Looking Backwards …
LB #1
Tom Hanks’ character Jimmie Dugan once signed an autograph “Avoid the clap, Jimmie Dugan” in the movie A League of their Own. His advice is timeless because some things once caught are tough to get rid of. Inflation is the financial equivalent of a sexually transmitted disease. It is hard to get rid of and can be quite painful. America’s politicians have saddled us with this financially transmitted disease and their overspending has been transferred to the prices that we the consumers must now pay for simple goods and services.
Stephanie Stamm and Jesse Newman have an article in the Wall Street Journal where they document that the modern consumer would have pay $37 more for the exact same groceries than they would have just four years earlier. They have great comparisons in individual items as well, cooking oil up 54% from 2019, beef up 51%, mayonnaise up 50%, and applesauce up 51%. Consumers are having less money to spend on other goods when they are spending more on necessities.
We have discussed this in detail, but when people can’t eat steak, they switch to ground beef perhaps and then the government says the $20 that people were spending on steak is now $20 on ground beef, see no inflation. These are all part of the CPI adjustments which the average consumer doesn’t understand and adds to their confusion when they hear that inflation isn’t up year over year. They went from eating steak to eating ground beef because steak is now $30 instead of $20. The problem that will develop when the government lies to its people long enough is that they just stop believing the government and we are tip toeing into that territory already. When Nancy Pelosi says that Trump stole the 2016 election and Donald Trump says that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election then most of the country has had its preferred leaders tell them the election was stolen in the last two elections. If we don’t have sanctity of elections, do you think the BLS statistics on inflation or jobs or immigration are correct. News flash, they are not.
LB#2
If there is one thing that scratches me where I itch, it is seeing dumb ideas fail miserably. Amazon has decided that its Just Walk out technology led to customers just walking out without paying. They aren’t alone though as others are shedding the cashier-less model and reducing self-checkout due to theft. Talal Ansari writes for the Wall Street Journal “Last month, the discount retailer Five Below said it would limit self-checkouts to curb theft.”
I have also been reading that stores will start offering more check out lanes and reduce self check-out. It turns out customers that want to check their own groceries have wonderful options like being cashiers at wonderful retailers all across the country. There is Albertson’s, Kroger’s, Dierberg’s, Safeway, Wal-Mart, Publix, HEB, and Whole Foods. People that want to be cashiers can earn a fair wage, receive health benefits after 90 days, and even contribute to a retirement plan. Meanwhile, the rest of us can finally stop waiting in line so long to have a professionally trained cashier help us with our shopping. This will be a huge win as the stores will have the added protection that they need on the security of the items that they own and are important to them, and by providing a cashier they can ensure a quality trade of fiat money for consumer goods. This is a novel concept and one that is sure to catch on nationwide. It turns out that customers don’t know the codes on onions or weighing plantains leads to exasperation and exasperation just leads to customers giving up and walking out in dismay, but they aren’t leaving their plantains behind, now they are just not paying for them. I’m surprised that Amazon hasn’t gotten into banking yet where customers can just walk into a bank where there is a big pile of money and the customers just grab what they need and walk out. Someone will pitch this idea soon and banks will be trying it to reduce the windows that need to be filled with cashiers. The idea will likely come from Congress.
LB#3
What has gotten into Israel lately? Last week they fired a missile into Damascus killing Mohammad Reza Zahedi, Iran’s top general in Syria and Lebanon. In early October we amongst others asked if Israel was attacked for being a bully towards the people of Gaza. People were outraged as the default reaction to the events of October 7th’s Hamas invasion was back Israel at any price and if you didn’t you were anti-semitic. We didn’t have a horse in the race then or now, but we just searched for the understanding of the why of the matter. Israel has been attacking Gaza for months now and pushing them further and further south. The rest of the world is now slowly moving their support away from Israel. This latest attack has American intelligence sources saying that Iran will attack within a week. We have talked about the B&B boys, Blinken and Biden, making trips over there to settle the peace lest this oil price get out of hand and drive gas prices higher. If that happens, the election will be very difficult to win. Even Nancy Pelosi is talking about cutting Israel off from weapons support. I never thought it would get this far. Israel thinks they can go it alone, I think not.
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Looking Forwards…
LF#1
Paul Joseph Watson writes for Modernity News about the new law in Scotland. “A person could now be imprisoned for up to seven years if they engage in “insulting” behaviour towards ‘protected’ groups, and the prosecution only needs to prove that the hatred was “likely” rather than “intended”. That’s right, the Hate Crime and Public Order Act 2021 created a new crime for misgendering people, you know calling them what they are not what they imagine themselves to be on any particular day. Watson continues “As predicted, Police Scotland was deluged with nearly 4,000 complaints in the first day alone after the passage of an absurd new hate crime law, proving the legislation is being weaponized by activists.” JK Rowling, the author of children’s books, who has repeatedly stated that a biological man is a man was told that she wasn’t a target due to her high celebrity profile, she responded on Twitter, “If they go after any woman for simply calling a man a man, I’ll repeat that woman’s words and they can charge us both at once.”
A celebrity with common sense, a rare unicorn indeed. I will pass on that trip to Scotland and not give a country so stupid a single dollar of support.
LF#2
This next turn of events is simply stunning. The Houthis seem to have won the battle for the Red Sea and “now the White House is mulling the removal of Yemen’s Ansarallah movement (the Houthis) from the US list of designated terrorist organizations should the Shia rebel group agree to halt its attacks. The current international headlines strongly point to the Houthis having ‘won’ in a direct months-long standoff with the most powerful military in the world.” That according to ZeroHedge and it continues “Geopolitical analyst Arnaud Bertrand observes that the US change of course with the Houthis is “stunning” as this is “the US essentially admitting they can’t prevail militarily with the Houthis, and are therefore suing for peace.” It’s “hard not to see this like a Suez crisis moment for America. And now the Houthis know they are in the driver’s seat, and they’ve been there from the start of the Gaza war, given also the vital geostrategic advantage of their location and the proximity to Israel’s ports. The goat herders in the mountains just brought down the most powerful military in the world, wow!
This will also go down in the history books as yet another example of a ragtag third world militant group in the Middle East bringing the US empire to its knees.” This is referencing the 1950’s crisis in the same region. More on that in Bygone Relics on Wednesday.
LF#3
Lastly, we follow up on the bridge collapse in Baltimore. Divers are finding the murky water very difficult to navigate to even prepare plans on where to cut and disassemble the bridge blocking the port. Liz Young writes for the Wall Street Journal, “Surveys of the river bottom in the 50-foot channel show the wreckage “is far more extensive than we could have imagined,” Col. Estee Pinchasin, the district commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said in a briefing on the clearance effort this week.
“We have portions of the wreckage that are completely collapsed. What this means is that the state of that wreckage makes it very difficult to figure out where to cut, how to cut,” she said.”
There is also the financial fallout that Dun & Bradstreet is estimating at $1.7B a week. No cars, no coal, nope all those products and more are being diverted up and down the east coast from Savannah to Boston. This will raise costs for businesses and unless they can pass those costs on, they will hurt margins. The logistical problems aren’t limited to just the sea, but because the bridge handled so many cars a day, that traffic is having to be diverted causing delays and more traffic through out the region. Businesses are being affected, and while they might adjust, it comes at a cost.
Sincerely Yours,
C Thomas Printer
The Dow Jones finished trading at ………..38,904.
The 10-year Treasury bond is at …a ytd high at 4.4%
The price of Brent Crude is … at a 6 month high of $91.17 per barrel.
The price of gold is … an all-time high at $2,349/oz.
The price of silver is … 52 week high of $27.60/oz.
Thank you for listening today and you can find all of our articles and more on our website cthomasprinter.co