The problems are, in no particular order, 1) they still have to unwind the balance sheet underneath the hood so conditions probably arent going to be loose any time soon 2) inflation is definitely easing but getting it down to 2% is going to be tricky, can/do they live with something higher and 3) 0% probably still isnt the long-term rate, but its what everything has been build off of for a decade. What happens as we come out of that world into a more “normalized” environment.
Plus it isnt like US equity markets are cheap yet, especially if you think earnings are overestimated for 23/24
The most recent Plain English podcast is interesting, but not super mindblowing, if you want to think more about inflation.
Today’s Matt Levine newsletter is literally making me laugh out loud. He describes a scam where the scammer promises a 56 million percent return. The best part:
The SEC prints different versions of the payout table that Glaspie allegedly offered investors, which kept growing over time; by June 2021 it looked like this:
At the highest tier, a $100,000 investment, that’s a 56 million percent promised return, not even counting the Bentley, which I guess more than doubles your money right there. Also, I mean, imagine a world in which you put $25,000 into some investment and got back ELEVEN POINT TWO FIVE BILLION DOLLARS and they also gave you a “$35k car allowance!” and you were excited for the car allowance? Like, you check your bank balance, and it says $11,250,000,000, and then you go to the Subaru dealership and pick out a nice Forester in the top trim package and the salesperson is like “that one is $36,495, let me tell you about our financing options” and you are like “actually I have a voucher?” ELEVEN BILLION DOLLARS PLUS A CAR ALLOWANCE! Come on. This is so, so stupid. Nobody could have fallen for this, except that people allegedly did, to the tune of $45 million, and those are the people you want when you’re running a scam. CoinDeal’s email list is worth a fortune.
Plenty of states are severely regulating how restrictive they can be. Maybe they can do something like that. I guess SC can just do 'States Rights" for the win.
Sadly I live in a state (GA) which passed a freaking state constitutional amendment allowing the enforcement of these non-competes. This involved a statewide referendum which people stupidly voted for due to the way it was worded.
Right. If it is 185 then it is easy to see S&P in the 2500-3000 range. I remain pretty cautious, still think pandemic low retest is a reasonable scenario.
this wage slave bullshit has to stop, not even close stop it and you should all be embarrassed for having ever said it, you are all lucky nobody alive actually was or it’d be incredibly offensive and they’d probably kick your ass for saying it and deservedly so
The view that wage work has substantial similarities with chattel slavery was actively put forward in the late 18th and 19th centuries by defenders of chattel slavery (most notably in the Southern states of the United States) and by opponents of capitalism (who were also critics of chattel slavery).[9][22] Some defenders of slavery, mainly from the Southern slave states, argued that Northern workers were “free but in name – the slaves of endless toil” and that their slaves were better off.[23][24] This contention has been partly corroborated by some modern studies that indicate slaves’ material conditions in the 19th century were “better than what was typically available to free urban laborers at the time”.[25][26] In this period, Henry David Thoreau wrote that “[i]t is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.”[27]
Abolitionists in the United States criticized the analogy as spurious.[28] They argued that wage workers were “neither wronged nor oppressed”.[29]Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans argued that the condition of wage workers was different from slavery as long as laborers were likely to develop the opportunity to work for themselves, achieving self-employment.[30] The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass initially declared “now I am my own master”, upon taking a paying job.[31] However, later in life he concluded to the contrary, saying “experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other”.
Of course you’re right. But I’m still amazed that Hertz literally declared bankruptcy and the doofus wsb crew were buying shares of stock in a bankrupt firm and like quadrupled their money because the equity did not, in fact, get wiped out.
