Our billionaire president joins the deplorable Bubbas! Bless his heart. (See 1 below.)
https://www.reuters.com/articl
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Smart News: https://bit.ly/smartnews-app++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Another Rant. (See 2 below.)
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Many of the Trump Haters are now going after his Attorney General because Trump has been Tweeting his displeasure over McCabe and Stone's sentencing or lack thereof. The problem is, Burr reacted publicly and told Trump to stop and nothing happened because Trump never interfered beyond his tweets.
Those who hate Trump will stop at nothing. They just keep digging. Eventually, I believe Bloomberg will fall in their hole because , except for his billions, he is not a candidate most of America will warm to because he is aloof and has a record that is not overly exceptional.
Time will tell. It always does.
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Dick
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1)That’s how many people are attending the Daytona 500 in Florida, where Trump visited to serve as grand marshal for the annual NASCAR race. When Air Force One flew into the Daytona International Airport, right next to the speedway, the plane first swooped over the track at an estimated 800 feet. The crowd went nuts.
Fox showed the flyby live.
“I have been to a lot of Daytona 500s,” one commentator said as Air Force One flew in, “never have I felt the excitement and energy. We’ve got great racing on the track but we’ve got the president landing right now, the fans are pumped up, I mean, wow, what a day!”
“It’s one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen,” said another commentator. “They said that plane’s 800 feet above the racetrack right now. What an entrance by the president of the United States!”
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2)It appears that interest rates have a high probability of remaining around where they are for the rest of the year. Corona is not going to impact the US sufficiently to cause the Fed to move either direction. That should mean the ten year remains near its current yield of around 1.6% or maybe 25 basis points higher. If Trump is reelected, then possibly it goes over 2% as there would be a move out of fixed income and into equities. If rates remain very low, housing remains robust, and a strong housing market means jobs and spending on all the things needed for a home. Low rates also means a lot more spending on renovations which is happening. Housing is a key component of the economy.
Someone recently sent me an article by an known financial advisor saying that GDP is inaccurately measured, and so the Fed, and policy makers are basing decisions on bad data. Everyone in economics and the Fed and Treasury already know none of the economic measures -GDP, unemployment, productivity, inflation are not accurate. In an economy as complex as the US, there is simply no way to get all the data to accurately measure anything. Most suspect that inflation is overstated as an example. How do you measure the productivity increase a new smartphone created compared to phones of just five or seven years ago, relative to the price. Now you can do so much more with that phone which has the computing capacity of the old mainframes that took up a whole room. What is the productivity increase from using Google to search for information compared to having to figure out where to go to look up information. How do you measure the increased productivity of a law associate who used to have to go to the law library and search for hours and now just goes on his computer and in minutes gets more cases and details. In both cases it is a vast improvement at nil cost. What has been the economy wide savings due to Amazon and Walmart online shopping, and now almost all retailers and others offering product online, meaning price transparency, meaning lower prices and much faster delivery. What is a measure of the productivity gains from various internet shopping, texting, or other capabilities, and what is the measure of lost productivity due to workers being on their phones for personal things during the workday. You get the picture. These and many other things simply cannot be accurately measured but they have increased all of our productivity. We can accurately measure factory worker productivity by counting the number of widgets he produces in a shift, but that is a small part of the economy today. How do you measure the employed when there are likely tens of thousands, or more, working off the books, or who work in the family business and do not get paid, or are paid off the books. The BLS household survey tries to count these people to come to the real unemployment number you hear, but it is a sample, and so is subject to assumptions when extrapolated to the whole economy. Bottom line is, the published data are inaccurate to some degree, but there can never be fully accurate measures, so they do the best they can and try to regularly update the methods. The data are more trends, and need to be looked at in relative terms. For example, we know unemployment is near historic lows, and that is meaningful. The exact number is not as meaningful. We can't measure the real number of available able bodied people who just decide not to work because they are lazy, they are on drugs, or daddy is paying for him to screw around traveling for a year after college.
The best test is to see 7 million unfilled jobs, and hundreds of thousands returning to the workforce each month. That tells us the economy is strong. Because we are living longer, healthier lives, many over 65 people are continuing to work because they can, and they want to, not need to. That never happened before. Companies are very happy to have them and their experience, but it shifts the database measures. The bond market is also a historically reasonable indicator, but it can miss things. For those of us who were watching closely, the capital markets clearly foretold the crash when in August of 07, the capital markets became unwilling to eat more much more paper from the CMBS offerings. That was a clear red flashing signal to some of us in that market. Greenspan missed it entirely, as did much of Wall St and the real estate industry. If any type of bonds start to back up and not be able to be sold except by raising the yield, then it is time to look deeper as to what is happening. That is happening in some parts of the junk bond market, but so far it does not seem to be an indicator of a major widespread crisis in the making.
When selecting stocks I like to try to identify long term demand trends as well as high quality brands and managements. So Home Depot has always been a favorite because renovation is going to be a big demand factor for several years, and now home building which HD also supplies contractors. With very low rates likely to stay for a while and a huge deficit in housing, homebuilders seem to be winners. Industrial companies that supply tech and medical industries, are also going to have good long term demand. Elder healthcare is only going to grow for years.
It is clear now from a variety of reports and experts, that the virus crisis inside China is far worse than they say. Companies are saying they are again postponing reopening because their workers are sick, dead or afraid to come to work. New pictures from inside major cities look like ghost towns. That is the best evidence. The Chinese economy is in very serious trouble and nobody has any idea when it will end. Just because the government says the number of new cases is starting to decline does not mean that is true. Maybe it is, but maybe they are just making believe. Reality is it may be March, or maybe even later before the economy can really get restarted. Chinese GDP is plummeting, and could be negative this quarter, for all we know. What is unclear is how impacted the US manufacturing and retail will be impacted as shipments stop or are very limited. For now nobody thinks the imp[act will be greater than .2% of US GDP. In a year from now, we will very likely see hundreds or more companies having moved out of China as a result of this. Xi has a lot of serious problems now and just throwing money at the problem will not resolve it. In fact, over time it will create inflation and even more leverage and bad debts. All of this will impact Belt & Road money and military spending. To what extent, we have no way to know yet. This just makes he US that much more critical to the rest of the world, and gives Trump more leverage with the EU.
It is very clear now that Bernie has zero chance to be elected, and after S Carolina and NV his shot reduces. Buttaboy has no chance. He is just the press' latest pretty face like Beto was for three weeks, but proved to be an empty suit. Buttaboy is not a moderate other than compared to Bernie. He recently said if you are not for abortion you don't belong, plus he wants to take away your guns. That alone will stop him in many parts of the country. He did a poor job as mayor and he alienated the blacks and the cops. It is fake news to portray him as moderate. He fades with S Carolina. Bloomberg may have just lost the election if he is nominated. The audio of his real comments about stop and frisk and the filed complaints by women who worked at Bloomberg have begun to surface. He has proposed an end to right to work, a $15 minimum wage, and new efforts to unionize industry. That is really pandering. However there are a lot of workers who rejected unions, which are now a tiny percentage of the private sector workers and who are very happy with how things are. Between that and the left rejecting a white billionaire buying the election, it looks more and more to me like a chance for Klobachar. Who else is there? A black minister in Philadelphia recently stated that he is noticing that blacks are now realizing the Dems just show up around election time and pander to them, while Trump has actually done good things for them. Some of his people have moved from the Dems and many others are considering it. My guess is that is happening across the country as blacks are seeing their job s greatly improve along with their incomes for the first time ever, plus prison reform happened, and those two things are making a real difference in thinking. Obama did nothing but increase racial tension. Trump puts money in their pockets and gives them respect as real jobholders they never had.
The Dems continue to live in fantasy land still believing the way to peace in the world is by minimal military power and instead using dialogue. We tried that for 70 years and look at the world we got-Iran, Russia, China, Kim, Turkey, Syria, and more. It is only by having the most powerful military and CIA, and willingness to show you will use it (Kill Soleimani), that matters. It is more dangerous to have a gun, but be afraid to use it if needed, than to have no gun at all. The Congress is treating killing Soleimani as some sort of horrible thing, but killing Bin Laden was good. Soleimani posed a far greater threat to the US than Bin Laden did hiding in Pakistan. Congress acted out of a mix of the Dems wanting to attack Trump and make him powerless despite the terrible damage that would do to the country, and some dumb Republicans whose ego was out of joint because Trump did not ask their permission to do his job. The new war powers resolution is even more dangerous than the Church hearings and follow on laws of decades ago. Can you imagine if Trump had to get permission from Schiff and Nancy and Schumer to act. It is why he is chief executive and they are a separate branch of government with different powers. Washington knew he needed to be able to act when needed and depending on Congress was not realistic. Nothing has changed. Remember in 1941, Congress refused to have the US do anything about Hitler and japan when it would have cost a fraction of lives and money. Not killing Soleimani would have been far more costly in American lives and money. It just shows how stupid most of Congress really is.
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