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jacobinmag.com

Chicago Is Being Amazonified

Chicago recently made headlines for turning public parks space over to Amazon package lockers. But those lockers are only one example of Amazon and public officials using public-private “partnerships” to give away public resources and harm communities.
jacobinmag.com jacobinmag.com
 
www.bbc.com

Bitcoin crashes on first day as El Salvador's legal tender

Technological glitches plagued the first day of El Salvador accepting Bitcoin as legal tender.
www.bbc.com www.bbc.com

"But, as the day went on, Chivo began appearing on more platforms and was accepted by the likes of Starbucks and McDonald's.

The government has even given Salvadorans $30 each of Bitcoin to encourage its adoption. It says bitcoin could save the country $400m a year in transaction fees on funds sent from abroad.

However, using data from the World Bank and the government, the BBC calculates this to be closer to $170m.

What wasn't good timing for El Salvador though was the tumble Bitcoin took on its first day as legal tender, falling 20% at one point."

Back to US green backs?
 

Closely Watched Atlanta Fed’s GDP Forecast Cuts U.S. Growth by 41 Percent

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 9, 2021 ~ The highly respected and closely watched Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow forecast for the third quarter has been
wallstreetonparade.com


Atlanta-Fed-GDPNow-Forecast-for-Third-Quarter-GDP.jpg
 
Rambo said:
www.liverpoolecho.co.uk

UK faces 'permanent' food shortages and it will 'get worse'

A number of key workers missing from the supply chain is having a huge impact
www.liverpoolecho.co.uk www.liverpoolecho.co.uk
Click to expand...
Certain sectors of the British economy have become addicted to cheap immigrant labour. It is now about to experience a long-overdue corrective.

These companies will either have to increase wages to attract labour and/or increase automation.

Fucking good.
 
Technically those aren't "working" people if cutting unemployment benefits results in income and spending losses.
 


not necessarily economy related but i thought this was an interesting comparison of transport costs between the US and the EU
 
Rambo said:


not necessarily economy related but i thought this was an interesting comparison of transport costs between the US and the EU
Click to expand...

There's a number of factors at play here. But I can assure you, the cost of gas/petrol is much higher here in the EU compared to the States. The comparison is not really like for like.
 
Pimpernel Smith said:
There's a number of factors at play here. But I can assure you, the cost of gas/petrol is much higher here in the EU compared to the States. The comparison is not really like for like.
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You’re literally arguing the premise of the tweet.

Data comes from here

www.itdp.org

The High Cost of Transportation in the United States

What does the average American pay to get around every day in 2024? What portion of their income is devoted to transportation? Is that cost typical across developed countries? Unfortunately, the portion of household expenditure spent on transportation in the United States is often a larger...
www.itdp.org www.itdp.org
 
Rambo said:
You’re literally arguing the premise of the tweet
Click to expand...
Not really, plenty of car dependency here too. But in many cases, the public transport system is spot on compared to the USA. Still doesn't stop the Rotterdam ring road and particularly going south being a car park for six hours of the day. Not forgetting the nightmare that is Antwerp.
 
Pimpernel Smith said:
Not really, plenty of car dependency here too. But in many cases, the public transport system is spot on compared to the USA. Still doesn't stop the Rotterdam ring road and particularly going south being a car park for six hours of the day. Not forgetting the nightmare that is Antwerp.
Click to expand...
That has nothing to do with the premise. The article lays out how for Americans transport takes up 4x more of our income if you’re poor than it does for euros
 
www.bbc.com

Evergrande: Asia stocks mixed as investors weigh China concerns

The Chinese property giant is facing a debt crisis, triggering fears of contagion in global markets.
www.bbc.com www.bbc.com

"There are concerns that Evergrande - a major Chinese property developer - is struggling to meet interest payments on more than $300bn of debts.

Regulators have warned it could affect the country's financial system."

Countrywide? Fannie Mae? Lehman? I'm not familiar with Chinese companies.
 
Fwiffo said:
www.bbc.com

Evergrande: Asia stocks mixed as investors weigh China concerns

The Chinese property giant is facing a debt crisis, triggering fears of contagion in global markets.
www.bbc.com www.bbc.com

"There are concerns that Evergrande - a major Chinese property developer - is struggling to meet interest payments on more than $300bn of debts.

Regulators have warned it could affect the country's financial system."

Countrywide? Fannie Mae? Lehman? I'm not familiar with Chinese companies.
Click to expand...

Evergrande is one of the China´s top-three developers even though the property market is highly fragmented (Evergrande´s market share in 2020 was only around 4%). Also is the 6th most indebted firm in the world with liabilities of $305 billion against a market capitalisation just over $6 billion. The excessive use of leverage at Evergrande and within the Chinese property sector as a whole has been a concern for regulators and investors for years – hence the high yields of the issued debt for this sector.
In order to reduce the use of leverage, the Chinese regulator introduced the “three red lines” policy in August 2020. This policy sets limits on three leverage ratios and categorises property development companies according to how many of the limits they breach. It is good to see that he policy is already showing signs of success and most developers are actively reducing their leverage to meet these red lines – this includes Evergrande which moved from a red classification (failing all three tests) to orange (failing two) after reducing their net debt to equity ratio below 100% (…to 99.8%) earlier this year.

If Evergrande does default, due to the large size of outstanding debt ($19.25bn notional) the default rate for Chinese high yield bonds could rise from 4% to 20%. Their default could also push Chinese banks non-performing loans ratio up by 1.2ppt to 2.96% and it would have a ripple effect across the Chinese economy with many of their counterparties suffering potentially terminal distress. While it is unlikely that the government will provide zero support to achieve an orderly unwind of Evergrande, the bond market has already priced in a worst-case scenario with the company’s bonds trading as low as cents.24 on the $ and the proportion of bonds priced under $50 in the Chinese high yield property sector at record levels.
 
There is an interesting blog that today had lots of information on "peak capitalism", specifically on how screwed the supply chains currently are for more or less everything. Might take years to return to normal. There was one particularly interesting thing I did not know. I put it through google translate so it might not read to well. But I guess the message is clear:

I work for an international logistics group with several thousand trucks and can perhaps draw a bow here to the objections that some here have problems with being able to use forwarding services (trucks) at all. My employer is pretty deep into contract logistics, we do e.g. the complete warehousing, dispatch processing, etc., thus a quite large part of the supply chain management. E.g. we hang there with our customers directly in the order management with our IT and supply the just-in-time with the necessary parts for their production, many customers have outsourced the entire storage area to us and we keep X pieces per article depending on customer requirements in front of our warehouses which have been bursting at the seams for months. Now to the actual perversion and some "insight" into such deals. Not a single one of our trucks goes somewhere empty to load something and then unload somewhere half-full. We see trucks as rolling storage space and have quite sophisticated systems so that a truck is always full. So before a truck goes somewhere half full, we fill the other half of the truck with stock and drive the "pointless" around in world history. Why are we doing this Up to a certain fill level of a truck with stored goods (varies depending on the route / duration), the m² price in the "rolling warehouse" is cheaper than buying new storage space. A large part of our truck fleet already has over 70% stored goods, which means, conversely, that we can only fill 30% of the area per truck with actual forwarding tasks, normally the ratio is actually exactly the opposite and we probably still have upwards Air to "outsource" even more stored goods profitably to the trucks, one of the main drivers is the ever increasing price per square meter for land in Central Europe, which is why we are moving more and more storage space to low-cost countries in the EU and then using the trucks to circulate the stock to the warehouses close to the customer in Central Europe. In view of the climate catastrophe, this is of course terrible. In short, it can be said that we charge 70% of our in-house truck traffic and its emissions to the general public because rolling bearings are cheaper than buying new storage space despite the pollution. This is peak capitalism and also explains why it is currently difficult to find a truck, because we are by far not the only logisticians who do that. So the next time you see a truck on the highway, you can assume that most of the cargo doesn't have to go where the truck is going at all.
 
belinmad said:
While it is unlikely that the government will provide zero support to achieve an orderly unwind of Evergrande, the bond market has already priced in a worst-case scenario with the company’s bonds trading as low as cents.24 on the $ and the proportion of bonds priced under $50 in the Chinese high yield property sector at record levels.
Click to expand...

Apparently foreign creditors are behind the queue from domestic ones in collecting.

It sounds like it's a too big to fail. I just wasn't sure why it would rattle international markets. I don't recall the Chinese property market being open to any capital.
 
Fwiffo said:
www.bbc.com

Evergrande: Asia stocks mixed as investors weigh China concerns

The Chinese property giant is facing a debt crisis, triggering fears of contagion in global markets.
www.bbc.com www.bbc.com

"There are concerns that Evergrande - a major Chinese property developer - is struggling to meet interest payments on more than $300bn of debts.

Regulators have warned it could affect the country's financial system."

Countrywide? Fannie Mae? Lehman? I'm not familiar with Chinese companies.
Click to expand...
www.bloomberg.com

Evergrande Debt Crisis Is Financial Stress Test No One Wanted

China’s real estate powder keg threatens President Xi’s drive for stability—and may yet force a too-big-to-fail moment with global implications.
www.bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com

good piece here with a lot more detail
 
great economic system you've got there


A hamster has been trading cryptocurrencies in a cage rigged to automatically buy and sell tokens since June - and it's currently outperforming the S&P 500​

 
Rambo said:


comments are interesting reading
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Part of it is the parents are willing to shelter them more these days and big them up on post graduate studies. I'm not saying getting financially dumped on the street around the time you turn 17 or 18 like what happened to my father is a good alternative. The coddling goes both ways.

The other thing I never understand is why there is this myth one generation is going to be better than the next when the prevailing trend of our time is that mankind is in decline and fall and we're on track to making the planet inhospitable.

My maternal grandparents were wealthy and when they passed away one after another they gave away their fortune to their eight children. Due to primogeniture rules I received nothing. Not a penny. My younger cousins at worse received free tuition for an MBA. I don't rue it. I'm not envious. I made what I am today with what I had. I certainly don't go on Redditt and moan as if people owe me.
 
Fwiffo said:
Part of it is the parents are willing to shelter them more these days and big them up on post graduate studies. I'm not saying getting financially dumped on the street around the time you turn 17 or 18 like what happened to my father is a good alternative. The coddling goes both ways.

The other thing I never understand is why there is this myth one generation is going to be better than the next when the prevailing trend of our time is that mankind is in decline and fall and we're on track to making the planet inhospitable.

My maternal grandparents were wealthy and when they passed away one after another they gave away their fortune to their eight children. Due to primogeniture rules I received nothing. Not a penny. My younger cousins at worse received free tuition for an MBA. I don't rue it. I'm not envious. I made what I am today with what I had. I certainly don't go on Redditt and moan as if people owe me.
Click to expand...
The question has to be: are they really the most-educated generation in history i.e. are those qualifications with some merit and an entry into a career and profession? It's well known that certain arts and humanity degrees are tickets to very average paying jobs. If you get a degree from a top university, you're still likely to get a good graduate position. The rest is about applying yourself.

It was hard to get on the property ladder 30 years ago and the interest rates were much higher. Very strict on deposits and what you could borrow based on current earnings which was around 2.5 x yearly salary. In the UK access to higher education was rationed to the top percentages of academic performance, but you did get tuition fees paid for. My nephew by comparison has over GBP 60,000 in student debt, has a degree in Accountancy, but can't stand it so is in sales of frozen fish. He didn't need to get that much debt to do that job. He has just bought a house though.

The thing with inherited wealth it tends to fizzle out over the generations. But when it comes to it, it's always good to be an only child.

The West is certainly in decline, much less productive than it once was, dependent on exploited foreign labour, elements of the common-culture are decadent and possessed by hysteria, a Jacobin elite that despises where it came from and seeks Orwellian and authoritarian control with a message to the plebs that you need to your life expectations curtailed to live poorer and reduced lives for the greater good of the planet.
 
About 35 years ago my father was able to own an apartment building in Brooklyn because he took his brother's monthly paystub and presented it as if it were his weekly earnings. Being the irreverent person he was, he didn't bother collecting rent when people didn't pay and lost the building a few years later. That building would be worth a couple million now.
 
ballmouse said:
About 35 years ago my father was able to own an apartment building in Brooklyn because he took his brother's monthly paystub and presented it as if it were his weekly earnings. Being the irreverent person he was, he didn't bother collecting rent when people didn't pay and lost the building a few years later. That building would be worth a couple million now.
Click to expand...
Sounds like a good egg
 
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