American Economics Thread

[Equation]

The wisdom of Socrates. Very interesting read.

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"China has become a superpower faster than any nation in world history," Sekora told CNBC. The key is, China has done it through technology-based planning.The country "is run by engineers and physicists, not MBAs and economists," Sekora said.

Yup, now where are all my China doubters, haters, and naysayers at?!

By stark contrast, Trump is merely continuing U.S. policy, in place since the end of World War II, that calls for the U.S. government to follow a budget-driven procurement process.

"Every person Trump has appointed is from the world of finance-based planning," said Sekora.

This approach to planning was the main reason behind a decline in America's competitive position, the Socrates analysts found.

Good, now stop blaming America's problems upon "liberals" and President Obama.

 

[AssassinsMace]

Problem with that article is Star Wars never became a reality with many doubters that said it would never work. It was more psychological warfare where the Soviets thought the US had the edge and were obsessed that they were falling behind wasting resources. Today it's Americans obsessed with falling behind even though the US is number one which is worse psychologically. China is not obsessed with catching up. They're catching up... period! No obsession needed. China would have a lot more nukes if it were obsessed trying to match and then pass the US point for point. Look at how the US today is obsessed with how many ships in the US Navy compared to China. Are they still using propaganda figures from years ago where the Pentagon counted anything that floated on the water belonging to the Chinese navy to inflate the number to scare Congress to put more money into the military?

Technology based planning didn't beat the Soviets. It was the fear of losing that made them waste resources that did them in. Obsession is based on emotion and when obsessed people don't get what they want, they get desperate which makes people not think straight and that leads to miscalculation.

 

[Jura The idiot]

now noticed Enjoy that road trip! July 4th gas hasn't been this cheap in years

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Drivers are enjoying the cheapest Fourth of July gasoline in more than a decade. Enjoy it while it lasts: Experts say prices will start inching higher soon.
The average price nationwide for a gallon of regular is $2.23, down 15 cents from a month ago, according to AAA. The last time gas was this cheap heading into Independence Day was 2005.


But wholesale gasoline prices have already started to climb up, and that will probably translate into modestly higher prices at the pump in coming days, said Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst for the Oil Price Information Service, which tracks gas prices for AAA.

"I think today's number might be about as low as it gets this summer," Kloza told CNNMoney.

The price of

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has started to creep up as U.S. oil production has declined recently, he said. But demand will stay strong. "From now to Labor Day, there's no question we'll use plenty of fuel," Kloza said.

Those factors should combine to send prices up about 10 cents a gallon, Kloza said. The price will probably then drop again come fall, when gas stations stop selling the more expensive blend of gasoline required during the summer months to fight smog.

Meanwhile, Indiana, Montana, South Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia raised state gasoline taxes on July 1.

South Carolina still has the cheapest average gas price in the country at $1.90 a gallon, despite a two-cent increase in gas taxes.

when I had lived in the US (heck sixteen years ago, is it true?!) the gas was around one sixty

 

[Jura The idiot]

Jun 14, 2017

it's very recent (I highlighted the key part inside)
Press Release

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... raise the target range for the federal funds rate to 1 to 1-1/4 percent. ...

and it'll stay:
"... the Committee decided to maintain the target range for the federal funds rate at 1 to 1-1/4 percent"
July 26, 2017
Federal Reserve issues FOMC statement

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[Jura The idiot]

here's the news!
The US government just passed $20 trillion in debt for the first time ever
Sep. 11, 2017

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For the first time in its history, the US federal government has more than $20 trillion in outstanding debt.

The milestone was technically hit Friday, with the Treasury Department settling its accounts at the end of the day

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. Of that debt, the Treasury said $14,622,661,213,046 is held by the public, while $5,539,515,584,857 is held by various parts of the government, also known as Intragovernmental Holdings.

The amount of debt held by the federal government had been stagnant since March

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, or the statutory limit of debt the Treasury is allowed to hold at any one time.

Since the limit was reimposed in March, the Treasury used so-called "extraordinary measures" to keep the amount of debt at the roughly $19.84 trillion cap.

On Friday,

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, among other things,

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. That means the Treasury can borrow freely until that date, when the outstanding amount becomes the new debt ceiling and extraordinary measures must begin again unless new legislation is passed.

That led to the roughly $317 billion jump in the amount of debt outstanding, likely to refill the Treasury's ability to use those extraordinary measures in three months if needed.

Given the jump in funding, the Treasury could hold out until at least sometime in early March on the extraordinary measures. If all falls right with corporate and individual income tax receipts, that could

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, analysts say.

 

[Jura The idiot]

LOL

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Jeff Bezos’s Net Worth Just Broke $100 Billion

• Amazon founder’s net worth has risen $33 billion this year
• Bill Gates was last person to attain 12-figure fortune in 1999

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is the world’s newest $100 billion mogul.

The Amazon.com Inc. founder’s fortune is up $2.4 billion to $100.3 billion, as the online retailer’s shares jumped more than 2 percent on optimism for Black Friday sales. Online purchases for the day

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18.4 percent over last year, according to data from Adobe Analytics, and investors are betting the company will take an outsized share of online spending over the gifting season.

The $100 billion milestone makes Bezos, 53, the first billionaire to build a 12-figure net worth since 1999, when Microsoft Corp. co-founder

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hit the mark.

Bezos’s fortune rose $32.6 billion this year through Thursday, the largest increase of anyone on the

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, a daily ranking of the world’s 500 richest people. Amazon have climbed 5 percent this week alone.

As Bezos’s wealth flirts with new heights, there’s likely to be more questions about what he intends to do with it. Unlike Gates, who was the world’s richest person until Bezos

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him in

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, or U.S. investor

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, the world’s third-richest person with $78.9 billion, Bezos has given relatively little of his fortune to charity.

Bezos is only just starting to focus on philanthropy, and in June tweeted a request for ideas on how to help people. Since 2002, Bezos has given away Amazon shares worth about $500 million at current prices, according to a Bloomberg analysis of Form 4 filings. The billionaire said in April that he sells $1 billion of Amazon stock every year to fund his space business Blue Origin LLC.

Gates, 62, who has a net worth of $86.8 billion according to the Bloomberg index, would be worth more than $150 billion if he hadn’t

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almost 700 million Microsoft Corp. shares and $2.9 billion of cash and other assets to charity, according to an analysis of his publicly disclosed giving since 1996. The index numbers are based on the close of trading in New York Wednesday. Bezos’s fortune and Amazon share data reflect Friday’s closing trading prices in New York.

 

[delft]

On drinking water:
Why millions of Americans could be drinking bad water

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[Jura The idiot]

noticed through News of this Hour at gazeta.ru now (

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)
Nasdaq plans bitcoin futures contract in 2018 - source

Updated 12 minutes ago

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Nasdaq Inc plans to launch a futures contract based on bitcoin in 2018, making it the third exchange operator to plan U.S. derivatives contracts linked to the digital currency, a source with knowledge of the matter said on Wednesday.

The price of bitcoin topped $11,000 on Wednesday less than a day after passing the $10,000 mark and has increased more than 10-fold in value so far this year, prompting concerns of a bubble.

CME Group, the world’s largest derivatives exchange, and CBOE Holdings, have both said they plan to launch futures products based on bitcoin this year, pending regulatory approval, helping fuel the crypto-currency’s rally.

While Nasdaq does not have a hard date set for its product, the transatlantic exchange operator has offered an exchange-traded note based on bitcoin on its Stockholm exchange since 2015.

Nasdaq has teamed up with New York-based money manager VanEck to develop the futures contract, which will be cleared by the Options Clearing Corporation. The OCC clears all Nasdaq futures products, the source said.

VanEck had applied to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) this year to launch a bitcoin-related exchange-traded fund, but withdrew the request in September after speaking with SEC staff, according to a regulatory filing.

The SEC requested that VanEck wait until the underlying instruments in which the ETF planned to primarily invest - bitcoin futures contracts - become available for investment, the filing said.

A representative for VanEck was not immediately available for comment.

One of the ways the Nasdaq futures product will differ from CME’s and CBOE’s is that it will be based on an index that takes in prices from more than 50 bitcoin exchanges, the source said.

CME has said it’s bitcoin future will be based on the CF Bitcoin Reference Rate (BRR), a once-a-day reference rate of the U.S. dollar price of bitcoin, that currently takes prices from four bitcoin exchanges. CBOE will price its bitcoin future off the Gemini Trust, the digital currency exchange founded by brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.

The SEC in March denied a request for CBOE to list what would have been the first U.S. ETF built to track bitcoin.

 

[Jura The idiot]

Jul 26, 2017

Jun 14, 2017

and it'll stay:
"... the Committee decided to maintain the target range for the federal funds rate at 1 to 1-1/4 percent"
July 26, 2017
Federal Reserve issues FOMC statement

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now "... the Committee decided to raise the target range for the federal funds rate to 1-1/4 to 1‑1/2 percent."
Federal Reserve issues FOMC statement

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[Jura The idiot]

in case you cared U.S. oil production booms as new year begins

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U.S. crude oil production is flirting with record highs heading into the new year, thanks to the technological nimbleness of shale oil drillers .

The current abundance has erased memories of 1973 gas lines, which raised pump prices dramatically, traumatizing the United States and reordering its economy. In the decades since, presidents and politicians have made pronouncements calling for U.S. energy independence.

President Jimmy Carter in a televised speech compared the energy crisis of 1977 to “the moral equivalent of war.”

“It’s a total turnaround from where we were in the ’70s,” said Frank Verrastro, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Shale oil drills can now plunge deep into the earth, pivot and tunnel sideways for miles until they hit an oil pocket, Verrastro said.

The United States is so awash in oil that petroleum-rich Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil and natural gas company is reportedly interested in investing in the fertile Texas Permian Basin shale oil region, according to a report last month.

That is a far cry from the days when U.S. production was on what was thought to be an irreversible downward path.

“For years and years, we thought we were running out of oil,” Verrastro said. “It took $120 for a barrel of oil to make people experiment with technology, and that has been unbelievably successful. We are the largest oil and gas producer in the world.”

Shale oil drillers have spawned a revolution using high-pressure drilling, coupled with a mixture of water and sand, which breaks open — “fractures” — hard-to-reach oil pockets trapped in rock.

The major shale oil fields are in southern and southwest Texas, Montana and North Dakota, and Oklahoma, Colorado, Wyoming and parts of Nebraska. There are also deposits east of the Mississippi in West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York.

U.S. oil production averaged around 9.6 million barrels per day in 2017. The highest U.S. production based on monthly government data is above 10 million barrels per day, which dates back to 1970.

Production hit 9.58 million barrels per day in May 2015 before prices dropped because of an oil glut.

The resilience of U.S. oil producers has come as the price of crude rose above $60 per barrel on world markets. Many shale drillers can start and stop on a dime depending on the world oil price. The sweet spot for shale profit is in the neighborhood of $55 to $60 per barrel.

An expanding world economy and production cutbacks by Russia and the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries have helped push prices above $60 per barrel in recent days.

The oil-friendly Trump administration has approved the controversial Keystone XL pipeline and is reportedly considering loosening offshore oil drilling regulations.

The Republican tax bill that President Trump signed into law Dec. 22 allows oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, a potentially rich pool but a move that conservationists oppose.

“This tax bill trades away a national treasure — for what — oil we don’t need,” said David Yarnold, president of the National Audubon Society, in a statement last week. Yarnold called the Arctic Refuge “one of the Earth’s last wild places.”

U.S. average daily oil production of 10 million barrels a day wasn’t thought possible a few years ago. Daily U.S. output plummeted to 3.8 million barrels per day in September 2005 and again in September 2008.

That’s nowhere near the almost 20 million barrels per day in petroleum products that the United States consumes. But the volume of domestic production allows the United States to tamp down oil prices by maintaining supply.

The increased production “doesn’t make us independent, but now we have a lot of low-cost natural gas and low-cost oil. And we have become exporters of natural gas,” Verrastro said. “It’s a rosy scenario. At least for now.”

Brad McMillan, chief investment officer for Commonwealth Financial Network, said the various shale producers have coalesced into a few big players, resulting in more predictable production.

That results in a less volatile price.

“If producers can set the price, then oil companies can be a great investment,” McMillan said. “If they are forced to compete, oil companies won’t be.”