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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Dec 23, 2023 9:09:00 GMT -6
Here's a recent article listing allegedly US companies that are owned by foreign entities:
from the Pittsburgh Tribune
December 19, 2023
by Samantha DelouyaThese all-American brands aren’t actually American"US Steel was once the pride and joy of the United States and the most valuable company in the entire world. The 122-year-old company has agreed to be bought by Japanese firm Nippon Steel in a $14.1 billion deal. But this isn’t the first instance of an international company snapping up a classic American brand.... Here are some of the most notable examples: GE appliances.... The company was founded by legendary American inventor Thomas Edison. But Americans with a GE microwave or washing machine in their homes may not realize that General Electric’s century-old appliance division is owned by Haier Group, based in Qingdao, China. Haier bought the division from General Electric for $5.6 billion in 2016, as General Electric’s business stalled and it looked to raise cash to chip away at a mountain of debt. Haier is itself a major appliance seller in the United States, with its own products offered at US stores such as Home Depot and Lowe’s. Budweiser.... Budweiser’s brewer, named Anheuser-Busch after the company’s founders, was created in the United States in 1879 and helped pioneer pasteurization technology that allowed beers to be shipped across the country without spoiling, according to its website. But Budweiser’s parent company was acquired by European alcohol conglomerate InBev in 2008, forming a new company: AB InBev, based in Leuven, Belgium. AB InBev also owns other well-known beer brands like Corona and Stella Artois. Burger King The current home of the Whopper is Toronto, Canada — kind of. The seminal fast food chain, founded in Miami in 1954, has been part of Canadian conglomerate Restaurant Brands International for nearly a decade. RBI was formed in 2014 with a $12.5 billion merger between Burger King and Canada-based coffeehouse Tim Hortons. While RBI’s headquarters is in Toronto, Burger King’s functional headquarters remains in Miami. Since RBI’s creation, it has snapped up two more popular food brands: Popeye’s Louisiana Kitchen and Firehouse Subs. 7-Eleven.... More than 13,000 7-Eleven stores operate in the US, making it one of the largest convenience store chains in the country. But there are even more 7-Eleven stores in Japan, according to the company. That’s because the corner store, founded in 1927 in Texas, is owned by Seven & I Holdings, a Japanese retailer based in Tokyo. Seven & I officially became the sole owner of 7-Eleven in 2005, after Ito-Yokado, a unit of Seven & I, first bought a stake in the convenience store in 1991. Trader Joe’s California-based Trader Joe’s brands itself as a “national chain of neighborhood grocery stores.” But the grocery chain known for its private label goods and competitive prices is owned by the same German family that founded another well-known grocery store: Aldi. Aldi, which was founded by brothers Karl and Theo Albrecht in 1946, was cleaved in half in the 1960s. One half of the Albrecht family owns Aldi Nord, while the other half owns Aldi Sud. Trader Joe’s has been under Aldi Nord’s ownership since 1979, while Aldi-branded grocery stores in the US are owned by Aldi Sud, meaning the two chains have no business relationship. Jeep, Chrysler and Dodge cars The Jeep Wrangler was first introduced at the 1986 Chicago Auto Show, but its roots date back to World War II, when the US Army used an earlier version as a reconnaissance vehicle around battlefields, according to Jeep. The famed model, with its rugged design and off-road capabilities, has had enduring appeal in America. But Jeep and its siblings Chrysler and Dodge have belonged to European companies since 2014, when Italian company Fiat Group acquired 100% ownership of Chrysler Group. In 2021, Fiat Chrysler Automotive Group, as it was then called, merged with French manufacturer PSA Group, creating Stellantis. The Amsterdam-based auto giant is now the fourth-largest automaker in the world by volume and part of the Detroit “Big Three” automakers in the US. Frigidaire Refrigerator appliance company Frigidaire is responsible for a lot of firsts in America: According to the company, it is the inventor of the first self-contained refrigerator and the first-ever home freezer, which it originally called the “ice cream cabinet.” Frigidaire joins GE Appliances as a brand once owned by General Electric. The refrigerator maker was part of the Edison-founded conglomerate from 1919 to 1979. After brief ownership by White Consolidated Industries, Frigidaire was bought by Swedish multinational home appliance manufacturer Electrolux AB in 1986 — and it has remained in its ownership ever since. Ben & Jerry’s Ben & Jerry’s is best known for its quirky ice cream flavors with pun-filled names like “Cherry Garcia” and “Phish Food.” The ice cream company, which was founded in 1978 by school friends Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield in a converted Vermont gas station, was acquired by British conglomerate Unilever in 2000. That means the sweet treat shares a home with consumer goods like Axe Body Spray and Vaseline. One company that is American… While many brands with international owners may seek to highlight their American roots, at least one of Ben & Jerry’s competitors decided on a different route. Häagen-Dazs was cooked up by Polish immigrants Reuben and Rose Mattus in 1960 in the Bronx, New York. The couple invented a made-up Danish-sounding name for the brand, likely adding an air of mystery to the ice cream makers’ origins in the decades since."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Oct 9, 2021 12:07:45 GMT -6
Dr. Jain in Santa Monica is the best Infertility doctor that I know about.
I don't have the exact address and number at hand, but I'll try to find it.
We now have a 4-year old son, thanks to Dr. Jain
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jan 1, 2020 8:16:55 GMT -6
from USA Today www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/10/07/ge-pension-freeze-reasons-defined-benefit-plans-are-dead/3898630002/4 reasons the corporate pension is on its deathbedby Nathan Bomey "GE on Monday announced that it would offer lump-sum pension buyouts to about 100,000 former U.S. employees who have not yet begun receiving their pensions. The company, which has been facing pressure to bolster its finances, also announced plans to freeze pension benefits for about 20,700 salaried pensioners at current levels. Taken together, the moves illustrate how corporate America has largely ditched pensions, which are swiftly becoming a thing of the past for active employees who don't work for the government..... Here are 4 key reasons why: 1. Pensions are seen as expensive, risky
Defined-benefit pension plans are viewed as expensive and risky to maintain: Corporations are making promises to pay out benefits for decades but may not be able to guarantee their own financial success for the same period of time. If they fall on hard times, pension promises can become burdensome. As a result, they have largely shifted investment risk to individual workers. Instead of managing investments on behalf of employees in the form of corporate pension funds, companies have formed defined-contribution plans like 401(k)s, which typically require tax-free withdrawals from people's paychecks. If the worker's money is invested successfully, the payoff can be lucrative. But if the investments sour or the market tanks, workers, not the company, are on the hook for finding additional income. "A pension is a promise to pay monthly benefits for as long as the employee lives after retirement," Munnell said. "For employers, a system where they bear all the costs and all the risks is not appealing." 2. Union power has diminishedAs private-sector unions have withered, so have private-sector pensions. Unions have historically championed defined-benefit pensions for their members. For example, the United Auto Workers union is currently bargaining for improved pension benefits.... But the percentage of American private-sector workers in a union was only 6.4% in 2018, compared with 33.9% in the public sector, according to the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics. The nation's overall unionized rate of 10.5%, which includes public workers, is down from its all-time high of 20.1% in 1983, the 1st year comparable BLS figures are available.3. 401(k)s have been normalizedA series of tax law changes in recent decades has enabled the rise of defined-contribution plans like 401(k)s. Until the 1980s, this was not a normal employee benefit. Today it is. More than 100 million people have 401(k)-style benefits, according to the Department of Labor. Critics say it's not enough. The Economic Policy Institute says 401(k)s are a "poor substitute" for defined-benefit pensions, in part because many people simply aren't saving enough and small businesses are less likely than large companies to offer them. But advocates say the defined-contribution approach gives workers more control over their money and they point out that defined-benefit pensions are vulnerable to corporate bankruptcy, mismanagement, and corruption. Also, in the modern economy, many workers prize the ability to move from company to company, instead of accruing benefits at a single employer. That emphasis on mobility tends to favor 401(k)-style plans. "It’s really only the older companies that have residual defined-benefit plans," Munnell said. 4. Public companies are under pressure to reduce pension debtAs public companies face pressure to deliver positive quarterly earnings, one area they often seek to improve is their general liabilities. That can involve slashing debt to earn a better credit rating, which typically makes it cheaper to borrow or win over investors. When GE announced its pension moves Monday, analysts welcomed the plan. "This move shows that GE is looking to pull any and all levers to restore its financial health," CFRA Research stock analyst Jim Corridore said in a research note. The major ratings agencies often praise companies for reducing their pension liabilities. And despite the pivot away from defined-benefit plans, corporations still owe a lot. The top 100 private plans alone owe their workers $1.66 trillion, according to actuarial firm Milliman. In other words, while most active employees won't be getting a pension, the legacy of America's pension system will live on for decades."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jan 1, 2020 7:50:43 GMT -6
www.yahoo.com/finance/news/really-over-corporate-pensions-head-050108115.html'It's really over': Corporate pensions head for extinctionfrom USA TODAY Dec 10, 2019 by Nathan Bomey "The practice of companies sending monthly retirement checks to their former workers is headed for extinction, and remaining pension funds are in tough financial shape. Nearly 2/3 of pension funds are considering dropping guaranteed benefits to new workers within the next 5 years, according to a human resources consulting firm that studied the matter. Despite gains in the stock market this year, U.S. pension plans are near their worst financial state in 2 years, according to the new report by Mercer, which casts a spotlight on the escalating cost of past promises to employees. Most U.S. companies no longer offer defined-benefit pensions, which typically provided guaranteed monthly payments to workers when they retired. But pension funds that still operate must gain in value to ensure they have enough to meet their obligations. By late 2019, the average pension fund had 85% of the funds necessary to meet its obligations over time due largely to low interest rates, according to Mercer's 2020 Defined Benefit Outlook. The firm also reported that 63% of companies with defined-benefit pensions "are considering termination" of the plan within half a decade. That would mean the pensions would be closed off to future participants. The report comes as corporate pensions continue to disappear. General Electric announced in October that it would offer lump-sum pension buyouts to about 100,000 former U.S. employees who have not yet begun receiving their pensions. The company, which has been facing pressure to bolster its finances, also announced plans to freeze pension benefits for about 20,700 salaried pensioners at current levels. "In the bigger picture, GE is just going the way that most of the private sector in the United States has gone," Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, said in a recent interview. "It’s really over in the private sector. The question is, just when does the last plan close down?" The number of pension plans offering defined benefits – which means the payouts are guaranteed – plummeted by about 73% from 1986 to 2016, according to the Department of Labor's Employee Benefits Security Administration. That's due to a mix of reasons, including risk, costs, declining union power and the rise of 401(k)-style defined-contribution plans, which require workers to kick in their own funds for retirement investments, often with a company match."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Dec 24, 2019 9:31:06 GMT -6
Lukesjohn65,
I couldn't agree more.
Innocent people can, and do, go to prison because they couldn't afford attorneys.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Apr 14, 2019 7:31:46 GMT -6
The Basic Facts of best bitcoin exchange Such a coin is going to be preferred by lots of people over the other ecoins in the marketplace. Rather than relying on miners to fix complex mathematical issues, proof-of-stake coins utilize the stakes themselves to secure the network. There are lots of coins in the cryptocurrency market which use proof-of-stake to guarantee the blockchain. Can you explain what "proof-of-stake" means?
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Sept 22, 2018 7:19:51 GMT -6
from PaulCraigRoberts.org Freedom Where Did You Go? Sept 22, 2018 by Paul Craig Roberts "My Generation is the last one to have known privacy and to have lived out most of our lives in freedom. I remember when driving licenses did not have photos and most certainly not fingerprints. A driving license was issued on proof of birth date alone. Prior to the appearance of automobiles IDs did not exist in democratic nations. You were who you said you were. The intrusive questions that accost us every day, even when doing something simple as reporting a telephone or Internet connection being out or inquiring about a credit card charge, were impermissible. I remember when you could telephone a utility company, for example, have the telephone answered no later than the third ring with a real person on the line who could clear up the problem in a few minutes without having to know your Social Security number and your mother’s maiden name. Today, after half an hour with robot voices asking intrusive questions you might finally get a real person somewhere in Asia who is controlled by such a tight system of rules that the person is, in effect, a robot. The person is not permitted to use any judgment or discretion and you listen to advertisements for another half hour while you wait for a supervisor who promises to have the matter looked into. The minute you go online, you are subject to collection of information about yourself. You don’t even know it is being collected. According to reports, soon our stoves, refrigerators, and microwave ovens will be reporting on us. The new cars already do. When privacy disappears, there are no private persons. So what do people become? They become Big Brother’s subjects. We are at that point now. This interview witth Julian Assange is worth the 53 minutes: www.rt.com/news/438968-assange-last-interview-blackout/ Think about Assange for a minute. He has done nothing wrong. There are no charges against him. All charges have been dismissed. But he cannot walk out of the Ecuadoran Embassy in London without being seized by the British police and handed over to Washington whose prosecutorial apparatus intends to prosecute Assange for treason although he is not a US citizen but an Australian and Ecuadoran citizen. What did Assange do? Nothing but practice journalism. His problem, his only problem, is that his journalism embarrassed Washington, and Washington intends revenge. Law is nowhere in the picture. The UK is breaking all known laws including its own by the forced detention of Assange in the Ecuadoran Embassy. The US in its determination to get Assange has no law whatsoever on which to stand. It only has raw unbridled power that can operate without law. In other words, the Anglo-American world is totally lawless. Yet the Russian government holds firmly to its delusion that the US and Britain are countries with which agreementts can be made. The digital world makes Big Brother’s Memory Hole possible. No need to burn books. Just push a button and information disappears. As I write Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Apple, and so forth are all making non-approved information disappear. In a digital world, not only can our identities be stolen—indeed, it can be stolen multiple times so that there are many of you at the same time—but we can also be erased. Poof—push a button and there you go. This makes murder easy. You never existed. As I said before and will say again, the digital world and artificial intelligence are a far worse disaster for mankind than ever was the Black Plague. All the smart people busy at work creating the new world are destroying the human race." Article printed from PaulCraigRoberts.org: www.paulcraigroberts.org URL to article: www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/09/22/freedom-where-did-you-go/
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Aug 18, 2018 12:16:19 GMT -6
from Coalition for a Prosperous America August 13, 2018 By Jeff Ferry, CPA Research Director "It’s just six months since the first of the Trump administration’s tariffs went into effect and the job gains are already visible. Our CPA Tariff Job Creation Tracker (TJCT) shows over 11,000 jobs have been created or announced since February 1st and that includes only cases where companies announced specific job counts. Other companies have also said they intend to add jobs, but we will wait for numbers before adding them to the TJCT. In general, these are good, well-paying jobs, in strong, stable industries. The addition of high-paying jobs to any locality creates upward pressure on wages in the entire region. The process is just beginning. More tariffs, which were previously announced, are being finalized and implemented. The so-called “second tranche” of section 301 tariffs recently announced on 279 lines amounting to about $16 billion of Chinese imports will go into effect on August 23. Hearings will be held on August 20 by the US Trade Representative’s office relating to the proposal of 10% to 25% tariffs on an additional $200 billion of Chinese imports. As a result, we should expect to see more future job creation by domestic companies that make or can make products associated with those tariff lines. A good example of the job creation now underway is the expansion by Magnitude 7 Metals, in New Madrid, Missouri. Privately-owned American company Magnitude 7 bought the aluminum smelting facilities out of bankruptcy after previous owner Noranda failed, due largely to international competition which forced some 90% of US aluminum smelters out of business. In March, Missouri Governor Eric Greitens spoke at an event at Magnitude 7, praising the company for relaunching the smelter and creating jobs offering average annual pay of $64,000. “These jobs will improve the whole economy in the region. It means more money for the schools. It means more customers for the restaurants,” Governor Greitens told the crowd. n total, our tracker shows 2,899 jobs have been announced or created in the aluminum industry since February. In the steel sector, industry leaders Nucor and US Steel have announced expansions and re-openings of previously shuttered facilities. Nucor has also announced plans to build a new greenfield steel mill in Frostburg, Florida, creating 250 jobs at an average pay of $66,000 a year. Less well known is that smaller steel companies are expanding too. Big River Steel, a steel startup, is investing in its Arkansas mill to double production capacity to 3.3 million tons a year. Big River is also planning to open a second mill in Brownsville, Texas, which will employ 500 steelworkers. Our tracker shows a total of 4,960 new jobs planned in the steel industry. The solar panel industry was the first industry where the administration announced tariffs, back in January. Some doom-mongers predicted disaster for the industry. Instead, the solar industry is booming. Around 10 solar manufacturing companies have announced investment and job creation in solar manufacturing facilities, from Oregon to Florida. In April, First Solar Corp. announced a $400 million expansion at its Ohio plant, which will create 500 new jobs. First Solar’s innovative thin-film solar cells are not directly affected by the solar tariffs, but its ability to build a strong manufacturing capability depends on the existence of a robust solar supply chain and the required skills here in the US. The solar tariffs are designed to achieve exactly that. According to jobs website Glassdoor, a manufacturing operator at First Solar earns about $37,000 a year while a development engineer earns $97,000. Our tracker shows new solar jobs at 1,150 so far, and new jobs in the washing machine industry at 2,100. Add up those four categories and you get 11,100 new jobs. And that’s without counting jobs that will be created in the diverse industries and sectors where the administration is levying tariffs on Chinese imports worth $50 billion a year. It’s the Supply Chain The United States made a huge mistake in the 1990s and early 2000s when it allowed entire manufacturing supply chains to move to Asia. Manufacturing is too important for employment, wealth, and income creation to allow so much of it to move overseas. Further, manufacturing success is not about individual products or stages of production dispersed over different countries thousands of miles apart. Skills and knowledge tend to cluster together, and they grow and develop best in close proximity. So it’s especially good news to see growth in broader supply chains. A good example is the recent announcement by iron ore miner Cleveland Cliffs of a new facility to process ore in Toledo, Ohio. That facility is targeted to create 1,200 new jobs. Across the industrial world, there is growing awareness that local and in-country production is coming back into fashion. Another way to put it is that the corporate strategy of saving a few cents on every input by disaggregating production and siting it all over the world is going out of fashion. The change is not just the result of President Trump’s tariffs, or of China’s blatantly offensive IP theft, (such as the latest case of a Chinese Apple employee arrested by the FBI at San Jose Airport on July 7th, after allegedly walking out of an Apple lab with stolen circuit boards and heading for a job at a Chinese autonomous vehicle competitor). For example, inverters transform the voltage generated by solar cells into domestic AC current and are an essential part of every solar system. Inverter maker Chint Power Systems recently announced plans to increase inverter production at its Texas facility and said it’s actively seeking a second location for US manufacturing. Chint is partly motivated by the likely third round of Chinese tariffs under consideration, but the US manager of Chint has also said he also is seeking to work closely with “customers that plan projects closely with us.” Similarly, Giant, the Taiwan-based bicycle market leader that made 4.4 million bikes last year, mainly in China, recently told the Financial Times that it is investing in production in eastern Europe as there is a global trend to reduce dependence on Chinese production. The European Union recently enacted anti-dumping tariffs on Chinese electric bikes. Supported by tariffs on both sides of the Atlantic, the business community is actively seeking to diversify out of China and find new locations in Asia, the US, and Europe. It’s the beginnings of a new world manufacturing order. US Public Companies Need to Wake Up and Diversify Their Manufacturing But there is one group of companies dragging their feet: American companies, and particularly publicly quoted American companies. In solar inverters, there are three large players, two Chinese and one American. Chint, one of the Chinese manufacturers, is seeking to expand US production. The sole American producer, Enphase, still produces all its inverters in China. Like many tech companies, it has a contentious relationship with its Wall Street investors. The stock is under attack from a hedge fund. Enphase CEO Badri Kothandaraman recently said: “We are laser focused on our number one priority: improve profitability quarter on quarter and creating further shareholder value.” It is this short-term obsession that prevents US tech companies from seeing the bigger picture and seeking to build a business for the long term, which would include global manufacturing. There is also a herd mentality in which tech company executives believe investors will only support manufacturing in the cheapest markets. That’s part of the reason Apple has not lived up to vague suggestions by Tim Cook that it would build US manufacturing—while its Taiwan-based supplier, Foxconn, is going ahead with a large Wisconsin manufacturing facility. US government action is needed to change this dynamic. Downstream Industry Impact While many companies are benefiting from the tariffs, there are also some companies that pay higher prices for the tariffed products. Those companies either pass the price increase along, reduce their profit, or lay off workers depending upon the nature of their market. The administration should follow up the existing tariffs with tariffs to protect downstream industries. More generalized tariff coverage causes fewer distortions than targeted tariffs. It is already doing so, with its “second tranche” of tariffs against $16 billion of Chinese imports and the upcoming third tranche. But more may need to be done. Free traders wrongly focus only upon alleged “efficiency gains” of trade. But they incorrectly assume that displaced workers quickly find jobs of equal quality. That assumption has now been proven untrue. Large numbers of those who lose their jobs due to import competition either leave the workforce or find jobs at significantly lower pay. Their current and future earnings are severely reduced. Marginal efficiency gains are dwarfed by the aggregate wage reduction. It is also important to note that future innovation and productive capacity from lost industries, often high tech industries, are forfeited forever. Tariffs present a strong initial solution to the job and industry losses caused by foreign subsidies, dumping, and China’s acts, policies and practices of commercial espionage, technology theft, and weaponized incoming investment."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Aug 5, 2018 11:07:26 GMT -6
TARIFFS: Did Tariffs Make America Great?by Pat Buchanan buchanan.org/blog/did-tariffs-make-america-great-129752" "Make America Great Again!" will, given the astonishing victory it produced for Donald Trump, be recorded among the most successful slogans in political history. Yet it raises a question: How did America first become the world's greatest economic power? In 1998, in "The Great Betrayal: How American Sovereignty and Social Justice Are Being Sacrificed to the Gods of the Global Economy," this writer sought to explain. However, as the blazing issue of that day was Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton, it was no easy task to steer interviewers around to the McKinley Tariff. Free trade propaganda aside, what is the historical truth? The Great Betrayal As our Revolution was about political independence, the first words and acts of our constitutional republic were about ensuring America's economic independence. "A free people should promote such manufactures as tend to render them independent on others for essentials, especially military supplies," said President Washington in his first message to Congress. The first major bill passed by Congress was the Tariff Act of 1789. Weeks later, Washington imposed tonnage taxes all foreign shipping. The U.S. Merchant Marine was born. In 1791, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton wrote in his famous Report on Manufactures: "The wealth ... independence, and security of a Country, appear to be materially connected with the prosperity of manufactures. Every nation ... ought to endeavor to possess within itself all the essentials of national supply. These compromise the means of subsistence, habitation, clothing, and defence." During the War of 1812, British merchants lost their American markets. When peace came, flotillas of British ships arrived at U.S. ports to dump underpriced goods and to recapture the markets the Brits had lost. Have something to say about this column? Visit Pat's FaceBook page and post your comments.... Henry Clay and John Calhoun backed James Madison's Tariff of 1816, as did ex-free traders Jefferson and John Adams. It worked. In 1816, the U.S. produced 840 thousand yards of cloth. By 1820, it was 13,874 thousand yards. America had become self-sufficient. Financing "internal improvements" with tariffs on foreign goods would become known abroad as "The American System." Said Daniel Webster, "Protection of our own labor against the cheaper, ill-paid, half-fed, and pauper labor of Europe, is ... a duty which the country owes to its own citizens." This is economic patriotism, a conservatism of the heart. Globalists, cosmopolites and one-worlders recoil at phrases like "America First." Campaigning for Henry Clay, "The Father of the American System," in 1844, Abe Lincoln issued an impassioned plea, "Give us a protective tariff and we will have the greatest nation on earth." Battling free trade in the Polk presidency, Congressman Lincoln said, "Abandonment of the protective policy by the American Government must result in the increase of both useless labor and idleness and ... must produce want and ruin among our people." In our time, the abandonment of economic patriotism produced in Middle America what Lincoln predicted, and what got Trump elected. From the Civil War to the 20th century, U.S. economic policy was grounded in the Morrill Tariffs, named for Vermont Congressman and Senator Justin Morrill who, as early as 1857, had declared: "I am for ruling America for the benefit, first, of Americans, and, for the 'rest of mankind' afterwards." To Morrill, free trade was treason: "Free trade abjures patriotism and boasts of cosmopolitanism. It regards the labor of our own people with no more favor than that of the barbarian on the Danube or the cooly on the Ganges." William McKinley, the veteran of Antietam who gave his name to the McKinley Tariff, declared, four years before being elected president: "Free trade results in our giving our money ... our manufactures and our markets to other nations. ... It will bring widespread discontent. It will revolutionize our values." Campaigning in 1892, McKinley said, "Open competition between high-paid American labor and poorly paid European labor will either drive out of existence American industry or lower American wages." Substitute "Asian labor" for "European labor" and is this not a fair description of what free trade did to U.S. manufacturing these last 25 years? Some $12 trillion in trade deficits, arrested wages for our workers, six million manufacturing jobs lost, 55,000 factories and plants shut down. McKinley's future Vice President Teddy Roosevelt agreed with him, "Thank God I am not a free trader." What did the Protectionists produce? From 1869 to 1900, GDP quadrupled. Budget surpluses were run for 27 straight years. The U.S. debt was cut two-thirds to 7 percent of GDP. Commodity prices fell 58 percent. U.S. population doubled, but real wages rose 53 percent. Economic growth averaged 4 percent a year. And the United States, which began this era with half of Britain's production, ended it with twice Britain's production. Under Warren Harding, Cal Coolidge and the Fordney-McCumber Tariff, GDP growth from 1922 to 1927 hit 7 percent, an all-time record. Economic patriotism put America first, and made America first. Of GOP free traders, the steel magnate Joseph Wharton, whose name graces the college Trump attended, said it well: "Republicans who are shaky on protection are shaky all over." "
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Mar 18, 2018 8:27:32 GMT -6
buchanan.org/blog/gop-terrified-tariffs-128840March 2018 By Patrick J. Buchanan "From Lincoln to William McKinley to Theodore Roosevelt, and from Warren Harding through Calvin Coolidge, the Republican Party erected the most awesome manufacturing machine the world had ever seen. And, as the party of high tariffs through those seven decades, the GOP was rewarded by becoming America’s Party. Thirteen Republican presidents served from 1860 to 1930, and only two Democrats. And Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson were elected only because the Republicans had split. Why, then, this terror of tariffs that grips the GOP? Consider. On hearing that President Trump might impose tariffs on aluminum and steel, Sen. Lindsey Graham was beside himself: “Please reconsider,” he implored the president, “you’re making a huge mistake.” Twenty-four hours earlier, Graham had confidently assured us that war with a nuclear-armed North Korea is “worth it.” “All the damage that would come from a war would be worth it in terms of long-term stability and national security,” said Graham. A steel tariff terrifies Graham. A new Korean war does not? “Trade wars are not won, only lost,” warns Sen. Jeff Flake. But this is ahistorical nonsense. The U.S. relied on tariffs to convert from an agricultural economy in 1800 to the mightiest manufacturing power on earth by 1900. Bismarck’s Germany, born in 1871, followed the U.S. example, and swept past free trade Britain before World War I. Does Senator Flake think Japan rose to post-war preeminence through free trade, as Tokyo kept U.S. products out, while dumping cars, radios, TVs and motorcycles here to kill the industries of the nation that was defending them. Both Nixon and Reagan had to devalue the dollar to counter the predatory trade policies of Japan. Since Bush I, we have run $12 trillion in trade deficits, and, in the first decade in this century, we lost 55,000 factories and 6,000,000 manufacturing jobs. Does Flake see no correlation between America’s decline, China’s rise, and the $4 trillion in trade surpluses Beijing has run up at the expense of his own country? The hysteria that greeted Trump’s idea of a 25 percent tariff on steel and 10 percent tariff on aluminum suggest that restoring this nation’s economic independence is going to be a rocky road. In 2017, the U.S. ran a trade deficit in goods of almost $800 billion, $375 billion of that with China, a trade surplus that easily covered Xi Jinping’s entire defense budget. If we are to turn our $800 billion trade deficit in goods into an $800 billion surplus, and stop the looting of America’s industrial base and the gutting of our cities and towns, sacrifices will have to be made. But if we are not up to it, we will lose our independence, as the countries of the EU have lost theirs. Specifically, we need to shift taxes off goods produced in the USA, and impose taxes on goods imported into the USA. As we import nearly $2.5 trillion in goods, a tariff on imported goods, rising gradually to 20 percent, would initially produce $500 billion in revenue. All that tariff revenue could be used to eliminate and replace all taxes on production inside the USA. As the price of foreign goods rose, U.S. products would replace foreign-made products. There’s nothing in the world that we cannot produce here. And if it can be made in America, it should be made in America. Consider. Assume a Lexus cost $50,000 in the U.S., and a 20 percent tariff were imposed, raising the price to $60,000. What would the Japanese producers of Lexus do? They could accept the loss in sales in the world’s greatest market, the USA. They could cut their prices to hold their U.S. market share. Or they could shift production to the United States, building their cars here and keeping their market. How have EU nations run up endless trade surpluses with America? By imposing a value-added tax, or VAT, on imports from the U.S., while rebating the VAT on exports to the USA. Works just like a tariff. The principles behind a policy of economic nationalism, to turn our trade deficits, which subtract from GDP, into trade surpluses, which add to GDP, are these: Production comes before consumption. Who consumes the apples is less important than who owns the orchard. We should depend more upon each other and less upon foreign lands. We should tax foreign-made goods and use the revenue, dollar for dollar, to cut taxes on domestic production. The idea is not to keep foreign goods out, but to induce foreign companies to move production here. We have a strategic asset no one else can match. We control access to the largest richest market on earth, the USA. And just as states charge higher tuition on out-of state students at their top universities, we should charge a price of admission for foreign producers to get into America’s markets. And — someone get a hold of Sen. Graham — it’s called a tariff."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Mar 11, 2018 11:17:24 GMT -6
from prosperousamerica.org WORLD STEEL MARKETS BY THE NUMBERSBy Jeff Ferry, CPA Research Director Feb 28, 2018 "The pundits who declare ominously that we are on the brink of a trade war have it wrong. In fact, we are in the midst of a war for domination of the world steel market. And as a quick look at the numbers makes clear, so far we are losing. The World Steel Organization does a great job of assembling data for the worldwide steel industry. A quick look at recent steel history makes it clear to what extent China is dominating the industry and creating problems for other producers. The core problem for the steel industry is overproduction: the world is producing about 1,600 million tons of steel a year and only consumes about 1,100. As Figure 1 shows, the overproduction problem is entirely due to China’s huge increase in production. China’s 2016 steel production of 808 million tons is up 65% on its 2007 total. In fact, the Chinese government officially and publicly recognized that it was overproducing back in 2007, and has called on its own industry to begin cutting back production and retiring steel plants, especially the older, heavily polluting ones. Despite the fact that the Chinese government and related agencies support the industry with billions of dollars in subsidies, the Chinese industry did not heed the call. Instead, production continued to rise. Today, China produces more steel than the next nine steel-producing nations combined. Figure 1: China now accounts for 50% of world steel production. As Figure 2 shows, many of the other top ten steel producers have reacted to the oversupply of steel by reducing production. Only India shows a large increase in recent years, and India consumes virtually all of its steel internally. The US has cut production by 20%, the largest production cut in this group (other than the Ukraine, which suffered invasion by Russia during the period). South Korea has raised production by 33% in the period, reflecting an economic strategy (neo-mercantilism) that is in some ways similar to that of China. Figure 2: The rest of the top ten steel producers have mostly held production flat in this era of oversupply. US production fell by 20%. Figure 3 looks at the top countries in terms of net exports and net imports in 2016. Net exports is the total of exports minus the total of imports in that year. Because steel is so critical to so many other industries, most advanced nations want to ensure that their net imports do not get very high, so they always have the capability to meet their own needs, even in times of crisis. Some nations, especially the neo-mercantilists, want to build up large export businesses in steel. As Figure 3 shows, Japan, Russia, and the Ukraine all export more steel as a share of their domestic production than China. However all these countries have responded to the overproduction crisis (and the weak steel prices) by cutting back production in these years. Japan’s 2016 production was 13% below its 2007 level. China’s net exports of 94.5 million tons are more than the other four major net exporters combined. And China has not cut back production. On the contrary, China’s steel production has increased, and with a slump in its previously-booming construction industry, there is nowhere for the excess production to go but into the export market. Meanwhile, on the import side, there is only one advanced nation willing to accept a large volume of steel imports—the United States. The net importers just below the US on this list have little or no steel industries of their own and must import to meet the needs of their domestic industries. Vietnam has ambitious plans to build up its own steel industry, which is likely to remove it from the list of large steel importers. The major steel producers within the European Union—Germany, France, and Italy—all manage their markets carefully to keep net imports at very low levels. Size and success in the steel industry has little to do with comparative advantage, to use the concept often invoked by “free trade” economists with near-religious fervor. The main raw materials used to make steel are iron ore, coking coal, and scrap metal. China has no natural comparative advantage in any of these and must import them all. Labor costs are small in steel: 1 to 2 man-hours per ton—no more than 10% of the cost of a ton of steel. The “advantage” China has is a government willing to spend billions to support the growth of its steel industry. The disadvantage the US has is a government that takes a short-term view and seeks the cheapest price today and encourages its domestic industries to do the same, without regard for the long-term consequences of allowing its military and civilian economies to become dependent on foreign suppliers who cannot be counted on for either price or availability in the longer term. Figure 3: China leads the net exporters and the US the net importers. Source: Data from World Steel Organization. Calculations by CPA."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Mar 11, 2018 11:11:13 GMT -6
from prosperousamerica.org WHY WE NEED STEEL TARIFFSFebruary 28, 2018 By Jeff Ferry, CPA Research Director "The Department of Commerce report on steel imports and national security asks Americans a fundamental question: Are we going to defend the US steel industry from the decline caused by the growth of uneconomic foreign competition? Or, are we going to allow the industry to fade away and become dependent on other countries for this ubiquitous product, vital to our military and civilian economy? We believe the answer has to be an effort in favor of defending America’s steel industry. Too much is at stake. America’s national security depends on a reliable supply of steel. America’s infrastructure, much of it urgently in need of renewal, depends on steel. Great American industries, including automobiles, aerospace, and many others, depend on a reliable supply of high-quality, low-cost steel. Thousands of jobs also depend on the steel industry. Equally important, the international rule of law depends on the US taking a strong stand today. In the last nine years, China has increased its steel production 65% and now accounts for 50% of world production and 23% of world steel exports. Some believe it is the Chinese government’s deliberate intention to weaken the US steel industry; others say they are simply subsidizing their loss-making steel industry with billions of dollars of government money as a huge employment program, and taking advantage of the US market as the only major nation willing to accept large-scale imports. National Security The January report from the Commerce Department explains that the US military depends on steel for weapon systems, ships, planes, and land vehicles. Although critics have argued that only 3% of US steel production is required for defense needs, this ignores the broad range of types of steel needed by the military and the way a complex industry really works. As Commerce spells out in its report, the military needs not just thousands of tons of common steel plate, it also needs specialty steels including high-carbon forged steel, high-tensile strength steel, high-carbon steel laminate, steel forgings, and other steel alloys that deliver greater strength at lower weight than ordinary steel. All these steel variations can only be produced by a healthy commercial industry deriving the majority of its revenue from civilian customers. The report cites (Appendix H, pg. 3) two cases where the Defense Department (i.e. the US taxpayer) has had to provide funds to the industry to ensure a supply of specific steel variations: one for the high-purity, low-alloy, iron-based steel used in MRAP vehicles widely deployed in war zones to protect troops from mines, and another steel variation for Navy-grade, heavy-alloy steel plate used in submarines, helicopter landing decks, and other military vehicles. A robust steel industry is required to meet these needs. Yet despite the economic recovery since 2009, US steel production has declined, down 12% since 2012 to 78.5 million tons in 2016. The US has lost 11,000 steel jobs since 2012 to reach a new low of 81,400 employees, according to BLS data. Continued decline of the industry threatens our defense needs, including our ability to respond quickly in times of crisis. As the Commerce report (pg. 26) puts it: “A continued loss of viable commercial production capabilities and related skilled workforce will jeopardize the US steel industry’s ability to meet the full spectrum of defense requirements.” A healthy industry is also important for the civilian economy. Steel is one of the most widely used materials in the world. Innovations in steel capability often play a substantial role in new opportunities and the competitiveness of industries like automobile and aerospace production. The view that steel is a mature, unchanging, dirty “old” industry is a facile presumption of those who don’t understand modern manufacturing. Research and development plays a role in every manufacturing industry. Steel and steel alloys evolve and change. As the World Steel Association points out, 75% of the steels in use today did not exist 20 years ago. Thanks to technological progress, the Golden Gate Bridge, which required 83,000 tons of steel when it was built in 1937, could today be built with only half that amount of steel. Our largest steel company, Nucor, has developed an innovative technique, known as Castrip, to use rollers to produce steel sheet as thin as 1 millimeter directly from the steelmaking furnace. The process is cheaper, more space-efficient, and more energy-efficient. Imports and China Capacity (or plant) utilization is the most important barometer of the health of our steel industry. At 80% or higher plant utilization, the industry is healthy. Below that level, it struggles. Between 1990 and 2008, the industry was healthy, with utilization rates averaging around 85%. However, around the year 2000, China embarked on its monumental drive for economic growth. Chinese steel production has increased six-fold since 2000, rising from 127 million tons to last year’s 808 million tons. China now accounts for 50% of global production. Industry experts agree that global demand is only about 1,100-1,200 million tons, so some 400 million tons needs to be removed from the market to restore the world industry to health. China has recognized that it is overproducing. According to the Commerce report (Appendix L, pg. 4), the Chinese government has been urging its steelmakers to cut capacity at least since 2006, with little result. In a 2016 Reuters article, Shiheng Special Steel Group CEO Zhang Wuzong said the government’s plan to cut capacity by around 100 million tons was insufficient. “Getting rid of 100 million or 150 million isn’t any good—300 million or 400 million is more appropriate,” he told Reuters. Unusually outspoken for a Chinese executive, he went onto criticize the government’s planned $15 billion fund to take care of layoffs and debt write-offs for so-called “zombie” steel companies as insufficient to solve the problem. Speaking in early 2016, he forecast that Chinese steel production would fall by 40 million tons a year. Instead, in 2016, it rose by 4.5 million tons. China now produces more steel than the US, Japan, Russia, and the European Union combined. This excess supply has led to a surge of imports into the US. In spite of over 100 individual tariffs on specific types of steel from specific countries, imports took 33.8% of US consumption last year according to Commerce Department estimates, up from an average of 30% over the preceding five years. Excess supply depresses prices in the US market, causing the industry to shrink. According to the Commerce Department report (pgs. 33-34), 10 steelmaking facilities have closed since 2000, in Ohio, Indiana, West Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, South Carolina, Alabama, and Oklahoma. Last year, ArcelorMittal announced the closure of a steel mill in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania. That list does not include other steel mills that have been “temporarily” closed while awaiting an upturn in the market—which may or may not come. The net result for American steelmakers can be seen in Figure 1. The industry has been unable to earn a decent profit since 2008. The fundamentals of a capital-intensive business like steel require companies to earn a return well in excess of their cost of capital; otherwise they are not creating value and shareholders will not provide the funds necessary to maintain and renew the heavy capital investment required. A Coalition for a Prosperous America (CPA) analysis of the last nine years of steel industry financial data shows that the industry’s return on invested capital (the broadest measure of profitability) ranged from 5.65% for industry leader Nucor to a negative 11.76% for the struggling industry laggard US Steel. Yet the cost of capital for these companies ranged from 11.27% for Nucor to 22.37% for US Steel. Despite an uptick in profits in 2017 (partly driven by anticipation of tariffs), these companies are not generating enough profit to attract the capital they need to invest in their own businesses. Further shrinkage and decline would be inevitable without a remedy. Figure 1: US steel companies have suffered losses or negligible profits since 2009. The Commerce Department has recommended three possible remedies to President Trump (see pg. 8). •“Alternative 1A” calls for an import quota requiring a 37% reduction on 2017 levels for shipments into the US for each country sending steel. •“Alternative 1B” calls for a global 24% tariff on all steel imports into the US. •“Alternative 2” is for a 53% tariff on steel from those nations that are not close allies of the US, including Brazil, China, South Korea, Russia, Vietnam, and several others. Canada and the European Union are notably absent from this list. All three alternatives are aimed at restoring the US steel industry to plant utilization levels of 80%. Alternative 2 has been designed to meet international considerations. In its Feb. 23rd memo to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, the Defense Department said it agreed that steel imports were endangering national security but added that it was concerned about the impact of action against steel from our allies. It asked Commerce to “create incentives for trade partners to work with the US on addressing the underlying issue of Chinese transshipment.” The idea of imposing steep tariffs only on certain nations could create an incentive for nations to resist Chinese transshipment. It also could mark a start for building an international coalition to pressure China to cut back on its production and exports. International conflict over steel can only be resolved if China is convinced that it cannot export its overproduction to the rest of the world. Our allies need to move away from the view that they can be unharmed bystanders as the bulk of overproduction ends up in the US. The entire international community has a shared interest in compelling China to act as a good global citizen instead of a rogue nation that pays lip service to “free trade” while relentlessly expanding its civilian and military capabilities. The Commerce Department’s tariff recommendations have been criticized by many “free trade” economists. They claim that tariffs will raise prices, hit consumers, and reduce American gross domestic product. They fail to recognize that American consumers are also American producers. While a tariff on steel will lead to small price increases in steel-using goods, it will also lead to more jobs and economic growth in the steel industry. Over time, that growth will spread to other industries. We know from bitter experience that the majority of folks pushed out of manufacturing jobs end up working in service industries with lower pay and worse benefits. That’s if they can find any work at all. With its critical importance to so much of the military and civilian economy, steel is an excellent place to begin a major pushback in favor of good jobs, US productive capacity, economic rebuilding, and the struggle for a more realistic international dialogue on economic relations."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Mar 11, 2018 10:07:31 GMT -6
from freedomsphoenix.com www.freedomsphoenix.com/Opinion/236239-2018-03-11-11-nations-sign-tpp-deal.htm11 Nations Sign TPP DealMarch 11, 2018 by Stephen Lendman "Signatory countries include Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam - America withdrew, China excluded. The Electronic Frontier Foundation earlier called TPP "a secretive, multinational trade agreement that threatened to extend restrictive intellectual property (IP) laws across the globe and rewrite international rules on its enforcement." It's NAFTA on steroids, a stealth corporate coup d'etat, a giveaway to corporate predators, a neoliberal ripoff, a freedom and ecosystem destroying nightmare. Corporate predators and lobbyists representing them wrote the agreement, exclusively benefitting business interests at the expense of public health and welfare. On Thursday in Santiago, Chile, 11 nations signed the renamed Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). Provisions lobbied for by Big Pharma were excluded from the deal, subject to possible later inclusion. Americans at least temporarily were saved from a deeply flawed deal, grievously harming consumers in all signatory countries. CPTPP revisions leave most of its harmful provisions intact - including the infamous investor-state dispute settlement ( ISDS) system. It lets corporate predators sue governments before a rigged panel of 3 corporate lawyers for virtually unlimited compensation from taxpayers on what they claim violates their rights - including alleged loss of "expected future profits." Rulings in their favor can be gotten by claiming laws protecting public health or ecosanity violate their trade agreement rights. Rulings are not subject to appeal. If a nation refuses to pay, the suing corporation can seize its assets to obtain compensation. ISDS amounts to extrajudicial rigging, occurring outside of a nation's courts. It incentivizes offshoring of jobs by providing special privileges and rights for firms relocating operations abroad.A global race to the bottom is facilitated. Signing on to CPTPP would have greatly increased US exposure to ISDS attacks - by empowering corporate predators in all signatory countries. Why any nation would agree to abandon consumer rights, ecosanity, and greatly increased vulnerability to ISDS attacks is incomprehensible. To its credit, the Trump administration wants ISDS rolled back in ongoing NAFTA renegotiations. Corporate lobbyists are going all-out to block this proposal - aided by 11 CPTPP nations agreeing to include it in their agreement. In America, unions, consumer and environmental groups, Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz, even Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts oppose ISDS. The most significant provisions of CPTPP, NAFTA and similar deals are investment rules, not trade-related ones. They're about maximizing corporate profits at the expense of public health, safety and ecosanity."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Mar 10, 2018 13:03:46 GMT -6
from David Stockman's Contra Corner davidstockmanscontracorner.com/its-not-bad-trade-deals-its-bad-money-part-2/It's Not Bad Trade Deals--It's Bad Money, Part 2March 6, 2018 By David Stockman "In Part 1 we made it clear that the Donald is right about the horrific results of US trade since the 1970s, and that the Keynesian "free traders" of both the saltwater (Harvard) and freshwater (Chicago) schools of monetary central planning have their heads buried far deeper in the sand than does even the orange comb-over with his bombastic affection for 17th century mercantilism. The fact is, you do not get an $810 billion trade deficit and a 66% ratio of exports ($1.55 trillion) to imports ($2.36 trillion), as the US did in 2017, on a level playing field. And most especially, an honest free market would never generate an unbroken and deepening string of trade deficits over the last 43 years running, which cumulate to the staggering sum of $15 trillion. Better than anything else, those baleful trade numbers explain why industrial America has been hollowed-out and off-shored, and why vast stretches of Flyover America have been left to flounder in economic malaise and decline. But two things are absolutely clear about the "why" of this $15 trillion calamity. To wit, it was not caused by some mysterious loss of capitalist enterprise and energy on America's main street economy since 1975. Nor was it caused---c0ntrary to the Donald's simple-minded blather---by bad trade deals and stupid people at the USTR and Commerce Department. After all, American capitalism produced modest trade surpluses every year between 1895 and 1975. Yet it has not lost its mojo during the 43 years of massive trade deficits since then. In fact, the explosion of technological advance in Silicon Valley and on-line business enterprise from coast-to-coast suggests more nearly the opposite. Likewise, the basic framework of global commerce and trade deals under the WTO and other multi-lateral arrangements was established in the immediate post-war years and was well embedded when the US ran trade surpluses in the 1950s and 1960s. Those healthy post-war US trade surpluses, in fact, were consistent with the historical scheme of things during the golden era of industrial growth between 1870 and 1914. During that era of gold standard-based global commerce, Great Britain, France and the US (after the mid-1890s) tended to run trade surpluses owing to their advanced technology, industry and productivity, while exporting capital to less developed economies around the world. That's also what the US did during the halcyon economic times of the 1950s and 1960s. What changed dramatically after 1975, however, is the monetary regime, and with it the regulator of both central bank policy and the resulting expansion rate of global credit. In a word, Tricky Dick's ash-canning of the Bretton Woods gold exchange standard removed the essential flywheel that kept global trade balanced and sustainable. Thus, without a disciplinary mechanism independent of and external to the central banks, trade and current account imbalances among countries never needed to be "settled" via gains and losses in the reserve asset (gold or gold-linked dollars). Stated differently, the destruction of Bretton Woods allowed domestic monetary policies to escape the financial discipline that automatically resulted from reserve asset movements. That is, trade deficits caused the loss of gold, domestic deflation and an eventual rebalancing of trade. At the same time, the prolonged accumulation of reserve assets owing to persistent current account surpluses generated the opposite---- domestic credit expansion, price and wage inflation and an eventual reduction in those surpluses. Needless to say, as the issuer of the gold-linked "reserve currency" under Bretton Woods, the Fed was the first to break jail when it was deep-sixed in 1971-1973. At the time, the freshwater Keynesians led by Milton Friedman and his errand boy in the Nixon/Ford White House, labor economics professor George Schultz, said there was nothing to sweat over. That's because the free market would purportedly generate the "correct" exchange rate between the dollar and D-mark, franc, yen etc; and then these market-determined FX rates, in turn, would regulate the flow of trade and capital. Very simple. Adam Smith's unseen hand all over again. In fact, not in a million years! The giant skunk in the woodpile actually smelled of state monetary emissions or what was called the "Dirty Float". The latter threw everything into a cocked hat because unlike under Bretton Woods or the classic pre-1914 gold standard, the new regime of unanchored money allowed governments to hijack their central banks and to use them as instruments of mercantilist trade promotion and Keynesian domestic macro-economic management. To be sure, it took some time for traditional central bankers to realize that they had been unshackled. For example, during the final years of his tenure (1970-1978) Arthur Burns caused a pretty nasty recession in 1975 trying to reclaim his reputation for monetary probity after meekly capitulating to Nixon in fueling the 1972 election year boom that finally destroyed the remnants of Bretton Woods entirely. At length, however, Alan Greenspan inaugurated the era of Bubble Finance in 1987, and the die was cast. During his 19-years at the helm of the Fed, Greenspan massively inflated the Fed's balance sheet (from $200 billion to $700 billion) and the cost structure of the US economy at a time when the mobilization of cheap labor from the rice paddies of China and east Asia demanded exactly the opposite policy. That is, a policy of Fed balance sheet shrinkage and domestic deflation. Accordingly, a destructive pattern of reciprocating monetary inflation within the global convoy of central banks was set in motion: The Fed inflated and they inflated in a continuous loop. So doing, the central banks of the world locked-in a permanent condition of unbalanced trade. The latter originated in the Fed's flood of excess dollars into the international financial system in the 1990s and thereafter. This, in turn, caused central banks in Asia, much of the EM, the petro-states and sometimes Europe, too, to buy dollars and sequester them in US treasury paper (and GSE securities). This Dirty Float was undertaken, of course, to stop exchange rate appreciation and to further mercantilist trade and export-based domestic economic policies in China, South Korea, Japan and elsewhere. But what is also did was enable a sustained debt-based consumption boom in the US that was not earned by current production. The excess of US consumption over production, which showed up in the continuous US current account deficits, was effectively borrowed from central banks (and often their domestic investors). That happened because these central banks, in effect, were willing to swap the labor of their people and the endowments of their natural resources for US debt paper rather than face rising exchange rates and temporary headwinds to their mercantilist growth policies. In short, the $15 trillion plague of US trade deficits since 1975 is the bastard step-child of the Dirty Float maintained in Asia and elsewhere as a defense against the Fed's profligate money printing. Over time, it morphed into a back-door form of de facto export subsidies that would otherwise be illegal under the current WTO rules of global trade. So when the Donald declaims that pointy-head bureaucrats are the culprits behind the US trade disaster, the part he gets wrong is the names. To wit, the real malefactors of trade stupidity are named Alan (Greenspan), Ben (Bernanke) and the Two Janets (Yellen and Powell). America is losing it shirt in trade owing to their bad money, not bad deals cut at the Commerce Department or Foggy Bottom (State). As we indicated in Part 1, Keynesian monetary central planning has it upside down. It seeks to inflate domestic prices, wages and costs at 2% per year (or more if correctly measured) in a world teeming with cheap labor---when a regime of honest money would have generated deflationary adjustments designed to keep American industry competitive. So doing, it would have denied much of the incentive for and rationalization of the Dirty Float. Indeed, had the US maintained a regime of high interest rates, low consumption and enhanced levels of savings and investments in order to maintain sustainable equilibrium with the rest of the world after 1990, it is doubtful that the Dirty Float would have become massive, near-universal and quasi-permanent. That's because in a world of hard dollars, money-printing, low-interest rate central banks would have caused soaring domestic inflation and destructive capital flight. The People's Printing Press of China, for example, would have been caught short decades ago. Indeed, in a world of hard money, the egregious 9X expansion of its balance sheet, which fueled the Red Ponzi's runaway capital spending mania, could never have happened. China Central Bank Balance Sheet Needless to say, China was not the only Dirty Float malefactor. The Japanese have been far worse. Since 1990 the balance sheet of the BOJ has expanded by 20X, thereby insuring that the yen exchange rate versus the dollar remained uneconomically low, and that Japan's egregiously mercantilist trade policy would remain undisturbed by honest yen selling prices for its goods sold on the international markets. Japan Central Bank Balance Sheet The story is much the same throughout the lands of cheap labor and/or Dirty Floats. As we pointed out in Part 1, Mexico's exchange rate has fallen from 4:1 at the time of NAFTA's inception to 19:1 at present. Therefore, it wasn't a bad trade deal that caused the current $71 billion US trade deficit with Mexico; it was bad money. After all, about the only thing more profligate than the Fed's 20X balance sheet growth since 1990, is the 40X expansion by the Mexican central bank. Mexico Central Bank Balance Sheet Not surprisingly, it turns out that the land of Dirty Floats accounts for the 90% of the $810 billion trade deficit incurred by the US last year. That's right. The overall trade problem is that the US exported only $1.55 trillion of goods, materials and energy last year, or just 66% of the $2.36 trillion of merchandise that it imported. Yet just 10 countries account for nearly all of that huge imbalance. These countries are China, Vietnam, Mexico, Japan, Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Thailand and India. As a group, these countries bought just $627 billion of US exports, while sending $1.35 trillion of imports to the US. Accordingly, the combined deficit was $725 billion, representing 90% of the total US trade deficit. Moreover, the US export-to-import ratio was just 46% for the 10 countries as a whole, and far worse among the most egregious Dirty Floaters. Thus, China's $130 billion of exports from the US represented just 26% of its $506 billion of imports to the US. In the case of Vietnam, the export ratio was only 17% ($8 billion of US exports versus $46 billion of imports to the US). In Part 3 we will explain why the massive trade deficit with these 10 countries is largely a product of the Eccles Building and the Dirty Floats it has fostered among these mercantilist countries. And that's true even in the case of Germany, which sent $118 billion of goods to the US last year compared to US exports to Germany of just $53 billion. The latter amounted to only 45% of imports from Germany, and resulted in a staggering $65 billion trade deficit with the US. Were Germany not a part of the EU, the exchange rate for the D-mark would be far higher than the euro's, and Germany's trade surplus with the US (and the rest of the world) would be far smaller. In effect, the mad money printer, Mario Draghi, has actually effected a hidden Dirty Float that has been a tremendous windfall to German industry. Euro Area Central Bank Balance Sheet By contrast, the US trade accounts are functionally in balance with the entire rest of the world. As we showed in Part 1, for instance, US exports to Canada are 95% of imports from our giant trading partner to the north. Indeed, for the rest-of-the-world as a whole, the trade numbers are quite striking and sustainable. Overall US exports to these destinations amounted to $924 billion during 2017 compared to $1.0 trillion of imports from these suppliers. Accordingly, exports amounted to 92% of imports, and the total $85 billion deficit at just 4% of two-way trade (nearly $2 trillion) was close enough to zero for big picture purposes. Needless to say, dumb trade negotiators did not produce a healthy balance within half of the $3.9 trillion of total US two-way trade, and a massive, disastrous deficit within the other half among the top ten Dirty Float countries itemized above. As we said, we are dealing here with bad money, but, alas, neither the protectionist inside the White House nor the free traders shouting at the front gate have explained that to the Donald. Ironically, the only way out of the Donald's crude protectionism is a return to sound money. Yet that's the last thing the Wall Street and Fortune 500 "free-traders" are about to embrace, as we will elaborate in Part 3. In effect, they wish to perpetuate a regime that swaps American labor and living standard in Flyover America for massively inflated financial asset prices on Wall Street. That is, for unspeakable windfalls to the top 1% and 10% which own 45% and 85% of financial assets, respectively. No wonder the people out there in Rust Belt America are mad!" And it's also no wonder they put a mad man in the Oval Office to attack a system that truly is "rigged" against them."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Mar 10, 2018 12:56:20 GMT -6
from David Stockman's Contra Corner davidstockmanscontracorner.com/hey-donald-its-not-bad-trade-deals-its-bad-money-part-1/Hey, Donald: It's Not Bad Trade Deals---It's Bad Money (Part 1)March 5, 2018 By David Stockman "The global trading system's newly activated one-man wrecking crew was at it over the weekend. Mustering up his best Clint Eastwood impression, Trump invited the Brussels trade bureaucrats to make his day. Retaliate against Harley's Hogs, Jim Beam's bourbon and Levi's Skinny Jeans, proclaimed the Donald, and you folks are going to find yourself neck deep in BMW's.... On the matter of trade policy, by contrast, the Donald has considerable unilateral running room owing to the vast presidential powers bestowed by section 232 of the 1962 trade act and section 301 of the 1974 trade act. The former authorizes protectionist measures, including tariffs, to safeguard "national security" and the latter authorizes such measures in order to enforce US trade agreements or to counter "unfair" foreign trade practices. To be sure, the rubbery definitions of the quoted terms (national security and unfair practices) were meant to be parsed and activated narrowly by mainstream White House occupants, not to be used as a protectionist blunderbuss by a raging wild man intoxicated with 17th century notions of mercantilist economics. For example, consider the national defense fig leaf under section 232 that Trump tapped for his across-the-board 25% tariff on $29 billion of annual steel imports. Last year the US produced an estimated 82 million tons of steel and imported another 14 million tons from Canada, Brazil and Mexico, which are the #1, #2 and #4 steel importers to the United States, respectively. So that's 96 million tons of availability---assuming that our hemispheric neighbors, who have no nukes, are not foolish enough to declare war on Washington and embargo their steel exports to the US. Somehow 96 million tons seems more than adequate to cover the 3.5 million tons needed for the current US war machine, according to the Pentagon; and in truth the real requirement would be perhaps a few hundred thousand tons per year to protect the actual safety and security of the US homeland. After all, under the present state of affairs true national security is purely a matter of nuclear deterrence---since no country in the world has an even remote capacity to invade North America. Moreover, the steel used in our current massive nuclear retaliatory force (Trident subs, Minutemen missiles and strategic bombers) was produced long ago. That is, we don't need no more stinkin' nukes nor any more steel to launch them. In fact, if Washington stopped wasting money on aircraft carriers, tanks, amphibious landing ships, TOW missiles, airlift planes and bunker buster bombs, among other weapons of foreign invasion and occupation, the national defense really wouldn't need much more steel annually than is produced by Denmark (70k tons). In today's world, in fact, military steel is about empire, not homeland security.... The United States has an $800 Billion Dollar Yearly Trade Deficit because of our “very stupid” trade deals and policies. Our jobs and wealth are being given to other countries that have taken advantage of us for years. They laugh at what fools our leaders have been. No more! "We are on the losing side of almost all trade deals. Our friends and enemies have taken advantage of the U.S. for many years. Our Steel and Aluminum industries are dead. " The funny thing is that Trump has an overwhelming case. Almost to the year that the foolish Trade Act of 1974 was put on the books, the US experienced its last annual trade (goods) surplus in 1975. Since then, there has been a continuous and deepening of the US trade deficit. That is, a 43-year plunge into the red that marks the vast off-shoring of US production, jobs, and wages. In all, it cumulates to about $15 trillion more of stuff America bought versus what it sold to the rest of the world since 1975. And needless to say, that doesn't happen on a level playing field. In that respect, at least, the Donald's so-called free trade critics have their heads buried deeper in the sand than even the orange comb-over. That's because most of them are Saltwater Keynesians of the Harvard/IMF/Brookings school or Freshwater Keynesian of the Friedman/Chicago/AEI persuasion. Either way, the establishment free-traders seem to think that America can borrow its way to prosperity forever and ever, world without end, and that the mangled state of the US economy after 4 decades of this kind of trade mayhem is a natural outcome of relatively free markets at work. No it isn't! Even when you throw in the $4 trillion surplus on the services account ( tourism, transportation, insurance, royalties and business services) during the same 43-year period, the deficit on current account with the rest of the world is still $11 trillion, and that's in then-year dollars. Inflated to 2017 purchasing power, the balance with the rest of the world since 1975 is well larger than the current GDP of the US. So notwithstanding his rhetorical bombast and primitive mercantilism, the Donald is on to something. In fact, it's why his candidacy rallied large swaths of voters in Flyover America, and it is ultimately why he won the electoral college, effectively, in the swing industrial precincts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa. US Balance on Goods Chart Alas, the $11 trillion economic enema depicted above (between the blue and orange lines) is not the work of fools, knaves or traitors in the trade negotiations departments of the US government. That is to say, the USTR (US trade representative), the Commerce Department and the State Department trade apparatchiks had comparatively little to do with it; nor can it be pinned on NAFTA, the WTO (world trade organization) or even the globalist minions at the IMF and World Bank, either. Instead, the malefactors names are Alan (Greenspan), Ben (Bernanke) and the Two Janets (Yellen and Powell). America is losing it shirt in trade owing to bad money, not bad deals. That's because Keynesian monetary central planning has it upside down. It seeks to inflate domestic prices, wages and costs at 2% per year (or more if correctly measured) in a world teeming with cheap labor---when a regime of honest money would have generated deflationary adjustments designed to keep American industry competitive. Likewise, Bubble Finance has resulted in drastic financial repression, ultra-low, sub-economic interest rates and debt fueled consumption and financialization---when sound money would have caused the opposite. To wit, high interest rates, low consumption and enhanced levels of savings and investments in order to maintain sustainable equilibrium with the rest of the world. Above all, America's greatest export was not merely the continuous trade surpluses racked-up every single year between 1893 and 1971, but actually the idea and institutions of free enterprise and capitalist invention. Yet it all went wrong after Tricky Dick's disastrous lurch to 100% state controlled money at Camp David in August 1971. By unleashing the world's leading central bank to print money at will, he paved the way for the Eccles Building to become a massive exporter of monetary inflation. At length, these floods of unwanted dollars mightily encouraged the mercantilism-prone nations of the East Asia, the Petro-states, much of the EM and sometimes Europe, too, to buy dollars and inflate their own currencies in order to forestall exchange rate appreciation and the consequent short-run dislocations in their own heavily subsidized export sectors. In subsequent installments we will track exactly how the Fed's great export contraption of monetary inflation brought about the hollowing out of industrial America as per the Donald's case of mistaken blame. But suffice it to say that in the pre-Keynesian world in which a monetary settlement asset governed the flow of trade and international finance, and which was anchored in gold rather than the fiat credit of national central banks, there would have been no such thing as $15 trillion of continuous US trade deficits over 43 years running. Instead, the large trade deficits caused by the mobilization of cheap labor from the Asian rice paddies and cheap energy from the sands of Arabia would have generated their own correction. To wit, large US current account deficits would have caused a painful outflow of the settlement asset (gold),which, in turn, would have caused domestic interest rates to rise, domestic credit to shrink and prices, wages and costs to deflate. At length, imports would have been declined, exports would have increased and the US current account would have returned to sustainable equilibrium, thereby bringing about a reflow of the settlement asset. As it happened, however, the Fed's destructive monetary inflation spread like an infectious disease, and nowhere is that more evident than in the case of the Donald's favorite whipping boy, NAFTA. To wit, Mexico went whole hog trashing its own currency in response to dollar inflation after the inception of NAFTA and the peso crisis in the early 1990s. Since then, the peso's exchange rate has plunged from about 4:1 to 19:1. Not surprisingly, Mexico's already cheap labor become that much cheaper in dollar terms. Or as the Donald pronounced this AM: We have large trade deficits with Mexico and Canada. NAFTA, which is under renegotiation right now, has been a bad deal for U.S.A. Massive relocation of companies & jobs. Tariffs on Steel and Aluminum will only come off if new & fair NAFTA agreement is signed..... In the case of Mexico, the Donald hit the nail on the head. In 1991, US exports to Mexico slightly exceeded imports, whereas in 2017 the US incurred a whopping $71 billion trade deficit. US exports to Mexico, in fact, were just $243 billion or 77% of the $314 billion of US imports from Mexico. Yet that huge imbalance wasn't owing to removal of tariffs and other barriers under the NAFTA deal which became effective on January 1, 1994; it was a monetary and relative cost phenomon. The evidence for that lays in the other half of the Donald's NAFTA tweet concerning Canada, which he got all wrong. Whatever games the Canadians have played in mercantilist promotion of individual commodities such as forest products, the Canadian exchange rate has not changed much since the early 1990s, nor has its internal prices, wages and costs relative to the domestic US economy. Not surprisingly, there has also been no trend change in the US trade balance with Canada. Both imports and exports have grown by about 4X compared to their pre-NAFTA levels. In fact, during 2017 US exports to Canada totaled $282 billion and imports from Canada were $300 billion. With exports at 95% of imports, we'd say that's close enough to zero for government work. Stated differently, an allegedly "bad" trade deal led to wholly different outcomes as between the NAFTA partner to the north versus the partner to the south. As we said, the massive trade problem and the resulting drastic decline of the US industrial economy during recent decades is a function of bad money, not bad trade deals. The divergent exchange rate history of these two NAFTA partners since 1993 provides a pretty good illustration of this phenomenon. When mercantilist nations used the flood of Fed dollars as an excuse to engage in persistent exchange rate suppression and dirty floats, they did in fact steal production and jobs from American workers. But as we will see in subsequent installments, the solution to that is a hard dollar at the Fed, not loud hollering through a Twitter account from the Oval Office."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Mar 10, 2018 12:02:06 GMT -6
from the Huffington Post www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/administration-needs-to-defend-our-steel-industry_us_59581f81e4b0f078efd98a96Administration Needs to Defend Our Steel Industry07/01/2017 06:23 pm ET By Jeff Ferry, CPA Research Director "This past April, on a 92-mile bike ride through the hills of Monterey, California, I met a young man I’m proud to call a friend, Rasheen Malone. Rasheen grew up in a tough section of Brooklyn, not far from where I was born. At 18, Rasheen joined the U.S. Marines. He did 4 tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. On one of those tours, he stepped on an IED (land mine) and had both his legs blown off. Military surgeons fixed him up—he has two rods and 13 pins in each leg, and to watch him walk you might not know it. As we biked, slowly, up the steepest part of the climb in the Monterey hills, I asked Rasheen how it feels to pull a bike uphill with all that hardware in his legs. He looked at me and smiled. “It hurts, man,” was all he said. Malone and the ex-Marine buddies with him on that ride are big supporters of the armor plating now used on U.S. military vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan. That hardened steel armor, introduced in 2007 in the MRAP vehicle, has saved an estimated 40,000 U.S. lives, according to one military estimate. According to another, a soldier is “between nine and 14 times less likely to be killed” hitting a land mine in the new generation of armored vehicle than in a traditional Humvee. The Trump Administration is looking at applying Section 232 of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act and restricting steel imports into the U.S. on the grounds that steel is critical to U.S. national security. Many economists don’t understand the complexity of the steel supply chain. Free traders who live in a world of simplified supply-and-demand curves think of steel as a mass-produced, low-tech product made in hot, dirty, blast furnaces and hammered into shapes in noisy steel mills. But there is a lot more subtlety to the steel industry than plain old crude steel. Specialty steels are used throughout the military, in weapons, vehicles, armor, tools and other defense systems. Basic steel, such as the sheet steel on your refrigerator, does not have the strength, hardness, or lightness needed for many military applications. Steelmaker Nucor makes forgings that are used in the Abrams tank and the Bradley Fighting Vehicles. Forgings are steel products specially cast to be much harder than bulk steel. TimkenSteel makes the hardened and treated steel used by U.S. Air Force “bunker-busting” bombs, to make bomb casings harder and eliminate collateral damage. Allegheny Technologies Inc. (ATI) makes alloy steels, adding nickel, titanium, and other metals to steel, to create products that are more heat-resistant, or stronger, or lighter, all qualities required in the latest generations of fighter jets. For all these steelmakers, defense markets are just a small share of their business. All of their businesses rely on a mixture of plain old bulk steel and a range of specialty steels to achieve sustainable levels of revenue and profitability. In every case, the defense business relies on a thriving non-defense market to add up to a sustainable business. As ATI Vice President Terrence Hartford explained in testimony[1] last month: “The production for all defense applications represents in our case perhaps 10 percent of total production…The survival of this industry however is dependent on the viability of all its businesses, not just defense-related production…the economic welfare of our high volume stainless steel operations directly impacts our ability to serve the needs of our military.” The core problem of the U.S. steel business is that due to a global oversupply of bulk steel, and some specialty steels such as stainless, the industry is losing money ($1.7 billion in 2015 according to Nucor CEO John Ferriola) and shrinking. Overproduction in China In discussing the global steel industry, all roads lead to China. Between 2006 and 2015, Chinese steel production rose 91% to reach 804 million tonnes, 50% of world production (see Fig. 1). Today the industry is only at some 70% of capacity utilized, and the enormous excess capacity weighs on prices and profitability. China has admitted it is overproducing, has committed to reducing production, but has not done so. On the contrary, Chinese production continues to rise—up another 1.2% in 2016. “China’s state-supported steel industry now exports more steel than is produced by all three NAFTA countries combined,” said Nucor’s Ferriola in his Commerce Department testimony.[2] Figure 1. World steel production in thousands of tonnes. China is up to 50% share; U.S. is down to 4.9%. Ward Timken, CEO of TimkenSteel, which was founded 100 years ago this year, said this in his testimony:[3] “Three numbers keep me up at night: 700 million, 425 million, and 94 million. The world has 700 million metric tons of steel overcapacity. 425 million of that is in China alone. Demand in the U.S. is only 94 million. Imports are a real issue for the U.S. steel industry, particularly when foreign competitors don’t play by the rules.” U.S. steel production has fallen by 20% since 2006. As Figure 2 shows, China stands out as the world’s dominant exporter of steel, while the U.S. is the dominant importer. There’s little doubt that if left to the so-called free market (which is not free at all, but driven by decisions made by the Chinese government), the U.S. steel industry could be wiped out by overproduction in China. Germany has urged the Administration not to block imports, pointing out (accurately) that Germany and Canada sell more steel into the U.S. than China, and they might bear the brunt of any import restrictions. They and their supporters also claim (probably accurately) that if we block Chinese steel, more Chinese steel will just be routed to Europe, depressing prices over there. In fact, between 2013 and 2016, Chinese steel exports into the European Union rose 90%, in part because U.S. antidumping actions kept Chinese steel out of our market. The result? European steel prices have fallen 44%, causing layoffs, losses, and general anguish in Europe’s industrial heartland. Figure 2. China dominates steel exports. U.S. is world’s largest importer. The German industry apparently would like us to follow their lead and just make do with whatever is left over after the state-supported overproducers have taken their share of the market. Is that the right thing for the United States to do? Can we afford to put our defense capability at risk? (Not to mention the economic and social cost of losing even more of our steel industry.) Or should we defend our market and our capability, while we stand ready to negotiate a fair international solution with all parties? When you talk about steel, the issue of defense is never far away. The Trump Administration should remind our friends in Germany that the original success of European unity, supported by voters in all six founding nations , was the creation back in the 1950s of the European Coal and Steel Community, when Germany, France and four other nations sat down together and agreed on rules for coexistence in the steel industry. It put an end to a century of European steel rivalries. Until we can have that sort of sensible discussion with today’s overproducers, the U.S. needs to take action to defend its steel industry. We owe it to soldiers like Rasheen Malone."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jan 28, 2018 12:14:18 GMT -6
Trump Employment Overview: From the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Household Survey From Dec 2016 to Dec 2017 Total Employment Increase 1.788 million Total age 16+ workers Incr: 1.367 million In Summary, Employed workers increased 400K+ more than the total # of workers. In the same vein, the total # of non-employed age 16+ workers (i.e, "Unemployed" + "Not-in-Labor-Force") Decreased by almost 500K workers. If these BLS numbers are accurate, it's great news for American workers. It means worker Demand has increased more than Supply, which should put upward pressure on wages. It's uncertain how much of this change is due to President Trump policies. But reducing immigration & reducing the outsourcing of American jobs would predicably cause exactly this kind of change. And those are both previously stated goals of President Trump. Just saying. CUsersrlblkfrdDesktopArticlesEmplymt_Wages0....PDF (16.4 KB)
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Dec 9, 2017 8:11:22 GMT -6
Hey.. Guys i just want toknow What are the advantages and disadvantages of economic migrants in the UK? share with me It expands the labor supply, which decreases the Price of Labor, which means decreasing individual wages. It Decreases the wages of UK workers.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Dec 9, 2017 8:07:08 GMT -6
from Yahoo News www.yahoo.com/finance/news/manufacturing-unemployment-record-low-193249392.htmlThe unemployment rate in the U.S. is currently at 4.1%, its lowest level since December 2000. But if you’re in the manufacturing industry, you’ve never seen an unemployment rate lower. In November, the unemployment rate in the manufacturing industry fell to 2.6%, the lowest on record for the series, which dates back to January 2000. Jed Kolko, an economist at job site Indeed, notes that in 2017 manufacturing employment has grown 1.5% from last year, right around the same pace at overall economic growth. In 2016, manufacturing employment declined. Since 2000, however, overall employment in manufacturing has declined about 25%, falling from around 17 million at the beginning of the century to around 13 million today. Workers leaving the industry or the workforce altogether, and therefore no longer counting as unemployed manufacturing workers, has no doubt contributed to some of this decline. This new low for manufacturing unemployment, however, comes during a year in which President Donald Trump has repeatedly harped on his desire to kickstart the sector. And amid a year that has seen the stock market soar to record highs and the economy enjoy some of its strongest overall growth in years, the administration will no doubt see this data point as affirmation of their economic initiatives boosting the manufacturing industry. Economists at UBS noted that most of the overall gains in manufacturing employment came in the fabricated metals and machinery industries, which are benefitting from an energy-led boost in overall capital investment from businesses. After declining alongside the 2015 plunge in oil prices, business investment has surged over the last couple of quarters. But Friday’s report largely indicates that in contrast to the last economic expansion, the U.S. manufacturing base is growing, or as Joe Quinlan, chief market strategist at U.S. Trust, wrote in a note this week, “the death of American manufacturing has been greatly exaggerated.”
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Nov 4, 2017 7:41:49 GMT -6
More on this story from Politico: www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/02/clinton-brazile-hacks-2016-215774Nov 2, 2017 by Donna Brazile "Before I called Bernie Sanders, I lit a candle in my living room and put on some gospel music. I wanted to center myself for what I knew would be an emotional phone call. I had promised Bernie when I took the helm of the Democratic National Committee after the convention that I would get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team had rigged the nomination process, as a cache of emails stolen by Russian hackers and posted online had suggested. I’d had my suspicions from the moment I walked in the door of the DNC a month or so earlier, based on the leaked emails. But who knew if some of them might have been forged? I needed to have solid proof, and so did Bernie. So I followed the money. My predecessor, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, had not been the most active chair in fundraising at a time when President Barack Obama’s neglect had left the party in significant debt. As Hillary’s campaign gained momentum, she resolved the party’s debt and put it on a starvation diet. It had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations. Debbie was not a good manager. She hadn’t been very interested in controlling the party—she let Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn do as it desired so she didn’t have to inform the party officers how bad the situation was. How much control Brooklyn had and for how long was still something I had been trying to uncover for the last few weeks. By September 7, the day I called Bernie, I had found my proof and it broke my heart. *** The Saturday morning after the convention in July, I called Gary Gensler, the chief financial officer of Hillary’s campaign. He wasted no words. He told me the Democratic Party was broke and $2 million in debt. “What?” I screamed. “I am an officer of the party and they’ve been telling us everything is fine and they were raising money with no problems.” That wasn’t true, he said. Officials from Hillary’s campaign had taken a look at the DNC’s books. Obama left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign—and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America (the campaign) and the Hillary Victory Fund (its joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC) had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the party on an allowance. If I didn’t know about this, I assumed that none of the other officers knew about it, either. That was just Debbie’s way. In my experience she didn’t come to the officers of the DNC for advice and counsel. She seemed to make decisions on her own and let us know at the last minute what she had decided, as she had done when she told us about the hacking only minutes before the Washington Post broke the news. On the phone Gary told me the DNC had needed a $2 million loan, which the campaign had arranged. “No! That can’t be true!” I said. “The party cannot take out a loan without the unanimous agreement of all of the officers.” “Gary, how did they do this without me knowing?” I asked. “I don’t know how Debbie relates to the officers,” Gary said. He described the party as fully under the control of Hillary’s campaign, which seemed to confirm the suspicions of the Bernie camp. The campaign had the DNC on life support, giving it money every month to meet its basic expenses, while the campaign was using the party as a fund-raising clearinghouse. Under FEC law, an individual can contribute a maximum of $2,700 directly to a presidential campaign. But the limits are much higher for contributions to state parties and a party’s national committee. Individuals who had maxed out their $2,700 contribution limit to the campaign could write an additional check for $353,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund—that figure represented $10,000 to each of the 32 states’ parties who were part of the Victory Fund agreement—$320,000—and $33,400 to the DNC. The money would be deposited in the states first, and transferred to the DNC shortly after that. Money in the battleground states usually stayed in that state, but all the other states funneled that money directly to the DNC, which quickly transferred the money to Brooklyn. “Wait,” I said. “That victory fund was supposed to be for whoever was the nominee, and the state party races. You’re telling me that Hillary has been controlling it since before she got the nomination?” Gary said the campaign had to do it or the party would collapse. “That was the deal that Robby struck with Debbie,” he explained, referring to campaign manager Robby Mook. “It was to sustain the DNC. We sent the party nearly $20 million from September until the convention, and more to prepare for the election.” “What’s the burn rate, Gary?” I asked. “How much money do we need every month to fund the party?” The burn rate was $3.5 million to $4 million a month, he said. I gasped. I had a pretty good sense of the DNC’s operations after having served as interim chair five years earlier. Back then the monthly expenses were half that. What had happened? The party chair usually shrinks the staff between presidential election campaigns, but Debbie had chosen not to do that. She had stuck lots of consultants on the DNC payroll, and Obama’s consultants were being financed by the DNC, too. When we hung up, I was livid. Not at Gary, but at this mess I had inherited. I knew that Debbie had outsourced a lot of the management of the party and had not been the greatest at fundraising. I would not be that kind of chair, even if I was only an interim chair. Did they think I would just be a surrogate for them, get on the road and rouse up the crowds? I was going to manage this party the best I could and try to make it better, even if Brooklyn did not like this. It would be weeks before I would fully understand the financial shenanigans that were keeping the party on life support. Right around the time of the convention, the leaked emails revealed Hillary’s campaign was grabbing money from the state parties for its own purposes, leaving the states with very little to support down-ballot races. A Politico story published on May 2, 2016, described the big fund-raising vehicle she had launched through the states the summer before, quoting a vow she had made to rebuild “the party from the ground up … when our state parties are strong, we win. That’s what will happen.” Yet the states kept less than half of 1 percent of the $82 million they had amassed from the extravagant fund-raisers Hillary’s campaign was holding, just as Gary had described to me when he and I talked in August. When the Politico story described this arrangement as “essentially … money laundering” for the Clinton campaign, Hillary’s people were outraged at being accused of doing something shady. Bernie’s people were angry for their own reasons, saying this was part of a calculated strategy to throw the nomination to Hillary. I wanted to believe Hillary, who made campaign finance reform part of her platform, but I had made this pledge to Bernie and did not want to disappoint him. I kept asking the party lawyers and the DNC staff to show me the agreements that the party had made for sharing the money they raised, but there was a lot of shuffling of feet and looking the other way. When I got back from a vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, I at last found the document that described it all: the Joint Fund-Raising Agreement between the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America. The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings...."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Nov 4, 2017 7:33:22 GMT -6
As many suspected, Hillary Clinton essentially stole the Democratic Primary. This is spelled out in a new expose' by former DNC chairwoman Donna Brazile. www.yahoo.com/news/former-dnc-chair-donna-brazile-205150524.htmlThurs, Nov 2, 2017 by Jamie Ducharme,(from Time magazine) "Former Democratic National Committee Chair Donna Brazile called Hillary Clinton’s fundraising practices “the cancer” of the Democratic Party in a fiery book excerpt published Thursday on Politico. Brazile, who served as interim DNC chair leading up to the 2016 election, had promised former presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) that she would investigate whether Clinton’s campaign rigged the nomination process ahead of the election. In the course of her research, she writes, she learned about a joint fundraising agreement among the DNC, Clinton’s campaign and the campaign’s fundraising arm. Under the agreement, Brazile explained, Clinton’s campaign provided a $2 million loan to the debt-ridden DNC, and took advantage of a loophole in campaign finance law to use the party “as a fund-raising clearinghouse.” In essence, the deal allowed the Clinton campaign to control the party, and its finances, well before securing the Democratic nomination, or even officially entering the presidential race. Brazile, by her account, was “in agony” when she dialed Sanders to tell him what she had found. “Hello, senator,” she remembered saying. “I’ve completed my review of the DNC and I did find the cancer. But I will not kill the patient.”
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jul 15, 2017 11:59:02 GMT -6
from Paul Craig Roberts.org www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/07/14/non-issue-trump-jr-s-emails/The Non-Issue of Trump Jr.’s EmailsJuly 14, 2017 by Stephen Lendman (stephenlendman.org – Home – Stephen Lendman) "Anything about Russia, Trump, his family and team consistently is overblown, misrepresented and lied about by what he justifiably calls the “dishonest media.” Indeed!! Trump Jr.’s meeting and email correspondence with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya amounted to much ado about nothing. A nothing story disgracefully became a cause celebre, anything to bash, denigrate and weaken Trump for the wrong reasons, ignoring plenty of justifiable ones – done directly or through other parties, in this case his son. Russian lawyer Veselnitskaya is a private citizen unconnected to the Kremlin. There was nothing improper or illegal about Trump Jr. meeting with her. No “collusion” occurred, no connection to Russia, no other known criminal activity of any kind. Trump Jr. published emails between himself and Veselnitskaya, showing they had nothing to do with Russia. Issues discussed related to adoption of children and related charitable activities. Emails between himself and publicist/tabloid writer Rob Goldstone claimed a Russian government lawyer had incriminating documents about Hillary, yet nothing of the sort was discussed or transmitted. Goldstone said he had no knowledge of Veselnitskaya’s connection to the Kremlin. Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Russian government knows nothing about this woman. On June 9, 2016, Trump Jr., presidential campaign manager at the time Paul Manafort, and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner met with her at Trump Tower in New York. Trump Jr. said the following: “I was asked to have a meeting by an acquaintance I knew from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant with an individual who I was told might have information helpful to the campaign.” “I was not told her name prior to the meeting. I asked Jared and Paul to attend, but told them nothing of the substance.” Veselnitskaya said “she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Ms. Clinton.” “(H)er statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense. No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.” “She then changed subjects and began discussing the adoption of Russian children and mentioned the Magnitsky Act.” “It became clear to me that this was the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting.” Goldstone called the meeting “the most insane nonsense I ever heard.” In a Tuesday interview on NBC News, Veselnitskaya denied any connection to Vladimir Putin or Russia’s government, explaining she didn’t meet with Trump Jr. to discuss Hillary or last year’s presidential campaign. Unprincipled claims by undemocratic Democrats and media scoundrels about alleged Trump team wrongdoing, including possible treason, show how low they’re willing to stoop to damage the president for the wrong reasons. It’s more hard evidence of the deplorable state of America, a serial aggressor, a fantasy democracy, an unscrupulous rogue state."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 21, 2017 11:32:56 GMT -6
Here's a follow-up link on bonds and interest rates: Again, from Investopedia www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/112614/what-determines-price-bond-open-market.aspWhat determines the price of a bond in the open market? July 6, 2016 By Sean Ross "A: One of the most basic concepts that investors should become familiar with is how bonds are priced. Bonds do not trade like stocks do. The pricing mechanisms that cause changes in the bond market are not nearly as intuitive as seeing a stock or mutual fund rise in value. Bonds are loans; when you purchase a bond, you are making a loan to the issuing company or government. Each bond has a par value, and it can either trade at par, at premium or at discount. The interest paid on a bond is fixed, but the yield – the interest payment relative to current bond price – fluctuates as the bond's price fluctuates. Put simply, bond prices fluctuate on the open market in response to supply and demand for the bond. The price of a bond is determined by discounting the expected cash flow to the present using a discount rate. Three primary influences on bond pricing on the open market are supply and demand, age-to-maturity and credit ratings. Bonds are issued with a set face value and trade at par when the current price is equal to the face value. Bonds trade at a premium when the current price is greater than the face value. For example, a $1,000 face value bond selling at $1,200 is trading at a premium. Discount bonds are the opposite, selling for lower than the listed face value. Bonds that are priced lower have higher yields, and they are therefore more attractive. For instance, a $1,000 face value bond that has a 6% interest rate pays $60 in annual interest every year regardless of the current trading price. Interest payments are fixed. When the bond is currently trading at $800, that $60 interest payment creates a present yield of 7.5%. Since you would rather pay $800 to earn $60 than pay $1,000 to earn that same $60, bonds with higher yields are better buys. The age of a bond relative to its maturity has a significant effect on pricing. Bonds are paid in full (at face value) when they mature, though there are options to call, or redeem, some bonds before they mature. Since a bondholder is closer to receiving the full face value as the maturity date approaches, the bond's price moves towards par as it ages. Age and demand for bonds influence prices, and the ratings provided to bonds and their issuers also have a large impact. There are three primary rating agencies, and the ratings that they assign act as signals to investors about the creditworthiness and safety of the bonds. Since bondholders are less likely to purchase bonds with poor ratings (and thus a lower chance of repayment by the issuer), the price of those bonds is likely to fall."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 21, 2017 11:24:39 GMT -6
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 21, 2017 11:15:42 GMT -6
I'm wondering the same thing.
I haven't seen him post since Oct-2016.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 21, 2017 11:14:13 GMT -6
Do you think this could cause a price collapse for commercial real-estate and be the trigger for another recession? That's an interesting concept. Yes, I think it could cause a decline in commercial real estate prices, if not an outright crash. I'm less sure about the recession part, however. But a reduction in competition among retailers, with Amazon cornering even more of the retail market, could certainly create problems. It will almost certainly increase prices of many retail goods, as Amazon's pricing power will increase with increased market share.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 21, 2017 11:05:00 GMT -6
Low Bond Interest rates increase the price of other, fixed-return bonds.
If a no-interest bond initially bought for $950 is worth $1,000 at maturity, a 0% interest rate on other bonds increases the current selling price of the original $950 bond. (i.e, now it may sell for $960, $970, $980, etc.)
In contrast, If the same no-interest bond initially bought for $950 is worth $1,000 at maturity, a 20% interest rate on other bonds decreases the current selling price of the original $950 bond. (i.e, now it may only sell for $780, $790, etc.)
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 21, 2017 10:55:12 GMT -6
June 21, 2017 from Investopedia www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/04/031904.aspWhy do interest rates tend to have an inverse relationship with bond prices? By Investopedia Staff April 3, 2017 "A: At first glance, the inverse relationship between interest rates and bond prices seems somewhat illogical, but upon closer examination, makes sense. An easy way to grasp why bond prices move opposite to interest rates is to consider zero-coupon bonds, which don't pay coupons but derive their value from the difference between the purchase price and the par value paid at maturity. For instance, if a zero-coupon bond is trading at $950 and has a par value of $1,000 (paid at maturity in one year), the bond's rate of return at the present time is approximately 5.26% = (1000-950) ÷ 950. For a person to pay $950 for this bond, he or she must be happy with receiving a 5.26% return. But his or her satisfaction with this return depends on what else is happening in the bond market. Bond investors, like all investors, typically try to get the best return possible. If current interest rates were to rise, giving newly issued bonds a yield of 10%, then the zero-coupon bond yielding 5.26% would not only be less attractive, it wouldn't be in demand at all. Who wants a 5.26% yield when they can get 10%? To attract demand, the price of the pre-existing zero-coupon bond would have to decrease enough to match the same return yielded by prevailing interest rates. In this instance, the bond's price would drop from $950 (which gives a 5.26% yield) to $909.09 (which gives a 10% yield). Now that we have an idea of how a bond's price moves in relation to interest-rate changes, it's easy to see why a bond's price would increase if prevailing interest rates were to drop. If rates dropped to 3%, our zero-coupon bond - with its yield of 5.26% - would suddenly look very attractive. More people would buy the bond, which would push the price up until the bond's yield matched the prevailing 3% rate. In this instance, the price of the bond would increase to approximately $970.87. Given this increase in price, you can see why bond-holders (the investors selling their bonds) benefit from a decrease in prevailing interest rates. For example, when the Federal Reserve increased interest rates in March 2017 by a quarter percentage point, the bond market fell. The yield on 30-year Treasury bonds dropped to 3.108% from 3.2%, the yield on ten-year Treasury notes fell to 2.509% from 2.575%, and the two-year notes' yield fell from 1.401% to 1.312%."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on May 27, 2017 10:05:43 GMT -6
from unz.com Interview with Michael Hudson www.unz.com/mhudson/another-housing-bubble/"SHARMINI PERIES: Just prior to the economic collapse of 2007-2008 there were several economic indicators which could have given us a clue of the impending disaster. If we look at the economic situation today in the US, we find many of these very same indicators. Housing prices are getting very high. Credit card debt has begun to rise again. Student loans are in default, many of them, and the stock and bond markets reached an all-time high. Are we actually in another housing bubble just nine years later? On to talk about this with me is Michael Hudson. Michael is Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He is the author of The Bubble and Beyond and Finance Capitalism and Its Discontent, Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy. His latest book is J is for Junk Economics. Michael, about 10,000,000 families lost their homes in the 2007-2008 crash, and many of these homes were bought by hedge funds such as the ones organized by Blackstone let’s say. The hedge funds didn’t really resell the housing that they bought, but rather hung onto them and rented them instead. But let’s really start off with the indicators that you had highlighted for me in an email, saying we might already be there in terms of another crisis. Give us the essence of what those indicators are and why you predict that. MICHAEL HUDSON: Many of the indicators may be the same, but the character of the crisis is very different now from what it was in 2008. You mentioned, for instance, that real estate prices now age exceed their early 2008 levels. All that’s true, but as you just pointed out, 10,000,000 people have already lost their homes. That’s what economists call housing moving from weak hands into strong, and they applaud that because instead of poor families, minorities, African-Americans and Hispanics buying homes that are way beyond their ability to pay the mortgage on, these houses have already been lost or foreclosed and Blackstone and other hedge funds bought them. They bought them for all cash. The reason they did that instead of debt leveraging, which is how people had been buying their houses in World War II, is that interest rates are so low. The Fed was plunging at zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) in order to try to re-inflate a bubble. But with these low interest rates, Blackstone and other hedge funds, Wall Street, could make more money renting out these properties than they could by actually selling them or speculating, or that they could make in the bond market. The effect is very interesting. Leading up to 2008, rents were actually going down. The more real estate prices were going up, the lower rents were falling, because 17% of the market was by flippers, by speculators who borrowed to buy a home or apartment. They thought okay, we’re going to buy a condo, buy a house, we’re going to wait for the price to be inflated. They all were desperate to find somebody to live in these apartments, to at least help cover the interest expense of buying these things. The result was that rents fell. Right now it’s the opposite. Rents are going way up because there’s much less property available either to buy or to rent. People can’t afford to qualify for the bank loan, so they can’t afford to buy housing, and they can’t find rental apartments because these have been monopolized, maybe 20% in some areas by the hedge funds and Blackstone and other people. My friend Gary Null, for instance, had Blackstone buy his building, smashed the furnace, wouldn’t turn on the heat, and forced him to move out so it could empty out the property and try to raise the price. That’s on commercial real estate. So these guys are really putting the class war back in business. Housing prices are going up in Canada and Australia, but again it’s not so much a bubble like it was before. The financial structure has shifted, largely because it’s being bought by very wealthy absentee owners instead of by the population as a whole. So the rate of home ownership in America has fallen by about six percentage points. That’s about 10% of the housing population, so you’re having housing way beyond the ability of most Americans to afford and beyond what banks are going to lend to buy a house. SHARMINI PERIES: All right. How does this benefit those holding the property, like hedge fund owners? MICHAEL HUDSON: They can make a large return renting it out. They can make five, 10, 15%. That’s much more money than they can make in the bond market and it’s much more secure money than they can make in the stock market, because stock prices may go down and corporate sales may go down as the economy shrinks, but people are desperate to have housing. It’s the one thing they absolutely need, so rents now are rising as a percent of the American budget. They’re 40% to 50% of income in places like New York City, San Francisco, the high rent areas of the country. SHARMINI PERIES: What are NINJA loans? MICHAEL HUDSON: That’s the other thing that’s changed. What was powering and pushing up prices in 2007 and ’08 were loans to borrowers with No Income, No Jobs, and No Assets. As Bill Black has explained, these are largely fraudulent loans. The frauds were the banks. The frauds were the mortgage companies that just faked the incomes of the buyers and would lend for almost the entire mortgage. Now we only have one kind of NINJA left, and those are students. Student loans have been the most rapidly growing loans in the country. They’re no about $1.3 trillion, more than credit card loans, more than most other kinds of loans. Everybody knows that students are not able to earn enough to repay them, because default rates on student loans are going way up. They’re not going up on mortgages. They’re falling on mortgages – home mortgages – but they’re rising on student loans. But the banks knew that they couldn’t pay and the government knew that they couldn’t pay, so the government made a sweetheart deal with the banks: “You can make all the loans to students you want. You can lend them as much money for any education, even for junk education, for junk colleges, or for-profit colleges like Trump’s college, and we know that the students are going to default, but we’re going to guarantee your loans and we’ll guarantee a higher rate of interest than you can make on any other loan, because we know these loans are risky. We know they won’t pay, but the government will take all the risk and we’ll pay you as if you were taking the risk and as if you were making a real loan, thinking you’d get repaid.” The whole student loan scandal is a corrupt. It shows the degree to which the universities and the government loan system have been taken over by banks writing the loans to give themselves a free ride at public expense. SHARMINI PERIES: Michael, the federal government already guarantees student loans, so when they default on these loans, does paying it back come out of the public purse? MICHAEL HUDSON: Yes. Not only paying back the loan, but paying the loan with enormous interest, higher than the banks can get on any other kind of loan, and very heavy penalty fees, so the banks are basically cleaning up on these. The ultimate beneficiaries, if you can call them beneficiaries, are the universities, because the basic principle in real estate that we learned in 2008 was that a house is worth whatever a bank is going to lend. Well, the same thing is true for education. An education is worth however much a bank is going to lend against it. The bank will lend everything that it costs, because there’s no risk, there’s no need for the banks to ask whether this is a junk education? Is this an educational loan that the student is really going to be able to get a job from? Or is it a Trump University loan or a for-profit university loan that is not really preparing the student for making enough money at all? And does the student have a choice? What’s happened is the price of education has gone way, way up because banks are basically funding an enormous growth in the price that universities can charge for an education. Now the pretense was that if universities charge more, like NYU charges maybe $40,000 for undergraduate and $200,000 a year in student debt for dental school … The idea was the higher price of an education, you’d learn more. But that’s not what’s happening at all. The universities have been turned into profit centers and they’re not hiring more professors, they’re hiring more part-timers, and an enormous growth in middle management and upper management. So all these bloated university expenditure costs are going to the management system, not to the teaching, not to professors, and not to turning out a good product. So the effect of student lending has been to distort the educational system, to turn universities like NYU into a big real estate company. They’re using the money to buy more real estate, to build up all sorts of extraneous things that don’t have anything to do directly with classroom teaching at all. So hardly by surprise, the students are not getting enough of an education to prepare them to earn the money to pay these loans. SHARMINI PERIES: Michael, lastly I want to ask you, you are predicting, or you speak of a slow crash rather than a big crash like we experienced in 2007-2008. Tell us about that. MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, the problem in 2008 was that the economy was over-indebted. The way to solve the problem was to do what crashes normally do: Most crashes wipe out debt, and so the recovery begins from an economy with a much lower level in debt, but the Obama Administration, although it had promised to write down the debts, never did. It supported the banks, and it left all the debts on the books, so the economy still has all of the debt that it had in 2008. And the debt is growing. Over the weekend, for instance, the New York Times celebrated, saying the economy’s optimism is going up because debt is rising. If you look at the National Bureau of Economic Research, economists call running into debt “optimism,” because they assume that all debt is a choice. People are choosing to be so broke that they have to run into credit card debt and borrow more from the banks. The fact is that people are not borrowing because they’re optimistic about the economy. They’re borrowing because they can’t afford to break even and pay for their housing and pay for their education without running into debt. And, they’re having to pay so much money in debt service that they can’t afford to buy goods and services. If you look around New York University, for instance, which used to be a thriving area, right now 8th Street and the big shopping streets are boarded up. The storefronts are closed. Nobody is in them because nobody can afford to go and eat out or buy books or even buy shoes and clothes that they used to buy on these shopping streets, because they have to pay so much for their education that’s been pushed up by the reckless student loan lending. This is an edited transcript from an interview on The Real News Network. (Reprinted from Counterpunch by permission of author or representative" RSS
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on May 6, 2017 11:32:59 GMT -6
It appears Amazon is also squeezing out online retailers. Amazon is moving toward a monopoly on retail sails of all types.
Meanwhile, Amazon's service and search engine are getting progressively worse.
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