Translate

Showing posts with label banks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label banks. Show all posts

Monday, October 28, 2019

Some of my tweets Oct 13 - 27

Monday, September 16, 2019

Some of my tweets Sep 8 - 15





 







gg

Friday, June 7, 2019

The state of the US economy


Worth a read. 

Paul Craig Roberts at his blog
The State of the Economy

The story line is going out that the economic boom is weakening and the Federal Reserve has to get the printing press running again.  The Fed uses the money to purchase bonds, which drives up the prices of bonds and lowers the interest rate.  The theory is that the lower interest rate encourages consumer spending and business investment and that this increase in consumer and business spending results in more output and employment. 

The Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, and Bank of England have been wedded to this policy for a decade, and the Japanese for longer, without stimulating business investment.  Rather than borrowing at low interest rates in order to invest more, corporations borrowed in order to buy back their stock.  In other words, some corporations after using all their profits to buy back their own stock went into debt in order to further reduce their market capitalization!  

Far from stimulating business investment, the liquidity supplied by the Federal Reserve drove up stock and bond prices and spilled over into real estate.  The fact that corporations used their profits to buy back their shares rather than to invest in new capacity means that the corporations  did not experience a booming economy with good investment opportunities. It is a poor economy when the best investment for a company is to repurchase its own shares.

Consumers, devoid of real income growth, maintained their living standards by going deeper into debt.  This process was aided, for example, by stretching out car payments from three years to six and seven years, with the result that loan balances exceed the value of the vehicles.  Many households live on credit cards by paying the minimum amount, with the result that their indebtedness grows by the month. The Federal Reserve’s low interest rates are not reciprocated by the high credit card interest rate on outstanding balances. 

Some European countries now have negative interest rates, which means that the bank does not pay you interest on your deposit, but charges you a fee for holding your money.  In other words, you are charged an interest rate for having money in a bank.  One reason for this is the belief of neoliberal economists that consumers would prefer to spend their money than to watch it gradually wither away and that the spending will drive the economy to higher growth.

What is the growth rate of the economy?  It is difficult to know, because the measures of inflation have been tampered with in order to avoid cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security recipients and the payment of COLA adjustments in contracts........

Tuesday, May 21, 2019

Some of my tweets ... May 16 - 20





























































Wednesday, January 9, 2019

How to Start a War


Excellent documentary from James Corbett of the Corbett Report.  Part One of the three-part doc is below.  Go to:

https://www.corbettreport.com/wwi/

for the "The WWI Conspiracy... Part Two The American Front"  and "WWI Conspiracy ... Part Three: New World Order"








Saturday, December 22, 2018

Some of my tweets ... December 13 - 21