Tag Archives: The United States

Our entire economy is characterized by cartel rentier skims, central-bank goosed asset bubbles and stagnating earned income for the bottom 90%. Despite the rah-rah about the “ownership society” and the best economy ever, the sobering reality is very few Americans are able to get ahead, i.e. build real financial security via meaningful, secure assets which can be passed on to their children. As I’ve often discussed here,...

The problem isn’t polarization; the problem is neither flavor of the status quo is actually solving any of the nation’s most pressing system problems. As I write this at 5 pm (Left Coast) November 6, the election results are unknown. While various media are trumpeting this as “the most important election of our lives,” the less eyeball-catching, emotion-triggering reality is this election is nothing but another...

An unknown but likely staggeringly large percentage of small business owners in the U.S. are an inch away from calling it quits and closing shop. Timothy Leary famously coined the definitive 60s counterculture phrase, “Turn on, tune in, drop out” in 1966. (According to Wikipedia, In a 1988 interview with Neil Strauss, Leary said the slogan was “given to him” by Marshall McLuhan during a lunch in New York City.) An...

Rebuilding social capital and social connectedness is not something that can be done by governments or corporations. As the mid-term elections are widely viewed as a referendum of sorts, let’s set aside politics and ask, what’s behind the erosion of our civil society? That civil society in the U.S. and elsewhere is fraying is self-evident. It isn’t just the rise of us-or-them confrontations and all-or-nothing...

Trade war stuff didn’t really hit the tape until several months into 2018. There were some noises about it back in January, but there was also a prominent liquidation in global markets in the same month. If the world’s economy hit a wall in that particular month, which is the more likely candidate for blame? We see it register in so many places. Canada, Europe, Brazil, etc. It does seem as if someone flipped a switch...

Why Eurodollars Might Be Key to the Market Sell-Off (Podcast) There’s a huge market out there that doesn’t get much attention: Eurodollars. These have nothing to do with the euro-dollar exchange rate. Instead, eurodollars are U.S. dollar-denominated deposits at foreign banks and overseas branches of American banks. They’re effectively a source of dollars that operates outside the control of the U.S., and have at...

Upon the precipice of the Great “Recession”, US workers were cushioned to some extent by what economists call sticky wages. Before the Great Depression, as well as during it, companies would attempt to deal with looming economic contraction by cutting pay rates before workers. Nowadays, the intent is reversed; businesses will try to keep core workers by keeping pay rates as steady as possible while instead shedding...

The desire to improve our social standing is natural. What’s unnatural is the toxicity of doing so through social media. It seems self-evident that the divisiveness that characterizes this juncture of American history is manifesting profound social and economic disorders that have little to do with politics. In this context, social media isn’t the source of the fire, it’s more like the gasoline that’s being tossed on...

The value of local control and local capital far exceed the pathetic “savings” reaped from shoddy commoditized goods. What do we make of an economy in which a handful of bubblicious urban areas are magnets for jobs and capital while rural communities have been hollowed out? The short answer is that this progression of urbanization has been one of the core dynamics of civilization for thousands of years: opportunities...

Nobody dares discuss it openly for fear of triggering a panic, but there aren’t enough lifeboats for everyone. There’s no shortage of explanations on the whys and wherefores of the US stock market’s recent swoon / swan-dive / plummet. Here’s a few of the many credible explanations: the economy has reached peak earnings so there’s no fundamentals-driven upside left; bond yields are now high enough to dampen enthusiasm...