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.”
To the sensible and experienced, it seems late indeed. But, does piling into U.S. dollars, made less worthy each day by the Powell Fed a good idea? The US central bank now has a climate change mandate, in addition to full employment. Soundness of the currency used to be top of mind for central bankers, but that horse left the Eccles building long ago.
A-J Aronstein, who has revised 3,000 résumés wrote a few days ago in the New York Times, “Recruiters often say they spend six seconds reviewing the average candidate. Are you worth seven?”
So job applying can be equated with staying on a bucking bull for the required time needed to score. Aronstein writes,
What Read did best was raise money while catering to what Rothbard called the “high school” of liberty. The current president of the country of Mar-a-Lago also successfully raises money while mouthing freedom bromides to housewives and the like.
When the pandemic struck, banks dumped plenty in their loan-loss provisions, $60 billion, expecting the worst. The cavalry arrived led by Jerome Powell’s Fed liquidity flood, Steven Mnunchin’s PPP loans, Congress’s CARES Act, and moratoriums on foreclosures and evictions. Instead of an Austrian Business Cycle cleansing, the cracks were papered over, including bailing out money-market funds allowing us to watch the pandemic comfortably on TV.
When I asked the phlebotomist why the TV in my oncologist’s office was always tuned to HGTV, he seemed amused while he drained a half-pint of blood from my arm for immediate disposal in the bright red waste can next to me. “Oh, I think it has something to do with them wanting programing with no violence, or sex, or cussing,” he said in Philipino-accented English, followed by a shrug and smile.
Using the same logic as shooting a hole in the barn and then painting the target around it to determine marksmanship accuracy, the USPS is trying to achieve its goals by gaming the metrics. “Last year, first-class mail hit its service target 89.7% on average, well below its 96% goal,” write Jennifer Smith and Paul Ziobro for the WSJ.
Roger McKinney doesn’t see eye-to-eye with the pope. In his book “God is a Capitalist: Markets from Moses to Marx,” Mckinney “shows how Biblical economic principles answer the most vexing problems the world faces today, such as poverty, inequality and pollution.”
