"Money is not as important to our organization as knowing who to trust."
- Mr. White in Casino Royale
Posted on 02/08/2008 9:22:07 PM PST by TigerLikesRooster
You’re right, things are still good in Tennessee and the Carolinas. That’s because the retirees with cash are moving in. Other areas are not in good shape.
.....That’s because the retirees with cash are moving in....
We are also getting famalies coming up from Florida, but the main reason is that we have a strong industrial economy that has global reach.
Tennesse exports are booming.
Very good, thanks.
Oy Vey !
Scrambling this AM for time , will read later.......Thanks !
Stay safe !
third, US households - whose consumption is over 70% of GDP - have spent well beyond their means for years now piling up a massive amount of debt, both mortgage and otherwise;But this misunderstands the point. A society cannot live beyond its means. A society cannot produce what it does not consume and cannot consume what it does not produce. I will grant the nasty problem of imports paid for with credit dollars, but that is a side issue.
The fundamental issue is that the economy has been driven not by earned dollars in peoples pockets purchasing the produced goods. Unfortunately, through the federal reserve's policy of massive expansion of credit, credit dollars have driven out earned cash dollars in the economy. This the innevitable result of massive expansions of credit. That consumers end up with lots of debt is the direct and deliberate result of a federal reserve policy of credit expansion. They go together. One cannot happen without the other.
Cui bono?The banks (investment and merchant, though there is now no large distinction) who earn the interest on the loans that were created and created for the benefit of the banking system, who make money by borrowing short at low interest rates and lending long at high interest rates.
The problem is far worse than alleged because the federal reserve has been finincing an enormous structural problem that makes easy resolution impossible. In a closed economy, without foreign production in exchange for federal reserve computer bits, an economy where lawyers, regulators, organizers and middlemen (bankers and anyone else taking a fee for passing along newly minted FR moola) receivse the lion share of newly minted money, i.e. what passes for wealth in our society.
An IRS taxcode PhD's and tax attorneys cannot understand, a federal bureacracy that thinks it can meet out educational tax benefits to the church of scientology, states that mandate harmful gasoline additives at great expense and then change their mind and mandate other additives at great expense, a legal system where the smallest issue can take 5-10 years to resolve and where they attorneys fees outweigh by many times the actual value of the issues in question, a health care system where the doctors are just cogs in the wheel, that consumes 1 in 7 dollars in the economy, and it still is way short of "what is needed," the list is endless.
The Federal reserve enabled a system of perverse incentives that makes voluntary transactions prohibitively expensive or illegal. This has happened over the course of many decades. Returning ourselves to a productive economy where what you earn is related to what a consumer will pay for your labor will take massive structural adjustements.
Fiddling the interest rate and helping out the banks won't begin to fix this problem. In fact, part of the problem is that the banks have gotten fat on their own uneconomic behavior, as system of very high fees and transaction costs for services a lot of people didn't want in the first place. People living at the margin did not intentionally run up credit card debts. What they did was bought food, paid taxes, bought a car to get to work, etc. etc. and the federal reserve created a system where to pay for "life's necessities" you had to augment your salary with credit card debt.
I didn't ask for the value of my real estate to go up by a factor of 3 (on paper). The federal reserve did that through its printing of cheap credit loans. I benefit little except from the point of view that I could sell at a profit an move someplace I don't have a job and buy a cheaper house. The city of DC benefitted enormously because they peg my property taxes to the federal reserves largesse.
Like toddster always says-- We are an importing superpower. That's how we run 750 billion dollar trade deficits while a similarly industrialized country, Germany, runs trade surpluses of ~180 billion dollars per year. Prolly more now since U$D has sunk versus the Euro
I'm curious. What does Tennessee export abroad besides country music? Is it auto parts made by Jap owned companies in Tennessee?
But that's fine because there is plenty of serious economic discussion going on elsewhere.
“Besides, he’s going to tell us what to do in the next installment!”
I read the next installment, and it’s just more of the same. You can read it too if you register for his website.
What to do:
Cut your expenses to the bone.
Buy ammunition, dried food, gold, and tbills.
We have a very large chemical company that exports cigarette filter tow and plastics all over the world. They maintain a very large container pool. They have very very large sales to China
We have a GE world distribution center that exports many product lines but especially transformers and circuit breakers. We have a bearing distribution center that distributes the products of several bearing manufacturers throughout the Western hemisphere.
We have very good banks with international trade expertise.
we have a company that manufactures bladders used in tire manufacture. We have the primary offices and plants of the largest flat glass manufacturer in the country.
These are but the tip of the industrial export iceberg.Tennessee exporters are all over. I call on many and business is very good.
Out west, the port of Memphis moves lots of cotton and other ag products. Fedex is a large international player and is in Memphis.
In days gone by, my small company existed for 20 years fabricating and exporting architectural products to Saudi Arabia and US government projects out of the country. I was able to do so largely because of the strong export and banking community locally.
You’re right about families coming up from Florida. They’re called “half-backs” because they moved to Florida, didn’t like it for whatever reason, and moved back north to the Carolinas, Tennessee, Georgia.
Before we can speculate on the dynamics of an economic system we need to know that we have a dynamic economic system and know something about the actual characteristics of that system beyond what some scare articles in the blogosphere tell us.
Those who do not read books (e.g. most of the population of the U.S.) or attempt to review and understand history are doomed to live through depressing times over again . . .
“It all boils down to trust....”
And hence the generation that granted us Clinton, Enron, and now this mess should be VERY afraid of this...
http://samvak.tripod.com/nm104.html
"Money is not as important to our organization as knowing who to trust."
- Mr. White in Casino Royale
Giddyup.
Tennessee exports a lot to foreign markets but it imports more even a lot more
neighborhood of $900 million. To put the size and importance of this flow of trade in perspective, if international trade were to be considered as its own economic sector, it would rate as seventh largest of the state's twenty major industries based on value of shipments.
The range of the products being shipped through these ports is vast. Automobile parts, aircraft parts, computer and office machinery parts, and apparel are some of the leading products moving through the state's international gateways, but products from 184 different SITC industry codes were exported from Memphis alone over the last year.
http://www.mtsu.edu/~berc/global/oldissues/fall96/p1.html
My concern is the rest of the world deciding who NOT to trust..!!!
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