Investing

[gehringer_2]

23 minutes ago, oblong said:

.Ford announced that hike 8 days ago and only applies to anyone who has yet to place an order or reservation.   Tesla increased their prices a few months ago. 

the have been a lot of stories in the MSM recently about how terrible it is that such a large % of the EV's are going to go to the upper class people who have the money to be 'early adopters.'  Who TF cares? Your economic situation won't be any worse if you still drive an IC car 10 yrs after your your radiologist got his EV. As long as the manufacturers are selling as many as they can build the CO2 impact is the same. If they make more money doing it, they will be able to build more sooner. Few things the Americans media is dumber about than economics.

Edited August 16, 2022 by gehringer_2

[Deleterious]

42 minutes ago, Hongbit said:

My gut tells me they don’t have enough batteries to meet demand so they are  purposely stepping on the price to slow down the pace of orders.  

They had already announced how many they planned to make the first year. 

They simply took advantage of the tax credit.  

[oblong]

27 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

the have been a lot of stories in the MSM recently about how terrible it is that such a large % of the EV's are going to go to the upper class people who have the money to be 'early adopters.'  Who TF cares? Your economic situation won't be any worse if you still drive an IC car 10 yrs after your your radiologist got his EV. As long as the manufacturers are selling as many as they can build the CO2 impact is the same. If they make more money doing it, they will be able to build more sooner. Few things the Americans media is dumber about than economics.

Upper class people were early adopters or automobiles!   They’re typically early adopters of everything arent they?  We didn’t have a microwave until 1990.  Mom still doesn’t have a dishwasher.  

[Deleterious]

[CMRivdogs]

After bilking investors out of more than $700 mil with WeWork...guess who's back ready to do it again?

https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/15/tech/adam-neumann-flow/index.html

Quote

Nearly three years after Adam Neumann stepped down as CEO of WeWork following a failed attempt to take the company public, he is said to once again be in charge of a billion-dollar real estate startup.

Andreessen Horowitz, the prominent venture capital firm known for its early investments in Twitter and Airbnb, has pumped about $350 million into Neumann's newest venture, called Flow, according to The New York Times, citing unnamed sources briefed on the deal. The investment valued the startup at more than $1 billion, according to the report. 

Representatives for Flow and Andreessen Horowitz did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

 

[oblong]

I think we discussed gas prices in here before, if not my apologies.  I keep seeing stories about them going down by my stations dipped to 3.89 a few weeks ago but went back to 3.99 recently and stayed there.  However I did get gas in Flint on Sunday for $3.63.  Quite a few in that area that we passed by in that range.

 

[Deleterious]

Saw it for $3.68 in BC.

[Deleterious]

Stock is down 5% today.

Ex-Twitter security head claims company misled regulators on bot accounts

[gehringer_2]

1 hour ago, Deleterious said:

Stock is down 5% today.

Ex-Twitter security head claims company misled regulators on bot accounts

should be interesting.

I suppose every engineer whose management shoots down part of what he proposes can make a pretty similar set of complaints about the company putting profits first, but that's what companies do. Management in general has some rights around deciding how much risk they are willing to accept in their operations, at least when it's not a matter of people's personal safety. Whether Twitter's claims rose to the level of investment advice fraud is the kind of thing that can end up as a he said/she said. How much security constitutes 'good' security may not have obvious bright lines.

Still in all, this news probably makes Elon a happy camper.

[Deleterious]

I forgot Tesla split 3-1 today.  Bit of a shock when the spreadsheet auto updated.  

[gehringer_2]

Reuters data summary

• Second-quarter GDP contraction revised to 0.6% from 0.9%
• Gross domestic income rises at 1.4% rate in Q2
• Average of GDP and GDI climbs at 0.4% pace
• Weekly jobless claims drop 2,000 to 243,000

Recession? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[gehringer_2]

Market taking a beating based on Powell's hard stance on anti-inflation in his comment today. S&P down 2.5% and haven't hit much support yet.

[Screwball]

 

[oblong]

I don’t understand any of this.  Last month I seem to recall the market doing well because “investors” liked Powell saying he was going to raise rates.  Now they don’t.  The paradox that inflation is bad so when trying to curb inflation then that’s bad too.  What is the solution?  Is the thought that raising rates won’t help inflation?  What would “investors” like us to do?   What would happen if everyone just chilled out and quit buying and selling for awhile?  Just sit on your shit and be content for the time being.   I guess I don’t have that gene where I think and worry about money all the time.  I’m fortunate that I don’t have to I guess.  I’m not rich but I don’t want for anything. I just don’t sweat the small stuff. I have my investments and I let them do all the work. That’s what they get paid for. 

[gehringer_2]

24 minutes ago, Screwball said:

 

LOL. really.

But I also think there is a little 'chicken little' effect going on - and maybe on purpose. I listened to it and if I hadn't read how much reaction there had been already, I would have thought what he said was pretty stock stuff.  But aside from that,  he also made a point of noting the long term expectation polling data. So that gives you a clue that there may also a psyops component to it all. The Fed believes that the more aggressive he can make people believe the Fed will be, the less aggressive the Fed may actually have to be. 

Bottom line, if I recall he more or less said to look for them to get to 4%. That shouldn't be the end of the world. US economy did pretty well in the post WWII era with interest rates in the 4-5% range. My personal view would be that when all the stress from Ukraine and Covid fade to the back burner, the population will still be getting older and so aggregate demand will still be slack and rates will end up floating back down.

Edited August 27, 2022 by gehringer_2

[gehringer_2]

1 hour ago, oblong said:

Last month I seem to recall the market doing well because “investors” liked Powell saying he was going to raise rates.  Now they don’t.

and the 'bloodbath' yesterday only took the market 'back' to where it was that same month ago. 

[oblong]

13 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

and the 'bloodbath' yesterday only took the market 'back' to where it was that same month ago. 

Is too much information being a available a bad thing?  The instantaneous action and reaction makes us thing something is there that isn’t there. All these yahoos with their apps reading stuff.  It’s like being in a fantasy league where you can trade players by the minute instead of weekly.  

[gehringer_2]

Funny thing is, I'm beginning to think the whole exercise is based on a fallacy. I've worked on capital project proposals for multiple large corporations, and you learn that high interest rates slow the economy because they kill capital expenditures because ROI must be higher than interest rates to borrow expansion money profitably. Thus as interest rates rise, fewer and fewer potential projects can clear the bar.

Except that in all my years of doing those ROI calcs under multiple different corporate calculation guidelines, I yet to have ever been able to include the year by year inflation in the value of the product in the calcs. Maybe somewhere they do it, but if so I haven't seen it. So I'm beginning to wonder if the premise by which raising interest rates slows capital spending may not be mostly be due to a shared culture of poor accounting models. If you capture the projected inflationary increase in the value of your project outputs into the ROI calc, your projects would suddenly be a lot less sensitive to interest rates and they would thus have a lot less impact on capital spending.

IMO Society has not given the problem of poor accounting models nearly enough attention. All the vexing social problems around the human cost of capitalism, pollution, climate change, could have come out differently if we simply ever had accounting systems that properly modeled those costs.

Edited August 27, 2022 by gehringer_2

[oblong]

So we can stop building things when we have empty things sitting around being empty?  Corporate office space is so open now but yeah let’s build more of it. 

[gehringer_2]

7 minutes ago, oblong said:

So we can stop building things when we have empty things sitting around being empty?  Corporate office space is so open now but yeah let’s build more of it. 

Well, I was a heavy industry guy, we never proposed building real estate! But apropos of that, I saw a story about how China has gotten itself into a weird unrighteous feedback loop where they keep financing real estate construction to keep the economy going, then halt work before projects are done and tear them down so real estate prices don't crater and create a mortgage collapse epidemic. Made no sense, but what does in China today?

Edited August 27, 2022 by gehringer_2

[Screwball]

About as much as here.  Like the Fed printing trillions while creating more bubbles they can't see or know how to fix.  All while more people starve, get priced out of housing, and can't pay their utility bills (depending on what information bubble one currently lives in).

Fucking brilliant.  It's like the 3 blind mice who can't see what the hell is going on.  With help from a media who can't, or refuse to see, what the hell is going on.  As long as the Casino keeps going up - fuck everyone else.  Until they can't ignore it all; and here we are.

At least a Casino gives you free drinks.  All we have is monetary idiots who only know Ctrl+p.

Does anyone not see what the hell is going on around the world?  This is not the only place with issues (contrary to the belief of some), and there are no easy or pain free solutions (Powell even said that).

Thanks to years of free money.  There is suppose to be a reason for the cost for credit.  They know this, they don't care.  But at some point easy money for too long comes back and bites you in the ass.

Welcome to we are here.  The only question is who, and how many will suffer.

Worthless fucks.

[gehringer_2]

1 hour ago, Screwball said:

Thanks to years of free money.  There is suppose to be a reason for the cost for credit.  They know this, they don't care.  But at some point easy money for too long comes back and bites you in the ass.

I had to laugh a little when Powell noted that inflation was high in a lot of places like Europe, it isn't just a US thing. Well of course, they've all been pursuing the same policies in lockstep. Why would the Euro outcomes be any different? Still and all, I do believe a lot of this is transient dislocations and things will crash back to low demand pretty quickly. Old people don't buy a lot of stuff and nothing that has happened has made the country (or EuroZone) any younger. If anything, putting the screws to immigration is making us older as a country even faster.

A new virus or the Ukraine war going global are still wildcards of course. If we finally do start spending serious bucks to get off fossil that should heat things up a bit - but I'll believe that when I see more of it.

Edited August 27, 2022 by gehringer_2

[1984Echoes]

7 hours ago, gehringer_2 said:

Funny thing is, I'm beginning to think the whole exercise is based on a fallacy. I've worked on capital project proposals for multiple large corporations, and you learn that high interest rates slow the economy because they kill capital expenditures because ROI must be higher than interest rates to borrow expansion money profitably. Thus as interest rates rise...

Also...

Growth companies that are not cash positive (they may have a high revenues growth rate but if Op expenses remain higher than Net Margin as they try to expand their business) have to borrow money. The higher the interest rates, the harder or more costly it is to borrow. Thus, the businesses growing the most rapidly, and that includes employment, stop growing or run into cash flow problems if they are unable to borrow... or both.

[1984Echoes]

9 hours ago, Screwball said:

 

Awesome buying opportunity after this overreaction.

[1984Echoes]

Inflation:

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/inflation-falls-in-july-for-first-time-in-two-plus-years-key-gauge-shows-due-to-falling-gas-prices-11661517617?siteid=yhoof2