril in red ink……Trump is Amerika’ version of Mugabe!
The bubble saves pension and other retirement funds. I think everyone is missing the quandary the Fed and the economy are in. There is really no other way out. The Fed has to manage it until the economy gets back to positive growth.
“The Fed has to manage it until the economy gets back to positive growth.”
The Fed “managing” it, is exactly why there is no positive growth.
The more they “manage,” the lower the growth. That has been demonstrated enough times all over the world, that even the yahoo brigade still dumb and indoctrinated enough to fall for the nonsense that economic arguments somehow require empirical support, should be able to pick up on it by now.
For one, just as an example: Taking resources from potentially productive young working people, in order to hand it to old people no longer even attempting to do anything productive, is exactly how you ensure there will be no positive growth.
So you are blaming Covid on the Fed ? I understand the point you are making but this crisis wasn’t created by the Fed. And I’m among the ones that is accepting that Modern Monetary Theory was already here before Covid. It is being done by the Fed. Debt is getting monetized by a computer at the Fed and end up on their balance sheet. If you want to argue for a different system go ahead. I’m only focusing on what IS.
The problem younger people have is globalization of their labor market. Productivity doesn’t just happen in the United States anymore. But many of these same people voted in favor of candidates who supported globalization. There will be positive growth globally sooner than people think. And the US consumer will drive it. If the US consumer can’t make money from the stock market (including old people) then it’s a bigger problem. I realize the Fed created many of these “markets” but we are where we are. Covid’s fault is China’s not the Fed.
No one’s blaming Covid on the Fed, but this crisis WAS created by the Fed. Covid simply sped it up. By continuously blowing bubbles and supporting MORAL HAZARD, the Fed:
People who support the Fed are only interested in their stock portfolio and nothing else. Don’t BS about MMT and such. MMT, and all other acronyms are supposed to help people. What the Fed’s doing is socialism for the rich and nothing else.
“If the US consumer can’t make money from the stock market (including old people) then it’s a bigger problem”
????????
How do supposed one “make money from the stock market”????
Where do you think the money you ostensibly “make” comes from? Just thin air? Waved into existence by some yahoo at The Fed with a magic wand? The fungus growing on stock certificates?
Dude: Mindlessly printing Washington’s head on paper pieces, doesn’t create any new value. At all. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Instead, all it does, is redistribute value which has already been created by someone doing something productive: From those productives, and to those who benefit from the redistribution resulting from the money printing. The latter being those who “make money from the stock market.”
Every penny those guys “make”, first have to be confiscated from someone who earned it, by way of Fed debasement. Every single penny. Only once that is done, can it then be redistributed to some idle dunce who “owns stocks.”
There is no “growth” resulting from that. Just redistribution. As always, from productive people, to card carrying, and always oh-so self righteous, members of the Free Shit Army.
Blah Blah Blah. While I agree with most of what you write, most people know the system is hot air and play the game. If you get caught with holding then you are the bagholder. Is it a casino ? Yes. Is it unfair ? Yes. Do we really need all these people ? No. Do we have them ? Yes. Is anything meaningful going to change ? Nope. Computers at the Fed and central banks around the world run the monetary system now. Welcome to Modern Monetary Theory. There is no way the world can productively keep 7+ billion people productive. It just isn’t possible with all the automation and machinery we have. This isn’t the agrarian or industrial revolution.
“There is no way the world can productively keep 7+ billion people productive. It just isn’t possible with all the automation and machinery we have. This isn’t the agrarian or industrial revolution.”
Again, WTH??????
The specific reason, why the world can provide opportunity for 7 billion people to be sufficiently productive to feed themselves, is exactly “automation and machinery.”
The world could NOT feed 7 billion back when it was agrarian. Hence why people back then starved, despite there only being one billion of them.
Output, which is what people need in order to avoid starvation and to stay alive, are positively rising in both capital and labor. The more of either, the more output. Hence the more people the earth can support.
If the world can not, as of now, support 7 billion people, it is because there is too little capital. Too little automation. Too few machines. Not the other way around.
And the reason why there is too little capital to go around for all these laborers, is that the savings which would, I a free society, have gone into investment in productive capital have, instead, been pilfered away and handed out, to be consumed , as in not saved, not invested , to the idle produce-nothings “making money in the stock market.” Or “off their home.” Or any other such utterly non productive, idle pastime.
Every penny “made” by any person by way of any such mechanism, first have to be taken from those who earned it, and who would otherwise have saved some of it, and hence made some of it available to be invested productively. Into increasing the capital stock. Such that more people could be supported. Instead of their earnings being confiscated by debasement, only to be handed to idle nothings, in return for nothing more than illiterate, uncritical and mindless support for the theft rackets which is all “The System”, and any component of it, both is and ever has been.
My point is exactly that. What are 7B people supposed to do when automation and massive scaling provides everything ? I think we agree on a lot of how we see things but solutions are another matter. Do you think that every adult in the world can be gainfully productively doing something ? I really don’t. So what is the solution for governments around the world ? The painful truth is there is no good solution for this.
“What are 7B people supposed to do when automation and massive scaling provides everything ?”
The same stuff people did when farm automation rendered mass farm employment a thing of the past: Find something else to do with all their newfound spare time.
“Do you think that every adult in the world can be gainfully productively doing something ?”
Of course. Why wouldn’t they? They have so far. Why should they just stop, just because they now have access to power tools making finding something gainful to do easier than ever before?
“So what is the solution for governments around the world ?”
To not exist. Or at least very close to that, such that they simply get out of the way and stay there.
Your premise in all this seems to be entirely backwards. Assuming some modicum of freedom and free markets: What determines how realistic it s for someone to find sufficient gainful employment, is how many hours he has to work, in order to essentially feed himself. If he can do that, he has succeeded. He doesn’t need more gainful employment than that.
Back in agrarian, and even more so pre-agrarian, times, just doing that (feeding oneself), was at least a full time job. More than full time in years of drought etc., which resulted in people failing at that test and hence starving.
As technology improves, people exist further and further from this very minimum. Meaning, it takes a greater and greater upset, before they starve. People nowadays, don’t need to do much at all, in order to be sufficiently gainfully employed to get by until tomorrow. Then, if they want more than the minimum, they still have almost every hour of the day to chip away at finding something else to do, in addition to the ever fewer minutes of work they need to find, in order not to starve.
It’s never the case, again assuming some modicum of freedom, that better technology somehow makes it harder to get by. Instead, all technological improvment does, is make getting by easier and easier. Leading to less and less risk of anyone falling through the cracks sufficiently to no longer finding enough gainful work to meet his caloric needs.
The same holds through for shelter and other basics. Only difference being, once you get to shelter: In limit case totalitarian financialized dystopias built exclusively for the benefit of useless leeches, there are NO modicum of freedom. As in, none whatsoever. Instead, official policy is specifically to try to ensure that as many as possible are homeless, and that members (for now) of the ever dwindling share who aren’t, need to work harder and harder in order to obtain something as simple as a roof over their head.
But there is nothing natural about that. Like all manufactured goods, shelter gets cheaper and cheaper every year, as the technology required to build it improves. No exceptions.
Only the massive, never before experienced in all of totalitarian history, program of crass theft; undertaken to ensure the utterly useless garbagepiles making up the FIRE rackets, get to live large off of the work of others; keeps alive the illusion that houses are somehow hard to come by, and require ever more work to obtain every year.
Fix that, by gutting government and arbitrary “laws” enacted solely for the benefit of theft-beneficiary leeches; and every year, year in year out, more and more people will be able to do enough gainful, productive work, to get by on.
Things simply cannot be any other way, since what people need to live, is captured by economic output. Increases in capital stock and improvement in technology, increases the amount of output a labor force can produce. Which enables more people to get by. Not less.
Only the current policy of robbing people for the benefit of Free Shit Army leeches living off of artificially pumped up “assets,” and indeed robbing them at a rate greater than the one at which technology improves and capital is increased, is what sustains the economically otherwise impossible illusion, that improvements in technology and capital position, somehow makes it harder to find enough work to get by.
Obviously the fed got a new tool in their bag, a thoughtful hammer.
To answer your question,Yes!