Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

I think the concern is that the teeter might totter.

i don't think flattening is a leading indicator tho

What kind of an indicator is the 87,000+ people on LinkedIn referring to themselves as "thought leaders"?

meme infection indicator?

I miss the days of the beginning of this shitbin thread where I had some semblance of an idea on how the economy worked. Now its all just endless sock market gains.

The actual economy seems to anecdotally be fairly strong depending on where you are, unemployment is low, people are spending money on stuff, more of them have health insurance, the minimum wage is higher in multiple cities and states. Tech startups are the preferred speculative bubble of the coke-fueled investor class right now, and that generates gentrification and real estate speculation as an externality, but man maybe like…stock market gains are tracking with the real economy??

NB: I don’t know a damn thing

lol nope

i mean those gains aren't tracking with the real economy, although a lot of smoke and mirrors are being used to make one think it might be

I can well believe that

I don't know, my impression is that macro economic indicators - hiring/employment/spending/profits/corporate earnings, etc. - are strong. What's not strong are wages, debt is high, income inequality is terrible and getting worse, health care costs are rising, etc. I suppose the question is how to join those two threads. Toss in a flat market following years of sustained growth and record highs, the general instability of trade/politics and the like, and I think people who know are nervous. And yet, it's unclear what to do with that uncertainty. It's like the entire US economy is holding its breath.

smoke and mirrors are essential parts of the economy

Shell game for sure.

smoke and mirrors are essential parts of the economy

― Hazy Maze Cave (Adam Bruneau), Thursday, June 28, 2018 9:56 PM (sixteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hah I feel the same way when people talk about 'waste' in the insurance and heathcare industries. if it was a totally efficient system there'd be hundreds of thousands of layoffs.

yeah I mean everybody knows most of the white collar workforce doesn't do anything important

Don't tell that to the GOP, they'll try to shrink the size of government.

https://res.cloudinary.com/s8/image/fetch/c_scale,d_missing_imx2hb.png,f_auto,q_auto,w_350/https://cdn.waterstones.com/bookjackets/large/9780/2412/9780241263884.jpg

ayo Im a paralegal I resemble this remark. well my added value to this place is do things that people who charge $450-$800/hr shouldn't be doing.

yeah I mean everybody knows most of the white collar workforce doesn't do anything important

― devops mom (silby), Thursday, June 28, 2018 10:15 PM (forty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The big tax cut bill the R's rammed through now allows megacorporations to repatriate nearly a trillion in profits currently parked overseas at heavily discounted tax rates. The supposed idea was they'd invest it in US expansion and employees, but the open secret is that they'd be more likely to use it for massive stock buy-backs to inflate their stock prices -- and possibly absorb a lot of executives' stock options getting cashed out.

My imagination wonders if, after the big stock buybacks happen at bubble prices, the market will crash and all those corporate profits get turned into dust and ashes.

If you look at the market for the time pre 09/2008 until now, yeah smoke and mirrors. Nothing drastically changed with the broader market after the election except that a criminal got elected and people decided to stop caring even more about fundamentals. Oddly enough gold has stayed really wishy washy this year.

I am dying for the market to crash. Sorry. But it's super inflated right now and it's not healthy for anyone longterm.

The current unemployment rate is 3.8! TRUST ME, we’re not having a recession any time soon. And we should all be very very thankful for that.

I’m certainly making no significant investments anytime soon.

From a strictly cut and dry investment perspective, market "corrections" are actually good for the portfolio if - and this is important - you're relatively young, or at least nowhere near retirement age. The market will (historically) eventually rise back up, and funds/401Ks and the like in particular will have snagged a whole bunch of stuff at fire sale (or, you know, recession) prices. The people who really get screwed are the ones the need their money *now*, people about to cash out or who have cash flow issues and suddenly learn their investments are worth half as much as they were. So yeah, obviously it's more important to have enough cash/liquidity to carry you through hard times, to pay the rent/bills/food. That's the first luxury. But on average investing long-term is still the best tried and true method of generating wealth, smoke and mirrors and all. Isn't that what they call the Rule of 72?

I mean it goes without saying that *if* you are worried about your 401k or IRA right now at these high levels you can always redistribute your 401k into something less equity heavy for the near term and if you have an IRA at a regular brokerage you could always start moving to cash. But if you don't care or need the money anytime soon, hey let it ride. But yeah a lot in in the market is expensive. I don't know how individual buyers feel safe buying up there. But besides the overnight crash when Trump got elected there really hasn't been any real pull back besides one off days. It's stupid. Nothing matters.

Yes, I mean I wouldn’t touch my current investments or stop normal contributions. Just nothing new and significant.

"what are these mysterious luxuries you call 'investments'" - the entire millennial generation

i would look at the quality of employment rolled into that rate mr. shrub before making any grand proclamations (and yes, i thought this throughout the obama years as well)

Flat market is just as worrying, sometimes, as downs. It's like being stuck at the top of a rollercoaster. Nobody knows anything.

The market could also just stagnate for years, it's happened before

. . . except mr. snrub xp

Why the capitalist class does this is something of a mystery. Don't they love growth? Well, they do, but only under the right circumstances. They present themselves as concerned with growth, productivity, and output above all else, but it turns out they are in reality a lot more concerned with high profits and a politically quiescent working class. A big economic boom is fine, but a tight labor market requiring wage increases that come out of the capitalist share of the corporate surplus — or worse, workers confident that they can get another job organizing union drives — is horrifying to them. Our capitalist overlords think they deserve easy profits and beaten-down workers who will take crappy wages and bad benefits without a peep or protests, and mobilize politically to rig the economy to make that happen.

http://theweek.com/articles/783356/how-capitalist-class-strangling-american-economy

Testifying before Congress in 1997, Greenspan attributed the “extraordinary’” and “exceptional” performance of the nineties economy to “a heightened sense of job insecurity” among workers “and, as a consequence, subdued wages.”

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/01/federal-reserve-interest-rate-increase-janet-yellen-inflation-unemployment

janet-jackson-inflation-unemployment-control

Our Country was built on Tariffs, and Tariffs are now leading us to great new Trade Deals - as opposed to the horrible and unfair Trade Deals that I inherited as your President. Other Countries should not be allowed to come in and steal the wealth of our great U.S.A. No longer!

whenever I think a market correction is afoot it swings the other way immediately. I salute our algorithmic trading overlords.

dow down 1.17% yesterday
dow up 1.58% today

afaics, there are no obvious signs the party is over, yet.

otoh, the economy is surfing on big waves of misallocated capital, so it's obvious the party will end whenever the Fed chooses to raise rates far or fast enough to subdue the enthusiasm and flip greed to fear. 2019 seems about right, but who knows, really?

The general rumblings seem to be that tariff impact is playing out in so-far invisible ways -- less big plans being made by a wide variety of businesses, general caution, an eating of costs so as not to pass anything along to consumers. But there have been a slew of closings and relocations regardless, and the general sense is that things are worsening in ways that will become more evident with time. Which, a couple of months out from the midterms, is not exactly good timing.

Without pretending to be able to fully appreciate this myself, I think sometimes we fail to appreciate how international most "American" corporations are today both in production and in sale of their goods and services, so that it can be really hard to predict what something like a tariff will do to "our economy," if by our economy you mean our corporations (the stock market) rather than the people who live in this country.

i'm not an expert economist but it does seem to me there could be some reasons why republicans are good for markets. market volatility is driven, by and large, by ignorance, as a wise investor isn't going to do a lot of trades. at the same time there's no reason for someone (who has the capital) to _not_ invest in the markets - either in the long term one's investment will increase or capitalism will collapse and fiat money will be worthless. so a political situation like the one america has now encourages stupid people to put their money in the markets while discouraging rational investors from taking their money out of the markets.

Republicans are shit for markets and have been for decades. Read your recent history before you stick your foot in your dick again

Love the classic internet category of “I don’t have a clue, but I think...”

v specific but i pay attention because of work: rumors of four local(seattle) shipyards laying off because of tariffs, 400+ living wage jobs, but counter stories about ongoing federal contracts blunting that. nothing has happened yet, but first of this kind of rumor going around in 4+ years of watching closely

https://blogs-images.forbes.com/peterlazaroff/files/2016/07/2016-07-20-President-Market-Data.jpg

I should say that having known about DJ Trump as an investor since the late 90s, the prudent choice is to short any institution he's affiliated with, particularly after an early term run up to a management payday.

There’s still way too many people taking the long position on US debt to make money shorting it I would think

The implication of this really is incredible: regular people working 40 hours a week are essentially working one day per week for free, with all their pay for that day going to the top 1% https://t.co/q0O3mpZvke

— Jon Schwarz (@schwarz) August 20, 2018

this has always been a (the?) goal for foreign-government support of trump and the GOP, no?

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/100966

This month, officials from France, Germany, and the UK have begun planning with China and Russia a special payments channel that would allow these countries to defy new American sanctions against any company doing business with Iran. This payment channel would bypass the American-dominated international banking system and the dollar.

no, that's a specific response to Trump backing out of the Iran deal

'help put trump in office and egg him on to do stupid own-goal isolationist BS' is what i was getting at