Entries Tagged 'Government' ↓

Book Review – The 10 Rules of Successful Nations

Ruchir Sharma is the author of The 10 Rules of Successful Nations (2020). He is Chief Global Strategist and head of Emerging Markets Equity Team at Morgan Stanley Investment Management.

Sharma is a young man who manages $20 billion of assets, and already has two other books out: Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the next Economics Miracles (2012) and The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in a Post-Crisis World (2016)

Interviewed by Fareed Zakaria this past week, Sharma announced that when the COVID Crisis is contained, we, the United States, will not be among the top ten successful nations on his list—or even anywhere near it.

Given that Sharma’s first rule for a successful nation is “They fight population decline,” it isn’t surprising that we won’t be great again when this pandemic cools down.

It’s obvious that we are not fighting our population decline in the face of COVID-19. We are at the very top of the losers, with many of us gone and the health of millions of others diminishing every day more rapidly.

The Successful Nations

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Are Vaccines the Answer?

Thanks to the incessant drone of the media and and social media this century there is a huge split between the “right” and “left” in the U.S.

I look at that split and I feel it only goes to serve the ends of the wealthy to become even wealthier at the expense of the rest of us. Here’s how.

Coronavirus-19 seems to have accelerated that split even faster as we watch the death count in our country rising more and more each day. 

If you don’t believe that corruption lies in D.C. take a look at the chart I just posted on Brucenomics. 

In four weeks, the cream of trillions of dollars was skimmed off by Wall Street, while our President said, “Let them drink disinfectant,” and he urged us to go on contaminating each other by not wearing masks. 

Now on the second-and third- rounds of the “stimulus”, things haven’t changed much. Public corporations are getting money and so are foreign students. The death rates are still underestimated and tests and PPE supplies undelivered.

Now our President is promising a miracle cure in just months. Let’s take a look at the left and right responses to this. Continue reading →

Word of the Day – Helicopter Money

Definition of Helicopter Money

“Helicopter money is a proposed unconventional monetary policy, sometimes suggested as an alternative to quantitative easing when the economy is in a liquidity trap”. Wikipedia

This term, invented by Milton Friedman, conservative Economist at the University of Chicago in 1969 to explain how economic stimulus works works, means just what this image brings up. A whole lot of minted money dropped out a helicopter which blows it around to those on the ground.

But where is that ground and who is getting that money?

When we got out of the Financial Crises in 2007, the Fed had $3 to $4 trillion in debt on its books. Get ready for what it has on its balance sheet now—6.37 trillion dollars!

“Since March 11, the Fed created $1.77 trillion and handed it to Wall Street either by purchasing financial instruments or as loans. The sole purpose of this was to inflate asset prices and bail out asset holders.” (Wolf Street, “QE 4 Cut in Half….Fed’s Helicopter Money for Wall Street & the Wealthy Hits $1.8 Trillion in 4 Weeks” 4-9-2020)

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