Category Archives: Economics

Miscellaneous economy stuff

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.

Another Reason…

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…to disband altogether the Securities and Exchange Commission and build a new exchange watchdog from the ground up. Now it wants a database of all investor personal information whenever those investors make a move in our stock market.

The Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT) database was originally proposed by the SEC in 2010 to help regulators track order and trading activity throughout US markets for listed equities and options. According to the ASA, the database will list all the financial holdings and personal information of investors, including their name, phone, address, brokerage accounts, birthdate, and Social Security numbers.

Then, a year ago,

the SEC released an order that granted temporary relief from certain requirements of the CAT, delaying its full implementation until 2024. In the interim, the SEC is requesting the information be given voluntarily, with expected forced implementation by next year’s deadline, according to the ASA [American Securities Association].

This is just weasel-working around the SEC’s demand to have all personal information, even though it has no need for those data.

This SEC has shown, once again, that as an institution it cannot be trusted with American investor data.