Essential Economics for Politicians

Thanks to the success of Quantitative Easing which did not blow up the world economy and lead to economic growth and the financial markets being incredibly solid. The current economic expansion is one of the longest in history.
Fantastic! Finally. Inequality and the 1 percenters are no more.
 
The No. 1 Lesson of the Lehman Collapse: QE Worked.
Doomsayers predicted that the Fed’s bond-buying spree would wreck the U.S. economy. Instead, it made the recovery possible.

The Fed ended QE in 2014, increased interest rates seven times since 2015 and last year began reducing its $4 trillion balance sheet as debt acquired during the bond-buying program matured. The Fed’s preferred measure of inflation, the Personal Consumption Expenditures Core Price Index, now sits at an annualized rate of 1.98 percent. At the same time, the big and small companies included in the Russell 3000 index saw their net debt to Ebitda ratio — or total debt minus cash divided by earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization — diminished to the lowest on record in 2015. It remains 2.2 percentage points below the Russell 3000 debt ratio of 2000.

It’s doubtful that the economy’s robust health would have occurred without QE. But the academics, billionaires and politicians who denounced the policy as ruinous in a public letter with 23 signatures in 2010 still haven’t acknowledged QE’s role in the recovery and subsequent prosperity. The group, led by Stanford University Professor John Taylor, billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer and U.S. House Speaker John Boehner, predicted that the monetary stimulus would provoke runaway inflation, damage the dollar’s special role as the world’s reserve currency and send bond prices plummeting. They were wrong.

The recovery from the death of Lehman proved to be the most dynamic since 1980, with the rebound making the U.S. the only developed economy to attain record GDP by 2015, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The dollar rallied 20 percent, the most of any developed economy’s currency during the past nine years.

After the crash of 1929, it took 25 years for the stock market to recover. The S&P 500, which lost 47 percent of its value in the bear market from September 2008 to March 2009, was at a record by 2013 and is up 327 percent from the recession low, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-09-13/lehman-collapse-lesson-qe-worked
Suckers

http://www.usdebtclock.org
 
Trump wanted to print money to repay the national debt. That’s bananas

Donald Trump has made his ignorance of Economics 101 abundantly clear—from his late-night phone calls to ask how the dollar works to his constant confusion over the cause of the US trade imbalance.

Trump: “Just run the presses—print money.”

Cohn: “You don’t get to do it that way. We have huge deficits and they matter. The government doesn’t keep a balance sheet like that.”

There’s a touch of irony in Trump’s proposed shortcut. Not only has the president failed to balance the budget, his massive tax cut and a huge spending bill threaten to push the budget deficit from $665 billion in 2017 to a whopping $1.3 trillion by 2022, according to the Congressional Budget Office (pdf, p.83). By 2028, the CBO says the deficit could rise to $29 trillion—which, as a share of GDP, would be twice the average over the last 50 years. No wonder the siren song of the printing press beckons.
 
Trump wanted to print money to repay the national debt. That’s bananas

Donald Trump has made his ignorance of Economics 101 abundantly clear—from his late-night phone calls to ask how the dollar works to his constant confusion over the cause of the US trade imbalance.

Trump: “Just run the presses—print money.”

Cohn: “You don’t get to do it that way. We have huge deficits and they matter. The government doesn’t keep a balance sheet like that.”

There’s a touch of irony in Trump’s proposed shortcut. Not only has the president failed to balance the budget, his massive tax cut and a huge spending bill threaten to push the budget deficit from $665 billion in 2017 to a whopping $1.3 trillion by 2022, according to the Congressional Budget Office (pdf, p.83). By 2028, the CBO says the deficit could rise to $29 trillion—which, as a share of GDP, would be twice the average over the last 50 years. No wonder the siren song of the printing press beckons.
Q.E.
 
Trump wanted to print money to repay the national debt. That’s bananas

Donald Trump has made his ignorance of Economics 101 abundantly clear—from his late-night phone calls to ask how the dollar works to his constant confusion over the cause of the US trade imbalance.

Trump: “Just run the presses—print money.”

Cohn: “You don’t get to do it that way. We have huge deficits and they matter. The government doesn’t keep a balance sheet like that.”

There’s a touch of irony in Trump’s proposed shortcut. Not only has the president failed to balance the budget, his massive tax cut and a huge spending bill threaten to push the budget deficit from $665 billion in 2017 to a whopping $1.3 trillion by 2022, according to the Congressional Budget Office (pdf, p.83). By 2028, the CBO says the deficit could rise to $29 trillion—which, as a share of GDP, would be twice the average over the last 50 years. No wonder the siren song of the printing press beckons.
Obama averaged at least a trillion a year. We already covered this.
 
Here’s how Amazon’s $15 minimum wage could cause some employees to earn less
7 hours
amazon-1280x720.jpg

Some Amazon employees could lose out on money due to conditions of the company's minimum wage increase. (David Ryder/Getty Images
Amazon announced that it was raising minimum wage for all employees to $15 per hour earlier this week, but The Guardian reported that the increase comes with a catch that could end up costing some employees in the long run.

The $15 minimum wage wasn’t just a straight wage increase–it was a trade off. In exchange for increasing the minimum amount employees can earn, Amazon also took away incentive pay and stock option awards, which are extremely valuable at a company like Amazon.


“This is basically a stealth tax by the employer on its own wage increase,” said Tim Roache, general secretary of the British trade union GMB, according to The Guardian. “If Jeff Bezos — the richest man in the world — really wants to give hardworking staff a pay raise, he should let them keep their share options as well as increasing their hourly rate.”

How it works
According to The Guardian, warehouse workers previously got an Amazon share worth nearly $2,000 at the end of each year, and an additional share at the end of every five-year period of employment. Employees could also earn up to 8 percent of their monthly income by way of incentive bonuses.


So while employees who were making significantly less than $15 per hour might love the change, those who were making near $15 or more have a different perspective. Here’s how an Amazon employee explained it to Yahoo Finance:


An employee earning $15.25 an hour who has worked for Amazon for more than three years in Arizona crunched the numbers. Although he is getting a $1 an hour raise, which would equate to as much as $2,080 in additional pay a year, he said he could have earned a few thousands of dollars more from the incentive programs. “Amazon isn’t giving its employees a raise, they’re taking money from us,” he told Yahoo Finance. “It only looks good if folks don’t know the truth.”


Amazon’s response
Amazon claims it made the compensation change based on employee feedback, and that workers preferred the “predictability and immediacy of cash.” The company also said everyone will make more money.

“The significant increase in hourly cash wages more than compensates for the phase out of incentive pay and [restrictive stock units],” an Amazon statement read. “We can confirm that all hourly Operations and Customer Service employees will see an increase in their total compensation as a result of this announcement.”
 
Here’s how Amazon’s $15 minimum wage could cause some employees to earn less
7 hours
amazon-1280x720.jpg

Some Amazon employees could lose out on money due to conditions of the company's minimum wage increase. (David Ryder/Getty Images
Amazon announced that it was raising minimum wage for all employees to $15 per hour earlier this week, but The Guardian reported that the increase comes with a catch that could end up costing some employees in the long run.

The $15 minimum wage wasn’t just a straight wage increase–it was a trade off. In exchange for increasing the minimum amount employees can earn, Amazon also took away incentive pay and stock option awards, which are extremely valuable at a company like Amazon.


“This is basically a stealth tax by the employer on its own wage increase,” said Tim Roache, general secretary of the British trade union GMB, according to The Guardian. “If Jeff Bezos — the richest man in the world — really wants to give hardworking staff a pay raise, he should let them keep their share options as well as increasing their hourly rate.”

How it works
According to The Guardian, warehouse workers previously got an Amazon share worth nearly $2,000 at the end of each year, and an additional share at the end of every five-year period of employment. Employees could also earn up to 8 percent of their monthly income by way of incentive bonuses.


So while employees who were making significantly less than $15 per hour might love the change, those who were making near $15 or more have a different perspective. Here’s how an Amazon employee explained it to Yahoo Finance:


An employee earning $15.25 an hour who has worked for Amazon for more than three years in Arizona crunched the numbers. Although he is getting a $1 an hour raise, which would equate to as much as $2,080 in additional pay a year, he said he could have earned a few thousands of dollars more from the incentive programs. “Amazon isn’t giving its employees a raise, they’re taking money from us,” he told Yahoo Finance. “It only looks good if folks don’t know the truth.”


Amazon’s response
Amazon claims it made the compensation change based on employee feedback, and that workers preferred the “predictability and immediacy of cash.” The company also said everyone will make more money.

“The significant increase in hourly cash wages more than compensates for the phase out of incentive pay and [restrictive stock units],” an Amazon statement read. “We can confirm that all hourly Operations and Customer Service employees will see an increase in their total compensation as a result of this announcement.”
It has to make cents.
 
Here’s how Amazon’s $15 minimum wage could cause some employees to earn less
7 hours
amazon-1280x720.jpg

Some Amazon employees could lose out on money due to conditions of the company's minimum wage increase. (David Ryder/Getty Images
Amazon announced that it was raising minimum wage for all employees to $15 per hour earlier this week, but The Guardian reported that the increase comes with a catch that could end up costing some employees in the long run.

The $15 minimum wage wasn’t just a straight wage increase–it was a trade off. In exchange for increasing the minimum amount employees can earn, Amazon also took away incentive pay and stock option awards, which are extremely valuable at a company like Amazon.


“This is basically a stealth tax by the employer on its own wage increase,” said Tim Roache, general secretary of the British trade union GMB, according to The Guardian. “If Jeff Bezos — the richest man in the world — really wants to give hardworking staff a pay raise, he should let them keep their share options as well as increasing their hourly rate.”

How it works
According to The Guardian, warehouse workers previously got an Amazon share worth nearly $2,000 at the end of each year, and an additional share at the end of every five-year period of employment. Employees could also earn up to 8 percent of their monthly income by way of incentive bonuses.


So while employees who were making significantly less than $15 per hour might love the change, those who were making near $15 or more have a different perspective. Here’s how an Amazon employee explained it to Yahoo Finance:


An employee earning $15.25 an hour who has worked for Amazon for more than three years in Arizona crunched the numbers. Although he is getting a $1 an hour raise, which would equate to as much as $2,080 in additional pay a year, he said he could have earned a few thousands of dollars more from the incentive programs. “Amazon isn’t giving its employees a raise, they’re taking money from us,” he told Yahoo Finance. “It only looks good if folks don’t know the truth.”


Amazon’s response
Amazon claims it made the compensation change based on employee feedback, and that workers preferred the “predictability and immediacy of cash.” The company also said everyone will make more money.

“The significant increase in hourly cash wages more than compensates for the phase out of incentive pay and [restrictive stock units],” an Amazon statement read. “We can confirm that all hourly Operations and Customer Service employees will see an increase in their total compensation as a result of this announcement.”
People on the left are short sided.
 
Before Amazon started showing billion-dollar profits, there was a joke that the massive public company was in reality a charity run by Wall Street investors for the benefit of American consumers. But that humor revealed a deep misunderstanding of Amazonomics. The internet retailer was never any sort of philanthropy. Instead it was a rapidly growing business that invested every dollar of excess cash back into growing the business even further. It sacrificed short-term profitability for innovation and growth. It was capitalism done right.

Given that wildly successful strategy, we can be confident that Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, the world’s wealthiest person, has coolly calculated that it makes ample business sense for Amazon to raise the minimum wage it pays its U.S. workers to $15 an hour. The logic seems obvious. The boost would give the trillion-dollar retailing giant an edge over rivals such as Walmart and Target in the competition for increasingly scarce workers. It also gives the company a reputational lift — or perhaps a political heat shield — after politicians such as Bernie Sanders have attacked it for its labor practices, including how some employees receive assistance from government safety-net programs.

Hiking the minimum wage makes sense for Amazon and its workers. That doesn’t mean it makes any sense for Washington to follow suit.

http://www.aei.org/publication/a-15...Uck8xSjJxUkxLYUVnZXR3aTFNSk41WUE0U2t3cDNpNiJ9
 
Trump wanted to print money to repay the national debt. That’s bananas

Donald Trump has made his ignorance of Economics 101 abundantly clear—from his late-night phone calls to ask how the dollar works to his constant confusion over the cause of the US trade imbalance.

Trump: “Just run the presses—print money.”

Cohn: “You don’t get to do it that way. We have huge deficits and they matter. The government doesn’t keep a balance sheet like that.”

There’s a touch of irony in Trump’s proposed shortcut. Not only has the president failed to balance the budget, his massive tax cut and a huge spending bill threaten to push the budget deficit from $665 billion in 2017 to a whopping $1.3 trillion by 2022, according to the Congressional Budget Office (pdf, p.83). By 2028, the CBO says the deficit could rise to $29 trillion—which, as a share of GDP, would be twice the average over the last 50 years. No wonder the siren song of the printing press beckons.


Man are you stupid.....
The " Stupidest " would be your forum Booty Buddy ....Rat the " Pussyman " Rodent....
 
Back
Top