Tag Archive for: falling interest

Textbook Falling Interest Behavior

This is a textbook case. Well, it would be if there was a textbook that presented the dynamics of the rising and falling interest rate cycles. Costco is spending over a quarter billion dollars, to make a capital investment in chicken processing. This is not the typical entrepreneurial investment, which seeks to increase margins by serving […]

Why Are Wages So Low, Report 23 Sep 2018

Last week, we talked about the capital consumed by Netflix—$8 billion to produce 700 shows. They’re spending more than two thirds of their gross revenue generating content. And this content has so little value, that a quarter of their audience would stop watching if Netflix adds ads (sorry, we couldn’t resist a little fun with […]

Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Avocado Toast, Report 16 Sep 2018

For about ten bucks a month, Netflix will give you all the movies you can watch, plus tons of TV show series and other programs, such as one-off science documentaries. They don’t offer all movies, merely more than you can watch. Oh, and there are no commercials. They don’t just give you old BBC reruns, […]

News from Switzerland and Turkey

Trouble in Swiss Employment This story from Switzerland will be ignored, lest it generate cognitive dissonance. The mainstream looks at a few carefully curated statistics. I encourage you to do a Google search on “marginal productivity of debt”. My articles are all over the first page of results. This is not because I am such […]

Illicit Arbitrage Cut by Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Report 3 Sep 2018

This week, we are back to our ongoing series on capital destruction. Let’s consider the simple transaction of issuing a bond. Party X sells a bond to Party Y. We will first offer something entirely uncontroversial. If the interest rate rises after Y buys the bond, then Y takes a loss. Or if the interest […]

Monetary Paradigm Reset, Report 5 August 2018

Explaining a new paradigm can be both simple and impossible at the same time. For example, Copernicus taught that the other planets and Sun do not revolve around the Earth. He said that all the planets revolve around the Sun, including Earth. It isn’t hard to say, and it isn’t especially hard to grasp. Indeed, […]

Social Security Deterioration, Report 17 Jun 2018

We have been writing about capital destruction. This week let’s look at an event which is currently making news. Social Security will begin tapping into its trust fund this year. This happens, as the Social Security Board of Trustees states antiseptically, “four years earlier than projected in last year’s report.” In other words, the economy […]

Liquidity Preference Rising, Report 3 Jun 2018

Picture a scene in one of those action moves. Two guys are fighting for control over the steering wheel. The car is going 75mph, the road is narrow, and there is a drop over a cliff on one side. And there are lots of sharp curves. Central Planning This is a pretty good picture of […]

The Demand to Hoard, Report 13 May 2018

Since 1981, interest rates have been in a falling trend. Last week, we said this trend will continue, and the present blip up in rates is just a correction. We did not argue technical analysis, nor quantity of dollars, nor the general price level. Instead, we asked a question: …It seems obvious that if one […]

Wealth-Destroying Zombies

Wealth Destroying Zombie Firms

The hot topic in monetary economics today (hah, if it’s not an oxymoron to say these terms together!) is whither interest rates. The Fed in its recent statement said the risk is balanced (the debunked notion of a tradeoff between unemployment and rising consumer prices should have been tossed on the ash heap of history […]