Matt, a couple of issues. First and foremost the Gini Coefficient increased every year under Obama. It decreased for the first time in half of forever under Trump. not sustainably, of course. K-shaped stimuli are designed to keep forcing the Gini Coefficient higher.
One reason the large firms benefited was the war on small business successfully undertaken by Obama. The most reliable and successful route to upward socioeconomic mobility has always been entrepreneurial pursuit. Immigrants start new businesses at a much higher rate than the native-born, a reason we want more immigrants. New business formations dropped under Obama, and the five-year survival rate plunged. Dodd-Frank created CFPB, which crippled small business.
Second, your citation about 401(k) accounts is from 2017. From 2020, https://medalerthelp.org/blog/retirement-statistics/ reports that 59% of American workers had access to these accounts, but only 32% took advantage of them. That's a failure in life-skills learning, including basic financial education. This is best done in the nuclear family - which the authoritarian left is trying to destroy.
Third is back to the entrepreneurial pursuit issue: It's hard to open a new business when all the existing small businesses are closed. I am a scientist, and can find no information supporting an assertion that the size of a business is relevant to its ability to spread disease, let alone holding a BLM sign or illegally crossing our southern border. I want more opportunities for black Americans and more immigration; I don't want them built on a foundation of lies, any more than I want public health built on that same foundation.
Each of these is a liberal's view of events, not an alt-right bigot's. The fight is between authoritarians and libertarians.
Historical Gini coefficient data by quarter is available at Bureau of the Census. I assumed that anyone who knew what Gini coefficient was would know to look there. I apologize for overestimating you.
Two of Obama's pet projects led to the first decline in new business startups and a parallel decline in five-year survival rates for new businesses. Dodd-Frank treated all derivative transactions as equally speculative, and imposed fees on them to limit their use and fund corrections. That's a novel reading of economics; invoice factoring is a derivative transaction used almost exclusively by small businesses to replenish working capital. This led to higher costs of capital for small businesses, while large businesses were unaffected. It also caused medical invoice factoring, unique to small startups, to be wiped out.
The other project was the Consumer Financial Protection Board, which ruled that any business charging interest on overdue accounts was defined as a financial services business, subject to the same regulations and reporting requirements as Goldman Sachs. The result was predictable. Large nationwide companies snapped up local small businesses in the lawn care segment for pennies on the dollar. Consolidation across multiple industries typically run by small businesses had to occur to defend the owners from government. One such business suffered a triple whammy, the solo practitioner physician. The ACA, Dodd-Frank and the CFPB combined to do away with them, so that today the decision-maker is many levels removed from the physician-patient relationship. I'm simply not smart enough to know why that's supposed to be a good thing.
I'm puzzled about Trump's role in shuttering Main Street. I recall that onerous lockdowns of dubious constitutionality were imposed by state Governors, primarily in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, Washington, Oregon and California. Florida allowed most small businesses to stay open, as did Texas, Tennessee, West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky and several other states. How any of that is Trump's responsibility needs to be explained to me.
Small businesses were able to apply for loans under the Paycheck Protection Program, which saved many small businesses. Large businesses were not eligible for those loans, although the Los Angeles Lakers took a PPP loan for reasons unknown. They were shamed into returning the money. President Trump and the Senate both begged the House of Representatives to provide additional funds to the successful PPP, but the Speaker said she wanted to wait until we had a new President. Fortunately, all the small business owners were able to subsist from August 2020 through March 2021 on their massive stores of designer ice cream.
I assume you lived in the US through the pandemic, as did I, and had access to a variety of news sources. Your discussion of small businesses reflects a likely consumption of news only from sources that fed into your echo chamber. A brain is a terrible thing to prostitute.
Please spell out what is pretty telling. Yes, Matt did not mention BLM and black-owned businesses. He also did not mention CFPB, ACA or Dodd-Frank, nor the burdens imposed on small businesses. Are you claiming authority to tell me what I can and cannot discuss in response to the article? If so, I'm not sure how you stumbled into Substack.
Dodd-Frank made it de facto illegal to compete with existing megabanks. Prior to DF there were an average of 100 new banks started every year; since DF, there has been one (1). How you concluded that DF was all about supporting small banks is a mystery.
May I suggest you read the Constitution and its amendments? No President can micromanage individual state actions. We have to leave it to the voters to elect governors and other state officials who will serve the interests of the people. Otherwise, the voters get the government they deserve.
Banks made off with $10B in fees? How awful! They should have done the work for free, paying the cost of administering a massive loan program, just like landlords must pay the cost of nonpayment of rent.
You're right about the partisan bit. I was inspired by JFK to become a liberal Democrat in 1960; in 2009 I was inspired by Nancy Pelosi to become a liberal independent. I didn't leave the Democratic Party, it left me when it turned into a massive criminal conspiracy. I've never been a Republican; I do criticize Democrats and will probably do so until I die or Democrats turn away from authoritarian rule. My money's on dying first.
If you expect me to continue engaging with you, stop the ad hominem attacks. You did say DF tried to help small banks with exemptions; on balance it destroyed them.
There are >30M small businesses with more than 60M employees. Immigrants start 25% of all new businesses. Ergo, we need more entrepreneurial immigrants.
According to https://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/news/economy/us-startups-near-40-year-low/index.html, "during Obama's fifth year in office only 452,835 firms were born in 2014, according to the most recent U.S. Census data released in the past week. That's well below the 500,000 to 600,000 new companies that were started in the U.S. every year from the late 1970s to the mid- 2000s."
According to https://www.smallbizgenius.net/by-the-numbers/small-business-statistics/, by 2020 that had reached an average of 534,000 startups PER MONTH. I agree that more money needed to be made available to small businesses. You may recall that the Speaker of the House admitted she held up any relief for seven months until we had a new president.
Small business lockdowns were all at the state level, Trump didn't shutter a single business. Yes, almost half of small businesses died in 2020; some cooperation from the House might have been a good thing. Small businesses generally do not contribute large sums of money to Democrats; large businesses do. In Michigan, marijuana shops were allowed to be open (marijuana sellers and growers backed Governor Whitmer) but gardening and agricultural shops, which more often contribute to Republicans, were ordered closed. In California, movie studios were allowed to set up outdoor dining filming sets in the same parking lot used by small restaurants, which were refused permission to set up outdoor dining because of the pandemic. Guess which group backed Gavin Newsome?
Micromanaging society is an urge difficult for an authoritarian to resist. When given the opportunity, they reward their supporters and punish their opponents. "Follow the science" my ass. The worst thing to do with a respiratory virus is to lock people indoors. Sunlight damages viruses and breezes disperse virus particles, reducing viral load from exposure. I haven't practiced medicine in more than thirty years, but we knew during World War I about the need to put people outdoors
There's a saying that generals always fight the last war. I can see the same idiom applied to economists.
I have to side with Summers. If anything, most people I've talked to agree that significant inflation is likely coming. It's happened before and why shouldn't it happen again? Record low interest rates + massive stimulus spending all point to one thing = massive inflation in the value of assets (which for most people would be housing and funds).
And who gets screwed when the cost of assets soars? Not the asset owners, who get richer on paper are are protected against inflation by owning assets. But the working people who don't own but must rent, and don't have 401ks or investments. In other words, the working classes are going to get screwed. Again.
Doubtful. We’ve had very little meaningful inflation in decades, despite consistent policies of low or non-existent interest rates + deficit spending. That you agree with people you talk to isn’t really a factor. And siding with Summers is always an express train to being wrong.
"siding with Summers is always an express train to being wrong."
Yet he keeps getting jobs.
Maybe being an economics mental wizard is its own reward. "Right" and "wrong," "correct" and "incorrect," "proven" and "unproven"... these are concepts for the little people.
So you don’t consider the gini coefficient explosion due to stock market appreciation (driven mostly by the fed) and housing/rent price increases to be meaningful inflation? It seems to me that the neoliberals push this inflation isn’t real line as a way to hide their blatantly obvious creation of the current stock and housing bubble at our expense and in the interest of their buddies. The conservatives push it as trickle down. Bush, Obama, and Trump all did it and now Biden will continue. The leftists agree because they want central planning to work this time once the right people are in power.
It’s also important to note the effects of improvements in production technology, massive government subsidies to business, increased automation, and overseas slave labor in producing food and consumer goods have all been required to hold the inflation to only the asset classes of the 1% and not wages and consumer goods as well.
How did we reach here? At this place where almost every measurement is a speculative instrument or a derivative that has nothing to do with the underlying reality. Valuations have nothing to do with economy, recovery shaped in different letters has nothing to do with the well-being of people, a pandemic has nothing to do with actual medical science and an election that has nothing to do with real choices of the voters.
This past year I have been grappling with these new realities even as I stay put at home doing nothing. TK is one substack where I have found some solace. Yet 2020 as an year had remained an enigma to me until I found this rational, precise and rather long explanation of 2020 like nowhere else.
It is a bit of a long read, but I really thought it opened my eyes to newer realities and therefore took the liberty to share it here in the TK community.
This is the unintended result of the Dual Mandate. In the 1970s, the government insisted that the Fed not only protect against inflation, but that they also keep the unemployment rate low. This specious economic idea sounded like the perfect way to help the rich (by keeping inflation low, thus protecting financial assets) while helping the working class.
In practice, it meant that the Fed must keep the pedal to the metal as long as inflation (as measured by the PCE Index) is behaving. But what happens if the inflation is not in goods and services, but in financial assets instead? What if we don't have "too much money chasing too few goods," but "too much money chasing too few assets?" And every time the unemployment rate ticks up, the remedy is to cut rates and goose asset prices?
The humungous increase in inequality pretty much stems from asset price increases, when the late 1970s and early 1980s turned into the mother of all bull markets in stocks, bonds, and real estate.
This increase in inequality is due to the unintended consequences of a well-meaning, but ultimately flawed law which had the effect of turning the central bank into the biggest central planner on Earth. The US now controls interest rates the way the Volograd Tractor Factory set its quotas: by a bunch of bureaucrats sitting in a room.
Yes, I was going to say something along what Brent has said. The 'net worth' divergence is baked into the public policy of inflation, which will always (now) favor the value of assets over earnings.
Part of the solution might be to create better earning opportunities in this country - by re-shoring jobs, work apprentice programs, modernized collective bargaining, etc. I don't think too many people care that someone makes more than them, or that society has 'winners'; they just want to be moving upwards too.
The stock market is a market just like that for any product such as eggs. If there is an increase in demand for either and the supply is essentially unchanged, the price is going to go up. Thus the fuel supplied by the Fed, with money growth greater than the growth in products and services is going to, all else being equal, drive up the price of them as well as the stock market, real estate, collectibles.
Sadly, whoever is closest to the Fed money printing spigot benefits the most. Everyone else will suffer a terrible inflation as the wealth gap widens.
Matt, I’m a huge fan of Hate Inc. and your recent coverage of WallStreetBets taking on the Hedge Funds. Have you considered covering the new reddit grassroots effort to take on the Bullion Banks (JPMorgan, Scotia, etc) who suppress the price of silver and gold? The r/WallstreetSilver group has grown from zero to 37K members in a month, and made the news when they bought out all available retail silver coins/bars in a few days. This David vs. Goliath story seems right up your alley.
In this recent interview, Vampire Squid’s Jeff Currie claims the silver ETFs short the silver price as a hedge. How would that be ethical or legal for the ETFs to short silver when the ETF shareholders are long silver?
…while the CFTC turns a blind eye to the bullion banks dumping tons of paper silver contracts during overnight thinly traded hours to drop the price of silver. If you want to get the best price for your asset, you don’t dump large amounts during low volume trading hours.
If this story interests you, please reach out to the mods on Reddit:
You can also reach out to Chris Marcus of Arcadia Economics who wrote the book "The Big Silver Short". He's a very smart and entertaining guy, and is an expert on the silver price manipulation.
Can't figure out how to get help on Substack. Am a Matt T subscriber. Logged in. Don't get full article. Re-logged in (just in case), still can't see full article. Any suggestions? Thanks!
What happens is there are two articles posted, one for subscribers and one for the public. Go to the main page and refresh. You'll see them both. It's usually the oldest one, which is usually the one with vastly more comments.
Matt, you might want to periodically let people know about this, and also how a person can collapse comments by clicking the vertical bars. There seems to be frequent confusion/frustration about those two items.
Though the focus here is the disparity in wealth accumulation and government policy that has the effect of inflating the asset values of the well to do, the average income has increased rather dramatically over the last several years, at least prior to the epidemic.
Matt, a couple of issues. First and foremost the Gini Coefficient increased every year under Obama. It decreased for the first time in half of forever under Trump. not sustainably, of course. K-shaped stimuli are designed to keep forcing the Gini Coefficient higher.
One reason the large firms benefited was the war on small business successfully undertaken by Obama. The most reliable and successful route to upward socioeconomic mobility has always been entrepreneurial pursuit. Immigrants start new businesses at a much higher rate than the native-born, a reason we want more immigrants. New business formations dropped under Obama, and the five-year survival rate plunged. Dodd-Frank created CFPB, which crippled small business.
Second, your citation about 401(k) accounts is from 2017. From 2020, https://medalerthelp.org/blog/retirement-statistics/ reports that 59% of American workers had access to these accounts, but only 32% took advantage of them. That's a failure in life-skills learning, including basic financial education. This is best done in the nuclear family - which the authoritarian left is trying to destroy.
Third is back to the entrepreneurial pursuit issue: It's hard to open a new business when all the existing small businesses are closed. I am a scientist, and can find no information supporting an assertion that the size of a business is relevant to its ability to spread disease, let alone holding a BLM sign or illegally crossing our southern border. I want more opportunities for black Americans and more immigration; I don't want them built on a foundation of lies, any more than I want public health built on that same foundation.
Each of these is a liberal's view of events, not an alt-right bigot's. The fight is between authoritarians and libertarians.
Historical Gini coefficient data by quarter is available at Bureau of the Census. I assumed that anyone who knew what Gini coefficient was would know to look there. I apologize for overestimating you.
Two of Obama's pet projects led to the first decline in new business startups and a parallel decline in five-year survival rates for new businesses. Dodd-Frank treated all derivative transactions as equally speculative, and imposed fees on them to limit their use and fund corrections. That's a novel reading of economics; invoice factoring is a derivative transaction used almost exclusively by small businesses to replenish working capital. This led to higher costs of capital for small businesses, while large businesses were unaffected. It also caused medical invoice factoring, unique to small startups, to be wiped out.
The other project was the Consumer Financial Protection Board, which ruled that any business charging interest on overdue accounts was defined as a financial services business, subject to the same regulations and reporting requirements as Goldman Sachs. The result was predictable. Large nationwide companies snapped up local small businesses in the lawn care segment for pennies on the dollar. Consolidation across multiple industries typically run by small businesses had to occur to defend the owners from government. One such business suffered a triple whammy, the solo practitioner physician. The ACA, Dodd-Frank and the CFPB combined to do away with them, so that today the decision-maker is many levels removed from the physician-patient relationship. I'm simply not smart enough to know why that's supposed to be a good thing.
I'm puzzled about Trump's role in shuttering Main Street. I recall that onerous lockdowns of dubious constitutionality were imposed by state Governors, primarily in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, Washington, Oregon and California. Florida allowed most small businesses to stay open, as did Texas, Tennessee, West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky and several other states. How any of that is Trump's responsibility needs to be explained to me.
Small businesses were able to apply for loans under the Paycheck Protection Program, which saved many small businesses. Large businesses were not eligible for those loans, although the Los Angeles Lakers took a PPP loan for reasons unknown. They were shamed into returning the money. President Trump and the Senate both begged the House of Representatives to provide additional funds to the successful PPP, but the Speaker said she wanted to wait until we had a new President. Fortunately, all the small business owners were able to subsist from August 2020 through March 2021 on their massive stores of designer ice cream.
I assume you lived in the US through the pandemic, as did I, and had access to a variety of news sources. Your discussion of small businesses reflects a likely consumption of news only from sources that fed into your echo chamber. A brain is a terrible thing to prostitute.
Please spell out what is pretty telling. Yes, Matt did not mention BLM and black-owned businesses. He also did not mention CFPB, ACA or Dodd-Frank, nor the burdens imposed on small businesses. Are you claiming authority to tell me what I can and cannot discuss in response to the article? If so, I'm not sure how you stumbled into Substack.
Dodd-Frank made it de facto illegal to compete with existing megabanks. Prior to DF there were an average of 100 new banks started every year; since DF, there has been one (1). How you concluded that DF was all about supporting small banks is a mystery.
May I suggest you read the Constitution and its amendments? No President can micromanage individual state actions. We have to leave it to the voters to elect governors and other state officials who will serve the interests of the people. Otherwise, the voters get the government they deserve.
Banks made off with $10B in fees? How awful! They should have done the work for free, paying the cost of administering a massive loan program, just like landlords must pay the cost of nonpayment of rent.
You're right about the partisan bit. I was inspired by JFK to become a liberal Democrat in 1960; in 2009 I was inspired by Nancy Pelosi to become a liberal independent. I didn't leave the Democratic Party, it left me when it turned into a massive criminal conspiracy. I've never been a Republican; I do criticize Democrats and will probably do so until I die or Democrats turn away from authoritarian rule. My money's on dying first.
If you expect me to continue engaging with you, stop the ad hominem attacks. You did say DF tried to help small banks with exemptions; on balance it destroyed them.
From https://fortunly.com/statistics/small-business-statistics/#:~:text=Small%20Business%20Stats%20%E2%80%93%20Editor%E2%80%99s%20Choice%201%20According,started%20with%20less%20than%20$5,000%20More%20items...
There are >30M small businesses with more than 60M employees. Immigrants start 25% of all new businesses. Ergo, we need more entrepreneurial immigrants.
According to https://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/news/economy/us-startups-near-40-year-low/index.html, "during Obama's fifth year in office only 452,835 firms were born in 2014, according to the most recent U.S. Census data released in the past week. That's well below the 500,000 to 600,000 new companies that were started in the U.S. every year from the late 1970s to the mid- 2000s."
According to https://www.smallbizgenius.net/by-the-numbers/small-business-statistics/, by 2020 that had reached an average of 534,000 startups PER MONTH. I agree that more money needed to be made available to small businesses. You may recall that the Speaker of the House admitted she held up any relief for seven months until we had a new president.
Small business lockdowns were all at the state level, Trump didn't shutter a single business. Yes, almost half of small businesses died in 2020; some cooperation from the House might have been a good thing. Small businesses generally do not contribute large sums of money to Democrats; large businesses do. In Michigan, marijuana shops were allowed to be open (marijuana sellers and growers backed Governor Whitmer) but gardening and agricultural shops, which more often contribute to Republicans, were ordered closed. In California, movie studios were allowed to set up outdoor dining filming sets in the same parking lot used by small restaurants, which were refused permission to set up outdoor dining because of the pandemic. Guess which group backed Gavin Newsome?
Micromanaging society is an urge difficult for an authoritarian to resist. When given the opportunity, they reward their supporters and punish their opponents. "Follow the science" my ass. The worst thing to do with a respiratory virus is to lock people indoors. Sunlight damages viruses and breezes disperse virus particles, reducing viral load from exposure. I haven't practiced medicine in more than thirty years, but we knew during World War I about the need to put people outdoors
There's a saying that generals always fight the last war. I can see the same idiom applied to economists.
I have to side with Summers. If anything, most people I've talked to agree that significant inflation is likely coming. It's happened before and why shouldn't it happen again? Record low interest rates + massive stimulus spending all point to one thing = massive inflation in the value of assets (which for most people would be housing and funds).
And who gets screwed when the cost of assets soars? Not the asset owners, who get richer on paper are are protected against inflation by owning assets. But the working people who don't own but must rent, and don't have 401ks or investments. In other words, the working classes are going to get screwed. Again.
Doubtful. We’ve had very little meaningful inflation in decades, despite consistent policies of low or non-existent interest rates + deficit spending. That you agree with people you talk to isn’t really a factor. And siding with Summers is always an express train to being wrong.
"siding with Summers is always an express train to being wrong."
Yet he keeps getting jobs.
Maybe being an economics mental wizard is its own reward. "Right" and "wrong," "correct" and "incorrect," "proven" and "unproven"... these are concepts for the little people.
As the great Ken Galbraith once said: “Economics is extremely useful . . .as a form of employment for economists.”
As the great David Graeber once wrote: "Bullshit Jobs"
So you don’t consider the gini coefficient explosion due to stock market appreciation (driven mostly by the fed) and housing/rent price increases to be meaningful inflation? It seems to me that the neoliberals push this inflation isn’t real line as a way to hide their blatantly obvious creation of the current stock and housing bubble at our expense and in the interest of their buddies. The conservatives push it as trickle down. Bush, Obama, and Trump all did it and now Biden will continue. The leftists agree because they want central planning to work this time once the right people are in power.
It’s also important to note the effects of improvements in production technology, massive government subsidies to business, increased automation, and overseas slave labor in producing food and consumer goods have all been required to hold the inflation to only the asset classes of the 1% and not wages and consumer goods as well.
How did we reach here? At this place where almost every measurement is a speculative instrument or a derivative that has nothing to do with the underlying reality. Valuations have nothing to do with economy, recovery shaped in different letters has nothing to do with the well-being of people, a pandemic has nothing to do with actual medical science and an election that has nothing to do with real choices of the voters.
This past year I have been grappling with these new realities even as I stay put at home doing nothing. TK is one substack where I have found some solace. Yet 2020 as an year had remained an enigma to me until I found this rational, precise and rather long explanation of 2020 like nowhere else.
https://5forty3.substack.com/p/2020-explained
It is a bit of a long read, but I really thought it opened my eyes to newer realities and therefore took the liberty to share it here in the TK community.
I just subscribed to the Indian substack column. It is priceless.
Thank you so much for sharing. I will set aside the time to read it and hopefully it wii shed some light on what just unfolded
This is the unintended result of the Dual Mandate. In the 1970s, the government insisted that the Fed not only protect against inflation, but that they also keep the unemployment rate low. This specious economic idea sounded like the perfect way to help the rich (by keeping inflation low, thus protecting financial assets) while helping the working class.
In practice, it meant that the Fed must keep the pedal to the metal as long as inflation (as measured by the PCE Index) is behaving. But what happens if the inflation is not in goods and services, but in financial assets instead? What if we don't have "too much money chasing too few goods," but "too much money chasing too few assets?" And every time the unemployment rate ticks up, the remedy is to cut rates and goose asset prices?
The humungous increase in inequality pretty much stems from asset price increases, when the late 1970s and early 1980s turned into the mother of all bull markets in stocks, bonds, and real estate.
This increase in inequality is due to the unintended consequences of a well-meaning, but ultimately flawed law which had the effect of turning the central bank into the biggest central planner on Earth. The US now controls interest rates the way the Volograd Tractor Factory set its quotas: by a bunch of bureaucrats sitting in a room.
Yes, I was going to say something along what Brent has said. The 'net worth' divergence is baked into the public policy of inflation, which will always (now) favor the value of assets over earnings.
Part of the solution might be to create better earning opportunities in this country - by re-shoring jobs, work apprentice programs, modernized collective bargaining, etc. I don't think too many people care that someone makes more than them, or that society has 'winners'; they just want to be moving upwards too.
"they just want to be moving upwards too."
I think they just want to not be sinking, but I possibly move in a different crowd.
The stock market is a market just like that for any product such as eggs. If there is an increase in demand for either and the supply is essentially unchanged, the price is going to go up. Thus the fuel supplied by the Fed, with money growth greater than the growth in products and services is going to, all else being equal, drive up the price of them as well as the stock market, real estate, collectibles.
Sadly, whoever is closest to the Fed money printing spigot benefits the most. Everyone else will suffer a terrible inflation as the wealth gap widens.
Matt, I’m a huge fan of Hate Inc. and your recent coverage of WallStreetBets taking on the Hedge Funds. Have you considered covering the new reddit grassroots effort to take on the Bullion Banks (JPMorgan, Scotia, etc) who suppress the price of silver and gold? The r/WallstreetSilver group has grown from zero to 37K members in a month, and made the news when they bought out all available retail silver coins/bars in a few days. This David vs. Goliath story seems right up your alley.
In this recent interview, Vampire Squid’s Jeff Currie claims the silver ETFs short the silver price as a hedge. How would that be ethical or legal for the ETFs to short silver when the ETF shareholders are long silver?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=81&v=ESxpDsUmQRE&feature=youtu.be
Note that the bullion banks are participants and custodians of the largest ETFs, which seems a conflict of interest.
Also note how Bloomberg and CFTC make it sound like Redditors are bad guys for attempting the #silversqueeze…
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/health-law-and-business/spike-in-silver-prices-has-similarities-to-gamestop-trading-regulators-on-alert
…while the CFTC turns a blind eye to the bullion banks dumping tons of paper silver contracts during overnight thinly traded hours to drop the price of silver. If you want to get the best price for your asset, you don’t dump large amounts during low volume trading hours.
If this story interests you, please reach out to the mods on Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Wallstreetsilver/
You can also reach out to Chris Marcus of Arcadia Economics who wrote the book "The Big Silver Short". He's a very smart and entertaining guy, and is an expert on the silver price manipulation.
This link is to an excellent NPR analysis of the lack of success of wealth taxes in Europe.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/26/698057356/if-a-wealth-tax-is-such-a-good-idea-why-did-europe-kill-theirs?fbclid=IwAR0jAHYVfJ5dMgLdMon6doQ2RusCoCBydeCyvuP1iPp1GP4X3nXq1m7L7L4&sc=tw
Lions...I see what you did there.
Can't figure out how to get help on Substack. Am a Matt T subscriber. Logged in. Don't get full article. Re-logged in (just in case), still can't see full article. Any suggestions? Thanks!
I am having the same problem
Me too. I set up a yearly subscription only 5-6 weeks ago, so it's not (or at least shouldn't be) a subscription issue.
What happens is there are two articles posted, one for subscribers and one for the public. Go to the main page and refresh. You'll see them both. It's usually the oldest one, which is usually the one with vastly more comments.
Matt, you might want to periodically let people know about this, and also how a person can collapse comments by clicking the vertical bars. There seems to be frequent confusion/frustration about those two items.
I had the same problem a few days ago, it's cleared up now. This was right around my renewal date, maybe it has something to do with that?
Though the focus here is the disparity in wealth accumulation and government policy that has the effect of inflating the asset values of the well to do, the average income has increased rather dramatically over the last several years, at least prior to the epidemic.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/200838/median-household-income-in-the-united-states/