Although famous for his business acumen, for Trump, numbers were not a fixed thing, “for him they were surprisingly, even magically elastic.” Elections, like bets, lie in the fickle hands of the Goddess of Wagering and as the aforementioned Axthelm wrote: "The Goddess must be appeased, soothed, tithed. She must never be affronted by statements hinting that a gambler has taken fate into his own firm grip."
The US economy has become hyper financialized, says Pal. If the S&P 500 goes down, employees are laid off. And, we all know that one of the Fed’s mandates is maximizing employment. “It's like nothing will last long because the Fed will not allow it to.”
Republicans and Democrats have identified a pocket they both agree on to pick to fund their spendapolloosa: cryptocurrency brokers. The Senate, at the last minute, figured it can raise $28 billion with a “large-scale increase in the requirements for crypto brokers and investors to report their transactions to the Internal Revenue Service.
A Charmin spokeswoman, when confronted by reporters at WBUR about shrinking the size of their toilet sheet squares, pulled an explanation out of her you-know-what, suggesting it was the result of "innovations" allowing “consumers to, basically, wipe their butts more efficiently.”
Of course, the singing “Crypto revolutionary” believes climate change is a government conspiracy to control us. It seems funny that a “peace & liberty advocate” would assume that government force provides the only answer to climate change, if there is such a thing.
Instead of getting the sweaty, intoxicated crowd home in under three hours, Clark County Commissioner Michael Naft told the LVRJ, “I think there were lots of departments and agencies that were taking notes and making sure that every situation was an opportunity to learn from.”
South African labor needs to employ more capital, but they can't because mining companies are afraid to provide the capital. These same companies need to open new mines as well, along with providing sustaining capital investments in the existing mines. But, why would they, they're not sure who's going to own the mines?
Back in the days of quasi-Laissez Faire, a pandemic would have created plenty of opportunities for the Zells of the world, but, as Grant explains, “Hotels, malls and other properties have suffered enormous declines in revenue. But few owners have been forced to sell at steep discounts thanks to government stimulus programs and the Federal Reserve’s easy money policy which kept a lid on foreclosure.”
This generation of skilled labor was neutered long ago when parents insisted their kids go to college so they can get office jobs. At the same time, in population centers, neighborhood associations band together to stop any new development in their backyards. Especially any proposal for affordable homes.
Since when does forecasting a couple rate bumps two years from now be considered hawkish to the point of making the dollar pop and gold flop?
The government’s COVID mandate calling for lenders to cease and desist if borrowers didn’t pay expanded the market for this bit of accounting trickery. The market, forgetting that real estate sometimes falls in value, “viewed them as a relatively safe bet.”
My friend echoed those comments, talking about how cool the scene was. Playboy had a booth, there were ladies walking about dressed only in paint. To someone who has attended plenty of stodgy gold and natural resource conferences, not to mention Austrian economics confabs, the Miami happening sounds like a Grateful Dead concert by comparison.
Supply chain breaks and increased demand are not inflation. A more clear-eyed view is from Peter Boockver, who wisely looks at price inflation, first in services, and then in goods. In an interview with Real Vision’s Ed Harrison, Boockvar said, “When it comes to services, take out energy, so call it core services, over the last 20 years, it's averaged an annual gain of 2.7%.”
According to Bianco, the plumbers working at the Eccles Building don't understand their own plumbing. In September 2019 when the repo market blew up, Powell referred to it as a technical plumbing problem, in other words, too complicated for mere mortals and leave it to the monetary gods.
Weston Nakamura in an interview with Real Vision’s Jack Farley made the trenchant point, “This is what markets look like when you don't have global central banks artificially suppressing volatility, intervention of central banks buying every dip, putting a safety net under every single slight tremor or taper tantrum or whatever it may be, this is what happens.”
How on earth did monetary matters get tangled up with environmental concerns? Perhaps Bitcoin should send a representative to the aforementioned Central Banks and Supervisors Network for Greening the Financial System. No doubt Elon would be too busy, but perhaps Mr. CryptoWhale would sit in.
The disconnect between the stock market and the economy has created a conundrum, is it hemlines or is it jeans style? Going into the COVID crash skinny jeans were all the rage, now, according to The Washington Post, “the fashionistas are going for ‘the mom’ and the flare.”
Created as a joke, goofing on Bitcoin, dogecoin has gone from .03 cents to 61 cents as I write up 109,007.44 percent. Available wherever crypto is sold. It’s enough to make you mad. Happily, there’s something for that. Last November Oregon joined Denver, Colorado in decriminalizing psychedelics. And you thought all the libertarians had moved to New Hampshire.
I popped awake at 1:00am, anxiety my alarm clock. A half-hour later I feared someone was already on their way to be first in line for a prized lot, overlooking the city, one of only four being released by a large publicly held homebuilder for that subdivision.
Real estate investors can feel it too. Last week The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that developers reached a deal to buy 2 acres in CityCenter on the Strip for $80 million. LVRJ report Eli Segal described the price as “a sky-high valuation that exceeds land deals on Las Vegas Boulevard even during the frenzied mid-2000s real estate bubble.”
