Thursday, March 24, 2022

Is This The End Of Capitalism? | Answers With Joe - YouTube

In response to...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wny-d15ZETw

I wrote...

The word capitalism is used as a pejorative. The correct term should be a free market, which is the freedom to own a business and run it with minimal interference from the government. The opposite of this is different degrees of tyranny. Do you want the government running your business, or taking it away from you?

Corporations are used as a whipping boys, but corporations are a way of democratizing business ownership. My retirement fund invests in the S&P500, meaning that I have some tiny ownership in 500 companies. People resent corporations because they are a concentration of power, and this could possibly be a threat to freedom, but without corporations, very few people could afford to invest in business ownership.

The socialist left keeps looking for excuses to give us a command and control economy. The most recent is a fear of automation, but history shows that automation leads to more prosperity, more jobs not less.

Milton Freidman said that the robber barons were mostly a myth.  People flocked to difficult factory jobs because that was better than the alternative.  Nobody forces you to give a corporation a dime.  Nobody forces you to work for an employer.  In a command and control economy, everything is done by coercion.  They will tell you what to buy, who to work for, what type of energy you can use, what kind of health care you are eligible for, and what you can say.

Friday, June 25, 2021

Housing prices

Although the Zillow estimate on housing value might not be perfect, it is a pretty good judge of which way the market is going.
The housing prices in Salt Lake City have gone through the roof. The house that I paid $130,000 back in 1999 is now estimated to be worth $647,000. I sold it for a fraction of that.
Indiana is not as bad, but it seems recently that prices have taken off. The home I purchased less than 3 years ago is up by 25% from what I paid. My previous home in New Whiteland that I paid $120,000 for six years ago is now estimated to be worth $220,000.
The key point is that I could not afford to move if I wanted to. I would have to sell my home first or make my next purchase contingent on selling my home first.

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Tuesday, May 25, 2021

CRYPTO CRASH. I'M DONE (as a millionaire)

The first seven minutes give a pretty good reason why as to why cryptocurrency might be a bad idea.  The rest is just technical analysis.





Bitcoin has no value other than the willingness of other people to buy it or accept it as payment.  This is called the "bigger fool" theory, where you hope that there is a bigger fool than you out there.

I could have bought bitcoin at $5, $50, and $5,000.  I could have made a fortune.   During an inflationary period, some assets will increase in value.  Someday Bitcoin could be worth a million dollars.  However, the moment that people decide that they don't want it, it could lose all its value.  Likewise, the government could regulate it out of existence.





Thursday, March 4, 2021

Monday, January 25, 2021

Why mainstream media's slander of wall street bets pisses me off regarding GME.

This is interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EUbJcGoYQ4

I think that Gamestop will eventually go out of business.  There is a very strong trend toward buying or renting videogames off of the internet.  Retail sales of games can't last more than a couple of years.   Video is headed in the same direction.

Games were distributed on media because that was the only practical way to transfer large data.  Storage of the data was also an issue if you had a bunch of games.  These are no longer limitations.

Thursday, July 30, 2020

Housing prices in Utah

It is amazing how much houses are selling for in Utah. Not just new or nearly new houses. Some older houses that I had looked at and rejected are selling for $250K to $300K. My old three-bedroom house built in 1939, the same year The Wizard of Oz came out, which I paid $120K for, is now estimated at $476K. I didn't even like this house. It was too old and had too many problems.

I would not be able to afford to move back to Utah.

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Friday, August 16, 2019

New Asian flu?

From: utahtrout 

However, it may be a sign of a much more troubling problem. China has some issues eerily similar to what other Asian countries had just prior to the 1997 Asian financial crisis. That event two decades ago has been analyzed in great detail. It was triggered by a debt default of two companies: Somprasong Land (a major Thai property developer) and Finance One (one of Thailand's largest finance companies). Currency traders began to short the Thai currency, and eventually it broke its peg to the U.S. dollar, resulting in a 40% collapse in value. This steep drop made paying back dollar-denominated loans impossible. Currency weakness spread to South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. All their currencies declined dramatically --between 34% and 83% against the dollar. Equity markets around the world, including the U.S., experienced significant declines

While the trigger was a debt default as financial conditions shifted, the underlying factors had long been in place – these were export-driven economies that had close government co-operation with preferred manufacturers, subsidies, favorable financial deals, massive debt-financed growth and a currency pegged to the U.S dollar. Sound familiar?