[Adam] Smith was not saying that people are ruthlessly selfish, or that they ought to be; he was one of history’s keenest commentators on human sympathy. He only said that in a market, whatever tendency people have to care for their families and themselves can work to the good of all. --Pinker
Fed-driven credit cycle now supersedes the traditional business cycle. Since debt drives so much GDP growth, its cost (i.e. interest rates) is the main variable defining where we are in the cycle. The Fed controls that cost—or at least tries to . This is the opinion of Boockvar who writes:
"We must understand that we no longer have economic cycles. We have credit cycles that ebb and flow with monetary policy. After all, when the Fed cuts rates to extremes, its only function is to encourage the rest of us to borrow a lot of money and we seem to have been very good at that. Thus, in reverse, when rates are being raised, when liquidity rolls away, it discourages us from taking on more debt. We don’t save enough."
Companies will need to refinance an estimated $4 trillion of bonds over the next five years, about two-thirds of all their outstanding debt, according to Wells Fargo Securities. This has investors concerned because rising rates means it will cost more to pay for unprecedented amounts of borrowing, which could push balance sheets toward a tipping point. And on top of that, many see the economy slowing down at the same time the rollovers are peaking.“If more of your cash flow is spent into servicing your debt and not trying to grow your company, that could, over time—if enough companies are doing that—lead to economic contraction,” said Zachary Chavis, a portfolio manager at Sage Advisory Services Ltd. in Austin, Texas. “A lot of people are worried that could happen in the next two years.”
According to American theory, all power is in the hands of the plain people, and according to American legend they always exercise it wisely. The theory, of course, is almost as absurd as the legend. The plain people, in fact, can only exert their power through agents, and in the election of those agents they seldom face a clear choice between a good candidate and a bad one, or a wise idea and a foolish one. In the normal case both candidates are frauds and both ideas are idiotic.--Mencken
In 1870, the eccentric American transportation entrepreneur George Francis Train took a trip around the world in eighty travel days (with a two-month stopover in Paris), so when Jules Verne published his bestselling Around the World in Eighty Days in 1873, Train was quick to claim, "Verne stole my thunder."
Who is...Guccifer 2.0?
The newest Children's Crusade--this one against guns--is reminiscent of the 60s. In the 60's, the radicals used to put girls in the front of demonstrations.
China's first prototype space station, Tiangong-1, came down last month. Tiangong-1 went up in late September 2011, to help test the docking and rendezvous technologies required to build a bona fide space station, which China aims to do by the mid-2020s.
Craigslist is shutting down its personals section.
The service announced it will no longer operate the portion of its website that allows individuals to seek encounters with strangers.
Gee, what possibly could go wrong with that?
Unilever, one of the world's largest advertisers, spent about $9.5 billion last year marketing its many brands, which range from Dove soap to Best Foods mayonnaise and Lipton tea. A quarter of that amount, about $2.4 billion, was spent on digital advertising.
The AP (3/21, Murphy) reports that an analysis published in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that “hospitalizations cause only about 4 percent of personal bankruptcies among non-elderly U.S. adults.” The new findings “contrast with previous research by former Harvard professor and current U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and others that pointed to medical reasons as the trigger for more than 60 percent of U.S. bankruptcies.”
In 1972, federal government spending was $244.3 billion. In 2016, it was $3,852.6 billion. That's a compounded annual growth rate of 6.5%.
According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the deficit for 2018 will reach $800 billion. That's a solid $230 billion higher than what was projected by the Congressional Budget Office in its June 2017 10-year forecast. That's a whole $2 trillion in additional debt after just one year of Republican control of the legislative and executive branches.
Larger deficits also mean larger interest payments. A CRFB analysis found that "interest payments will quadruple, topping $1 trillion per year in as little as a decade. That's more than we will spend each year on the military or Medicaid, and as a share of the economy, it is the highest in history. ... Over the next decade, we'll spend around $7 trillion -- $55,000 per household -- just servicing our debt."
The hacker who took credit for providing WikiLeaks with hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee in 2016 has been linked to Russian military intelligence, according to a report by The Daily Beast. The hacker, known as Guccifer 2.0, had claimed to be a Romanian "hacktivist," and hid his true location by using a VPN service. But the Daily Beast reported that cybersecurity experts traced one logon in which he apparently neglected to use VPN to a building in Moscow that is the headquarters of the GRU, Russia's military intelligence agency.
Golden oldie:
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steeleydock.blogspot.com
The next ten years the United States will try to come to grips with the financial problems we have and what compromises of which principles must be made to solve them.
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[This year]... Vladimir Putin staged yet another phony election, a charade to distract Russia and the world while his brutal dictatorship continues into its nineteenth year. Putin’s repression, corruption, wars, assassinations, and his interference and undermining of democratic governments will continue. For now. But his rule will not last forever.--Garry Kasparov, who is obviously very brave
Will:
For the first time since World War II, when the mobilization of U.S. industrial might propelled this nation to the top rank among world powers, the American president is no longer the world's most powerful person. The president of China is, partly because of the U.S. president's abandonment of the Trans-Pacific Partnership without an alternative trade policy. Power is the ability to achieve intended effects. Randomly smashing crockery does not count. The current president resembles Winston Churchill's description of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles — "the only bull I know who carries his china closet with him."
I can not believe that John Bolton is back.
The read on Trump is that he has a distorted bias in favor of Russia and Putin. So how does Bolton's appointment fit in that narrative?
A fascinating case study over the last two administrations: Which is more dangerous to the poor citizenry, a charming guy with a bad philosophy or a boorish guy with no philosophy?
A third of current full-time physicians have a plan in the next three years to retire, go part-time, or switch to a non-clinical career.
Is a black guy playing Judas in "Superstar" cultural appropriation?
Stormy Daniels was at a Pittsburgh strip club, Blush Gentlemen's Club and Sports Bar. Ah, politics.
AAAAaaaannnnnddddd.....a graph:
Source: Gluskin Sheff
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