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Ross Rants Again:
There seems to be a difference
between skilled and unskilled labor as to unemployment. I hear from friends
trying to hire that there is a shortage of semi-skilled and skilled people, for
example a bookkeeper, is hard to find. There is a shortage of well-trained
people who will actually show up every day, on time, and who do not have an
attitude. You know, like the old days before there were so many demands about
race, gender, and all the crap in today’s workplace. Point is, if people are
skilled even somewhat, and have a good work attitude, there are plenty of jobs
for them at good pay now. A mid-level bookkeeper in NJ gets $65,000 now, plus
normal benefits.
Back to what I keep
saying. If they would end the lockdowns and let restaurants, bars, gyms and
venues reopen as they are in FL, unemployment would drop materially with no new
$1.9 trillion package of waste. Business does not need to be told to pay
$15. They will pay whatever the market will require to get decent people,
depending on where they are located and the cost of living there. The $1.9 bill
also has a $400 a week add on to unemployment checks. That will mean
around 60% will earn more staying home, plus a family of four will get $5600
for free-$413 billion cost. Why would they go back to work? It will force employers
to have to offer higher wages just to get people to show up, and so up a little
more inflation, and squeezed margins. Add on $15 minimum, and small business
gets killed.
Powell and Yellen have
assured that the stock market in the short run -2021, will go up and keep the
Wall St big donors happy. Wall St is always short term focused so they are
ignoring the reality. Real investors who believe in fundamental investing, will
ride the wave or now, but watch for when to get out. I am in for now.
Here on Longboat last
night I was at a local restaurant. There is a big bar and large dining area.
The bar was packed as were the tables. Life is normal here, and the virus is
not out of control. Many of us have had our shots already, or soon will. It is
done very efficiently and easily here. I don’t believe all the press stories
feeding the Dem line of what a mess it is to get vaccinated, and the BS from
Biden that it will take until late this year to get back to normal. There was
just a report that the NYT has been lying about the cases and shots to make it
look worse than it really is so Biden looks like he actually did something and
Trump failed. The White House is lying as well to make it seem we need the $1.9
trillion, or the economy will crash. It is more likely to lead to a crash next
year if they do pass the spending bill because it will contribute to
inflation and waste huge amounts of money needed for other things, like
advanced weapons to counter China, or to complete the wall.
In talking to a number
of investors who handle large sums, and reports from Wall St money managers, it
seems most serious investors are mostly sitting still for the moment. Not in,
nor out. Not chasing the latest fad. A number took advantage of the downturn
this week to buy some select stocks at the lower prices. Nobody has any idea
what will happen, or when, so if they feel good about their current
investments, they are, for the most part, just sitting still until they see
where the country and the market are really going. Most are out of the bond
market.
Despite what Powell
said, most think rates and inflation are rising. Most, but not all, have
liquidated their short positions because they believe the market will go up
from here. Barring some black swan event, the economy should be recovering now
and will be doing better most of the rest of the year. Powell’s comments on
Tuesday were everything the markets wanted to hear. Continued low rates and
huge amounts of added money in circulation-25% of GDP in a year. This will
drive up stocks and other risk assets like Bitcoin for a few more months.
M2 is up by a staggering
$4 trillion in 2020. That is 26% which is the most since 1943. The Fed holdings
increased by $3 Trillion, bank deposits at the Fed increased $1 trillion and
companies borrowed under credit lines by $800 billion, much of which is in
deposits at banks. Bank reserves are now $3.2 trillion, including another
$1.4 trillion added due to the Fed buying bonds. As M2 grows, the probability
of inflation grows. It was rather astonishing to me that Powell said inflation
is not an issue right now when we can see the numbers I have quoted in earlier
Rants. And now Yellen is pushing for massive fiscal spending. They should
know better, but this is the basic Biden policy espoused by Moody’s that the
key goal needs to be reducing unemployment and the Keynesian theory that
spending is the way to create jobs. This is what is driving the $1Trillion and
added spending plans they will come with. Moody’s is giving them cover with
models and the forecast that the economy will boom due to the spending. While
at the same time Moody’s acknowledges there is a long term deficit problem and
a likely collapse of stock prices in 2022-you will never hear that in any
public statements..
The M&A business has
really taken off in the past few months as the stock market has boomed and
SPACs are booming. That is good for stock prices. The Atlanta Fed has forecast
that GDP Q1 could rise 9%. They are often wrong in their forecasts and
change them frequently, but it suggests the trend is strong as I have
contended. It also further demonstrates we don’t need the $1.9 trillion, and
the economy is doing well overall. Out of the $1.9 trillion there is only $800
billion with any remote connection to the virus, or the economy, and even that
is marginal in most cases. There is $130 billion for schools which is not
needed at all and is just a payoff to the unions. So make $800 billion $670
billion. And I am certain there is another batch of billions of unneeded
allocations.
There was a news item
that 150 CEO’s back the $1.9 trillion. What we don’t know is what each of them
was promised in exchange. How irresponsible these people are . They got bought
off, or they are just sucking up to the new administration hoping for the
payoff later in the form of a contract or freedom from regulation on some key
issue
Biden has not wasted any
time doing many of the things I feared he would do. The $1.9 Trillion package
is at least $1.2 Trillion bigger than it should be. $1.1 trillion is pure
unrelated to Covid or economic recovery. CBO says much of it will not possibly
get spent until 2022 or later. It is filled with wasteful payoffs to
Pelosi’s favorite friends, and will not really help the economy, and do nothing
new to end the virus. It is being sold to voters as a necessary boost to the
unemployed, and to almost all voters with the $1400 payoff, and other
subsidies. It is a pure bribe to voters for 2022. It is disappointing
that Yellen is going along with and touting the wasted spending.
The border is reopened,
and soon the caravans will show up, and we will again be flooded with
uneducated and possibly Covid infected thousands who will be given your tax
money and other goodies. They will also take jobs from low income workers who
are the hardest hit by the shutdowns. And now he is housing kids in the exact
same facility that Harris labeled as disgraceful when Trump did exactly the
same thing. He has already taken steps to show Iran how weak he is. He cut off
the Saudis from all help in Yemen, plus he stopped arms sales to them and the
UAE, he is going to release the intel report on the murder of Khashoggi which
implicates the Prince, and he has ended the UN snap back sanctions, while
agreeing to an EU sponsored meeting without getting Iran to agree to do
anything. In addition he waited weeks to call Netanyahu in a clear snub. He had
no retaliation for the Iran backed rocket attack in Erbil last week that killed
an American. He also has rejoined funding UNRWA, the UN organization that funds
the Palestinians which money is used to pay terrorists and gets stolen by the
leaders.
He has made it clear he
will no longer confront China, and will focus on climate as opposed to mainly
focus on technology theft, influence on other countries using trade and using
money and vaccines, influence through Confucius Centers on campus, and spying.
He issued an order that we can no longer call the Chinese virus by its
name. He took no action to stop the Nordstream pipeline so that will
now get completed and Russia will have a controlling lock on energy for
the EU and especially for Germany. So much for expecting Germany to go along
with any real actions in the future against Russia. This was a major strategic
error which will come home to be a problem for the world and the US some future
day. He shuts down Trans Canada, but not Nordstream. He rejoined WHO without
requiring any reforms, and now they did their investigation of the virus and
seems to have bought the Chinese line it came from rabbits or some other
animal, while Pompeo who had access to the intelligence says it was from the
lab.
Now the Chinese want a
reset of relations-translation-go back to the bad old days of Obama Biden
appeasement. I am sure Kim is watching all of this and N Korea will be
next to threaten some action to get Biden to fold on some issue. China is also
watching and will see the weakness, and will push Biden on several fronts
including Taiwan which remains a really dangerous situation. We are headed for
a geopolitical nightmare. Instead of taking steps to show Iran he was willing
to be compliant, he should have ramped up the sanctions and assured Saudi of
even more arms and help, and Netanyahu should have been one of his first calls
with a public reassurance that the US stood with Israel.
I expect Biden will fold
on Iran and lift sanctions in exchange for another disastrous agreement that
will let Iran recover from the disaster they are now in due to sanctions, and
the EU will think that is wonderful. This will be a rerun of the first Obama
nuke deal, just as Iran is in real economic trouble, they get bailed out. The
EU was never willing to back Trump on Iran, and is once again demonstrating its
utter weakness in foreign policy. They are seeing that they also can push Biden
around, and will do so on China and the Nordstream pipeline which is already
back under construction. The world just became far more dangerous as I feared
would happen.
The economy is actually
doing quite well despite CA, NY and Il and the teachers unions. As vaccinations
ramp up now, there will be even faster growth, and by late April, things will
be much better economically as cases become very few, and restaurants and
travel begins to reopen. By May, hospitalizations and deaths will be nominal,
and people will again be getting back to living and spending. The problem is
the things Biden is doing with the minimum wage, new regulations, proposed
taxes, and other anti-business steps, the recovery will be less than it could
have been, and if all of his economic proposals become implemented,
corporate earnings will be more restrained than they could be, which will have
an impact on share prices. By 2022 interest rates will be higher, and corporate
earnings lower than expected, and that will, at some point, likely lead to a
decline in the stock market which could become as much as 10%-20%. There is now
$800 billion of margin loans in the stock market, and when share prices begin
to back off, there will be selling to cover, and that can become a flood of
selling as prices decline. This is a real shadow over the market.
Frank Luntz, the
pollster, surveyed people about the Robinhood situation. As usual the general
public is grossly misinformed and rails against hedge funds, the new punching
bag, and Robinhood and Wall St in general. They have no clue how Wall St really
works, or even what hedge fund is, but they know they hate them. They
have zero understanding of what happened with Robinhood and its capital rule
issues, but they think they know it was greedy Wall St screwing the little guy.
Reality is if Robinhood had not done what it did to temporarily halt buying
Game Stop and other stocks,, and had it not stayed alive, it would have
triggered a real problem for stocks had they collapsed.
The regular press has no
clue either, and neither does Maxine Waters, so the public is grossly
misinformed, and that is not good for Wall St, and so not good for stocks at
some point. The internet sites that let kids push stocks has changed how the
market reacts, and the genie is now out of the bottle. Hopefully enough of
these kids will lose some money and learn that the stock market goes down as
well as up, and is not a place for kiddies to play. We hopefully will not get
any material new regs which would only serve to constrain trading.
Gary Gensler is the new
head of the SEC. He is a record of being a very tough enforcer. Expect
the SEC to go after all sorts of small infractions by Wall St firms. Wall St
voted for Biden, but now is going to pay the price with heavy regulations and
legal costs.
Cuomo is going down
after being the hero of the press and Biden calling him the gold standard. He
should be indicted. He essentially killed thousands of people.
The NYC AG is going
after Trump claiming he inflated the value of his real estate assets to be able
to get bigger loans and to depreciate more for tax deductions. Welcome to the
real estate world. I was a real estate lender for many years. I never saw an
honest valuation of assets. In the hotel industry owners would go to HVS and get
inflated appraised valuations of hotels, or prospective hotel developments so
they could get a bigger loan. When I did expert witness work, owners would come
to court with appraisals to fit their case-all of them being total BS. The
other side would have an appraisal to fit their case.
In the eighties, when I
was arranging financing for large hotel projects, we would calculate what we
needed to build the hotel, and then I would call an appraiser and tell him I
needed an appraisal of X. Back then Lloyds Bank, Mellon, and others would
do loans on development deals at 75% of appraised value, which in many cases
was really 90%-100% of true cost of the development. If the cost was really $20
million, we would tell the appraiser we needed an appraisal of $27 million, and
they would produce it. They would just charge a little extra for the
higher number. I did 15 or more of these loans. That was also the days when a
developer would option a parcel for say $2 million, then a few months later
when he had his initial plans, he would tell lenders the land was now
worth $3 or $4 million because he now had a plan, and was in entitlement
so it had much more value. Then he would claim he had invested
sweat equity so did not have to invest any cash of his own.
If you have been a
developer for a long time you remember those days. I never bought this BS, but
lenders did sometimes. When I created the first hotel CMBS program in
1993, I made an underwriting rule that we only loaned on provable cash
flow, and we ignored the appraised value other than to make sure it covered a
60% LTV loan to satisfy the rating agencies. Trump did nothing that everyone
else in the real estate industry did. The case is purely a get Trump
indicted effort. It is total crap. Appraisals are nothing but fairy tales
written by kids. They should never be relied on as true indicators of value,
and basing a prosecution on that is manufactured political absurdity.
If you still do not
appreciate what has happened to university education in America, read the
attached. It is not unique. This is what university education in the US has
become, and now it is seeping down into the K-12 levels as the kids graduate
from university and become teachers in lower grades they bring this ideology
with them. This is a major problem for the US educations system today.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Biden heals the nation by considering reparations. I and my children and their children, who were not born during the period of slavery, might be taxed to pay for reparations. That is like charging me for the cost of people who had to rebuild their homes after tornadoes that occurred 50 years ago. Click on video below.
The Hammer May Be About to Fall: FBI and U.S. Attorney Now Looking Into Cuomo's Nursing Home Scandal
Neera Tanden’s Death by Twitter
Does Twitter have a
tool for deleting 1,000 politically self-destructive tweets?
Joe Biden’s nomination of Neera Tanden to run the Office of Management and Budget looks as if it is going to fail Senate confirmation because of her . . . tweets. As the long-ago talk-show host Jack Paar was the first to say, I kid you not.
Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin most likely sank Ms. Tanden’s
nomination when he said he would vote against her. He joined three Republicans
in opposition—Sens. Rob Portman, Susan Collins and Mitt Romney. On Wednesday,
two Senate committees “postponed” votes on her nomination, which means, it’s
melting.
In her years before the Twitter mast, Ms. Tanden tweeted that
Mitch McConnell was “Voldemort” and “Moscow Mitch,” compared Ted Cruz
unfavorably to vampires, called Tom Cotton a “fraud,” said that Bernie Sanders
—a frequent Tanden target—was helped by Russia in the 2016 Democratic primaries,
and called Sen. Collins’s reasons for voting to confirm then-Judge Brett
Kavanaugh a “pathetically bad faith argument as cover for President Trump’s
vicious attacks on survivors of sexual assault.”
For readers by now wondering how the phrases “Neera Tanden” and
“U.S. budget director” fit together, let it be noted that Ms. Tanden was once
president of the Center for American Progress, a left-of-center think tank that
has published fact-filled policy papers on public issues. Which is to say that
in an earlier life, Ms. Tanden was a serious person. Then she discovered
Twitter.
I’m fascinated at how so many people who become addicted to social
media’s hourly injections of bile think that somehow it’s not really public, or
that no one beyond their troll world will notice.
Amid Ms. Tanden’s current crucible, it has been reported that in
preparation for her confirmation hearings, she deleted 1,000 of her Twitter
account’s 88,000 tweets. A thousand deleted tweets???!!! Does Twitter have a
tool for scanning and erasing a user’s tweets, which on second or third thought
were a bad idea?
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says it will be hypocritical
if Ms. Tanden is defeated for a cabinet post by Republicans who “looked the
other way” from Donald Trump’s
all-through-the-night Twitter rants, which by the way, the New York Times took the time to compile
last month as “The Complete List of Trump’s Twitter Insults (2015-2021).”
In fact, rather than turn a blind eye to Mr. Trump’s Twitter
feed, everyone begged him in public and private to stop doing
it, but he refused, insisting this was how he “communicated” with his base. Who
can doubt it? But the belligerence of his tweets contributed to the erosion of
Mr. Trump’s re-election support among suburban voters, who simply couldn’t take
it any more. Neera Tanden isn’t setting any precedent as a high-level Twitter
self-immolator. She’ll always be No. 2.
Beyond self-destruction, a more serious concern is the implication
for free speech of disqualifying people for what they have said (or tweeted).
I think calling Mitch McConnell “Voldemort” is kind of funny and fair game—just as the connotative effect of calling Sen. Schumer “Chuck” makes sense. Columns of political opinion, one may have noticed, would be out of business if they had to be written in patty-cake prose.
But it’s hard to credit progressives’ complaints about punishing
Ms. Tanden for free, if ill-considered, speech when they have transformed what
people say—going back to writings in college—into a justification for routine
political and personal destruction. When that stops, the free-speech dialogues
can begin.
No one would understand better than Ms. Tanden, a famously
hardball political player, that you pays your money and you takes your chances.
She took hers with this endless stream of insults against U.S. senators.
I think Sens. Manchin, Collins and Portman are concerned about
something beyond Ms. Tanden’s OMB nomination. Mr. Manchin has become famous
recently for saying he won’t vote to end the legislative filibuster, as has
fellow Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. Actively protecting the Senate’s
prerogatives is an overdue step toward not letting the legislative branch
become moribund in an era when national policy is increasingly set by whoever
wins the presidency, as in Joe Biden’s stream of executive orders and those of
the two presidents before him.
Sen. Manchin, explaining his opposition to Ms. Tanden, said her
“toxic” tweets would impair her ability to work with Congress as budget
director. That assumes she has much interest in working with Congress, which I
doubt. Diminishing the role of the legislative branch is a progressive goal
dating back to Woodrow Wilson, as Ms. Tanden surely knows. She has little use
for Congress, which would explain why she was so dismissive of even Sen.
Sanders and why she reflexively mocked senators. It’s not them personally but
their institution that is an impediment to her force-fed agenda.
The Center for American Progress was the originator of the
arguments for Barack Obama’s unilateral pen-and-phone authority. That expertise
is why Joe Biden, or someone, wanted her at OMB. She published the blueprints
for ignoring Congress.
A vote to defeat her isn’t personal. It’s about making sure the
Senate still matters.
And:
Why is Neera Tanden so important that Democrats would smear Joe Manchin to save her doomed nomination?
It’s a bold move to smear your own party's most important senator
as a racist and sexist. But evidently, the Biden administration believes that
ramming through a professional Twitter troll as the director of the Office of
Management and Budget is worth it.
Nine of President Biden’s nominees earned bipartisan support and,
with the exception of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, majority
support even among Republicans. But now, the president of the liberal Center
for American Progress is set to be voted down by every Republican in the Senate
plus West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin. Manchin, the crucial swing vote
of the 50-50 Senate, has announced his opposition to Tanden’s confirmation.
The case against Tanden is simple enough: She lacks both the
resume qualifying her for such a vital position and the civil temperament to
work across the aisle.
Not since Ronald Reagan has a president successfully seen through
every single Cabinet nomination, and the number of failed nominations per
administration has only escalated in recent history. George W. Bush had to
withdraw two nominees, Barack Obama three, and Donald Trump four. (Bill Clinton
was an outlier, with five nominees withdrawn.)
It’s to be expected that at least one of Biden’s nominees would
fail, and given Tanden’s prolific Twitter tirades — among other more unsavory
items, she’s called centrist Republicans Susan Collins “the worst” and Lisa
Murkowski “high on [her] own supply” — everyone assumed that Tanden served as
the administration’s sacrificial lamb to take attention off of his more
consequential nominees.
And yet, Biden’s team has chosen Tanden’s confirmation as the hill
to die on, deploying the Hail Mary pass of Democratic politics — a bigotry
accusation. Astoundingly, the senator being smeared is key not only to Biden’s
$1.9 trillion fantasy of a coronavirus aid bill but also every judicial
confirmation and budget deal for the next two years.
Just days after Manchin’s announcement, California Democratic Rep.
Judy Chu accused those opposing Tanden of a “double standard.” New York Rep.
Grace Meng deemed Manchin’s opposition to Tanden and indecision about Interior
Secretary nominee Deb Haaland a “pattern that is happening and increasingly
hard to ignore.” Manchin’s colleague from Hawaii, Mazie Hirono, also echoed the
“pattern” line, and House Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries insinuated
that Manchin’s opposition to “people of color” was no coincidence. Top
Biden-backers in the media, such as MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Bill Kristol of
the Bulwark, have also claimed opposition to Tanden
stems from sexism.
Yet somehow, these sexists confirmed Director of National
Intelligence Avril Haines before any other Cabinet nominee, with just 10
Senators opposing. And somehow, right after that, these racists confirmed
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a black man, with just two senators
opposing.
Maybe they're all racists and sexists. Or, maybe the problem is
that Tanden spent the last four years hurling caustic insults at the very
senators she would have to work with as OMB director. And maybe Biden should
have chosen an actual qualified candidate instead of a hackish resistance bully
so vicious that she once punched journalist Faiz Shakir for having the audacity
to ask Hillary Clinton a question about the Iraq War. (Tanden insists that she
merely “pushed” him.)
So now, the greater question is why Biden considers Tanden so
important to his administration that he’s willing to jeopardize his
relationship with someone so critical to his agenda. Some say it’s because of
Tanden’s close personal relationship with White House chief of staff Ronald
Klain, whereas others assert that Clintonworld insisted on her.
But consider: Tanden was just as much a thorn in the side of
leftists as she has been for Republicans, famously insulting and smearing
Bernie Sanders and his allies. Yet Biden blindsided Bernie, refusing to give
him a heads-up about her nomination even after the Vermont senator did Biden
the favor of quitting the presidential primary, a show of respect that he did
not grant Clinton.
And all of this ignoring that Tanden is a conspiratorial troll who
blamed Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement from the Supreme Court on Russia,
outed a sexual harassment survivor in retaliation for her coming forward, and
thinks the solution to our deficit is for Libya to repay us for illegally bombing
it by giving us its oil.
Tanden is a violent and vitriolic hack without the chops for
running the entire federal budget. But sure, sexism and racism ... or
something.
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