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- This 2.9 percent figure is pretty specific, though, giving it a veneer of precision. How exactly did the Treasury Department choose that number from all the possible numbers in the world, you ask?
If you average US GDP growth going back to the Great Depression you get 3 percent.
If you look at average US GDP growth from 1970 to 2007 you get 3 percent.
This allows the Trump administration to point to "historical norms". It also allows them to pretend the recession never happened. Once you incorporate that...
Effectively, the treasury letter says "we can spend our emergency fund because nothing bad will happen."
am_Unition · 189 days ago · link ·
Can we get some Trumponomics erotic fan fiction? “Wait..”, she whispered. “What will people say?” “The Liddle American public will know NOTHING! They only follow my actions on Twitter (which are tremendous, I can assure you),” he assured her. She giggled like a child. “Actually, I am a child,” she reminded him, recoiling slightly. He shook his head. “Baby, this is Russia, and everyone’s paid off for the next two hours. Now are you gonna give it up or NOT, because erecting Trump Tower, it ain’t a walk in the park anymore, here.”He ravenously peeled off her Dodd-Frank, knowing the riches that lay beneath. He didn’t just want some of them; He wanted them all.
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I would follow this Twitter feed, for the same reason I follow Kim Kierkegaardashian ("Glosses & shimmering powders are calculated to make life as grandiose as possible in order to keep it from being eclipsed by death") and Conan the Sysadmin ("#HPKP is a dangerously powerful incantation.")
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FirebrandRoaring · 189 days ago · link ·
"But the temperature isn't rising!" ...of course not. The last ten years were fantastic, as far as climate change in concerned. Don't that just smell similar?
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Meanwhile, several economists are trying to point out that our risk behavior is starting to look a lot like it did around 2004-2005, right before we decided that risk isn't really a thing anymore that needs to be considered.Effectively, the treasury letter says "we can spend our emergency fund because nothing bad will happen."
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I probably read 15 finance letters a week. Granted, there's certainly some self-selection in there. But despite my self-selection, 100% of them are anti-cryptocurrency (dismissively so). And self-selection or not, 90% of them are in "batten down the hatches" mode. The one or two that aren't are in "we probably have another 12-18 months" mode. This is the thing that bugs the shit out of me about Nassim Taleb. "Nobody predicted" the crash of 2008. No, fucker, every real estate blog was howling to the moon about it. "Nobody predicted" the rise of Hitler. Except fucking Churchill and Wilson. Shit's gonna go hyper-pearshaped and some fuck will be all "nobody predicted."
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The thing that bugs the shit out of me about Nassim Taleb is "antifragile". Thanks, dipshit. Those of us who have studied physics at any level beyond first year call that "stability". A fancy word isn't a theory, asshole. Anyway, now that I got that out of my system... Why would anyone be pro-crypto at this point? If I were a proponent of crypto (and for the record I think that block chains have a lot of utility) I would be incensed about what's happening. This bubble shit is going to harm, not help adoption of cryptos. The weird thing is that literally everyone is predicting a crash, yet here we are, moving right along. Even the SEC just sent out a warning letter about "investing" in those products (and I put that in quotes because I know very few people who are in crypto who aren't speculating in crypto, which I would argue is different from investing). The difference of course between speculators in various instruments and the administrations speculation, is that at least there's an argument on the other side for the speculators. In housing, once could say, "Well they're not making any more land." In crypto, "Blockchains are here to stay." Etc. With the Trump administration, it's literally just, "This number sounds good, so let's all repeat it, K?" Fucking nonsense. Anyway, what do you expect from the sycophants of a guy who accused a sitting senator of blowing him for campaign contributions? Fantasy and nothing more.
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Fuckin' "stability" is Chem 101. You don't even need to get into valances to understand that shit. But then, business majors don't have to take Chem 101. “We’ve always felt that bitcoin, given its properties, is gold 2.0 — it disrupts gold. Gold is scarce, bitcoin is actually fixed. Bitcoin is way more portable and way more divisible. At a $300 billion market cap, it’s certainly seen a lot of price appreciation, but gold is at $6 trillion and if bitcoin disrupting gold is true and it plays out ... then you can see 10 to 20 times appreciation because there is a significant delta still,” he said. - Cameron Winklevoss So let's look at this. As of this writing, gold is at $1247/oz. That's a Troy ounce so 1.6cc of gold is worth $1247. If you need to travel with, say, $50k in gold, you're walking around with basically a golf ball of gold. The portability of gold decreases linearly and your likelihood of seizure increases the more of it you carry. One BTC contains as much value as 15 ouces of gold (which is pretty crazy on the face of it) but a Trezor will hold one BTC or all the BTC in the same space. Getting into and out of BTC is either easier or harder than getting into and out of gold depending on who you are, where you are and how much of it you have. And that right there makes it a tricky calculation. BTC has more utility for hiding value from the government. How much that utility is worth is the question. Ain't nobody seizing bitcoin at the airport.Why would anyone be pro-crypto at this point?