Is EJ stil MIA?

[Mega]

I mean...........it would be nice if he put his head around the door now & again....

[vt]

Re: Is EJ stil MIA?

You can simply click on EJ's name and get all posts he has made. This was a quote from one of the latest from the end of August:

"Spot on, JK! As Yellen informed me in 2012 this ain't going to be your vanilla recovery. Return to "policy based central banking" means an output gap-based economy granularly managed with AI and fintech.

Waiting for the next big crash? Think: Mini-crashes managed autonomously, sans human intervention, that come and go so fast you don't even see them.

Could go on a rather long time.

Yes, I do have a theory of the failure mode of this new system.

And once my team and I are done creating a new fitness industry based on Virtual Reality exercise I'll be back to iTulip with a makeover that will be as big as, well, creating a new fitness industry based on Virtual Reality."

EJ has said a number of times in the past two years that the market could keep creeping up for some time, and that he would let us know if he saw a crash. Bull markets can go on for a number of years. No reason to sell in a major uptrend.

[Mega]

Re: Is EJ stil MIA?

That's all fine Fun...............but what about Gold?............inflation?
Mike

[globaleconomicollaps]

Re: Is EJ still MIA?

That's all fine Fun...............but what about Gold?............inflation?
Mike

You are looking for Drama. There is no Drama on the horizon. Not this year. Not next year. Not the year after that. Eric Townsend has a "Battle of the Triffin's dilemma" on his podcast. Somebody might say something they will regret after they get some holiday cheer in them. That is about as close as you're going to get to good news this year.

I have a suggestion for you. Hit up EJ for an exercise bike. It will be more fun than sitting on the couch getting drunk this winter.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Is EJ still MIA?

You are looking for Drama. There is no Drama on the horizon. Not this year. Not next year. Not the year after that. Eric Townsend has a "Battle of the Triffin's dilemma" on his podcast. Somebody might say something they will regret after they get some holiday cheer in them. That is about as close as you're going to get to good news this year.

I have a suggestion for you. Hit up EJ for an exercise bike. It will be more fun than sitting on the couch getting drunk this winter.

Timing things is dangerous. And I don't operate on grand theories. I just know what I see on the ground. But in my own little town, we're down a couple hardware stores, a gas station, a general store, an electronics store, etc. And it's not just about retail. A Chinese food joint, a pizza joint and a handful of insurance agents and lawyers and what not have gone with them. All in the past 3 months.

I know local situations don't portent anything necessarily, but here's some other weird truth from the ground level. Commercial rents are now less than one third residential rents. So I'm actually seeing people living/squatting in commercial properties more and more. Guess they shower at the Y. And they are replacing a lot of old time-true businesses. A 40 year old shoe shop that does special orthopedics. An old native jewelry shop. Etc. Etc.

Last time I saw things close up this quickly around here was going into the great recession. Before that, we had a 24 hour grocery store, 3 24 hour gas stations, 2 24 hour pharmacies, a 24 hour diner etc. Now we're down to 1 24 hour pharmacy, and forever hold your peace.

My nurse friend tells me that their normal Thanksgiving gifts for the poor were all taken up by nurses aides this year. Unprecedented. None of them can afford rent. Charity has to begin at home. Meanwhile, everywhere I look there are more panhandlers and homeless than even this summer.

The going theory here for most seems to be that the fed holds all the major levers. I tend to think that the real nature of the economy is less that; something more akin to a typical ponzi scheme. When the money can no longer be sucked out of the bottom, the tide recedes quickly.

I can't time things perfectly. But I will eat my own shorts if this train doesn't crash before 2020. I think good odds in 2018. Definitely by 2019.

It all boils down to one thing: Blood from a stone.

[Mega]

Re: Is EJ still MIA?

These Nurses......good looking females?
;)
Mike

[Mega]

Re: Is EJ still MIA?

Never fight the FED, they can out last you 4 ever!

[jk]

Re: Is EJ still MIA?

The going theory here for most seems to be that the fed holds all the major levers. I tend to think that the real nature of the economy is less that; something more akin to a typical ponzi scheme. When the money can no longer be sucked out of the bottom, the tide recedes quickly.

i think they've sucked all they could out of the bottom. the proposed tax "reform" is aimed at sucking what they can from the middle.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Is EJ still MIA?

i think they've sucked all they could out of the bottom. the proposed tax "reform" is aimed at sucking what they can from the middle.

There's no meaningful difference so far as I can see. The bottom are the 99% that earn their money by labor. The top are the 1% that earn it by capital gains. The very confusing maybe 5% that live in the middle and have very good 401(k) plans are an anomaly that only exists in silicon valley and the 128 belt, so you may be overly accustomed to them, but in most of the country they are unicorns.


Maybe that top 5% doesn't count either. But for everyone else, they're the base. Even the middle is banking on them having money to spend on Google or Facebook or Adobe or iRobot or Constant Contact or whatever east or west coast brand of superfluous nonsense that nobody needs that we're focusing all of our energy on now. You can't sell a hundred million roombas to 200 million near-homeless month-to-month renters.

I don't care how good the fed is at shaping the curve. At the end of the day, there are still fundamentals. If Johnny can't read and Johnny can't write and Johnny can't afford rent tonight then Jimmy can't pay his mortgage and Sally can't pay her student loans and Herbert can't justify his bonus and it's all downhill from there.

It's one big Ponzi, way bigger than Social Security, and it's all dependent on monthly payments, subscription plans, and multi-year agreements paid at the bottom. The month they can't make due is like playing Jenga in a hurricane. Blood from a stone.

And I can hear the winds whistling through the trees down here in the south-woods already. Give it a month or two's time, and they'll echo off the bay too...

[jk]

Re: Is EJ still MIA?

The following graphs show various aspects of the widening gap.



The chart above shows that the people making more than $100,000 per year have done very well, people earning less than $100,000 have had little growth, and those earning less than $50,000 per year have been stagnant or declining. The top 1% and the top 20% have done very well in the last 45 years, but the bottom 80% have seen little perceptible change.
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i think they are now trying to harvest the 4th quintile and most of the 5th quintile

[Mega]

Re: Is EJ still MIA?

"They"?
You sound like you should perhaps be on "Alex Jones"
;)
Mike

[Mega]

Re: Is EJ still MIA?

[jk]

Re: Is EJ still MIA?

"They"?
You sound like you should perhaps be on "Alex Jones"
;)
Mike

the people who own almost everything, and are in the process of collecting the rest.

[jk]

Re: Is EJ still MIA?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...=.a6ae156b2dcf

Congress’s own think tanks — the Joint Committee on Taxation and the Congressional Budget Office — calculate that in 10 years, people making between $50,000 and $75,000 (around the median income in the United States) would effectively pay a whopping $4 billion more in taxes, while people making $1 million or morewould pay $5.8 billion less under the Senate bill. And that doesn’t take into account the massive cuts in services, health care and other benefits * that would likely result. Martin Wolf, the sober and fact-based chief economics commentator for the Financial Times, concludes, “This is a determined effort to shift resources from the bottom, middle and even upper middle of the U.S. income distribution toward the very top, combined with big increases in economic insecurity for the great majority.”


*e.g.
The Congressional Budget Office said on Tuesday that a law passed in 2010 would necessitate cuts to Medicare of as much as $25 billion next year. The pay-as-you-go law requires that legislation that adds to the federal deficit be paid for with spending cuts or other offsets. If that does not happen, automatic cuts to programs like Medicare kick in. The Medicare cuts, which are capped at 4 percent of the program’s annual spending, could reach almost a half trillion dollars over 10 years, according to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
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the republican party have been trying to undo social security and medicare for years. gw bush unsuccessfully went after both programs. the current "tax reform" bill will cut medicare by ricochet [much less obvious than the bush approach] as described in the reference above.

otoh, some people will indeed benefit. e.g. "To put the number of estate tax returns filed in perspective, the Population Division of the Bureau of the Census projects that 2.7 million people will die in 2017. Thus, an estate tax return will be filed for only 1 in 237 decedents, and only 1 in 487 will pay any estate tax. let's do something for the financially suffering families of that 1 in 487. [5500 decedents/year]