I’m going on vacation next week, so I thought I’d check out the new downtown Target and see if there are any shorts or a bathing suit. Here’s my review. Like when I went to the Rack a few months ago (and like when I do all my clothing shopping) I looked for made in America. Unlike the Rack, I was able to find a few. It was a very few; most of the stuff was made elsewhere.
I found one nice pair of shorts that were the right size. No shirts that I saw were made in America.
The layout was fine there were signs to where everything was. It was well lit, and there was staff around.
I popped down to the grocery, and it looks fine. But it’s a block away from Pike Place and from the IGA, so I’m not sure when I’d pop in.
Unlike RR, I don’t earn money each and every day in the stock market by triumphing over stupid Republican traders.
I win some and lose some. In the late 90s I invested in WestPoint Stevens. Can’t even recall the reason I did. Anyway, this company had the misfortune of contracting to provide textiles for linens to be sold under the Martha Stewart name. At K-mart.
Martha went to jail, K-mart went bankrupt, and my stock became a total write-off.
It’s very, very hard to be a successful US textile manufacturer. I don’t think the margins are there, labor costs are high, and unless we refuse to import, imports will always be cheaper, and probably of equal or even greater quality.
I haven’t looked for the union label in a long, long time. I still can sing parts of the ‘Always look for the union label’ song, tho. That was some good advertising.
There is a photo of people lined up in front of Chick what’s it’s name restaurant.
Caption:
“You never see that many Christians lined up to help a food bank or a homeless shelter….
And that’s something Jesus actually said to do.”
@ 2
The Chick Fil-A support events are a one-time thing, organized on short notice and largely word-of-mouth.
One similarly might think of a disaster, such as a tornado or flood, as another type of one-time thing, in which responses are organized on short notice and through phone trees and electronic media.
Google ‘church disaster relief’ and you’ll see a large number of organized religions with disaster response centers, ready to help.
You seem to be suggesting that on Wednesday, homeless centers weren’t filled with Christians with sleeves rolled up, helping out, and criticizing religious types for being somewhere else. True, but those centers also weren’t filled with liberals, sleeves rolled up. They seemed to all be online, criticizing the Christians.
When one-time events strike, churches frequently are the second to help out. They prepare to do so. Churches have food banks, domestic crisis centers (my mother had to use one in the 60s), and a lot of other sources of support for those in need.
I’m somewhere between agnostic and atheist but your argument seems idiotic. Today is gay-kiss day at Chick Fil-A or something like that. Shouldn’t you be calling out the gay community for standing in line and putting on shows for the cameras, rather than spending that time at homeless centers?
Just sayin’.
@ 2 and @ 3 aren’t on-topic and shouldn’t be in this thread. Sorry, Carl.
In clothes I tend to look more for good quality stuff from brands that are less likely to use sweatshop labor than the made in the USA label. What’s the point if your shirt’s made in the USA by illegal immigrants in a sweatshop?
@Good point. Pull 2 and 3.
Maybe someone can come up with a Telemundo version of this tune:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QO7VUklDlQw
@ 6
I’d prefer cut and paste in the 8/2 Open, actually.
“What’s the point if your shirt’s made in the USA by illegal immigrants in a sweatshop?”
For a Republican, “Made in USA” labeled goods coming out of slave labor sweatshops in the Marianas was as American as apple pie. It was one of the few things besides deregulation, tax cuts for the rich and tax breaks for shipping jobs overseas that Republicans have believed to be worth fighting for.
@1 Has it occurred to you that if American employers still paid union wages, American consumers would have money to spend?
When Republicans gave tax breaks to companies for outsourcing jobs, they gave our prosperity to countries to like China, India, and Mexico.
@1 “Unlike RR, I don’t earn money each and every day in the stock market by triumphing over stupid Republican traders.”
Substitute “robotic computer traders” and you’re there.
About 70% to 80% of all stock trading is done by robotic computer programs operating on “algorithms” cooked up by highly-paid Ph.D. number cruncher types called “quants.” What happens is these computers sell stocks to each other, flipping them back and forth like a tennis ball over a net.
If a visitor from another planet watched the NYSE yesterday and today — just those two days — he’d conclude the human species is nuts and our financial markets are irrational.
The value of my portfolios dropped about $5,000 yesterday. They’re gaining it all back today. I’m breaking even for these two days. But a small investor with less experience than me would be spooked by this volatility and run for the sidelines. In fact, that’s what most of them have done. There’s almost no participation in this market by individual investors.
Many people believe the stock market is a rigged game. Of course it is, but that’s not as relevant as they think. CFOs game EPS numbers, quants rig trading, and the big multibillion-dollar banks, investment houses, hedge funds, and trading firms lie, cheat, and steal to beat the band. But the big boys are muscle-bound; they’re enslaved by their computers and, more importantly, they’re slaves to the fact they have to move so much money they’re all forced to trade the same few stocks. Which they mostly trade to each other, usually making a few hundredths of a cent per share on each trade, if they make anything at all.
I bought Cliffs Natural Resources last week for $37.47. It’s $42.38 this morning. That’s $4.91 per share of paper profit in 5 trading days during the most volatile week of 2012 so far. Do I think the market is nuts? Yes. Does this make me a genius? No. A stock with a P/E of 3.6 and 6% yield simply looked too cheap to me. Apparently the traders who are bidding it up think so, too. My question is, why did I get into this stock several days sooner, and several days cheaper, than the traders equipped with supercomputers, quants, trading programs, and research staffs? I don’t understand that.
This is the toughest investing environment I’ve seen in my 30 years of playing stocks as a hobby. (For me it’s strictly a hobby, because I’ve never spent any of my stock market winnings, and probably never will.) What makes it so is the government central banks’ efforts to manipulate market prices. You can’t rationally determine the value of anything when its prices is being fixed. But I’ll say more about that below.
correction @11 second last sentence in second last paragraph should read:
“My question is, why did I get into this stock several days sooner, and several dollars cheaper, than the traders equipped with supercomputers, quants, trading programs, and research staffs?”
I hope it’s clear to everyone by now that governments are manipulating markets for their own benefit, and not to jumpstart economies or help ordinary citizens.
The Fed’s QE1 was the right move to make in the circumstances of the time. It helped prevent a deflation that could have led to another Great Depression by putting money into circulation to replace money that people were hoarding.
The Fed’s QE2 was much more questionable. Its main effect was to pump up stock prices, which mostly benefitted the rich (who own most of the stock). Bernanke’s rationale apparently was that if the rich spent more, it would trickle down to unemployed workers, and eventually pull up consumer spending at all income levels. It didn’t. It merely made the rich a little richer on paper.
Now investors are demanding QE3, and yesterday they threw a hissy fit because they didn’t get it, although they’re still hoping Bernanke will cough it up next month — which is why they’re buying back stocks today they sold yesterday. (Go ahead, argue that humans are smarter than rabbits, if it makes you feel good.)
There should be no QE3. Expanding the money supply won’t stimulate consumer spending if this new money doesn’t go into the pockets of consumers of ordinary means, and so far little or none of the QE money has. It gets no farther than the banks and stock traders.
Now let’s ask ourselves who benefits from the Federal Reserve keeping interest rates artificially low.
Mostly the biggest and most creditworthy borrowers. Very little of it seeps down to middle class debtors. They can’t refinance mortgages if their homes are underwater, or refinance consumer loans because they’re unemployed or too far in debt. It’s not reaching small businesses, either, because banks don’t want to lend.
The biggest beneficiaries of cheap money are governments. Being able to borrow trillions for almost nothing allows them to keep running deficits without burdening their operating budgets with massive interest payments. Government are strongly self-interested in keeping interest rates low, no matter how much the low-interest policy screws up markets or hurts their own citizens.
And it is hurting ordinary citizens. Let’s set aside the “moral hazard” of rewarding borrowers and punishing savers, and look strictly at the practical impacts of this policy.
In a zero-return world, pension funds are going broke, pensioners’ incomes are being cut, and retirees are forced to spend their savings instead of living off the investment returns on their savings. That’s ugly.
Meanwhile, big corporations awash in cash, to whom banks are happy to lend bushels of newly-printed money, are exploiting cheap money to buy back their own stock and buy other companies. This benefits shareholders to some extent, but it doesn’t boost economic activity a whit or create a single job.
I mentioned screwing up markets. Printing money and keeping borrowing costs low inflates asset values and creates bubbles in anything return-seeking investors can in invest money in, which nowadays is chiefly commodities — which pushes up consumer prices.
In short, governments and corporations get cheap loans, and you and I get inflation.
The public shouldn’t stand for this. Tea Party activists, even if they don’t understand the mechanics, sense they’re being screwed and it feels morally wrong to them. They’re right on both counts. We liberals have a certain amount of common cause with them.
This isn’t my opinion. It comes from professional economists working in academia or other positions that allow them to be honest and objective about what they see happening.
“The transfer of responsibility for retirement planning from the state to the individual has left policymakers in Europe and the United States free to prioritize quick economic gain over long-term growth, catching thousands of pension savers in the crossfire.
“While cuts in pensions paid to teachers, police and health workers across the indebted euro zone dominate the headlines, many private sector savers have failed to grasp the more subtle link between central bank policy and their dwindling wealth.
“Lower interest rates earn savers less on their money, while an increase in the currency in circulation promotes inflationary pressures, reducing the purchasing power of that cash over time.”
And, one might add, more people are being forced into early retirement by the lack of jobs.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/48484139
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suddenly turning into a Republican; as dissatisfied as I am with current monetary and fiscal policies, their policies are even worse.
Republicans argue, for example, that unemployment benefits encourage people to stay unemployed longer. That’s poppycock. People are staying unemployed because of a weak economy that isn’t producing jobs. Taking away the safety net, as Republicans want to do, merely causes more human misery and depresses the economy even more as that spending power is removed from the economy.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/48484737/
Even if you’re a mean, evil, cold-hearted SOB who doesn’t give a damn about the suffering of your fellow citizens, you still should support Social Security, unemployment insurance, and food stamps simply in your own pragmatic self-interest. Why? Because they’re the best depression-fighting programs ever invented. They put a floor under how far consumer spending can fall. And because that money is distributed to our poorest citizens, nearly 100% of it gets spent immediately, which helps the economy. People receiving unemployment benefits and food stamps don’t use that money to buy stock or speculate in copper futures. They spend it on rent, utility bills, and food.
I think what our government should do now is maintain spending on extended unemployment benefits and food stamps for those who need it (this spending should gradually fall as the economy recovers), getting immediate deficit reduction by cutting military spending and eliminating corporate subsidies (they don’t need it, they’re making record profits), raising taxes on those who are doing well and can afford to pay more, backing away from manipulating interest rates and intervening in markets, and reforming bankruptcy laws so debts that have no realistic prospect of being repaid can be written off and cleared from lenders’ and individuals’ balance sheets. One of the things holding back the economy at this point is that people stuck in underwater homes can’t move to where jobs are being created. I also think we need to make fracking work by dealing with the environmental concerns via technology improvements and sensible regulation (not prohibition), because the flood of homegrown cheap energy that fracking makes possible is a huge plus for our economy.
Ultimately, the key to America’s economy recovery is debt reduction, and that necessarily involves writing down untenable debt and making lenders who made imprudent loans eat losses, instead of shifting the financial burden of their excesses onto the backs of taxpayers by nationalizing those losses. If that means letting some big banks and big investors go under, so be it. It’s called “market discipline” and the threat of loss is what makes market participants behave themselves. When you shift the losses they generate to the public, you’re just setting up the markets for another economic fall.
Roger,
I’d think there are at least two possible explanations for the apparent lemming-like march of rich individuals and large institutions down the path of unsustainability.
First, it might be that “supply-side economics” and “cheap-labor conservatism”, as you’ve christened it, has become such a religion that even its well-heeled adherents simply believe that no matter how badly they screw the bulk of the population, consumers with cash to spend will continue to materialize out of nowhere. This belief could be reinforced by how easy it’s been to coerce the masses into becoming “debtcroppers” via credit cards and equity loans collateralized by the roofs over their heads or their or their children’s earning power for the next half century. To maintain such a belief system in the face of what happened in 2007-2008 would have required the consumption of tremendous amounts of drugs and alcohol, along with endless repetition of the mantra that it’s all the fault of that (gasp!) dark-complected gentleman who entered the Oval Office after, in fact, spearheading the bailout that at least temporarily prevented the sky from falling.
The other, and perhaps more plausible, is that they know we’re headed for an adventure that will make the 1930’s look like a walk in the park–and that they’re merrily strip mining the global economy in preparation for the fall. After that, the entire planet would become rather like Brazil or even Haiti, with the glitterati holed up with their ill-gotten loot in a few fortified enclaves, while the rest of us struggle to survive in numbing squalor.
@14 I didn’t invent the term “cheap labor conservative,” this guy did:
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/
Btw, this is what CG says about who the real job creators are:
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/6731