Entries Tagged 'Economics and Investing' ↓
June 28th, 2024 — Corruption, Economics and Investing, Money, Tariffs
May 13th, 2019 | Economics and Investing, Jobs
Those of us who lived through recession during Jimmy Carter’s Presidency will remember this word—stagflation.
During Carter’s time in office we had long-lasting rise in unemployment and even gasoline rationing – onecould only fill up on certain days of the week.
It was a frustrating time for me as, with two graduate college degrees I stood in a line of 200 unemployed workers in South Carolina trying for a grocery store’s cashier job.
Stagflation is a word that conflates inflation with stagnation into one word.
First inflation comes about because there is “too much money chasing too few goods”. (And since our tariffs on imports are a tax on U.S. consumers, we expect prices of U.S.-made goods will go up in a trade war).
Then, if the government does nothing to curtail inflation, will come layoffs of workers.
After that, if too many Americans aren’t able afford to buy higher-priced U.S. goods, we’ll have stagnation occur in our economy because the production of goods and services slows down or even starts to decline.
Note too that the US. is a debtor country. We import $3.1 trillion and export only $2.5 trillion in goods and services.
Trump’s tariffs are threatening us with this fate again. Here’s why.
Today the stock market is plunging downwards. The reason is Trump’s tariffs. China has retaliated.
And China is angry. We import around three to four times as many goods from China as China imports from us. China has more to lose from Trump’s two hundred- to over three hundred-billion dollar tariffs on its imports to the U.S.
As the costs of buying Made in China exports rise, consumers will pay more for Made in America goods. That will cause inflation in the short run as American shoppers vie for the limited supply of U.S. consumer goods.
Supposedly that will create more jobs over the long run. But here’s the rub.
The 2018 tax change shifted billions of dollars from the poor and middle class to the rich. Now even more Americans will be unable to bridge the financial gap to pay higher prices for American goods.
The rich know this and they are selling their shares of stocks. This means less in the pockets of corporations.
Even if that tax law hadn’t weakened the market for domestic American consumer goods already, there was little expectation that U.S. corporations were going to create a significant number of new jobs in manufacturing or raises in wages for working people.
That’s because corporations are spending their money on buybacks, buyouts of other companies, bonuses to managers, and and dividends to shareholders. This is where they will cut down on their expenses.
In addition, many manufacturing industries such as steel and aluminum have already disappeared in the U.S. as China and other countries, including our now-tariffed allies in Canada and Europe, as we bought more and more of their exports of good to us.
The costs of starting up those defunct industries again will be very high.
Already we have seen farmers complaining about what is happening to them in the U.S. from the effects of tariffs on food products. Uncertainty is the anathema for markets.
This is where the danger of stagflation comes in. When inflation (people chasing limited supplies of goods) causes shortages in the goods markets, there has to be an expansion of the supply of those goods.
In other words supply-side economics does not work unless the demand-side is working too. Here the long- term outlook is grim. Who is going to pay for manufacturing to start up again?
A statistic I heard recently is is from a study that found three men in the United States hold half of the wealth of our country. Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett are worth a combined total of $2,68 trillion dollars.
Meanwhile “one in five US households live in what the report’s authors call the ‘underwater nation,’ with either zero or negative wealth.”
Without huge government support for farming and manufacturing in the U.S., declining demand for non- essential consumer goods will in the long-run lead to stagflation.
But where are the taxpayers who are supposed to pay for the vital increasing demand for starting up or funding existing farming, manufacturing, and other sectors of the economy? Our economy could stagnate if the minority of U.S. taxpayers are struggling to survive—and/or working at jobs paying minimum wage jobs, $7.50 an hour. All the while wealthy people are paying zero taxes.
Our services sector is the biggest industry sector is the U.S. today. Many of the workers in this sector are paid minimum wages. Many of those work in service and retail industries will be the first to become unemployed. Those in other sectors may soon find themselves out of work as well.
Stagflation was a word created after the Japanese economy in the 1970s had stalled after a huge period of inflation set in.
I can’t predict the future, but given what I see happening and not happening now, it is far more likely that in the long run, the U.S. will be unable to pull out of a period of inflation without falling backwards into stagflation.
And those of us who remember stagflation, recall that it took a years for the U.S. to recover from stagflation and decades for the Japanese economy to rebound from stagflation.
June 15th, 2024 — Government, Murder, Reviews, Word of The Day
Today I want to talk about something that isn’t political, but it is something that many people won’t have heard about. Back in January 1970 my mother and I were sitting in Willi Unsoeld’s house. Willi was a member of the first American mountain expedition to summit Mount Everest. He and my brother Bill Humphreys had overseen the founding of Evergreen State College in Washingon.
My brothers’ two boys had just drowned in Puget Sound. I’d flown to Washington from the UW-Madison in campus in Wisconsin. My mother and I were the first to arrive. Our two families were there in mourning. We walked over to Willi’s house near by my brothers’ home.
Willi sat at his piano bench telling us a Tibetan story about an antlered buck that had become tangled in a tree on the mountain. Sherpa guides tried for days to free it. And then they had to let go of it. At the time my mother and I were both bewildered.
Willi’s daughter, Devi Unsoeld, my nephews babysitter age 16 walked in and joined the conversation along with her older brother. Devi had golden yellow hair and an amazing vitality. Devi announced to her father she wanted to hitchhhike across the state of Washington.
Her brother reacted and argued that would be a dangerous thing to do. Being older, I sided with him. I don’t know if Devi hitchhiked across Washington State.
But I was sent the story that when Devi died on the on the mountain in her fathers’ arms, she had been named after that highest mountain, Nanda Devi, in the Himalayas.
LONG HAUL: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers.
Today I realize Willi’s story meant that if you can’t save or change someone you just must move on and don’t dwell on it.
But today I cannot not dwell on it, and I have to tell you all about Frank Figliuzzi’s book, LONG HAUL: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers.
Former FBI agent Frank Figliuzzi has just just revealed in his book that there a have been over 850 serial murders of women by Long Haul Truckers in this country over the last two decades. Two hundred of those murders have still not been solved.
Frank worked 25 years in the FBI. He was witness to many of those stories of the murderers. Frank even rode with long haul truckers to see how their world was working.
Frank’s book talks about how the (HSKI) (Highway Serial Killings Initiative) came to became to be a database for law-enforcement officers to understand the actions of serial killers.
In 2004, the FBI was tipped off to a pattern of unsolved murders along American roadways. The bodies of 40 women were found in Texas.
There was an interstate murderous long haul highway corridor between Oklahoma and Texas. [See link below]
Frank found that women and girls who fell victim to the murderers often lived nearby their trucker route, or were sex workers or children. Many of the serial killers were also lone wolves.
The Mirror Texas Interstate 45
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/us-news/killing-field-road-bodies-40-15055235 The Mirror Texas Interstate 45
You may think that the 850 ‘victims’ are women or girls who lived at the bottom of society, but you would be wrong. I’ve seen teenagers sitting on the sidewalk in Vancouver Canada, who like myself at age 17, were forced to move out of their parents’ toxic homes. They are a vulnerable meal for serial killers.
SERIAL KILLERS
Later in my life in Philadelpia I encountered a serial killer near the University of Pennsylvania students, who chopped up his ‘victims’ and threw their bodies into the Schuylkill River.
At this point I was a student and he was still killing his victims. He owned a tobacco shop. I went into his store late at night after I finished my work as waitress at the the Penn faculty club to buy cigarettes.
The killer came out of from a beaded curtain, a short white man pleasantly balding a bit with a white shirt and the arms rolled up, and asked me nicely what I wanted. Just a regular chap.
But soon I could see he was trying to ingratiate himself with me. Panic growing, and asking myself why I was lying, I saved myself by lying to every question he asked me, and then ran out the door.
Days later I passed the gigantic type on the Philly newspaper headline as well as photo of him in a kiosk as I shivered down to the subway stairs. It was a horrible story for the students.
Devi Unsoeld was a privaleged young woman who died tragically, doing something she had chosen to do. I feel both my nephews Willy and Tom, and Devi could have had great opportunities if they all had lived.
But serial killers don’t give their victims, whether or not at the top or bottom, a choice.
March 8th, 2023 — Government, Marketing and Selling, Money, Word of The Day
Did you know that Economists have invented games to predict what an economy will do? Do you think game-playing can work to solve our money problems?
Here’s a story about Monopoly, America’s favorite game. I’ll bet you haven’t heard the stories about how it came to exist at the turn of the 19th into the 20th century.
The first story I heard about that the game was invented by a man. Wrong! Nope, not true. It was a woman!
The second story I heard was that man was cheated out of his inheritance by the Parker Brothers, and he died broke.
Wrong again! In my opinion it was clearly the woman who got cheated out of her inheritance by the Parker Brothers.
The old saying “Behind every man who is successful there was a woman” is true for oodles of inventions created in the 1800s and 1900s centuries.
There were draconian limitations put on creative women inventors and business owners, slapped on them during the 19th and 20th centuries in America. Not to mention their inability to vote or own a business.
Women (such as Catherine Greene and her African-American slaves) needed a man such as “Eli Whitney” to get their invention of the cotton gin obtain a patent from the government for Catherine.
Many creative American women have used their husbands or fathers to back up their genius. For example Georgia Okeefe, famous American painter married to Alfred Stiegliz, famous photographer.
The real story is this: The game Monopoly was invented by Elizabeth Magie in 1903 and patented in 1905.
When she got her patent she was less than one percentage of women to file patents that year. Her helper man was Henry George, a Political Economist and Journalist with whom she conversed about how the the land tax should be collected and distributed.
Elizabeth had first named her game, ‘The Landlord’s Game.” This game eventually evolved into Monopoly.
For decades no one knew that Elizabeth made two sets of rules for Monopoly.
One was the competitive one where people succeed by playing until one person is richer than all the rest. The second one she named ‘Prosperity’ was one where players would share what they gained.
According to Economist, Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think like a 21st Century Economist, the purpose of Elizabeth Magie’s two sets of game rules was to compare monopolist rules now in play today with a second way to win at Monopoly.
The results of Parker Brothers Monopoly today are bankruptcy and greater income inequality.
Those results of Monopoly are what Kate Raworth is writing in her book about the failures of 19th and 20th century award-winning economists who have mis-used both algebra and calculus to get results for economic principles that do not don’t materialize over the long run. In particular Ecoonomists have missed the boat about achieving income inequality.
Magie’s second set of rules were that the players would share results by cooperating with each other. This monopoly game didn’t merely rely on luck of the dice.
Magie’s second set of rules posited that the player starting with the least amount of money—and first doubled it was called the winner.
Clarence Darrow, the legendary twentieth century lawyer, sold the idea to the Parker Brothers. Elizabeth, an experienced game board maker, merely asked the brothers to pay her for two other games plus Monopoly —$500 dollars and no royalties.
Even more unfotunately for us, The Parker Brothers deleted the second set of rules when they sold her game. Thus, Elizabeth Magie’s name was buried until 1973 when an economist, Ralph Anspach researched his game of “Anti-Monopoly” before taking it to the Supreme Court.
Why is this important? I write this as a warning to creative people to be careful what you do with your inventions or with your creative work, especially if you are a woman.
Today on International Womens’ Day 2023, I ask you, can we test for ourselves now to find out what will happen if we use the second rules that Elizabeth set for Monopoly? Will theses games predict for our economic futures?
Can economists start creating economic games as sharp as Elizabeth’s games showing there can be at least two different ways for winning Monopoly, a game that oozes with competition and income inequality.
Monopoly isn’t just a game! Henry George’s concerns about land (property) taxes have been discussed by Economists for centuries. As Paul Samuelson said, scarcity creates value, and big as this earth is, land is still scarce. Today water is the scarce issue of concern to many Economists.
Yesterday the Federal Reserve used only two variables from British Economist, early 20th century John Maynard Keynes antique linear algebraic equations full of variables to slap higher interest rates in Americans.
Fed head Jerome Powell said he would would get rid of millions of jobs for Americans in order to tame inflation.
This is ridiculous! The Fed is tying its own hands. And it is certainly going to hurt American women who have fought for centuries to get “good paying jobs”.
Along with the criminalized weaponized abortion laws—American women will go back to “Keep them barefoot, pregnant and at home.
And like Texas governors’ Greg Abbots’ empty promises to catch rapists, it demands push back. Who is really is running the economy of the United States in this century?
Next: I’ll be covering several women Economists who are greatly influenceing the future of the way the study of Economics is viewed in this century.