Category Archives: Economics

Miscellaneous economy stuff

A Good Move

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It needs a parallel move, as well. Sadly, both are pipe dreams in the current government.

Recall that President Joe Biden (D) has pushed, through the Federal Housing Finance Agency, his Loan-Level Price Adjustment rule which penalizes Americans with good credit scores by requiring mortgage lenders to charge them higher interest rates in order to lower the rates charged those mortgage borrowers who have poor credit scores.

Senator Roger Marshall (R, KS) and Senator Mike Braun (R, IN) have introduced the Middle Class Borrower Protection Act that would block Biden’s move.

This is a good initial move, but it wants a separate, parallel move: reduce the funding of the FHFA by the aggregated dollar amount of the loan rate increase that Americans with good credit scores would be forced to pay were the Biden Rule left intact. Leave that reduction in place, and freeze the FHFA’s remaining budget at its current level for a minimum of five years (to remove it from election cycles), with automatic extensions of the freeze until Congress is satisfied that no one in the agency is working on ways to get around the MCBPA’s bar.

Sadly, both are pipe dreams at present: there are too many Progressive-Democrats in the Senate for either legislation to pass.

New Novel

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My latest Peter Hunt novel, Homecoming, has been released, and it can be found in Kindle format on Amazon.com.

Conroy said, “That there,” indicating the file folder, “is what I got on a client of mine. Accused of some little thing. I need you to get me what I need to get him off.”
“If it’s some little thing,” I said, “why you need a private investigator?”
“DA’s real particular on this one. Wants to put my boy away.” He nodded at the folder. “Look it over.”
The folder was labeled William Hansel, and the some little thing was part of the label: a murder beef. I undid the cord and started to pick through the folder. It had several tabbed pockets; most of the tabs had labels on them. Many of them were empty.
I rapped my knuckle on his desk one time. “Pass.” Started to stand.
“Listen hard, boy. I don’t get told No.”
“Yeah, you do. I just did.”
Then there was the proper wealthy matron whose husband isn’t all that and who turned up dead. And he seemed to be connected to Conroy.
Next came the well-to-do older gentleman whose wealth actually was his wife’s—who turns up dead, and the gentleman was entangled with the matron.
All that with Hunt’s pseudo-niece, Trang Thi Thao, dealing with her sister’s addiction and the aftermath of the sister’s having been sex-trafficked for years.
And all the while, the Plano police and Peter Hunt are struggling to get used to each other.

I hope you like it.

Preparedness

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That seems a commodity in short supply these days. Its lack is especially expensive for student loan borrowers in today’s economic climate. The lede pretty much says it all.

Tens of millions of federal student-loan borrowers will soon owe monthly payments for the first time in more than three years. Some of them aren’t ready for it.
The payment and interest pause put extra cash into people’s pockets, but they tended to spend it rather than save it, according to recent research. Some borrowers are now concerned about being able to cover their student-loan bills this fall.

Not being required to make the payments is not the same as being barred from making the payments. Neither is it a block on putting those HIAed loan payments aside against a return to having to repay or to pay down other debts.

Some borrowers took the payment pause as an opportunity to save the extra money or use it to pay down other debts. But the more common response was to spend it….

But we’re supposed to be sympathetic to these spenders, even to spend our money, through our tax remittances, helping them cover the outcomes of their shortsightedness and irresponsibility.

Investing in the People’s Republic of China

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Foreign direct investment in the PRC has fallen to $20 billion in the first quarter of this year, compared with $100 billion in last year’s first quarter. This is strongly influenced by, if not a direct result of, PRC President Xi Jinping’s “security” policy that explicitly targets foreign investors as likely spies.

A Xi-led campaign this year has hit Western management consultants, auditors, and other firms with a wave of raids, investigations, and detentions. Meanwhile, an expanded anti-espionage law has added to foreign executives’ worry that conducting routine business activities in China, such as market research, could be construed as spying.

There’s this, also:

A senior official in a county of southern Guangdong province, which earlier this year set a goal of attracting nearly $300 billion in investment in the next five years, told a visiting American trade group recently that the county would reward any US corporate “decision maker” investing there 10% of the value of the promised deal, according to people briefed on the matter.
The trade group turned down the county official’s offer, which in the US would constitute an illegal bribe, the people said.

The Guangdong senior official knew his offer would be a bribe under US law, and he made the offer anyway.

There is no investment in anything in the PRC that’s worth the political, or the legal, risk.

More than that, as long as the PRC continues its genocide (in the present time against the Uighurs, but those people have not been the PRC’s only targets), it’s morally impossible to invest in any way, in any thing, in the PRC.

That’s apart from, and in addition to, the national security risk presented by any trade with or within the PRC, given its present control over our supply chains, particularly in critical items such as the rare earths it embargoed from Japan for a time and its current bar of gallium and germanium export to us.

We, and the West at large, have nothing to gain from investing in or trading with this enemy nation, and everything to lose.

Another Excuse…

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…for Leftist-dominated governments to grab power. Farmers Insurance, and other insurance companies, are moving to restrict policy sales in California and Florida due to rising payout costs from a recent spate of natural disaster claims. Public Citizen said that such moves are

prime example of the insurance industry’s hypocrisy on climate change.

Progressive-Democratic Party politicians insist that insurance companies aren’t doing enough to combat global warming and want to impose requirements on them to do more. Connecticut’s Leftist politicians are proposing a 5% surcharge on “any premium payments from any fossil fuel company” to any insurer licensed in the state.

Insurers, in a free market economy, are in the business of insuring risk—transferring the risk of a business venture, or ownership of a home, from the venturer/homeowner to the insurer in exchange for a fee based on the risk’s likelihood of occurring and its cost should it occur.

Insurers, in the Progressive-Democrat economy, are tools of the State, usable by the State to achieve the Progressive-Democrats’ personal goals.