Tag Archives: The United States

Let’s imagine a model in which the marketers of data distribute some of their immense profits to the users who created and thus “own” the data being sold for a premium. It’s not exactly news that Facebook, Google and other “free” services reap billions of dollars in profits by selling data mined/collected from their millions of users. As we know, If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product...

Solutions are only possible outside these ossified, self-serving centralized hierarchies. Correspondent Dan F. asked me to reprint some posts on solutions to the systemic problems I’ve outlined for years, most recently in How Much Longer Can We Get Away With It? and Checking In on the Four Intersecting Cycles. I appreciate the request, because it’s all too easy to dwell on what’s broken rather than on the difficult task...

If targeting political extremes generates the most profit, then that’s what these corporations will pursue. As many of you know, oftwominds.com was falsely labeled propaganda by the propaganda operation known as ProporNot back in 2016. The Washington Post saw fit to promote ProporNot’s propaganda operation because it aligned with the newspaper’s view that any site that wasn’t pro-status quo was propaganda; the...

In February 2018, it was like old times for the US industrial sectors. Prior to the 2015-16 downturn, the otherwise moribund economy did produce two genuine booms. The first in the auto sector, the other in energy. Without them, who knows what the no-recovery recovery would have looked like. They were for the longest time the only bright spots. US Industrial Production, Jan 2006 - 2018(see more posts on U.S. Industrial...

[embedded content] Bob Williams and Joseph Y. Calhoun talks about Bi-Weekly Economic Review for March 15, 2018. Related posts: Bi-Weekly Economic Review: The New Normal Continues Bi-Weekly Economic Review: Gridlock & The Status Quo Bi-Weekly Economic Review: Maximum Optimism? Bi-Weekly Economic Review: As Good As It Gets Bi-Weekly Economic...

If you think this is a robust, resilient, stable system, please check your Ibogaine / Hopium / Delusionol intake. Correspondent James D. recently asked for an update on the four intersecting cycles I’ve been writing about for the past 10 years. Here’s the chart I prepared back in 2008 of four long-term cycles: 1. Generational (political/social) 2. Price inflation/wage stagnation (economic) 3. Credit/debt...

Alas, fakery isn’t actually a solution to fiscal/financial crisis.. This chart of “debt securities and loans”–i.e. total debt in the U.S. economy–is also a chart of the creation and distribution of new money, as the issuance of new debt is the mechanism in our financial system for creating (or “emitting” in economic jargon) new currency: when a bank issues a new home mortgage, for example, the loan amount is new...

If indeed this inflation hysteria has passed, its peak was surely late January. Even the stock market liquidations that showed up at that time were classified under that narrative. The economy was so good, it was bad; the Fed would be forced by rapid economic acceleration to speed themselves up before that acceleration got out of hand in uncontrolled consumer price gains. On February 1, the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow...

Rising income and wealth inequality is causally linked to globalization and the expansion of Darwinian trade and capital flows. Stripped of lofty-sounding abstractions such as comparative advantage, trade boils down to four Darwinian goals: 1. Find foreign markets to absorb excess production, i.e. where excess production can be dumped. 2. Extract foreign resources at low prices. 3. Deny geopolitical rivals access to...

There has been a lot of talk about the economic impact of the recent tax reform. All of it, including the analyses that include lots of fancy math, amounts to nothing more than speculation, usually informed by little more than the political bias of the analyst. I am guilty of that too to some degree but I don’t let my personal political views dictate how I view the economy for purposes of investing. I am, to put it...