Financial topics

[OLD1953]

This appears to me to be one of those "smart" moves that looks really stupid in hindsight a few years later.

I'm sure the accountants have been all over this, but really, it looks to me like they are doing the equivalent of making this move in 1934. They are making a host of assumptions.
1. No financial crisis is awaiting in Asia.
2. Asia will not reject US companies as they might at the start of a war.
3. US consumers will not reject products associated with Asia because of war or political friction.
4. Production prices will remain low in Asia.
5. There will not be a currency crisis in Asian currency.
6. Chinese and Asian officials will "play fair" and not extort favors or penalize the company in favor of native companies.

Given that all these things are happening in a way that would negatively impact this move or obviously moving to happen soon, P&G is walking in with "eyes wide shut".

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/ ... A920120510

Consumer goods maker Procter & Gamble Co is moving its key skin-care, cosmetics and personal-care unit from the United States to Singapore to better tap Asian markets, the US company said Friday.

[aedens]

In Q1 2012, GDP rose $142 billion, while debt rose $359 billion. In other words, it took nearly $2.50 in debt to generate $1.00 in GDP.

The preceding chart covered the scope. Cotton covers carbon based units as does makeup. People do not get it...
The flaw in all of modern economics it is never about the stock. It is all, and always has been, about the flow.
Keynasians are not the brightest or ever have they been. I do not wish to be castagated in the wrong context.
I write this as a taxpayer reminded of a local meeting. Half of the Government is not wanted or needed, ok twenty five
percent. It should be private and sealed bid out. Of course some services need to be staffed from a basis of
what we can support from millage. When I went to the Public School for a meeting it was a FEMA day camp.
The system crashed when no bid was implemented and department heads get paid from having head count.
We deep sixed that model ever so long ago. I would say your law of diminishing marginal utility Old is a metric they
could care less about now given US data and corruption.
There is no economic difference between socialism and communism. The Keyansian rent seekers wish
negative interest rates in a dirty currency float world. They are nuts and growth is impossible. The market says so not
us. They wraped a arteria bleeping patient in duct tape just a we recorded in the forums the condition of the patient
in circa 1990 terms of acount.

"Anyone who doesn't regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains."
- Vladimir Putin-

Russia received its first loan from the IMF in April 1992, for $1 billion. In 1993, the Russian government took out another loan, this time for $1.5 billion. A year later the IMF provided still another $1.5 billion. By December 31, 1995, the Russian central government had borrowed over $10 billion through the IMF. When on March 26, 1996, the IMF and Russian central government reached final agreement on a new loan of $10.2 billion--the second-largest loan ever made to any borrower by the IMF. Capital flight at a rate of $2 billion to $3 billion per month was noted. Dmitri Vasiliev, former chairman of Russia's Federal Security Commission, confirmed that IMF loans were used to bail out insiders.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/china-giv ... ca-instead Old news on a topical front. Ask the Dinar. Italy never seemed to make that
resource payment to Libya did they.

Help me out here , how many more cops will do what the ones we have that do nothing now?
The J.P. Morgan story shows Romney’s position has been “dramatically proven wrong,” Levin continued, adding that Romney’s drive to repeal Dodd Frank would “remove the possibility that we would get a cop back on the beat on Wall Street.”
http://his.library.nenu.edu.cn/upload/s ... 119/28.pdf

[OLD1953]

The ultimate end of corruption is bailing out the insiders. If the system crashes afterwards, the insiders are there to pick up the pieces while trumpeting their "virtue" as good people. If it doesn't, they continue doing business as usual until it does finally crash.

Thus, the essential sameness of all systems is exposed. All become corrupt, and all end in granting public money to those "deserving" of whatever the buzzword of the day is, "too big to fail", "essential to national defense" or "necessary for world stability", we've used all those and more.

Myself, I just wonder which incident will be seized upon as the "cause" of the coming war. A woman beaten, a man's ear being cut off, a beheading on television, a shoe being thrown - there will be something which history will seize on as the "cause". But it may be tiny, many times in history some tiny action finally set off the conflict that was waiting to take the stage.

On the global warming front, recall that I said weather and climate would be less predictable until a new stable state was reached.

http://blog.chron.com/sciguy/2011/12/se ... ive-value/
http://tropical.atmos.colostate.edu/for ... ec2011.pdf

Also interesting is to note that the US is now at a considerable record of days without a hurricane landfall, which was not predicted. I'd include a link, but virtually all I can find would be to people who seem to have difficulty with the dictionary definition of "unpredictable". Myself, I just wish it would quit raining in Bagdhad, it's way too late in the year for this! I think a Kansas dryland farmer could have brought in wheat on land that wasn't irrigated in this area, this year.

Unpredictable weather will be likely to lead to shortages of foodstuffs, particularily in countries that don't export a surplus. It is also likely to speed the snail like movement towards finally killing the alcohol fuel subsidy. India and China are large countries that are very sensitive to world wide food prices.

At some point you get the "untouchables" and they clean things up. And then the slow slide begins again. It would be possible to set up a system that didn't naturally do this, but then attacks would come on the system itself, instead of on the rules. So what difference would it make over a sacelum? Requiring what amounted to a constitutional amendment to get rid of a roadblock to the amassing of corrupt wealth would just mean the amendment would be passed, probably to public acclaim. When Marius took the one action guaranteed to eventually destroy the Republic of Rome, he was cheered on by the mob. We did the same thing when Reagan took the same action in the USA. I doubt the outcome here will be any better.

[Higgenbotham]

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/92327533/

He says 3 of 4 of the broadest measures of economic activity have been declining for 2 years and the 4th has tipped over.

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/arch ... extinction

Back in 1960, social welfare benefits made up approximately 10 percent of all salaries and wages. In the year 2000, social welfare benefits made up approximately 21 percent of all salaries and wages. Today, social welfare benefits make up approximately 35 percent of all salaries and wages.

[Trevor]

Even the previous "recovery" was barely anything of the sort. Unemployment dropped because millions of people have given up looking for a job, not because they actually found one. The participation rate is at a 30-year low. If it was as high as it was in 2009, unemployment would be 11.5 percent, not including all the people who can only find part time work.

I'd say all the other economies falling apart is having an effect on us. I don't know why we thought that we would escape the effects.

[Higgenbotham]

If you ask me, the unemployment or participation rates are not even the biggest problem. The biggest problem is most of the existing jobs are low wage or government and/or irrelevant. Like if you have 35% of income coming from government welfare programs as the above article states, then lots of people are also being employed administering those programs and those jobs are completely irrelevant (not doing anything useful or productive in the overall scheme of things). You might as well count those people as unemployed too...

[Trevor]

I know; a lot of the high-paying ones have disappeared. Unemployment may not be the biggest problem, but it is definitely one of them. They're now starting to call my generation the "New Lost Generation" due to a lack of economic opportunities at the moment.

[OLD1953]

The latest from Greece is saying they haven't formed a government, therefore new elections are in order. I still say the Greeks will double down against austerity, and by that I mean the Greek on the street realizes they have to leave the EURO. And they will vote that way. This will lead to a great deal of friction in Europe, as the Greeks pay off debts in drachmas. There is no other solution to the Greek financial crisis, just as Iceland had no "lets play depression for a while" solution. Austerity of the "do what you were doing but just do less of it" sort is not a solution at all, it's just a holding pattern waiting for another bubble to ride upwards for a while. A healthy economy cannot be built on central bank bubbles. Not that central banks can actually blow another bubble, they've certainly been trying.

College loans and costs are just totally out of hand. And how about the people who don't graduate? And Higgs remarks about the moral stricture of an effective bankruptcy system are right on the mark, too, there's no reason to cut costs if you KNOW you will get paid somehow, by someone.

http://www.freep.com/article/20120513/N ... ed-by-debt

The average tuition at Michigan's 15 public universities has gone up 28.5% from the 2007-08 school year to the 2011-12 school year, according to data gathered by the nonpartisan state House Fiscal Agency.
****
Since 2005, the loans are not dischargeable by filing for bankruptcy.

And California either will increase taxes or go into default. I think they'll finally go sane and restructure their taxes. People simply don't "get" what's going on with taxes now, they are utterly distorted because they've not been altered or fixed in any way but downwards for years. Economies change, and a healthy tax code has to adjust. Three decades of political terror over the thought of touching the tax code has resulted in a system that simply doesn't work the way it is supposed to any longer. And the political "fixes" are just political bunkum and pablum, the world is a damn sight more complex than some people like to claim.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... 1OH8KL.DTL

California's budget deficit has jumped to $16 billion, forcing Gov. Jerry Brown to call for even deeper cuts in state spending when he releases his revised budget plan on Monday.

And a comment here, California keeps cutting school budgets. I hear all kinds of anger from many people in the rest of the country about how California kids "dont' pay enough". Well, if you take a look, there's a pretty direct correlation between state tax receipts and the number of college graduates in the state. That bit of infrastructure is probably what has kept California afloat for so long. But they'll likely sell off the state college system to Buffett or someone, the whole idea of public infrastructure seems to be anathema to politicians now.

[at99sy]

Higgy you're spot on with this observation.

If you ask me, the unemployment or participation rates are not even the biggest problem. The biggest problem is most of the existing jobs are low wage or government and/or irrelevant. Like if you have 35% of income coming from government welfare programs as the above article states, then lots of people are also being employed administering those programs and those jobs are completely irrelevant (not doing anything useful or productive in the overall scheme of things). You might as well count those people as unemployed too...

I showed this graph and several others that the DOL provides to my economics class. These current HS Juniors were not very impressed nor as confident about the HS-College-$$$ job formula they have been spoon fed for the past 11 years.

Table 3. The 20 industries with the largest projected wage and salary employment growth, 2010-20
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ecopro.t03.htm

This one did not impress them much either since almost all of the jobs listed would barely require a HS diploma.

Table 6. The 30 occupations with the largest projected employment growth, 2010-20
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ecopro.t06.htm

Nearly all the jobs mentioned are un or minimum skilled labor positions in service sectors. Several of my students go to a 1/2 time trade school and are
learning welding, nursing, cosmetology etc. and have already planned out their careers and will begin making money as soon as they graduate. Many of them are working at internships to gain experience and I'm telling them that they may have a significant competitive advantage over their peers who will be going off to college and spending $$$$$$$$ for a potentially worthless degree.

Going into the third worst consecutive job market for college grads ever in our history.

Cheers

sy

[aedens]

Marx never had an original thought nor do I in this specific conveyance. If you properly discern Sismondi’s Nouveaux principes d’ economie politique you will without intellectual drought see influence by both Smith and Rousseau. The Nouveaux principles, the focus of interest are Sismondi’s views on property, commercial wealth, work and leisure, division of labor, consumption and luxury, paper money and public credit, and citizenship. The paper concludes by suggesting that Sismondi managed to transform Genevan republicanism into a set of ideas which has nourished economic radicalism up to the present.
To many historians, the discovery that republicanism was relevant to the early shaping of political economy has entailed a reconstruction of the relationship between commercial society and political Liberalism which questions previous simplistic interpretations and the fallacy you will be in high probability liquidated as the author of the quote below provided. http://his.library.nenu.edu.cn/upload/s ... 119/28.pdf
Quote: “must be the work of the class and not of a little leading minority in the name of the class -- that is, it must proceed step by step out of the active participation of the masses; it must be under their direct influence, subjected to the control of complete public activity; it must arise out of the growing political training of the mass of the people.” This was derived from Sismondi work which is ignored and is a grave error to severe consequences still unfolding.
As captial is fungible and we have forumed the context of it we must be reminded how the calculation of the mixed economy and innovation are balanced to the movement. The consolidations noted are transpiring to promote zone stability in our sectors.

"The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea
acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can "throw the rascals out" at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy." Quigley
http://generationaldynamics.com/forum/v ... 630#p13490 <---- quigleys answer to our 60's GD context H
There is no economic difference between socialism and communism. This is the fact of the matter.