Economics and current events, no-tweet, no-tiktok: you posted a damn advertisement

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Business, Finance, and Careers > Economics and current events, no-tweet, no-tiktok: you posted a damn advertisement

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

hobbez posted:

Jamie Dimon is trying to cobble together another rescue of first republic bank today. FRB is down ~90% from only a month ago.

Starting to question if the extreme rescue packages, both private and public, we've seen so far are going to stabilize the banking system sufficiently. Not only in the short term, but on a long term enough basis for the Fed to continue to do the hard and destabilizing work of fighting inflation.

Too much smoke, just feels like there have to be more fires out there

Are they still having massive deposit outflows or is it just the equity getting punished? The latter is at least rational -- big likelihood of a ton of dilution and very limited upside for the foreseeable future, even if the bank survives.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2023 19:03

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 17:23

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

I guess my problem with what the Fed is doing is that they have one tool in their tool box (legally) and it's not the tool that's needed. Inflation is fundamentally about too much money chasing too few goods, and people often assume it's the "too much money" part that's the problem. That's the image burned in everyone's mind about Zimbabwean 100 Trillion Dollar bills or 1930s Germany or whatever. But there's a whole second half of that sentence, and the American economy is clearly suffering from a too few goods problem. COVID completely hosed up so much stuff in the economy. Supply chains and ports, were widely reported, but also more subtle stuff. Things like 500k-800k workers being missing because they're dead. Two years of economic demand being suppressed and then all wanting to catch-up at once. Industries that built their whole business plan around easy access to cheap immigrant labor running into the twin barrels of Trumpism and COVID. Everyone wanting to move to the countryside one year, then back to the cities the next. The complete inability of any American city to build affordable housing in any meaningful amounts.

Except the Fed can't do jack poo poo about any of that. They can't fix the ports, they can't fix immigration policy, they can't resurrect dead workers or force boomers back into the workforce. They can't make nimbys stfu and build multistory apartment buildings near transit hubs. They can't help the several taiwanese companies that make all the computer chips for every new car unfuck their supply chain and protect them from China. The people who can do anything about that are more interested in holding hearings about imaginary conspiracies of trans people that want to steal their children and make the Twitter mods be mean to them.

JPow has one tool, making money cheaper or more expensive. He's a man who only has a hammer and by god he's going to swing that hammer at the face of American workers until enough of them don't have jobs and they'll stop wanting to buy things.

# ¿ Mar 23, 2023 03:02

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

Shower thoughts: If you work for the Federal Reserve System, does that mean you're technically getting paid in company scrip?

# ¿ Apr 18, 2023 19:11

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

LostCosmonaut posted:

FRC shares dropped by almost 50% today (down to a bit over $8), so the stock market at least seems to think it's the first one.

Matt Levine had a write-up about it today arguing it's basically a zombie bank: From a regulatory perspective it probably has enough capital to continue indefinitely especially with the Fed facility and the banking industry generally working in concert to quell bank runs. From an economic perspective though, the bank is probably worth negative dollars, and they're unlikely to have any buyers at a price higher than a Snickers bar. If you accept that argument then buying any of their equity right now is basically lighting your money on fire.

# ¿ Apr 25, 2023 22:24

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

I liked the part about how the reason the Turkish Lira isn't a reserve currency is because of concerns about one party rule. :allears:

# ¿ Apr 26, 2023 14:12

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

Guest2553 posted:

I was going to send Matt Levine's summary - his writing is both accessible to people outside the industry and low key hilarious. He does similar writeups about major financial news and has authored a couple articles that became their own special editions of Bloomberg. I really enjoyed the crypto one.

The SPY kids one is my favorite.

# ¿ Apr 30, 2023 03:02

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

I'd say certain sectors that were particularly juiced by zero interest rates, like tech and commercial real estate, are definitely in a chill right now. I'd think residential real estate would be too, with mortgage rates tripling, but I guess it's having roughly balancing effects of "we are never moving" killing inventory vs. "a 2% ask price is unaffordable at 7%" killing demand.

# ¿ May 5, 2023 16:34

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

LanceHunter posted:

The direct flight situation in Austin is very frustrating. Up until 1999 we only had a municipal airport and the vast majority of flights went to other Texas cities (mostly Houston and Dallas) to then connect out. Our current airport opened just two years before 9/11, and it had about the worst possible architecture for handling things afterwards. For example, every single shop/restaurant/cafe/etc was behind the security checkpoint, since they never imagined a world where people without tickets wouldn't be able to go through security to be able to wait for their arrivals.

The airport has been trying its hardest to keep up with the insane amount of growth, but it's been a poo poo-show the entire time.

As long as we're doing weird airport chat, I flew out of Berlin Tegel in 2019 a few years before they finally closed it, and I'm still not totally convinced it wasn't one big fever dream. The airport is 100% from the jetset era when security checkpoints didn't even exist. They retrofitted this by having one big central hexagon that's entirely landside, which is also where all the shops and lounges are. Then there's literally individual isolated airside sections for every single gate. This means every single gate has its own security screening station and passport control. Except this was all built in the era before either of those, so the queues of 300 people waiting for security and passport control back up into long snaking lines inside the hexagon. If there's more than one flight leaving at nearby gates, their lines start overlapping and blocking the main travel hallway. Then once you're actually airside, it's one tiny cramped gate waiting room with a single toilet and vending machine, with everyone crammed inside like cattle because it's literally one of 20 small disconnected airside pocket zones.

The whole thing felt like an airport designed by an insane person.

# ¿ May 9, 2023 18:12

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

It's fine though inflation won't be a problem anymore when the US defaults next month.

# ¿ May 10, 2023 14:56

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

Hadlock posted:

Yeah 1) Mormons and 2) Utah is pretty mountainous, but still plenty of big flat areas, it's not especially productive farm land so land value is relatively low and as a result you can build giant homes

This is a wind map but has both elevation and roads well marked

Also the whole state is only 3.3 million people and the SLC metro area is 1.2 million so no shortage of buildable land.

Also for all their other problems Mormons generally don't tolerate anti-growth NIMBY blockades against ever building anything anywhere. The church says "we're gonna have X% population growth so we need Y thousand new homes, plus new sewer and water, roads, and schools, and an airport."

Kinda like China, Utah has basically zero political freedom (the church runs everything and puts their people in every elected position outside of a few gentile and tourism enclaves) but dang they aren't fantastic at building public infrastructure. There were a few articles a couple years back about how Utah was the only state to make any kind of meaningful progress in reducing homelessness because they did the radical thing of--- get this-- building homes for homeless people to live in.

# ¿ May 17, 2023 20:06

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

Baddog posted:

Btw, I don't think she has been definitive enough on the date. When she says "early june, maybe as early as June 1", I think some of these dumbasses interpret that as "we have until June 10 or 15 or so before something bad actually happens". I don't remember the treasury statements on the debt being as waffly in the past.

Aiui the treasury owes some huge lump sum payments the first week of June, mostly medicare and social security. At the same time, a number of counties in California and elsewhere have special August deadlines for paying 2022 taxes because of all the winter storm disasters. So it all depends on whether or not a bunch of taxes from wealthier parts of California come in soon or those people and businesses decide to take advantage of the 0% tax loans for a few more months.

# ¿ May 25, 2023 13:09

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

Cyrano4747 posted:

Eh, the $20B the IRS is loosing isn't nothing, and my understanding is that it was specifically earmarked to help with their staffing woes. It's not the end of the world, but that agency is flailing and really needs to be properly funded.

edit: The Republican talking point is that the money would have hired "an army of auditors." Setting aside that I don't think it was auditors (iirc it was fixing their hosed tech backend?) even if that was true I mean, yeah. . . . that's kinda the point. We have existing tax legislation, people need to pay their taxes, some people don't and this is how you find them and get them to pay their taxes. If you don't like that pass some legislation to decrease taxes but trying to gut the enforcement mechanism only helps the people who are under-paying to begin with.

What I'm saying is the Republicans like criminals.

The Dems could run on "Republicans took the economy hostage to demand lower taxes for tax cheats" but they won't because they suck at their jobs (and also I stop doing a politics derail in this thread).

# ¿ May 29, 2023 18:13

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

Space Fish posted:

I keep hearing noise about the pending BRICS currency (bricbucks?) that will be formally announced in August and diminish the status of America's reserve currency and somehow unite the world against America & Its Buddies while also bringing back the gold standard.

Would so many countries, even rivals and otherwise violent neighbors, band together to hurt the US dollar, with cutting off SWIFT access to Russia being the catalyst?

And the supposed use of gold to peg this new currency's value - doesn't every gold-backed currency turn to poo poo 'cause 1) no country wants to exchange their gold hoard over and 2) eventually every country tries to print its way out of catastrophe and gold can't keep up with that kind of desperation?

Gonna make a hot prediction here and say that China is not gonna be abandoning its currency to join some multinational currency by committee that also requires full gold reserves.

# ¿ Jul 11, 2023 01:14

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

I feel like clocking in at Alabama's level even with London isn't something to be too proud of either.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2023 15:02

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

LanceHunter posted:

The Fed has decided against raising rates again right now.

Seems to be basically "no gas, nor breaks, until we figure out what direction the economy wants to go in."

Economy doing pretty well overall, but tech and other ZIRP-sensitive sectors should dig in for 6 more quarters of winter.

I'm just an idiot on the Internet though.

# ¿ Sep 20, 2023 20:07

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

You can't have the explicit policy goal of decades of telling millions of your citizens that they should treat their home as the single most important asset and wealth building vehicle, while also having "affordable" housing. Housing becoming significantly more affordable for people, especially people on the lower end of the income spectrum, would require a lot more supply being built, driving down prices of existing housing assets. Boomers who have spent decades building their home equity would take significant haircuts.

The political powers won't do this, because after billionaires the only other people elected officials give a poo poo about is wealthy Boomers. The actual large scale reforms that would need to happen to see a relative decrease in what people pay for shelter will never happen, because the people who own that shelter now don't want to see it happen. Instead we'll muddle along for another 20 years as the Boomers die off and there's a massive wealth transfer to Millennials, followed by the winners (people with wealthy and house-wealthy parents) predictably pulling the ladder up behind them. In 2033 I predict that a lot of currently 37 year old Bernie voters will suddenly discover the religion of NIMBY and be deeply concerned about property values and how density upzoning is "not right for this neighborhood".

# ¿ Oct 7, 2023 18:00

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

Statins and Synthroid are like $5 a month or less for the generic formulations that most people take. $1000 a month for life for 50-100 million people is not something insurance companies or patients are gonna tolerate for very long.

# ¿ Oct 11, 2023 21:11

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

If nothing else it's very funny how nowadays whenever good economic news comes out the equities markets drop like 2% because it means JPow is gonna get mad and hit them again.

# ¿ Oct 26, 2023 17:12

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

I wonder how much of this is directly attributable to the stimulative effects of the Inflation Reduction Act starting to come online. 800 billion is quite a lot of demand being injected into the economy. Doesn't matter what the price of money is if the government is giving you big tax credits to replace your furnace or install solar.

# ¿ Oct 27, 2023 18:36

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

bob dobbs is dead posted:

if they can get a glp1 agonist that costs like $50 a month you can kiss the whole budget deficit goodbye

I mean we could probably have that now if not for patents.

# ¿ Nov 7, 2023 22:05

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

Cyrano4747 posted:

In the 90s my family moved to rural BF Egypt in the north east right in the Canadian border.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2023 19:55

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

bob dobbs is dead posted:

Unironically, part of the appeal of stardew valley is adding in some lovely things about rural living, like the shopkeep being a little poo poo or the drinking

Also there's only four people to date. Really, four is an embarrassment of riches.

# ¿ Dec 3, 2023 06:18

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

Yeah it's California getting mad about deferred comp. The scam is Baseball Man will spend X years working in CA making a piddling single digit millions then get paid out large double digit millions every year after X+1 when he is no longer required to play baseball in California and presumably decides to "live" somewhere else (probably Florida with no state income tax).

California is arguing "no no the labor you did to fulfill that contract was done in CA so you should have to pay CA taxes even if you don't get paid until later" which eh, probably fair. Sounds like that's not the law now though and you gotta admire the balls on the tax dodge here.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2024 15:42

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

pseudanonymous posted:

Enron was only like 64b dollars, the amount of this bullshit going on every year is probably in excess of that.

Yeah but NQDCs are used almost exclusively by rich executives. Those are Congress' people.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2024 16:37

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

My old company made us track how many days we spent on business trips or otherwise working out of state on a per-state basis. Once it hit like 30 days in a single state it triggered a new w-2 for that state and some tax payments.

Supposedly they would pay your extra taxes and a stipend for tax prep, but I never hit it. I think it was more an issue for outside sales and similar jobs.

# ¿ Jan 12, 2024 20:34

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

Nothingtoseehere posted:

SVB fails in about 24 hours because social media panic + instant online banking means that companies with deposits there could pull them all out faster than the system expects or regulates for. I assume this is the ECB hoping to spot something similar as it happens.

Yeah this is just "A recent fire started in this manner, so we're updating the fire safety manual". One of a central bank's main jobs is the health and monitoring of the banking system in their jurisdiction. There's no need to get weirdly conspiratorial about it.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2024 15:47

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

Lockback posted:

Such a weird mix of economy adding jobs and layoff announcements dominating the employment news.

I know these aren't mutually exclusive at all but it still feels odd.

It kinda feels like there's a recession of sorts in high paying white collar jobs (or maybe just revision to the mean of tech employment trends) but if you wanna work at a Whole Foods or something you can get a job today with a pulse and a valid I-9 document.

This doesn't necessarily translate into people feeling good about the economy though. If you and everyone you know is getting laid off from knowledge worker jobs and you can't get another one or can't get one for more than 80% of your previous wage, it doesn't make the Biden economy feel "good" to you.

I really should try to see if there's any actual data on this though, since my opinion is really just "vibes" at this point.

# ¿ Feb 2, 2024 16:44

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

LanceHunter posted:

Of course, tech is one of those fields (like media) that tends to take up a lot more attention than its actual share of the economy. So the downturn there could have the people with the biggest platforms saying that the "Biden economy" is bad even when the majority of people are doing a whole lot better than they were 4 years ago.

Yeah that's also a very plausible explanation.

# ¿ Feb 2, 2024 17:13

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

I'm probably an idiot who doesn't understand large numbers but this market reaction seems excessive for a CPI that's like 25 bps higher than what a bunch of Harvard professors guessed it would be.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2024 16:29

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

Market seems to be shrugging it off though. :shrug:

# ¿ Mar 12, 2024 16:58

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

"The unemployment numbers are fake Fake FAKE" has been an obsession of both partisan hacks and doomer brains for a while now.

# ¿ Apr 8, 2024 21:56

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

I know law of large numbers all that, but I always laugh every time a number that's a statistical sample and known to be noisy misses expectations by like 10 basis points and then the stock market is all "IT'S TIME FOR YOUR rear end WHOOPIN!"

# ¿ Apr 10, 2024 14:01

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

Feels like we're in a weird spot market vibes-wise where although there's an expected outcome, the true marlet expectation is that inflation would actually beat expectations and allow the Fed to lower interest rates. There has been a lot of positive-side beating of expectations in inflation and in jobs numbers, which can lead to the beat becoming the priced-in expectation.

Yeah I'm coming around to the idea there won't be a rate cut this year and the market vibes still need to catch-up to that. There's no reason for the Fed to tap the gas on rates if we spend the whole year in a situation where unemployment and jobs are "good to great" while inflation is "tolerable but jittery and above target".

# ¿ Apr 10, 2024 14:58

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

I feel like after two years of the tech industry and friends trashfire most of the layoff blood that's gonna be spilled because "money is no longer free" already has been.

Maybe some slow demand effects on things like real estate and housing might cause a bit more blood. Otherwise I don't see why businesses that have been doing okay with a year of 5.3% EFFR is suddenly gonna fire everyone because it's not 4.5% in October.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2024 19:24

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

Today in lol Turkey:

https://archive.md/sSJFp

quote:

The Turkish central bank had a loss of 818.2 billion liras ($25 billion) in 2023, a reversal from years of profits driven by sharply higher interest rates and the cost of a government-backed savings program designed to shield depositors against currency depreciation.

The result, which compares with a 72 billion-lira profit in 2022, means the central bank will have to waive a transfer to the nation’s Treasury at a time when the budget is in a deep deficit. But the staggering loss also keeps the focus on the mechanism — known locally as KKM — designed to act as a backstop for the lira, which authorities introduced in late 2021 and have struggled to unwind.

Hakan Kara, the central bank’s former chief economist, said on social media platform X that the loss is a reflection of the “world’s most costly economics experiment,” referring to KKM.

Hey guys you can backstop a depreciating currency by just handing out sacks of that same currency to cover fx losses, right? That's how money works? Asking for a friend.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2024 16:35

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

GhostofJohnMuir posted:

woof, 25b is 2.75% of 2022 gdp

man, erdagon straight up not understanding how interest rates and inflation interact and single handedly turning the lira to poo poo is a continuing mindfuck

edit:

seems like a tips-esque vehicle that i guess were priced poorly at auction or something?

also if the problem is an inflation hedge program that they can't unwind, then it seems like it hobbles the banks' ability to print their way out of the issue

AIUI it has nothing to do with the official inflation rate (although inflation is a disaster there too). The problem Turkey has with its currency is that it has devalued so fast that any savings people have is immediately converted to USD or EUR. This just makes the problem worse because people are dumping any TRY they aren't spending devaluing it further. It's such a common thing most bank accounts now actually have 3 accounts: A TRY account, a USD account, and a EUR account.

So they had a brain genius idea of "Nononono okay if you keep your deposits in TRY instead of converting to USD/EUR, the government will pay you bonus interest so your balance in equivalent USD/EUR today is the same as it would've been when you made the special deposits."

When my wife moved to the US from Turkey in 2009 the Lira was 1.5 to the dollar. When we went on a trip there in 2019 it was 6.8 to the dollar. In 2022 when we took another vacation it was ~17. Today it's trading at 32.5. Every single person has learned that keeping any money in Lira is basically setting it on fire and I don't see a way to fix it without some very drastic reforms.

mrmcd fucked around with this message at 02:42 on Apr 17, 2024

# ¿ Apr 17, 2024 02:38

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

It also leads to some hilarious situations where some places are just really slow to update their prices for political reasons. Like we went to a military history museum in Istanbul once and the admission price was something like 75 cents.

# ¿ Apr 17, 2024 02:55

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

"petite bourgeoisie" the term you're all looking for is "petite bourgeoisie"

# ¿ Apr 21, 2024 02:52

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 17:23

mrmcd: Feb 22, 2003; Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

Leperflesh posted:

boy I sure wouldn't bet on X being the substitute for TikTok. If anything, I think youtube shorts are the closest equivalent

I think he meant US Steel lol.

Xitter isn't a public company anymore.

# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 20:45

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Business, Finance, and Careers > Economics and current events, no-tweet, no-tiktok: you posted a damn advertisement