The Very People Who Messed Up The Monetary System Are Now Whining About Inequality
Read more: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/dailyreckoning/~3/rEM6BrUVXPg/#ixzz1yzybWSyI
We’re sitting in our favorite café in Paris. On the corner are two security guards trying to look inconspicuous. One speaks into an ear-mounted telephone. The other stares straight ahead. What are they looking for? Who are they meant to guard?
“They’re still guarding Carla,” [Sarkozy’s wife...who lives in the area...] said a bar patron.
Maybe. But we’re always surprised by how much people think they know that ain’t so… Our friend Dylan Grice told us about a study where people were asked a simple question and then asked how sure they were about their answer. Those who were 100% sure were only right 70% of the time.
[Bloggers note: In another study of the relationship between competence and confidence it was found that people with the most confidence were generally less competent than people with some self-doubt.]
After a few minutes the undercover cops disappear…
Dear Readers looking for investment advice should know better by now. If you think we know something about investing you’ve mixed us up with someone else. Besides, when it comes to the markets nobody knows anything.
We don’t even believe in investing…not the way most people think of it.
What we do know is that you can’t expect to get something for nothing…not in the world of finance and investment. So you can’t expect to earn a lot from your investments…unless you are lucky, or smart, or the feds rig the system in your favor. Which, of course, is what they’ve done for the last 40 years!
No kidding. In the early ’70s, the feds created a new kind of money. Dollars…with nothing behind them other than the feds themselves. If they wanted, they could destroy the dollar. Or keep it solid. It was entirely up to them.
In the event, they destroyed it slowly. In the early ’70s, we recall buying gasoline for 25 cents a gallon. Now, it was over $3 when we left the US a week ago. It’s lost more than 90% of its value!
But this destruction had consequences that were different for the “rich” than they were for the working classes. Financial assets rose with the inflation of the money supply. The price of labor did not. Stocks went up 13 times. Consumer prices (excluding gasoline) went up about half as much.
No wonder the rich got richer!
And now the same dumbbell economists who encouraged the feds to mess up the monetary system are whining about ‘inequality.’
Here’s Brian Fung kvetching in The Atlantic. He says income equality is not just an economic problem; it’s a matter of life or death. No kidding:
Growing income inequality in the United States has Americans talking about justice and economic fairness, but a new study suggests the burgeoning wealth gap is threatening more than just our pocketbooks. It might be raising our risk for an early death.
In one of the few studies to track the health effects of income inequality over time, one Ohio State University (OSU) researcher has discovered that an increase in inequality leads mortality rates to begin rising after five years. Inequality-linked mortality peaks about two years later, before tapering off five years after that. All told, even a modest increase in American societal inequality more than doubles an average individual’s cumulative risk of death over the next 12 years.
Drawing data from the US National Health Interview Survey for the years 1986 to 2004, the study found that for every 0.01 increase in the Gini coefficient — a standard measure of a country’s economic disparity where 0 represents perfect societal equality and 1 represents maximum inequality — an average person’s cumulative risk of death increased by 112 percent in the next dozen years. Hui Zheng, the OSU sociologist who ran the study, replicated the results using three different measures of inequality across a sample of more than 700,000 Americans aged 30 and older. He then ran the same test on 18- to 25-year-olds, with similar results.
Does inequality itself cause you to die young? If some guy in your town gets filthy rich, will your life expectancy go down? What if some guy gets extremely poor…like Mike Tyson, said to be the poorest man in the world, because he has such a huge debt to the IRS? Will that take years off the lives of the rich?
We don’t know exactly what insight Mr. Fung is discovering. But we are pretty sure that he doesn’t either. Income inequality in itself is not going to shorten anyone’s life…unless he gets depressed about it and blows his brains out.
Even then, we’ll never really know why he did it.
Nobody knows anything. Especially economists.
Bill Bonner
for The Daily Reckoning
Income Inequality: The Silent Killer originally appeared in the Daily Reckoning. The Daily Reckoning, published by Agora Financial provides over 400,000 global readers economic news, market analysis, and contrarian investment ideas. Recently Agora Financial released a video titled "What Causes Gas Price to Increase?"
.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bill Bonner is an author of books and articles on economic and financial subjects. He is the founder and president of Agora Publishing,[1] and the principal author of a daily financial column, The Daily Reckoning. Bonner is also a contributor to the news and opinion blog, LewRockwell.com.[2] He also has written articles for MoneyWeek magazine.[3]
Bonner co-authored Financial Reckoning Day: Surviving The Soft Depression of The 21st Century and Empire of Debt with Addison Wiggin. He also co-authored Mobs, Messiahs and Markets with Lila Rajiva. The later publication won the GetAbstract International Book Award for 2008.[4] He has previously co-authored two short pamphlets with British media historian, John Campbell and with Financial Times editor, Lord William Rees-Mogg, and has co-edited a book of essays with intellectual historian, Pierre Lemieux.
In his two financial books and in The Daily Reckoning, Bonner argues that the financial future of the United States is in peril because of various economic and demographic trends, not the least of which is America's large trade deficit. He claims that America's foreign policy exploits are tantamount to the establishment of an empire and that the price of maintaining such an empire could accelerate America's eventual decline. Bonner argues in his latest book that mob and mass delusions are part of the human condition.
Bonner attended the University of New Mexico and Georgetown University Law School and he began work with Jim Davidson, at the National Tax-payer's Union.
After a few minutes the undercover cops disappear…
Dear Readers looking for investment advice should know better by now. If you think we know something about investing you’ve mixed us up with someone else. Besides, when it comes to the markets nobody knows anything.
We don’t even believe in investing…not the way most people think of it.
What we do know is that you can’t expect to get something for nothing…not in the world of finance and investment. So you can’t expect to earn a lot from your investments…unless you are lucky, or smart, or the feds rig the system in your favor. Which, of course, is what they’ve done for the last 40 years!
No kidding. In the early ’70s, the feds created a new kind of money. Dollars…with nothing behind them other than the feds themselves. If they wanted, they could destroy the dollar. Or keep it solid. It was entirely up to them.
In the event, they destroyed it slowly. In the early ’70s, we recall buying gasoline for 25 cents a gallon. Now, it was over $3 when we left the US a week ago. It’s lost more than 90% of its value!
But this destruction had consequences that were different for the “rich” than they were for the working classes. Financial assets rose with the inflation of the money supply. The price of labor did not. Stocks went up 13 times. Consumer prices (excluding gasoline) went up about half as much.
No wonder the rich got richer!
And now the same dumbbell economists who encouraged the feds to mess up the monetary system are whining about ‘inequality.’
Here’s Brian Fung kvetching in The Atlantic. He says income equality is not just an economic problem; it’s a matter of life or death. No kidding:
Growing income inequality in the United States has Americans talking about justice and economic fairness, but a new study suggests the burgeoning wealth gap is threatening more than just our pocketbooks. It might be raising our risk for an early death.
In one of the few studies to track the health effects of income inequality over time, one Ohio State University (OSU) researcher has discovered that an increase in inequality leads mortality rates to begin rising after five years. Inequality-linked mortality peaks about two years later, before tapering off five years after that. All told, even a modest increase in American societal inequality more than doubles an average individual’s cumulative risk of death over the next 12 years.
Drawing data from the US National Health Interview Survey for the years 1986 to 2004, the study found that for every 0.01 increase in the Gini coefficient — a standard measure of a country’s economic disparity where 0 represents perfect societal equality and 1 represents maximum inequality — an average person’s cumulative risk of death increased by 112 percent in the next dozen years. Hui Zheng, the OSU sociologist who ran the study, replicated the results using three different measures of inequality across a sample of more than 700,000 Americans aged 30 and older. He then ran the same test on 18- to 25-year-olds, with similar results.
Does inequality itself cause you to die young? If some guy in your town gets filthy rich, will your life expectancy go down? What if some guy gets extremely poor…like Mike Tyson, said to be the poorest man in the world, because he has such a huge debt to the IRS? Will that take years off the lives of the rich?
We don’t know exactly what insight Mr. Fung is discovering. But we are pretty sure that he doesn’t either. Income inequality in itself is not going to shorten anyone’s life…unless he gets depressed about it and blows his brains out.
Even then, we’ll never really know why he did it.
Nobody knows anything. Especially economists.
Bill Bonner
for The Daily Reckoning
Income Inequality: The Silent Killer originally appeared in the Daily Reckoning. The Daily Reckoning, published by Agora Financial provides over 400,000 global readers economic news, market analysis, and contrarian investment ideas. Recently Agora Financial released a video titled "What Causes Gas Price to Increase?"
.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Bonner (author)From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bill Bonner is an author of books and articles on economic and financial subjects. He is the founder and president of Agora Publishing,[1] and the principal author of a daily financial column, The Daily Reckoning. Bonner is also a contributor to the news and opinion blog, LewRockwell.com.[2] He also has written articles for MoneyWeek magazine.[3]
Bonner co-authored Financial Reckoning Day: Surviving The Soft Depression of The 21st Century and Empire of Debt with Addison Wiggin. He also co-authored Mobs, Messiahs and Markets with Lila Rajiva. The later publication won the GetAbstract International Book Award for 2008.[4] He has previously co-authored two short pamphlets with British media historian, John Campbell and with Financial Times editor, Lord William Rees-Mogg, and has co-edited a book of essays with intellectual historian, Pierre Lemieux.
In his two financial books and in The Daily Reckoning, Bonner argues that the financial future of the United States is in peril because of various economic and demographic trends, not the least of which is America's large trade deficit. He claims that America's foreign policy exploits are tantamount to the establishment of an empire and that the price of maintaining such an empire could accelerate America's eventual decline. Bonner argues in his latest book that mob and mass delusions are part of the human condition.
Bonner attended the University of New Mexico and Georgetown University Law School and he began work with Jim Davidson, at the National Tax-payer's Union.
"Clearly this piece was intended to comfort those folks who have a favorite café in Paris."
ReplyDelete... was intended to comfort target audience for crap financial advice 'products', which is the core of Mr.Bonner business.