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U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

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Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#191
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Its hard to ascribe individual responsibility in that way when the only two choices were existentially awful. "You elected an idiot president...", the choices were Communism, or Fascism; which is recoverable and better for people. Certainly not the former, but to be clear neither are a real choice when you vote for democracy, and not voting is a vote for both fascism/communism at the same time. Such was a similar fai…

> First-passed-the-post voting is fundamentally flawed, and so is ranked choice...

What voting system so you think is best? None are perfect but IMO ranked choice is the best as it keeps the good attributes of FPTP without suffering from the spoiler effect

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So just for one example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics started publishing jobs reports in 1915. But having monthly jobs reports on the cotton sector lead to increased fraud and stopped bridges from being built? What's the mechanism? People are distracted by the amount of cotton production, which is the perfect time to falsify an earnings report?

How long were supply chains back then? 2-5 nodes in a typical case? I'm not saying publishing of statistics is what caused this shit to happen dingus. I'm saying focusing on it exclusively is dumb and it is wiser to look at a granular level. We can't look at this level because once you have a 150 node supply chain how trustworthy are the receipts? What if your body had a metric as dumb as our high level economic metr…

I think you have a point, at the resolution of personal liability shit is and has been cooked. Without being able to hold people to account for their misdeeds, misdeeds are de facto allowed and especially when you can obfuscate information. It's Goodhart's law in action, the sector looks good because we're shooting for targets in a heuristic measure but the reality is glum.

Worse is when fundamentals are [effectively] meaningless and everyone is a betting and hoping to pass it on to the greatest fool, even worse when that greater fool is the general public who are too with their own lives to fixate on the intractable nuances of the effects that Algerian hornet slayers are having on the price of tangerines which is buoying banana prices in Rwanada because legislation was passed last week in Kentucky.

Paradoxically, scale and complexity, but also psuedocomplexity (read:obscurantism) drive us towards these heuristics and effectively incentivise deeper cycles of Goodhart derangement. I expect this is a peculiar aspect of America's largess, though. The American cultural diaspora is actually pretty diverse from my experience.

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#193
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One can argue that we're only seeing the beginning of the destruction. The economic policies of this administration could take years to be fully realized. That also means that, unfortunately, it will take years to repair the damage.

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This downvote isn't a punishment, it's a way to help decrease the visibility of lies and missinformation.

Russia literally launched an aggressive war of conquest. Any response that doesn't involve literal soldiers occupying russian cities is an extremely minor one.

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#194
post #53

If unemployment continues to rise, and the one-time impact on prices of tariffs leads to self-reinforcing high inflation, we'll have stagflation : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagflation I sure hope not , because stagflation would be extremely unpleasant for everyone. Central banks like the Federal Reserve would be forced to raise interest rates, to put stress on businesses and consumers, so businesses find themsel…

So uh, I'm the first person in my family to break the cycle of poverty. I have nobody I trust to follow advise with money. I do all the 'standard' boring investment strategies (401, index funds, roth, etc). I don't bother with crypto (scams). What does one do if stagflation is coming? Float more cash? Buy real estate?

Well if you were following sound financial advice and understand the economics from an Austrian perspective you'd likely be diversified into several equal buckets with one of those buckets designed to offset the losses. You do this when it doesn't matter because you can never time the market. No one can.

In the case of inflation/stagflation it would be physical assets that increase in value under such circumstances. Gold/Silver meet this, as do many other assets. Under such environments counterparty-risk must be carefully evaluated.

All of your mentioned standard strategies have opaque and significant banking counter-party risk. There are also details such as the YTM loophole where the assets you hold may not have been marked to market (when interest rates go up).

This is particularly true of any bonds, or bond backed securities, and the leverage involved in many such markets is next to impossible to discern, and as a result the average advice of passive investment breaks down towards losses in the near term but not long-term.

None of this is financial advice, just reiterating things people should already know about. The stock market's synthetic share problem coupled with dark pools, and the commodity market's (COMEX) fail to delivers and failure to loadout (physical delivery), are things to know about. Unspecified risk from bad actors.

Its all paper with substantial counter-party risk until you hold it in your hands.

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#195
post #64
post #53

If unemployment continues to rise, and the one-time impact on prices of tariffs leads to self-reinforcing high inflation, we'll have stagflation : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagflation I sure hope not , because stagflation would be extremely unpleasant for everyone. Central banks like the Federal Reserve would be forced to raise interest rates, to put stress on businesses and consumers, so businesses find themsel…

I heard Volcker speak once, you could still see him remembering how hated he was for those years of the Volcker Shock on his face. Strained and a little sad.

I watched an interview with him several years ago. The brother was sipping from a glass of whisky on the rocks the whole time. I fully get it.

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BLS figures have been suspect for a long time as of a month ago.

I'm not sure why you'd claim that. BLS figures have been revised downwards repeatedly over recent years. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/08/21/economy/bls-jobs-revision... "US job growth during much of the past year was significantly weaker than initially estimated, according to new data released Wednesday. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ preliminary annual benchmark review of employment data suggests that there were 81…

Are you reporting on this breaking news scandal that predictions about future events are not always perfectly accurate?

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#197
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bad news is that we're only one year into the 4 years of bad policy(if we're lucky) and the policy itself will probably continue to get worse

We survived with 30% inflation ok key goods during the Biden years due to endless spending, we’ll survive this one too. You’re welcome to short the market though if you feel strongly otherwise

"key goods" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that statement.

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least on the US tariffs thing, congress can put Trump back in his box and revert to normalcy any time it wants to; the threat of stagflation might make it do that. The previous stagflation incident was more driven by outside forces.

> on the US tariffs thing, congress can put Trump back in his box and revert to normalcy any time it wants to We’ve already lost export market share. China, Russia and India have already begun building a trade bloc. FDI has already been trashed. We’re already in for a world of hurt. And personally, I’m eager to ensure it lands disproportionately on his voters and donors.

Pretty sure America is going to keep shooting itself in its foot in confusion.

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#199
post #167

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Good idea, just keep not voting while trumpists win elections, that'll show them!

Well they really fucked up. Biden was visibly senile, almost like trump is now, and they pushed it till last minute when switch to Kamala happened... too little too late.

Who is their counter-weight for future? As an outsider who doesn't watch US news regularly since they use pretty idiotic form most of the time, I know 0 powerful persona types of Clinton or Obama. A lot of blahs and farts in the wind, when you are against an expert populist that's not a winning recipe.

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fed was cutting rates and on track to continue until Trump threw a tariff grenade into the economy. They, like most businesses, decided they needed to see how the idiotic economic policy played out before doing anything else.

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> For now, massive inflow in capital into the coffers, repatriation from US companies seems like a win.

This is just idle curiosity, but what makes you come here and lie about stuff like this?

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