I think I nailed this one. Anyway, inflation is now so low that for me, it shouldn't go any lower, because you limit the Fed's ability to spur the economy in case of a slowdown via lowering interest rates. I think the target should be 3%, not 2%, because in the financial crisis in 2008, the Fed ran into trouble because of the zero bound.
Not sure employees ever really had Hand. But I guess this is a trend CAREERS Bosses are back in power — so get used to companies quiet cutting and quiet firing workers this year https://www.businessinsider.com/bosses-quiet-firing-staff-avoid-public-backlash-layoffs-2024-2?amp
I don't know where else to put this, but this is big, given how anti-union the South is. This is also the 2nd plant to do this in the South with a Volkswagen plant. The last few years with unions popping up along with Biden walking a picket line, it ain't the 80s anymore. Breaking: Workers at Mercedes-Benz’s largest plant in the U.S. announced that a majority of their co-workers have signed union cards in support of joining the @UAW. Workers at Mercedes Benz's Alabama plant launched their organizing committee 60 days ago. https://t.co/7lbhgW4zYg— Luis Feliz Leon (@Lfelizleon) February 27, 2024
Yeah. The PCE is now at 2.6% YoY through December. Mid to high 2s is fine. And housing prices are starting to revert a bit. They’ve Q4 2023 to Q4 2024, they’ve clawed back about 36% of the Q4 2019 to Q4 2023 increase. We’ll hopefully continue to see a bit of a YoY reduction for the next couple quarters and mortgage rates drop a bit in response.
Wendy’s is considering surge pricing for its menu. I put it here because Robert Reich has been making the argument that in the US, the majority of recent (I.e., after the initial COVID shocks) has been because companies saw a safe harbor for raising prices and increasing profits. (Thus the currently high flying stock market.) https://www.clickondetroit.com/busi...ium=social&utm_campaign=snd&utm_content=wdiv4 Interesting concept, but if prices don’t go down during slow times, it’s just a back door way to increase profits.
We clearly have to yolk in some of these producers https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/23/hig...llusive-scheme-by-suppliers-group-claims.html
Horrible story on CBS of a new mom in Boston dying after giving birth because the hospital hadn't paid its bills for a medical device to repair a perforated liver. Let's take a look at the CEO who purchased a $40M yacht. Ralph de la Torre Founding Chairman and CEO, Steward Health Care Dr. Ralph de la Torre is the Chairman and CEO of Steward Health Care Systems LLC. Steward Health Care is the largest physician-owned hospital system in the United States, with 39 hospitals and more than 5,500 providers caring for 12.3 million patients a year. The system is the nation’s largest accountable care organization (ACO), whose performance is top ranked in quality and patient experience. Steward accrues $6.5 billion in revenue annually. And: Dr. de la Torre graduated from Duke University in 1988 (B.S.E.), where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi, and from a joint program between Harvard Medical School (M.D.) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.S.) in 1992. https://milkeninstitute.org/events/a0c1u00000cf19buar/speakers/ralph-de-la-torre
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/27/kelloggs-ceo-cereal-for-dinner Kellogg's CEO has some practical advice for people struggling to afford dinner at home.
I read that. I see two themes. 1. Health care is unlike almost everything else else in that there’s not an alternative. It for some reason the jeans industry got all discombobulated and jeans became a luxury good, well, people would just buy slacks and skirts and dresses as substitutes. If you don’t have that coil machine at the hospital, a new mother dies from liver bleeding. 2. Your post personalized it to this one guy and his yacht, but that whole industry is very problematic. In many, many cases, at least the ones that hit the news, private equity doesn’t unlock value for the nation as a whole. In fact, it’s the opposite…they make money for themselves while impoverishing America. I believe in fettered capitalism, so if private equity has some really negative impacts, the answer is to regulate the market and fix it so capitalism works to increase wealth.
This deserves it's own thread. Private equity is the single biggest contributor to the indisputable fact that everything is getting shittier every day.
yes! this is why i am so glad german football fans just fought off a PE investment in the bundesliga why would any fan want that?
Summer of 2003 I worked a claims job before my senior year, inspecting houses in Iowa and Illinois for hail damage. I had to call in to a service and after giving the claim number, dictated my file notes to a machine. Someone would type them into the file! I also had a Polaroid camera I had to staple two pictures on each page, note the claim and description of what was the picture was to mail to home office.
Should be added devotion to the stock market as well. (I'm all for investment, but it's not a religion either). As for PE, hedge funds too. Alden Global Capital is why a lot of news outlets are going under. They own a lot of publications and have been notorious for gutting their outlets. Did I mention that they're 2nd in newspaper ownership?
In a way, the stock market seems less diabolical to me because most large companies are stupid. There was a Freakonomics episode last year that really spooked me. It was about veterinary care in the USA. Some private equity firm would buy all the veterinary clinics in an area to create a monopsony, a monopoly of labor. With control of wages, they control the industry. It goes without saying that the first step is to cut every cost imaginable, starting with wages and ending with paper clips. Once expenses are low enough to break a meagre profit, they can dump the entire portfolio off to one of the lumberingly massive stock-funded companies. This is happening everywhere in every industry. I don't want to sound like my grandpa but, seriously, everything is worse than it used to be. And that's partly because this whole country feels like an immense scheme to extract the last few nickels from the economy.
The kicker before I saw his...ahem...Milken Institute bio was that he was just some corporate douchenozzle laying waste to the Mass medical landscape. But dude was a well-respected heart surgeon.
I still get mad every time I see an 11.5 oz bottle of beer. Exactly. It's everything! Services and products get shittier and shittier so that some private equity firm can extract arbitrage-esque profit from them. It's sickening.
Yep. I found this one on PE One of my favorite NYC restaurants had become understaffed and dirty – a shadow of its former self. I learned an interesting fact: a couple of years ago, a private equity firm had bought the local chain. The same type of firm that had already ruined my beloved neighborhood grocer. The kind that was rapidly taking over vet clinics, dental offices, and gyms on every block – though you wouldn’t know it unless you did some sleuthing. Price hikes, deteriorating conditions, and poor service — along with a certain slickness of marketing — could be signs that ownership of a business you count on has transferred to one or more firms in a rapidly-expanding Wall Street industry. Names like KKR, Carlyle, and Blackstone tend to fly under the radar, but they’re everywhere, making more money, gaining more influence, and some would argue, wreaking more havoc than anything else on Wall Street. ...Financier William Simon got the idea for private equity back in the seventies. Simon, a Nixon administration official and right-winger whose heart’s desire was to free finance and corporations from regulation, left Washington to execute the first “leveraged buyout.” He and a partner bought an old greeting card company on mostly borrowed funds, extracted huge fees, and then sold it for enormous profit in a rising market. People like “junk bond king” Michael Milken took notice and started following the model. In the go-go eighties, the Washington Post noted that “greed and debt” had combined to “create the hottest game on Wall Street today.” Until things went bust. The leveraged buyout industry got a nasty reputation as the “robber barons of the eighties” and retreated. But there was just too much money to be made. The industry went on to rebrand itself as “private equity” and expanded following the 2008 financial crisis into many of the less regulated corners of finance – some previously occupied by the great investment banks. After yet another run of bad press – you might recall when Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital was denounced as a profiteering predator in the 2012 election — the industry started to rebrand itself once again. Today some of the big firms call themselves “global investment businesses” or “alternative asset management businesses.” Ballou warns that whatever you call them, many have become incentivized to do great harm to consumers, workers, and taxpayers– and they’re doing it with the help of lavishly-funded political allies. https://www.ineteconomics.org/persp...ng-america-this-prosecutor-says-we-can-fix-it
PE has just been fought off by a fan revolt in the Bundesliga. The pitch was that they'd put in a stack of money for a share of the future revenues, and this would help the BL compete with the EPL But step back and look from the fan perspective. The league already has more money than ever. How does them getting even more money via a PE cash injection really improve things for the average fan? Why would i care if St Pauli can 'compete' with EPL teams? Why do i want St Pauli to be watched by a global audience? The reality is, they will sign the local players than can get, and the world will spin on it's axis even if we don't have PE money
Not sure if it's the same in Europe, but going to live sporting events is becoming prohibitively expensive. If I go to a Devils game, 3 tickets are minimum $75-100 for upper tier seats. Parking like $35. Food like $60-70. It's gotta be in the $400-500 range. My BIL took my sis, 3 kids & DIL to a game and it had to be like $1000+