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Cita de: R.G.C.I.M. en Octubre 09, 2022, 20:59:55 pmOtro mensaje para enmarcar del maestro. Respecto a la parte de ucrania, no me sorprende lo que piensa, pero sí que lo diga. Y desde luego , no está " pretando las filas"...No acabo de entender la referencia a que desea que no sean kamaz y unimog. Es ucrania otro velo del sistema para administrar el desmantelamiento del PC? , o es una añagaza proPC para alargar la agonía??Gracias por adelantado, maestro. Interesante.+1Al leerlo, me dije que el Maestro se había puesto otra vez a cantar, Mirando las horas de mi mensaje a Wanderer y ahora éste, me dije también que el video le hizo reir,Además Wanderer lo contestó muy bien, con elegancia, tomando su parte de la gracia, De forma que al Maestro le entraron ganas de "salir del armario",Pero no creo que sea ni pro- ni anti- ruso, no más que ninguno aqui, A lo que va es a una metáfora que funcione en el canto, Si os fijáis, el nota-bene es un compendio de éstas y la serie de imágenes solo viene a ilustrar su definición de la "derecha" transicionista, No os engañeis leyéndole a la letra, Sigue a suyo,Recuerden la lección; Para que los poetas se pongan a cantar, tenemos que hacer que se rían, No hay nada como ponerse a recitarlos para alegrarles el día, y no sólo, también el de los oyentes, Porque cuando los oyentes se unen a vítores o a tomatazos, hacen sociedad y el Canto se torna realidad,Además, han vuelto Derby, VVPP, En otro hilo me topé con Starkiller. Y muchos que espero sigan leyendo,O BenditaLiquidez que espero responda a la invocación y nos actualice el serpencamelirafa,Cada uno aquí aporta su estilo y el resultado es francamente impagable, Y es real,Ojalá hayamos pasado página de malos tragos, Porque lo que viene ahora es de cuidado y vamos a necesitarnos a todos,Ahora, cada día que pasa anuncia un día nuevo, Que hay que cambiar el mundo, y ya tardamos ¡Diviértanseeeeeeeeeeeee!
Otro mensaje para enmarcar del maestro. Respecto a la parte de ucrania, no me sorprende lo que piensa, pero sí que lo diga. Y desde luego , no está " pretando las filas"...No acabo de entender la referencia a que desea que no sean kamaz y unimog. Es ucrania otro velo del sistema para administrar el desmantelamiento del PC? , o es una añagaza proPC para alargar la agonía??Gracias por adelantado, maestro. Interesante.
Cuando pase toda esta pesadilla —que viene de EEUU—, nos vamos a arrepentir de lo que le estamos haciendo a la Ucrania de toda la vida, la de la sopa borscht. ¿Dónde está escrito que nos interesa la dinámica de la derecha ucraniana o la de los países de Visegrado, quizá con la excepción de Hungría?Calle Alcalá, Madrid, 1917
WellThe Ukraine girls really knock me outThey leave the West behindAnd Moscow girls make me sing and shoutThat Georgia's always onMy, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my mind
Price Increases Come Easily for Big Businesses, but Inflation Still Squeezes ProfitsThird-quarter earnings are expected to soften, even though rising prices have helped push profit margins above prepandemic levelsMany big U.S. businesses say they have been able to increase prices this year with limited pushback from customers. Not all the changes are leading to higher corporate profits.(...)Inflation in the U.S. economy has been running near four-decade highs, prompting the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates in a bid to bring it under control. Prices are rising unevenly across the economy. Consumer prices rose 8.3% in August from a year earlier, while producer prices rose 8.7%, government data show.“There’s never been a better time to have a conversation with a customer about price increase because they all understand it, because inflation is pretty much across the board,” John Michael, an executive at MillerKnoll, told investors last month.Prices are sticky, economists like to say. Once they go up, customers get used to it, and they rarely come down quickly. If companies’ costs then fall, they can pass along even a little of the savings and keep the rest—customers get a bit of a break and margins still widen.Corporate profit margins—the difference between expenses and revenue—reached historically high levels in recent quarters, helped by strong consumer demand for a range of goods and services. But as more companies prepare to report third-quarter results, there are signs that profits might be under pressure, at least relatively speaking. Excluding the volatile energy sector, analysts expect third-quarter earnings to decline 2.6% from the third quarter of 2020, Refinitiv said.“It might be a tough quarter for margins,” said JPMorgan chief U.S. economist Michael Feroli. “I wouldn’t expect a big margin squeeze, but I think it’s going to be tough to expand margins from here.”Higher prices didn’t widen profit margins at MillerKnoll, which sells furniture such as the Herman Miller line of office chairs. The company said gross margins shrank slightly in the quarter ended Sept. 3, compared with the same quarter last year.Higher prices added about 3.3 percentage points of gross margin, but higher commodity costs reduced that by about 2.4 percentage points. Transportation pared 0.9 percentage point, and labor inflation and rising overhead reduced it another 0.7 point, executives said. MillerKnoll said it has announced list-price increases averaging 8%, taking effect in October. The company is also seeking to reduce costs by $30 million to $35 million a year by offering early retirement to employees and reducing operational and capital spending, among other steps. Elsewhere, company margins have widened with price increases. Gravel company Vulcan Materials told investors late last month that it responded quickly to rising costs earlier in the year, in part by increasing prices.“We got to hit hard in the first quarter with inflation,” Chief Executive Tom Hill said during a late-September meeting with investors. The company “went straight to work and reacted with price.”By May, the company was expanding its margins again, with pricing as well as operational efficiencies, executives said. “We grew [profit margin] more in June, and we’ll grow it more in the third quarter, and more in the fourth quarter,” Mr. Hill said. “We continue to see really good momentum with pricing going into 2023.”Cintas, which rents and sells uniforms to a range of industries, also used pricing to help widen margins over the past four quarters, despite rising costs, the company told investors on a Sept. 28 conference call.For the quarter ended Aug. 31, the company held on to 47.5% of sales for its rental business after deducting the cost of providing the service, a measure called gross margin.“That’s a really good gross margin for us—we’ve only been higher than that a few times, and that certainly is a much greater gross margin than we saw prepandemic,” finance chief Michael Hansen told investors. Price increases contributed to those gains, with bigger increases than normal to go along with bigger cost increases than normal, executives said. As costs decline, the company is likely to return to past pricing patterns, they added. Sales growth and improvements in productivity have also contributed, a Cintas spokeswoman said.Some companies are feeling the squeeze now, but are looking ahead to improvements.Darden, which operates such restaurant chains as Olive Garden and LongHorn Steakhouse, said that profit margins for its fiscal first quarter, which ended Aug. 28, declined from last year, but the company expects margins to remain above prepandemic levels. Measured price increases have helped, executives said.“We’re seeing the ability as we take price in some of the fine-dining brands, there’s really no pushback,” CEO Rick Cardenas said during a call with analysts. Darden kept its price increases below inflation for its market—raising prices about 7.5% over the past two years, compared with a 14% increase in a federal measure of inflation at full-service restaurants, the company said. Executives said they have seen little falloff in demand from the company’s customers as a result.Darden expects inflation in its own costs to run about 1 percentage point ahead of its price increases over the course of its full fiscal year, ending in late May, the company said. The gap will narrow as commodity prices come down and should improve with productivity gains, including from simplifying menus and processes, company officials said.“As we look at the full year, do we still expect restaurant-level margins to be better than pre-Covid? Yes,” Darden finance chief Raj Vennam said.
Strong Dollar Pressures U.S. Manufacturing ReboundOverseas producers gain pricing power; 3M, General Electric expected to take exchange-rate hit on foreign salesThe strengthening U.S. dollar threatens to undermine a rebound in American manufacturing, handing foreign producers an advantage in selling into the U.S., executives and economists said.The U.S. dollar’s surging value relative to the euro, the Japanese yen, the British pound and other currencies is making foreign-made goods cheaper to import, while exports of U.S.-made goods grow more expensive for foreign buyers. For U.S. manufacturers operating overseas factories, their sales in foreign currencies are worth less in dollars now because of the unfavorable exchange rates caused by the strengthening dollar.Industry analysts said that unfavorable exchange rates are likely to dent industrial manufacturers’ revenue when they start to report quarterly results later this month. RBC Capital Markets forecasts a currency-related sales drop of 5.1% for conglomerate 3M Co. , a 3.4% decrease for heating and air-conditioning-equipment maker Carrier Global Corp. and a 2% reduction for General Electric Co. Representatives for the companies had no comments.Foreign companies, meanwhile, are gaining a price advantage on exports to the U.S. at a time when U.S. companies have been adding production.(...) Advocates for U.S. manufacturing said they worry that American manufacturers will become less willing to invest in domestic operations if corporate profits get squeezed by a stronger dollar. At the same time, foreign companies will find it easier to sell their products to U.S. buyers.“It has a debilitating effect on U.S. companies,” said Harry Moser, president of the Reshoring Initiative, an advisory group for U.S. companies interested in returning foreign manufacturing operations to the U.S.
The broken US economy breeds inequality and insecurity. Here’s how to fix itJames K GalbraithOn one side, oceans of wealth and power. On the other, precarity and powerlessness. But we have the tools for reformRising interest rates, a falling stock market, a seesaw in the price of gas, a high dollar and chaos in world finance – we see in all this, once again, the folly of trying to run the world’s largest economy through a central bank. It’s time to rethink the basics: what has happened in America? And what should be done?Adam Smith wrote: “Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power.” Today in the United States we find islands of wealth and power on one side and an ocean of precarity and powerlessness, alongside poverty, on the other. This is a structural development over 50 years, the effect of politics and policies, but also of industrial change, globalization and new technologies, with intense regional, social, demographic and political implications.From the 1930s to the 1970s America had a middle-class economy centered in the heartland, feeding and supplying the world with machinery and goods while drawing labor from the impoverished south to the thriving midwest – an economy of powerful trade unions and world-dominant corporations. This has become a bicoastal economy dominated by globalized finance, insurance and high-end services on one coast, and by information technology, aerospace and entertainment on the other.Finance and technology do not create many jobs, and the conduct of business in those sectors is rapacious and predatory, shading often into fraud. Some years ago we calculated the rise of income inequality measured between counties during the 1990s boom years, and found that half the increase was due to income gains in just five counties: Manhattan, Silicon Valley, Seattle. There have been other big gainers since, but the fact remains: the largest income and wealth gains in America have become highly concentrated in a few very specific places, sectors – and people.Yet practically all new jobs created in the past 30 years have been in services, and most of those in “stagnant services” – the profusion of restaurants, retail shops, hospitals and clinics, offices and entertainment venues, fueled by household incomes (and borrowings) exceeding requirements for material goods. Pay in these jobs is mediocre and employment is unstable. Families compensated by having two or more earners, each sometimes holding two or more jobs, where 50 years ago the norm was one earner with a steady job paying a living wage. Then Covid blasted the sector.For better or worse, we can’t go back: globalization and the digital revolution are irreversible facts of life. The June 2021 White House Review on the supply chain made this very clear, using semiconductors, rare earths, batteries and pharmaceuticals as examples. Our advanced sectors need world markets – including the Chinese market – as much as they need access to the world’s resources. US consumers benefit from imported goods and from the efficiencies of the information age.The question is: what do we do now? We can adjust, and build a fair and secure middle-class society, free of poverty and of oligarchy alike, with tools that are broadly familiar. These tools include:Expand social insuranceSocial security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance and Snap already greatly reduce poverty, insecurity and hunger in America. They can be broadened and strengthened. If we can’t get Medicare for All, then drop the age of eligibility to 55 – that would cover a large part of the most vulnerable population and reduce in a stroke the burden of private health insurance on employers.Raise the minimum wageA federal minimum wage at $15 per hour would provide a raise to at least 20% of all working Americans. It would solve in a stroke the supposed problem of “labor shortage” – without hurting any employer relative to any other. Nor would it encourage immigration, since US workers would step up to take decently paid jobs.Implement a job guaranteeA federal job guarantee is well-prepared proposal that would eliminate involuntary unemployment, set a basic wage standard, and provide willing workers with continuous employment on useful projects, giving private employers a labor pool from which they can easily recruit the workers that they need.Stabilize energy prices and suppliesThe TVA and other agencies provide stable power under long-term contracts. Why should oil and gas be run by private equity on a boom-and-bust basis? Stabilize energy prices and supplies – with regulation, quotas, price controls (as in Germany right now), long-term contracts and public utilities – and many other problems would become much easier to solve.Build public services, infrastructure, and fight climate changeAnd do this while cutting military commitments and spending. The main job of infrastructure is to improve the quality of life, with clean water and air, good transport and communications, and – urgently – to change the resource mix so as to mitigate, so far as possible, global warming. We cannot meet these needs and at the same time devote our talents and resources to wars – the limits to that are clear after Afghanistan and Iraq. It is past time to end the illusion that the United States can or should run the world.Shift taxation toward land rentA great principle of classical economics was that taxes should encourage labor and enterprise while discouraging waste in both the public and private spheres. In the 1980s, taxes were shifted away from personal and corporate incomes and capital gains and toward payrolls and sales – and the unsurprising result was the rise of an oligarchy of hyper-wealthy persons. The remedy now is to tax these accumulations and the associated rents – land values, mineral rights, technology “quasi-rents” – so as to bring the new plutocrats back to earth. A stronger estate-and-gift tax can spur the transfer of great fortunes to foundations and non-profits, such as hospitals, universities and churches, while working to prevent the emergence of dynasties, financial and political.Reform banking before it’s too lateThe Glass-Steagall Act protected the middle class – the ordinary depositor at a commercial bank – from the speculative whims of the elites. Today big money is back in charge, despite the great financial crisis – and much of the American public as well as the larger world is sick of it. Perhaps the toughest, most necessary reform is to reduce debts including student debts, to shrink the banks, to restore effective regulation, to prosecute frauds, and to discipline finance to serve the public good. This will take the glamour out of being a banker – and the intoxicating power out of running the Federal Reserve.Is this program realistic? Perhaps not. But consider the path we’re on. What I propose is an alternative – to pitchforks, anarchy and civil war.
Ben Bernanke, former US Federal Reserve chief, wins Nobel PrizeThe Nobel Foundation chose to recognise work by Mr Bernanke about the importance of preventing runs on banks.
Chinese Stocks Slide on Weaker Consumer SpendingInvestors also fret about new U.S restrictions on chip exports, more Covid-19 lockdowns(...) An uptick in Covid-19 cases in China, recent weak consumer spending data and a decision by the U.S. government to tighten semiconductor exports to the country all weighed on the market, said Wei Xuan, chief strategist at China Asset Management Co., a domestic fund manager.He added that volatility in overseas stock markets during China’s long holiday also hurt sentiment. U.S. stocks had a roller-coaster week, rising on Monday and Tuesday before falling sharply in the second half of the week after hawkish comments from Federal Reserve officials. In Europe, the benchmark Stoxx Europe 600 largely followed ups and downs in the U.S., ending the week 1% higher.“It’s hard to be optimistic given the overall situation in the global financial markets, and it did not play a positive role in boosting the risk appetite for A-shares after the holiday,” Mr. Xuan said. Yuan-denominated stocks listed in mainland China are also known as A-shares.The tougher export rules, which require U.S. chip makers to get a license from the Commerce Department to export certain chips used in advanced artificial-intelligence calculations and supercomputing, came as a surprise, said David Chao, Invesco’s global market strategist for Asia-Pacific excluding Japan.“I thought we were pretty much out of the woods when it came to Washington implementing limitations on Americans selling to Chinese semiconductor companies,” he said.
A new model for Chinese growthConsumers need to be empowered to spend more and save less(...) The break-up of the state-run economy from the late 1980s smashed an “iron rice bowl” of housing, healthcare, pension and other benefits, inculcating a sense of insecurity. The hundreds of millions of workers who have migrated from farms to factories in recent decades do not qualify for city welfare benefits, forcing them to save. The one-child policy, introduced from the 1980s, meant that parents could not expect to rely on an extended family in old age.These stresses — combined with underfunded state pensions, and the spiralling costs of education and medical treatments (exacerbated by hospital corruption) — reinforce a savings mindset. This is crimping consumer spending, especially when most asset values are falling along with property prices and stock market indices. Building a more sophisticated financial system could ensure that even a less gargantuan amount of savings would finance more productive investments.If China is to put growth on to a more sustainable footing, it needs to empower its consumers. In particular, Beijing should allocate hefty fiscal transfers into state pension funds for both city and rural dwellers. This will cost a great deal. But if Xi is serious about creating “common prosperity” for future generations, he should make it a priority.
Here’s How Weird Things Are Getting in the Housing MarketWe’re hitting milestone after milestone in the US.Higher mortgage rates generally don’t bode well for the housing market, and the US has just seen one of the steepest increases in history.Would-be homebuyers are facing massive sticker shock right now, with measures of affordability worsening at their fastest pace on record. In fact we’re seeing a number of milestones reached in the market, with spreads on mortgages and benchmark interest rates reaching levels unseen in decades, while the volume of new sales is slowing at a faster pace than even during the aftermath of the global financial crisis.So does this mean that home prices are about to collapse? That's one possibility. But another possibility is that the housing market just gets weird.James Egan, Morgan Stanley’s US housing strategist, recently cut his house price forecast to show a year-over-year decline in December 2023. But he's expecting a fall of just 3% — a far cry from an outright collapse.The problem is we’re in uncharted territory. Yes, mortgage rates have shot up, crimping affordability. But at the same time, unlike in the era prior to 2008 and the bursting of the subprime mortgage bubble, there are very few forced sellers and therefore very little inventory. “A lot of these statistics that we use to forecast things like housing activity, and by that we mean home sales or housing starts as well as home prices, are at levels that we either haven't seen before, or if we've seen them, we haven't seen them for decades,” Egan says in an interview on the Odd Lots podcast.“The listings of existing homes available for sale — we have that data going back for single unit homes to the early 1980s — It was never lower than it was earlier this year. We’ve been increasing just a very little bit off the bottom for the past three months,” he explains. “But we think that they're going to keep listings tight, which will keep home prices more supported.”To understand where house prices are heading, the team looks at four key things: Supply, demand, affordability and credit availability. While the first two components don’t tend to change quickly, affordability and credit availability can move very rapidly. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing now.The upshot is that because the overwhelming number of homeowners are on fixed-rate mortgages, and because home equity is still high, most people are insulated from the coming shock. But this insulation comes with a cost, what Egan calls the “lock-in effect.”“Current homeowners, in order to sell their home in a lot of instances would have to take out a mortgage that might be 200, 250, 300 basis points higher than their current mortgage,” says Egan. “They're just not going to be willing to sell their home at the lower price point that might be more affordable for the first time home buyer.”And so there’s a chance we may be heading into uncharted territory, where measures of housing activity deteriorate rapidly, even as prices stay firm.Here's a look at seven charts that show how unusual the housing market picture looks right now.House prices surged after CovidThe increase in house prices in the years since the outbreak of Covid-19 has been very dramatic, exceeding the peaks from even the early 2000s. As Egan notes, each of the last 16 months represent stronger growth than the previous record prior to the global financial crisis. Naturally that raises the question of whether such rapid run-ups in house prices are sustainable.“Each of the past 16 months would've been a record in year over year growth if we were comparing it to 2004 and 2005,” Egan says. “We have significantly surpassed that when you add mortgage rates up over 300 basis points since the beginning of the year. Those things are going to combine to lead to the monthly mortgage payment on the median priced home up over 50% year over year.”Mortgage rates have been shockedThe average 30-year mortgage rate has increased from less than 3% in 2020 to almost 7% now, according to the Mortgage Bankers’ Association. That’s the highest since the early 2000s. But that sizable move has been surpassed by another key metric: the spread (or difference) between mortgage rates and benchmark interest rates as measured by the 10-year US Treasury yield.With the economic outlook so uncertain as the Fed raises rates and with volatility in the bond market markedly higher than it used to be, many big investors have shied away from buying mortgage-backed securities and that’s helped to contribute to the higher cost of borrowing to buy a home. At the same time, the Fed has also stepped away from the market as it winds down its balance sheet.“When you have so many of what have been your larger buyers over the past couple years for various reasons, not as willing and able to step into the market right now, combined with the rate volatility we’ve seen or perhaps even exaggerated by the rate volatility we've seen, that can kind of lead to that gap in spreads,” Egan says.Housing affordability is deteriorating rapidlyThe jump in home prices combined with increasing mortgage rates means that housing affordability is now deteriorating at an unprecedented pace, especially when compared to average income. The below chart shows the year-over-year change in the monthly mortgage payment on a median- priced home as a share of average household income (in blue), plus the year-over-year change in the monthly payment (in gold).“We’ve deteriorated incredibly substantially,” Egan says. “The GFC that year-over-year deterioration never exceeded 30%, we capped out in the twenties. But why we think home prices aren't going to crash here, why we do think this time is different, is because the question we have to ask after affordability deterioration is who's affordability just deteriorated.”Refinancing activity has fallen off a cliffAs Egan points out, it’s worth considering just whose affordability is actually deteriorating. Most homeowners have fixed-rate mortgages and the majority of them refinanced in recent years to take advantage of ultra-low interest rates, meaning affordability is less of any issue for existing homeowners than it is for would-be owners. You can see the extent of the refi activity in the below chart, which shows Morgan Stanley’s Truly Refinanceable Index, which calculates what proportion of the conforming mortgage universe has an incentive of at least 25 basis points to refi. The index is lower than at any point since at least 2005.“When you consider the record amount of mortgage origination volumes in 2020, the fact that we broke that in 2021 for a new record amount of mortgage originations, most of these homeowners were able to either buy their home or refinanced their mortgage at historically low rates,” Egan explains. “Their affordability is locked in for 30 years. They're not seeing affordability deteriorate. This deterioration is coming for first time home buyers. Prospective home buyers. That’s where this sits.”The lock-in effect That homeowners who were lucky enough to secure lower rates don’t have much reason to sell into an environment of higher mortgage rates and softening prices, helps create a ‘lock-in’ effect as existing homeowners refuse to put their houses on the market. “They’re kind of locked in at their current homes at these lower rates,” Egan says. “So what we think we’re already seeing, what we anticipate continuing to see going forward, is that the inventory, the listings of existing homes available for sale, we have that data going back for single unit homes to the early 1980s, it was never lower than it was in earlier this year.”Housing sales have slowed sharplySo many homeowners staying in place thanks to higher mortgage rates could help put a floor on prices. But it will almost certainly be bad news for realtors as new home sales fall off a cliff. Sales volume is already decreasing at a faster pace than during the global financial crisis thanks to the combination of deteriorating affordability and low supply of new homes hitting the market.“When a home is transacted, it looks at the last time that home was transacted,” Egan says. “And so if we're not going to be selling those homes at lower prices than they were purchased, that’s going to help support home price activity. But on the other side of this, it means that that existing homeowner is also not buying another home after they sell theirs, which we think is going to kind of exacerbate the decrease in sales volumes.”But credit standards have tightenedOf course, when anyone sees a chart like home sales falling at the fastest pace since 2008, they’re likely to wonder whether we’re heading for a rerun of the subprime mortgage bubble that sparked the financial crisis. For Egan, there are a couple of factors which make things different this time around, including a structural shortage of housing in the US. But perhaps the biggest consideration is credit availability.Pre-2008, it seemed like everyone could borrow oodles of money to take out mortgages on multiple properties. But lending standards tightened significantly after the financial crisis, and problematic mortgage products like Option ARMs have all but disappeared from the market. That means that people who own houses now should in theory be able to hold onto them even as economic growth slows.“You just do not have those resets. You don't have a homeowner that's reliant upon the credit availability environment going forward and credit availability it tightened,” Egan says. “We gave up six years worth of easing in the six months after the onset of Covid in March 2020. We’re at the tightest levels we’ve been in in effectively 20 years. And if anything, because of risk weight asset stresses at at large banks, we think the path from here might even be towards tighter lending standards.”Of course, much of that statement depends on the extent to which higher interest rates hit the economy. If things get bad enough and many people lose their jobs, we could see a wave of distressed sellers which could free up inventory and put downward pressure on the market.“Because of the lack of reliance of homeowners on the ability to refinance, we don't think that’s going to force them into defaults and foreclosures,” Egan says. “But that also means that we think that the risk of a dramatic increase to defaults and foreclosures that could, if we think about what could bring home prices down, it's those distressed transactions, those forced sellers.”