Here are a few Tweets that caught my eye this weekend.
Weekend Reading Quick Takes
“You can’t print money to create a thriving economy, you need real productivity”
US Manufacturing Productivity
Foreclosure in Dallas
How to Pick a Watermelon
Buffett’s Cash
Zoomers can retire on half of a Bitcoin. Yeah, right.
Yield Curve Inversion
Military Overreach
Apple Buybacks
Credit Card Delinquencies
Sticky Inflation
Chump Change Dividends
“You people are insane…this is chump change compared to some Oil & Gas stocks”
Buffet would have even more cash if he did not cash out of airline stocks (or at least kept Delta) during the pandemic. It’s not that BH sold. It’s that they sold too early.
“Apple has bought back $625 billion in stock over the past 10 years, which is greater than the market cap of 492 companies in the S&P 500.”
How long until Apple owns all its shares?
That $100,000 figure for Boomers is quite ridiculously low, esp considering that the Shadowstats 11%-15% inflation REAL rate range – – which will chew through it quite quickly…that is, unless those Boomers wake up and SELL ASSETS quickly (Homes, other crap).
link to shadowstats.com
The Fed has lost control. The markets will determine the rate (likely going up) until things become manageable again. This will not happen any time soon.
Speaking of AAPL…
Apple has repurposed the meaning of beat and raise. It used to mean you were crushing it. Now it means you beat on buybacks and raised your dividend.
When Starbucks sales are down, its time to worry.
Not to mention Apple’s sales declined by $4 BILLION DOLLARS.
Buffets surging tax pile is a terrible indicator as it has a decade of false positive going into 2020. Interesting nonetheless.
So does the productivity numbers include all jobs including Government Jobs? If so what is a productive government job producing?
Government jobs produce a total windfall….
the day after retirement.
Low interest rates are very bad for productivity growth.
Giving higher dividends using excess cash is good for your shareholders but does nothing for management’s stock options.
—is the complete and total lack of productivity growth over the last 15+ years
Don’t worry Joey!
Printing press is on full time mode and stock market is growing perfectly well.
Every time Buffett hoards record amounts of cash as the Fed raises rates an epic stock crash happens within the next 12 months, like it did in 2000, 2008, 2020 and now….
Cash record hoarding since 2013 – since then record holding every year till 2022.
There’s a recession in the future but the Fed will likely wait until it happens before lowering rates..They are always late to hike, and late to cut. Asset bubbles always end the same 2001, 2008/09 are instructive..Truthfully the commercial real estate market was bailed out by the Fed directly after the global financial crisis in 2008. They still haven’t unwound all of that support completely. Commercial real estate is a completel shitshow because companies have figured out they don’t need commercial real estate as much as they use to.
I suspect Mish just reposted whomever’s chart about Buffett, but crap is that sensationalist.
Lets see how it looks adjusted for CPI, which if anything understates true cost of living inflation. Just adjusting for CPI renders the chart almost flat. Buffett has been able to keep his liquidity, inflation adjusted, somewhat close to even.
Yes, inflation has been a very big problem during the Marxist Biden regime, and it was worse than CPI was suggesting for decades before that. See the Boskin Commission fraud in the middle 1990s.
The dip in 2021-22ish has a name. Occidental Petroleum. Its not a conspiracy, it was widely published.
Beyond that, Buffett has been very open in saying that there are very few acquisitions Berkshire could make that are big enough to move the needle, yet also small enough to get approved by the crooks / regulators in Washington DC.
Buffett has the political connections to ward off the crooks (his father was a Congressman). Buffett’s succesors will probably find out they need to bribe members of Congress and political regulatos to avoid the fate of so many other successful companies who didn’t.
I like Tracy’s comment.
Got oil?
Me too. Something useful there for everyone.
These Bitcoin predictions just keep getting better and better. How long before one of these dullards predicts one Bitcoin hitting a trillion or quadrillion? What about a gazillion million million? Maybe I just don’t understand Bitcoin. Guess I’ll just have to “have fun staying poor”…ho hum…..
How long? Until the tulips die and the music stops.
Apple buybacks are huge, but one thing is different: companies aren’t borrowing to finance buybacks as during the greatest counterfeiting experiment a.k.a ZIRP.
See how morale can improve?
Apple’s buybacks reflect a lack of innovation since Steve Job’s death (or since he stepped away a year or so before his death?).
The Apple cult continues to pay innovator prices for moving the camera from the front to the back (or vice versa). That tells us Apple consumers are not very discerning.
Since Apple cannot innovate without Jobs, they have no internal need for that cash. It makes more sense to return it to shareholders than to waste it on yet another corporate boondoggle. Have to give the new CEO credit for keeping his own ego in check, many CEOs fail at this
You should also understand that a lot of stock buybacks are done for tax purposes. Companies can return money via dividends or via buybacks. Dividends are taxed today in one manner. Buy backs are taxed in the future (when you sell share) at different rates (presumably lower since you control when you sell your shares).
Also, I believe companies can use pretax money to do buy backs. Apple notoriously has a lot of over seas trapped money it doesn’t want to bring home because of high corp taxes. Buy backs are a way around this.
This Steve Jobs cult is also getting old. Since it’s become known he resisted making iphone/ipod API public, the greatest source of iphone success so far, and great revenue generator.
“Warren Buffett’s surging cash pile”
Yeah, big, red 2024?
But, the graph censors big, red 2016, big red 2017, big red 2018, big red etc. etc.
The productivity graph screams stagflation on the way. Now, I understand that there aren’t enough electricians, nurses, sawmill/lumber workers, aircraft mechanics….the list is growing. Try getting someone skilled to work on your house or car when they can pick and choose jobs based on how lucrative they are.