91–100 of 393 posts
People who complain about extreme fed policy should look to congress. The inability of congress to address core economic and financial issues forces the feds hand.
Complete nonsense. The Fed isn't supposed to address any "issues", but simply be neutral. Instead they've spent a century saving entities that socialized private losses.
People who complain about extreme fed policy should look to congress. The inability of congress to address core economic and financial issues forces the feds hand.
Complete nonsense. The Fed isn't supposed to address any "issues", but simply be neutral. Instead they've spent a century saving entities that socialized private losses.
What the Fed is meant to do:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_12594.htm
> Instead they've spent a century saving entities that socialized private losses.
Yes, they've been around since 1913, about a century.
Don't get it mixed up, though, capitalism socializes elite private losses, not the blunt tool that is the Fed. Before that, feudalism did the same.
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While slowly turning the country into Bangladesh. Fantastic.
We have a TON of space, unlike Bangladesh and we’re already a developed economy with strong institutions and rule of law. From a lot of vantage points, the US has enviable problems.
I suspect near-zero interest rates for a decade also contributed to the political realignment of affluent suburbs trending Democrat. So long as the Fed would buy federal debt cheaply and there was no significant inflation, Democrats could advocate multi-trillion social programs while promising to maintain Reagan-era tax rates on even quite affluent folks.
I want to know what happened to the promised "Peace Dividend". Military spending was supposed to go way down, not just down, and civilians were supposed to reap the benefits... Instead Industrialists took up the Globalization mantra and forgot the little guys (the guys and gals working in factories) and happily told them it would mean lower cost of living --conveniently leaving out that they would also earn much less…
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The iShares S&P 500 ETF has returned about 11.6% annualized over the past ten years. Their Ex-US ETF: 2.8%. Point being: the third variable no one ever takes into account when considering Buffett's advice: "just invest in broad market indexes" literally only works in the US, and only has worked historically . It's not a coincidence that the US is the youngest developed economy on the planet. In other words: How high…
Maybe it only works in the US equity markets , but that's not "only works in the US" -- the S&P 500's companies are: not all based in the US, and in total derive only 75% of their revenues from outside the US. For reference, the US share of world GDP is about 25%. It would not surprise me at all if the most scalable, profitable, and growth-oriented companies ended up on the S&P 500 regardless of where in the world th…
The fact that the companies get a lot of their revenue from other countries is moot. In those countries, investing in index funds is not the highest performing long term investment.
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Interesting. I just asked the builder that built my house* and he said his business hasn't slowed down at all. His primary location since I'm sure that matters a lot: suburbs north of Dallas. * We got the land right before the boom in prices. Paid super inflated prices for materials. Finalized a mortgage before the recent rate increases. I guess overall we came out ahead?
> Finalized a mortgage before the recent rate increases. What a privilege it is to live in a country where home loan interest rates are fixed.
Property taxes have gone way up b/c home values have gone insane. My home when I purchased it was valued at $220k. Now the town is saying it is over double that. The tax RATE has gone down - but my taxes have still nearly doubled ($6k to $11k).
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Well just keep desperately importing people from other countries, unlike Japan and Co. Or, for the other side of the political spectrum, ban abortions/birth control.
While slowly turning the country into Bangladesh. Fantastic.
For anyone not following, Bangladesh has the highest population density in the world once you exclude city states. This is a classic example of a slippery slope argument.
Why is setting the price of money artificially - which gives free government money to financial institutions - better than the alternative: setting the base price of labour by guaranteeing people a job?
It would be better if we stopped talking about the false dichotomy of fiscal and monetary policy and started talking about stabilisation policy instead.
I think the article brings up too many separate concepts without sufficiently tying them together. One of the most basic concepts you have to accept to agree with the premise of the article is that the Fed kept interest rates low to transfer wealth to the wealthy. > After the Great Recession, the Federal Reserve instituted a zero or near-zero interest rate regime. The philosophy behind it was simple: > > The Fed’s “s…
I never understood the negative attention stock buybacks have received relative to dividends. They do basically do the same thing, but nobody is offended when companies pay a dividend.
If you hold stock options, a dividend doesn't benefit you. You need to hold shares to get the dividend. In fact, the dividend can cause the share price to fall (if it was not already anticipated) as the company's capital gets drained to pay shareholders.
On the other hand, buybacks (causing a sudden, surprising increase in share price) are most impactful on those who hold options. Proportionally speaking, they increase the value of options much more than the value of shares. The share price might go up 2%, and the options 200%.
Executive compensation packages tend to consist of stock options. So buybacks benefit corporate insiders more than shareholders.