Month: May 2018

How can inflation remain under control, with the 10 year Treasury stubbornly refusing to rise above 3%?

Inflation occurs when there is an oversupply of money.  Too many dollars chasing too few goods.  I believe it is the constant, uncounted creation of new wealth which has so expanded the amount of goods that printing money barely keeps up with.  The internet is creating wealth out of thin air.  Massive wealth.

Homeaway lists 2 million vacation rentals.  It’s one company among many.  The product it sells was a previously wasted asset.  In providing a mechanism for owners of valuable vacant real estate to reach consumers, and facilitating the transaction, this industry has created enormous wealth.  Is that wealth reflected in traditional economic statistics?  I think not.

I just purchased a fairly obscure book published in 2002.  It sold new for $22, and I paid $6.84 for a copy that is as good as new.   I bought it from Goodwill Industries of Greater Cleveland and East Central Ohio.  Someone donated it to them, they listed it for sale on Amazon, and I bought it.  Amazon created wealth by facilitating this otherwise impossible transaction.

This is occurring at an ever increasing pace throughout the world economy.  It’s not reflected in the old ways of measuring productivity.  And increased productivity is what is stopping inflation.

This pleases me in particular because inflation would damage the portfolio of stocks whose dividends support me.

According to Will Durant, there have been ten “peaks” of human progress: speech, fire, the conquest of the animals, architecture, social organization, morality, tools, science, education, and writing and print.  The great historian of civilization didn’t live to see the eleventh: the internet.  It’s just as important as the other ten.

 

The National Council of Resistance in Iran is promoting the overthrow of the Mullahs and a return to a secular Iran.  All Americans should wish them well.  Today American Thinker published my article on my personal experiences in the Tehran of over 50 years ago.  I hope the people at NCRI can make use of it.

My investments are now pure income plays, and I don’t care about anything except the security of their dividends.   But if I was trying to time the market, I’d be all in right now.

Trump is good for business, and threats to Trump are bad for the market.  With the unraveling of the Mueller-Rosenstein conspiracy, one serious threat to Trump is receding.

To me, that’s a buy signal.

The macho men of Manhattan don’t seek forgiveness for their sins.  In this peculiar subculture, it’s taken as a sign of weakness.  Donald Trump is a macho, macho man, and this bothers people like my friend former MT Rep. Matthew Monforton.  He thinks any such man, and the country he leads, will be punished for such arrogance.  And, indeed, the ancient Greeks believed excessive pride or defiance of the gods led to nemesis.

I tend to judge a man by his enemies, and by that standard Trump is a super star. The catalogue of his sin is an open book.  He doesn’t pretend to be anyone’s moral exemplar.  He wants the American people to love him, warts and all.  A lot of them do.  I won’t criticize them for it.

He’s a political genius who is also an American patriot.  I’ll settle for that, with all his warts.

Deion Kathawa is only a law school student, and not a big foot conservative like Jonah.  But he knows how to put people in their place.  Goldberg is in the process of becoming a pest.  Let’s hope he recovers his senses, and learns a little humility.