Tuesday, January 22, 2019

Conversations with Mr S.

Sometime last week I told Mr S. that I was starting to feel anxious about the economy. He's like - yeah. Who knows what this Brexit thing is going to do.

Me - Screw Europe! We haven't gotten any financial data in weeks. And it's starting to freak me out.

Him - Do we really believe that data anyway? It will be interesting to see how the market reacts when there is no government manipulation.

Which just made me just look and him and smile. Because he is sorta right. No one believes the numbers.

Then last night I was like - You are right, we don't believe that data - but I would like to at least how much I don't trust the data. We are four reports behind. And I would just like to know the range so I can decide what I want to believe or not.

5 comments:

  1. Have an evening's entertainment then ...

    Adam Curtis's "Hypernormalization" documentary from 2016.

    Although your attention span will need to be much longer than three minutes, this will be a bit of fun if you stream it from your Roku or from your bulbous Chromecast streaming thangy.

    So what's it about?

    It's almost exactly what you're talking about with a lot of relevant perspective.

    If Q-ball's still around, this sort of thing is right up his alley, so to speak.

    There's also an interview from Curtis on BBC that sums up some of the points for people who haven't watched the video (yet): Adam Curtis interview about "Hypernormalization".

    And for a little extra fun, we are all now Richard Nixon ...

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  2. Thanks for the short version. The longer version seems like a weekend thing. I don't know what to make of it yet, but it's an interesting theory. I am always curious about how people feel we wound up here. The older I get - I just feel like people don't really want to solve problems. They just want to fight about solving problems. But people are like cats. Tough to herd.

    I think I will watch that stuff though. I got through 30 mins of the long version and it's weird to see all those same players.

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  3. I'm digesting that. So - are short term rates so high due to a lot of demand - or something else. If everyone wants short erm money I can see why they would raise the rates to slow that down. but I don't know at all if that is how this works. Bonds are a definite soft spot in my brain. I stick with what I know. Tech and real estate. Mostly. It seems like you can't survive without knowing the wider package these days. So I guess I should learn.

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  4. Capital of Texas RefugeeTuesday, January 29, 2019 1:11:00 PM

    "... [the Fed Chairman's] REAL goal is to raise the treasury rate ..."

    Well, yes, that's obvious, and it's the real goal of any Fed Chairman.

    That's because the Reserve System is essentially a consortium of regional banks, and for those banks to be able to legislate via economics the "fortunes" of America, they need a way to drive money as a vehicle of debt rather than a vehicle of credit.

    If money were a vehicle of credit, then the Reserve System would eventually evaporate since all of the wealth would be distributed back to the individual citizen stakeholders of America.

    Instead, money serving as debt makes sure that the power remains concentrated, and that financial power remains concentrated within a few large institutions.

    So for the Fed Chairman to do anything but what he's doing?

    That'd be absolutely insane -- there's no way he's going to cause his own job to disappear, because that's a fundamental violation of the primary principle of government.

    Which is: government is a product in which the solutions for the shortcomings of government involve yet more government.

    And that's why I'm an anarcho-capitalist ... :-) *bows to the audience*

    As for Heinlein, the man looked at the independence of Ghana in his not-too-distant past, saw the rise of the American civil rights movement, and got so scared of the future that he crapped out "Farnham's Freehold" ... so I'm not exactly what you'd call a fan.

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  5. BUT WHO WILL BUILD THE ROADS?!

    You see, I just do this stuff to trigger people.

    :-)

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