US Economy Thread

Strange... I haven't seen any of this information on CNN or the BBC... they are too busy blaming Russian meddling for all the problems in the west...

Could we assume that because CNN and MSNBC and Fox are all owned by people who fit more in the 1% than in the 90% mentioned could be why it is not mentioned... because they are OK with how things are going and think they deserve their positions of wealth and power and the good things in life...

Democrat Bloomberg is now running for the White House- & he's not OK with the way MAGA is going! “I’m running for president to defeat Donald Trump and rebuild America,” Bloomberg wrote.
“We cannot afford four more years of President Trump’s reckless and unethical actions,” he continued. “He represents an existential threat to our country and our values. If he wins another term in office, we may never recover from the damage.” ..Forbes ranked Bloomberg as the 11th-richest person in the world last year with a net worth of roughly $50 billion. Trump, by contrast, was ranked 259th with a net worth of just over $3 billion. His businesses — among them are financial data services and news services in various formats — employ more than 19,000 people in 69 countries. They are also certain to raise ethical questions about how his news-oriented businesses will cover the campaign and financial conflicts of interest for a possible presidency.
Already, Bloomberg has vowed to spend at least $150 million of his fortune on various pieces of a 2020 campaign, including more than $100 million for internet ads attacking Trump, between $15 million and $20 million on a voter registration drive largely targeting minority voters, and more than $30 million on an initial round of television ads.
He did not say how much he would be willing to spend overall on his presidential ambitions, but senior adviser Howard Wolfson did: “Whatever it takes to defeat Donald Trump.”
https://apnews.com/583b5e7ecfc84b61b470b5e8e3c4bcab

He tripled his "fortune" after becoming mayor of New York. As Republican!

He tripled his "fortune" after becoming mayor of New York.

While being smarter about building up his fortune, leaving Trump in the dust, who btw refuses to disclose his income tax documents to hide the fact he got not $1M, but a lot more from his father.

As Republican!

The Clintons were also Republicans. If there was another strong party, they would go there, instead of running as independents or turncoats.

Bloomberg used his powers as mayor to boost his fortune.

Changing your political affiliations like your underwear shows what guys like him value the most: money.

Just realised.... the information in that chart that started this thread.... my mind played silly tricks on me... I am so used to hearing about the 1%... but look again... it is the 0.1 percent... own more than 90% of the population... the point is that is that it is getting worse because money makes money much faster than labour or effort... but you need to be an unfeeling bastard for the system to work... so not only are the richest getting richer, they are also becoming unfeeling who probably despise anyone with less than a billion dollars of their own money...

How does this tie in with the American dream?

The American dream is long dead and was never alive to begin with. I recommend people watch the movie Heaven's Gate. Not
because it is a great movie, but because it is a glimpse into the reality of the USA for immigrants. Another, eye opener
is Mattewan which shows us the feudal barbarity of the US coal mine belt. People think that the USA was always about freedom.
BS. It was the same feudal, colonial, racist sh*t as anywhere else. I saw some 1950s cowboy movie that was practically foaming
at the mouth with racist BS about US aboriginals. US aboriginals did not deserve to get ethnically cleansed. So the American
dream was supposed to overlap assorted barbarity...

Snake oil is what the USA has always peddled. It never, ever judges itself by the standard it claims to apply to others. But
that standard is mostly lie and spin. Recall the bleating during Putin's 2011 election how "only" around 60% of the eligible
voters turned out. This bleating coming from a country where some presidential elections see 40% turnouts. Although they
have been higher more recently for some reason. Also note how the US dominated western media yaps about inequality in Russia.
This takes the cake for hypocrisy. Income inequality in the USA is so bad, that even banana republics look good:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM

Americans hate socialism because they are brainwashed by their corporate oligarchy. Socialism (not authoritarianism) is in the
interest of the majority. At every stage of the labour movement, corporate shills and whores would always cry that the sky is
falling and that nothing short of sweatshop slavery is the only viable option to preserve the economy. Every freaking stage.
But somehow by the 1960s the USA saw the best economy it had. Then started globalization and offshoring to solve the union
"problem". Now the USA majority is relatively poorer even if they have more electronic junk. And MAGA is all about restoring
the 1960s. But the US is in a deep hole that its oligarchy has dug.

One of the great successes of brainwashing in the USA, is that "leftist progressive" thinking has been corrupted with fake identity
politics. Nobody gives a f*ck about workers' rights and the standard of living including fair healthcare. They are obsessed with
trannies and forced sex surgery on children.

That is something I find amusing too... they are so full of hate and anger... if you say something racist or homophobic they react as though you hit them... it seems the worst crime in their eyes is to not be as liberal thinking as they are, but obviously there are exceptions... I men you can't criticise or not approve of gay relationships, or because of some ones skin colour or religion... but it is fair game regarding anything Russian or Iranian or pro Assad Syrian or North Korean or Cuban or Venezuelan...

It was when Trump was elected and the liberal democrats lost that there was actual riots in the street and talk of revolution... imagine if he wins again...

But then who cares... the country is broken and he clearly has neither the will or capacity to fix it.

The US has transitioned into printing dollars to cover both the long term and short term new debt that is created every year via the
massive budget deficit. Actual demand for this new debt is not longer significant. The US is now in Pancho Villa fiscal policy mode.

If they just had some bananas to sell!

The Anglo-American Empire is at its heart a financial system. A long evolution of the Venetian/Dutch/British Imperial monetary system. Here is an example of how divorced funny money is from real world economics: Prior to last week DoorDash and Airbnb had a net worth of $34 billion. Now keep in mind neither company has solved the world's energy crisis, cured cancer, or even developed any novel technology. One delivers food, the other rents out peoples flats to visitors. Airbnb had revenues of $4.7 billion in 2019 and DoorDash had revenues of about $2.6 billion. The $34 billion imputed value occurs over years with a series of small capital raise each priced higher than the prior. Not hard to pull off in Silicon Valley.

Post IPO DoorDash and Airbnb have a combined market value of $170 billion. Thanks to the sales staff at Wall Street underwriters and a complicit $$$ friendly media. To put that in perspective, DoorDash and Airbnb are valued at about 25% of the entire 219 company Russian Micex stock market.

Stocks are speculative trash. No company can ever realize its stock "valuation" since if it tried to liquify them, the stock
price would collapse. I cannot understand the level of idiocy of urnalists and various talking heads that act as if stock
prices are intrinsic. They are vapour.

It is obscene how pension funds ride this casino Ponzi scheme as if they are real investments. So we even have legislators
who want to clean up the oil industry in the wake of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico blowout being brow beaten by urnalists
in interviews because their regulatory efforts are a "threat" to the stock valuation of BP et al. in which pension funds
are "invested". This is pure lunacy.

You can also see from the fundamentally secular rise of the stock market (e.g. Dow Jones) that it is detached from reality.
The US economy is not secularly increasing outside of its debt load.

Stock simply represents equity interest. There is nothing inherently "trashy" about that. What is hocus pocus is the current insane valuations which are a function of global central bank monetary policy. Stocks valuations are showing you the real value of the dollar as a fiat currency the same way flats in Moscow in 1990s kept going up in value despite a horrendous economy. People didn't want to hold rubles and had limited choices besides parking their money in a real asset - an apartment. Stock prices in the US are reflecting the fact that smart people would rather own a real asset (part of a company) rather than hold cash or even worse debt. Stock prices very likely may be 10 times higher in 10 years...and a roll of toilet paper might cost $10 too.

calripson wrote:Stock simply represents equity interest. There is nothing inherently "trashy" about that. What is hocus pocus is the current insane valuations which are a function of global central bank monetary policy. Stocks valuations are showing you the real value of the dollar as a fiat currency the same way flats in Moscow in 1990s kept going up in value despite a horrendous economy. People didn't want to hold rubles and had limited choices besides parking their money in a real asset - an apartment. Stock prices in the US are reflecting the fact that smart people would rather own a real asset (part of a company) rather than hold cash or even worse debt. Stock prices very likely may be 10 times higher in 10 years...and a roll of toilet paper might cost $10 too.

That does not contradict what I wrote. Exxon is always touted as vastly bigger than Gazprom even though it has much less
in reserves on a BTU basis and even price adjusted basis so oil vs. gas does not matter. Most of Exxon's "worth" is the hot
air known as stock prices. Like I said, it can never realize this "value" in any other form. To convert to other forms it has
to liquify its "high vlaued" stocks which would turn them to junk overnight. If it tried to sell them off a bit at a time, it would
take decades to liquify.

Stock markets are useful for raising capital, but we have entered cloud kookoo land in recent years where urnalists and talking
heads claim that stock prices are just like real estate prices. No they are not.

Companies, or the shareholders, realize their "value" all the time when they are bought by other companies or taken private. No one wants to buy Exxon because oil and gas is viewed as a declining asset. Tesla has a market cap almost equal to the entire S&P 500 Energy sector as crazy as that might be. No need to liquidate anything over time. You get cash or shares which you are free to trade the next day. You can turn around and buy real estate if you like which is not as you maintain much different in funny money land than stocks. Real estate prices in levered markets like the US are largely a function of easy credit. What do you think the price of an average home in the USA would be if every buyer had to pay cash? No 2% 30 year mortgages where you can roll your homeowners insurance and taxes into one amortized payment. No, given the current policies of global central banks, the last place you want to be is as a dollar denominated creditor. The second last place you want to be is in cash.

According to the Federal Reserve, U.S. household wealth rose by 10% last year to $130.2 trillion. Of the $6.9 trillion gain in the last 3 months, $6.2 trillion came from gains in assets holdings - primarily stocks and real estate.

Now, how is it that "wealth" increased by 10% during a year of pandemic and economic shutdown? What actual beneficial real world effects did the pandemic bring? Maybe some efficiencies in switching to online services and work, maybe the creation of some vaccines and medications, but hardly a world where U.S. wealth grew 10% to record levels.

What did happen is the monetarist creation of record levels of "money" - 25% in the case of the U.S. dollar, coupled with fiscal government deficits of $4 trillion. None of this possible without an accommodative Federal Reserve keeping short term interest rates at 0% and purchasing $80 billion in U.S. treasuries and $40 billion in MBS every month to control the yield curve. The Fed even expanded to buying corporate debt. The Fed was joined in this global endeavor by other world central banks. None of that is possible without the U.S. dollar reigning supreme as the global reserve currency.

Of course, this is all an illusion: I am reminded of the movie Wall Street where the character Gordon Gecko states that money is all an illusion, a sleight of hand, changing "perceptions" from one hand to another. The illusion becoming a reality.