Merv's Politically Incorrect Audio Blog

yes! Psaki is amazing! She defies everything I just said about Democrats and Liberals and communication. She’s 100x better than the mumbling, slow doofus’s Obama had as press secretary’s. They were so terrible I wanted to cry every time I watched them miscommunicate ideas and squander opportunities and get walked over.

It’s funny, Obama was elected because of his amazing communication skills and then failed as a president because he was so bad at communicating and didn’t understand the importance of it. That’s the job of the president. The president gets to frame all the issues. That’s a huge amount of power and Obama didn’t use it. He was a good guy though which did have a positive affect on the country.

and Biden is doing a much better job than I thought he would. I think part of his success is being a very unthreatening old white man. It’s hard to brand him as an outsider or a radical. It was easy to do that to a young black man.

but Biden also seems to understand the job better. During the campaign he created a brand that was pretty much just “compassion” which resonated with people after the sociopath of Trump. He did so much branding of himself as “compassionate” it has stuck with him as his main trait that is hard to contest.

And now he is intelligently framing all the issues in terms of compassion.

So it’s hard to refute. And he puts the GOP
in the position of being uncompassionate if they go against him. They’re desperately trying to reframe it all as radical but I’m not sure how well it’s working. Especially with all the the lies about the election. But I don’t know. All those MAGA fans could just be in dormant mode. But I have a feeling Biden is resonating pretty well with the majority of Americans.

 

This is right wing propaganda. These guys dont have much political power or influence. This is the “liberal elites” BS that people suddenly think exist because someone coined the term and then everyone repeated it constantly.

I did say the Democrats bow down to corporate interests too. But nothing compared to the corporations and super rich who control the GOP.

There’s only a handful of Democrats who do not follow the whims of corporate America. The rest of DC are puppets.

 

There are many other super rich.

Zuckerberg is cagey, but he's Trump. Same thing with Musk. I'm pretty sure Thiel (vulture capital - Facebook, Planatir), Eddie DeBartolo (ex-49ers owner who was pardoned), Ellison (Oracle), Dan Synder (Redskins - LOL), the Perlmutters (Marvel), Schwarzman (investments - Blackstone), Dimon (banking - JP Morgan) and every rich person in oil and energy wanted Trump to be President. Also keep in mind that old guard industries tend to be savvier than tech when it comes to lobbying.

The only reason Trump is not president is because he did it to himself. He made himself so offensive, so vile that even people who liked his policies or disliked Biden's could no longer stand behind him. Trump lost to himself - by managing to flip 1 in 20 voters to Biden, less than that even.

Super rich don't pick sides. They hedge their bets. They give to both sides. Both parties serve the super rich, that is until enough of the general public get hold of something that doesn't sound right. Then Congress has but no choice to listen to the people, e.g. "Umm, sorry Zuckerberg, I really appreciate the super PAC money, but my hands are tied on this one. My constituents will kill me if I don't let the antitrust investigation proceed". Rich people have money, not necessarily power. While money can be converted to power, it doesn't always work in a democracy. Even power can be fleeting in a democracy.

The notion that the tech lords form some sort of an illuminati who picks the POTUS to control policy is utter nonsense. If this were true, then we'd all be still using Internet Explorer, Bing would be a top search engine, Google wouldn't have to abide by DMCA, and Android wouldn't exist (either that or Apple wouldn't exist). The old guard (finance and energy) still have more influence. Heck, the old guard (film) movie industry was smart enough to hire an ex-Senator to stave off the inevitable (streaming) for a decade - while Zuckerberg got caught with his pants down in Congress.

Tech actually sucks at lobbying.

 

Things I'd love to hear more in this thread if you want to talk politics:

• How government policy has affected you personally. Personal stories.
• Insights into policy making, policy decisions, and metrics. Looking for subject matter expertise. Insider stories.
• Ways to stay alive or precautions to take, during protests, while being arrested, etc. Any firsthand experience. Any stories.
• Involvement in civics, participation in school boards, local measures, torching city hall, helping to rebuild, etc. What you did to make a difference in your little corner of the world. How did you do it?
• How laws and edicts have affected your place of work, your livelihood, your company, your family.

Otherwise politics is boring. Left, right, up, and down. It's all the same to me. Everyone's got an opinion. This thread was never meant to be about pure politics.

 

Look up money supply. M1, M2, M3, MZM, and M4 (UK). Can find lots of interesting reading.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MABMM301USM189S
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MZM

 

Reopening this thread for the purposes of technical analysis as I find these kinds of discussion much more interesting than culture wars because everyone has a butthole. I earlier mentioned looking at overall money supply, not just CPI, with respect to inflation. Here is a CPI from FRED (I think we all know what CPII is - up to June of this year from 2019). We can see the drop when the Wuhan pneumonia hit and the acceleration of price increases since the beginning of the year (check your gas per gallon at the pump).



The US government used to keep track of M3, which is basically M2 + large time deposits and money market funds. These "M"s are measures of money supply. See table below from Wikipedia. In 2006, (I was in banking then), I remember a big discussion on NPR (yes, that's left-leaning NPR, so I don't wan't to hear that this is right-wing reactionary conspiracy stuff from me) about the US central bank no longer keeping track of M3. There was a strong argument that no longer keeping track of M3 and instead relying on M2 was scammy because it was an artificial way to present the overall money supply as being lower than it really was, and thus inflation.



It's a very good question on how we define "money supply". We don't need to go deep into this because it's another discussion. It does get political.

Anyway, should we be worried about inflation? Look at just M2 alone, I'd say yes. Note the money dumped into the economy during the first several months of SARSv2. Not only that, but thereafter where the money supply has been increasing at a faster rate (steeper slope) than four years before when SARSv2 hit.



We'll see what happens. The one crystal ball I know that works is price of gas at the pump - at least in my lifetime. This time around, when it hits $5.50 per gallon in CA, that's when businesses should re-assess expansion plans or even consider contraction as a defensive measure.

Lots of money being thrown out there. I can't say that I'm upset because as the parent of two children, I am eligible for the new universal income plan from USA. I won't turn away free money from the gov't. However, I've been around long enough to know that there's no such thing as free lunch and gov't playing Sim Society even with the best of intentions doesn't always fare well.

So @crenca: Yes I am scared. Something doesn't feel right in my gut. The Force is not clear, but something ain't right. I hope to God that I will not come back a year or two from now and say: called it. I hope I am wrong.

P.S. One silver lining: The USA is now or can be a net energy (oil and refined products) exporter. If shit start to hit the fan, and we can frack like there's no tomorrow, we may be OK. Energy is everything. Wind and solar are here to stay. If we can keep the spice, I mean oil flowing, then we will be OK.

 

Inflation isn't necessarily currency devaluation. Inflation is inflation (look it up). A result of inflation could be currency devaluation. The EU (Germany) hates it when the USA has a loose monetary policy, i.e. quantitative easing (prints money out of thin air) because it makes dollars worth less, hence less Volkwagons and BMWs for us.

Now with respect to printing money and deficits, it's not relative, not equal. Since the 2008, the USA has gone bonkers with respect to Debt/GDP ratio. It may be worse after the end of this year. USA is 107% (latest data from FRED for Q1 2021 says it's much higher than this at 128%). For comparison UK is 81%, Germany is 60%, France is 98%. EU monetary policy is largely dominated by Germany because they have all the big banks and strong manufacturing base. And Germany had insisted for the longest time for "austerity", which pissed off the Greeks but in the end saved them. All the while keeping deficits relatively low in much of the EU.



Yes, we are bigger spenders than so-called "socialist" countries. Way way bigger spenders because not too long ago just before 2008, we were at 60% Debt/GDP! Think about that: in half a generation we exploded our debt to go way beyond the EU. Here is the same graph, but going back to 2000.



Finally, even if it were relative, inflation is not fun for older people on fixed incomes. It's also not fun for people who own the government debt. People do not realize that it's the citizens, the people, who "own" the public debt.