Today, the post-pandemic economy is being hurt by the supply-chain problems, which have been more severe than expected and will exacerbate inflation pressure. The delays in shipping are a huge part of the problem. Nike says shoes imported from China that normally takes 40 days now requires 80 days. That increases the level of needed working capital, as the shoes have already been paid for…
Imagine looking out your window and seeing a bunch of boys playing “cops & robbers” with toy plastic guns. Then, you realize the immature, incompetent boys have REAL guns. What could go wrong? That’s the way I see the Congressional debate to raise the debt ceiling. Republicans are wrong . . . this time! Democrats were wrong . . . last time! The out-of-power party…
Economists tend to be a pompous bunch and easily given to hyperbole. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is changing the world – making it better in the short-run. Of course, that begs the question of how short is short-run, and how long is long-run? As a refresher, MMT explains that nations with a reserve currency, such as the dollar or the euro or the yen, can…
Remember: if you are not paying for a service, you are not the client. Instead, YOU are the product! Somebody is paying money for information about you or for access to you. Readers know I have long believed that Facebook is a cancer on America. Facebook users pay nothing to Facebook. But they do enter information about themselves, which Facebook then sells to advertisers. Now,…
September is usually the worse month of the year for the stock market. But, the worse week of the year is usually the week in September having the third Friday. Grab your calendar and you’ll see that we’re right now in the middle of worse week all year, historically. One reason is that the “triple witching” or expiration of futures contracts and other derivatives. That…
I have never seen much value to crypto-currencies like bitcoin, except for criminals and speculators. However, the collapse of Afghanistan has demonstrated other uses. Importantly, crypto-currencies are easier to hide from the Taliban than Dollars. In addition, crypto-currencies allow Afghan citizens in the U.S. to send spendable money to family remaining in Afghanistan without governmental restrictions. Last year, crypto-currency holdings in Afghanistan were among the…
For twenty years, I have remembered September 11th as the day when I watched the Pentagon burning from my fifth floor office, as the wind pushed the smoke into my wife’s office on the Potomac. Including the World Trade Center, 2,996 Americans died that day. For eighty years, elderly Americans have remembered the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, when 2,403 Americans…
In early August, the University of Michigan Index of Consumer Sentiment crashed to a ten-year-low. Not surprising as consumers were weighed down by the Covid surge, rising concern over possible inflation, the fragility of our supply chain, and the painful images of our troops leaving Afghanistan. It was a depressing month. In late August, the government’s Consumer Confidence Index also fell but only to a…