The Business/Finance/Economics Thread | Page 58 | Vital Football

The Business/Finance/Economics Thread

wittonite said:
Friends of ours were compulsory purchased in Staffordshire. Family had lived there for almost a hundred years. They moved down here to Cornwall, but couldn't take to the way of life down here and moved up to Leicestershire to be by family. Went past the house the other day and just the foundations are left. Now it's cancelled, what was it all for?.
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So that Boris could throw money at his donors.
 
According to the Times investigation numerous warnings were given by financial experts who went through the figures forensically and found that costs were routinely and deliberately under calculated.
The reasoning behind the management decisions to go ahead was that the project had been begun so it would be too expensive to cancel. Documents were shredded and trouble makers were got rid of. Successive ministers of transport were either too dim, too trusting or in on the scam.
That last bit is my own wholly unbiased opinion with no evidence to back it up.
However….!!!
 
Here's a sobering thought for anyone invested in the stock market.

The majority of the money that goes into the stock market every year is people saving for retirement trying to get a decent return on their money. Every year they put more and more money in and don't take it out so the stock market goes up and up regardless of fundamentals.

The baby boomers have retired now. They are the largest generation in US history. They have been the ones pumping money into the US stock market for the past 40 years fueling the incredible growth since the 80s. They are not putting any more money in and are starting to take their money out.

Regardless of fundamentals, the US stock market is likely to be stagnant or negative for a very long time unless they can find new ways to get people to put their money in the markets.
 
BodyButter said:
Here's a sobering thought for anyone invested in the stock market.

The majority of the money that goes into the stock market every year is people saving for retirement trying to get a decent return on their money. Every year they put more and more money in and don't take it out so the stock market goes up and up regardless of fundamentals.

The baby boomers have retired now. They are the largest generation in US history. They have been the ones pumping money into the US stock market for the past 40 years fueling the incredible growth since the 80s. They are not putting any more money in and are starting to take their money out.

Regardless of fundamentals, the US stock market is likely to be stagnant or negative for a very long time unless they can find new ways to get people to put their money in the markets.
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So, is that an acknowledgement that we were good for something.
 
mike_field said:
People know I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but given the Tories are now pushing the sale of land and property so finances look a little bit better going into the election.

It'll be interesting to see who now purchases all of this land.
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Labour are already talking about taxing it even before they get into power.
 
I'm starting to think that whatever Twitter is in Elon Musk's head is very different from what I think it is.

For me, it's a toxic social media platform.

For Elon, it appears to be something completely different. In his "Go fuck yourself" message to advertisers, he said that the company is going bankrupt and everyone will know that it's the advertisers' fault. Elon seems to believe that advertisers are required to support Twitter regardless of what happens on the platform. He also seemed to believe that it was a platform of infinite value when he paid $44bn for it.

I'd like to see what happens if Twitter goes bankrupt out of morbid curiosity.
 
I might have mentioned this before but a couple of things are coming together which are going to influence the global economy for the next decade or more.

The first is the end of China. Their economy has gone. The property bubble (which most Chinese people have all of their savings in) has burst. The Americans have cut them off at the knees with trade sanctions. Their demographics are horrific. It's all over. China has been a hugely deflationary force in the global economy for the past 30 years. The deflationary force is gone.

The other factor is the Boomers retiring. The Boomers have been saving and investing hard for the past 40 years. They are the biggest and richest demographic in history. All those savings have been desperately looking for somewhere to go and so the global economy was awash with capital for every stupid tech start up or hipster coffee shop imaginable. The Boomers have retired and they want their money back now. Capital is not going to be as abundant as it was and so the price (interest rate) is going up. The days of cheap capital are over, even if inflation comes back under control.
 
BodyButter said:
I'm starting to think that whatever Twitter is in Elon Musk's head is very different from what I think it is.

For me, it's a toxic social media platform.

For Elon, it appears to be something completely different. In his "Go fuck yourself" message to advertisers, he said that the company is going bankrupt and everyone will know that it's the advertisers' fault. Elon seems to believe that advertisers are required to support Twitter regardless of what happens on the platform. He also seemed to believe that it was a platform of infinite value when he paid $44bn for it.

I'd like to see what happens if Twitter goes bankrupt out of morbid curiosity.
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I tried twitter once. I think it's very unfriendly for the user. I lasted about a week on it after adding all the babestation girls. I just could not get used to it.

What's the economy like in Malaysia? Things are picking up here and back to pre COVID. Airlines expanding and tourism back to it's best. Hotel prices sky high due to demand. They have more than doubled since the pandemic.

There are a lot of rich people in Bangkok. An awful lot. I imagine it would easily rival London for millionaires and above.
 
colavfc said:
I tried twitter once. I think it's very unfriendly for the user. I lasted about a week on it after adding all the babestation girls. I just could not get used to it.

What's the economy like in Malaysia? Things are picking up here and back to pre COVID. Airlines expanding and tourism back to it's best. Hotel prices sky high due to demand. They have more than doubled since the pandemic.

There are a lot of rich people in Bangkok. An awful lot. I imagine it would easily rival London for millionaires and above.
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I don't know exactly. My feeling is that people really felt the pinch of interest rate rises and became careful with their money around the middle of last year.

Malaysia doesn't have or want a tourism industry like Thailand. Manufacturing exports and oil (both palm and crude) are the big ones here. Crude oil is decently priced but nothing spectacular. Manufacturing is back to pre-pandemic levels.

It looks to me like construction is struggling. A lot of developers have slowed their projects or are offering discounts. That's usually a bad sign.
 
At 5%, the interest on America's national debt is $1.7tn. They will have to borrow to pay the interest on this debt snowball.

The sensible economic thing to do would be to raise taxes on rich people but that is politically unacceptable.

Another way to reduce the interest payments would be to lower interest rates. Economic theory says that lower interest rates will lead to higher inflation but it's not exactly rock solid. My guess would be that we are going to find out.
 
BodyButter said:
At 5%, the interest on America's national debt is $1.7tn. They will have to borrow to pay the interest on this debt snowball.

The sensible economic thing to do would be to raise taxes on rich people but that is politically unacceptable.

Another way to reduce the interest payments would be to lower interest rates. Economic theory says that lower interest rates will lead to higher inflation but it's not exactly rock solid. My guess would be that we are going to find out.
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Suppose it helps that its all made up.

Like what does this really mean other than people in the Top 15-5% like me will pick up the tax slack. Under 15% is simply too tight as it is and the top 5% have the means to escape paying what they should.

I think they know they're getting to a point where that bottom 80-85% can't be squeezed anymore without a revolt.
 
There is zero interest in paying it down and what will happen is that they will just keep issuing treasury bonds to finance the debt. Every year they will have the usual charade of the debt ceiling crisis, which will of course result in it being raised.

No government is going to try to pay down the debt and I cannot see a point where the markets will get so spooked by the magnitude of the debt that the US will be plunged into sovereign debt crisis.
 
Pangloss said:
There is zero interest in paying it down and what will happen is that they will just keep issuing treasury bonds to finance the debt. Every year they will have the usual charade of the debt ceiling crisis, which will of course result in it being raised.

No government is going to try to pay down the debt and I cannot see a point where the markets will get so spooked by the magnitude of the debt that the US will be plunged into sovereign debt crisis.
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If you can print your own currency, there isn't much point in paying it back. You can just print (or create on a computer) then necessary funds to pay it off. The only point I could imagine where the markets get spooked is when the US debt keeps mounting and mounting exponentially or it gets over 200% of GDP. At the moment, neither of those things are imaginable.
 
BodyButter said:
If you can print your own currency, there isn't much point in paying it back. You can just print (or create on a computer) then necessary funds to pay it off. The only point I could imagine where the markets get spooked is when the US debt keeps mounting and mounting exponentially or it gets over 200% of GDP. At the moment, neither of those things are imaginable.
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Everyone else is in deep with them so they all have a vested interest in keeping the system going. The BRICS do all their business in dollars because it has the most liquidity, nothing else is able to replace it right now.
 
Evergrande has been declared bankrupt in a Hong Kong court. If Evergrande is bust, so is every other developer in China.

They don't have a bankruptcy process in China so expect an almighty struggle over the assets with people who paid their life savings for apartments to be last in the queue.


www.theguardian.com

Evergrande collapse: Hong Kong court orders liquidation of China property giant

Judge says ‘enough is enough’ after developer, which has $300bn in debt, fails to provide convincing restructuring plan
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
 
Peter Zeihan reckons that there are 1.5 billion housing units in China which were built but will never be lived in. I'm not sure where he has got that figure from.

I did find this article which says that 250,000 foreclosed homes were put up for sale in November 2023.
www.google.com

Ordinary buyers eye China’s foreclosed home bargains as investors retreat

A growing number of ordinary homebuyers looking to occupy their house rather than invest are looking at properties that have been repossessed by banks as a supply surge brings prices even lower.
www.google.com www.google.com

The scale of the property market collapse in China is unlike anything anyone has ever seen before.

This article reckons there are enough empty homes to house 3bn people. That's almost half of the world's population. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bu...-people-housing-crisis-ex-official-2023-9?amp
 
I just can't imagine any kind of scenario which could manage this crisis in China. The US used the TARP program to draw a line under the subprime mortgage crisis. Those homes that were sold to buyers with subprime loans were houses that real people could live in.

A lot of these Chinese developments were built as new cities in the middle of nowhere. They were bought by investors, often families clubbing together their life savings to make a safe investment. There were also a lot of companies who set up property investment funds so that people with small amounts of saving could benefit from the real estate boom.

The savings of the nation have been wiped out in one go with this property bubble bursting. There are going to be 1.4bn people very angry and looking for someone to blame.

I can't see any way in which the CCP can manage this crisis so I suspect they are getting overthrown by the end of the decade.
 
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