Maybe Everyone Should Just Go On Strike
May's disappointing jobs report received better press than I expected, at least based on a quick scan of mainstream news outlets Friday.
And that's probably appropriate. As noted, 559,000 jobs is "not nothin'," so to speak. It's just not 1 million.
It feels like traders are waiting on one "big bang" report to declare the economic boom well and truly underway. Such a scorcher may not be forthcoming. Rather, it could be that the labor market simply walks out of the deep, dark woods at a reasonab
Wonderful article.
Follow the money… Follow the lack of money…..
Well said!
When policy decisions are based on narrow monied interests, and no one asks “What kind of society are we creating?”, society becomes the proverbial frog and is slowly boiled.
I dunno. I still think there’s too many middle upper class people for UBI to be politically viable. We need doctors, accountants and even more lawyers (and portfolio managers/wealth advisors) to lose their jobs… Someone was saying that when AGI or even just ML processes will be deployed, we’ll go from UBI being decried as a socialist monstrosity to the most obvious and widely approved policy in the western world…
Hey I am an RIA and help my clients- lay off!
lol
You are at your best in this one H…… Everyone is to a large extent a product of their past experiences. Me I lived with , partied with , and supported (mentored ) most all my employees. I did the rottenest jobs and never put the burden of it on my people (on Saturdays). The volunteers wandered in during the later part and without ever punching a clock got me through all the 3 hr jobs that turned out to be 10 hour jobs.
No one begrudged a penny I ever made whether it was 30,000 a year or some other number.
I talk to them still after twenty years and thousands of miles of separation.. We are happy for each other ! You covered it all but the last sentence even if true pops a bubble for me.. Thanks for writing this one !
I took WMT as a test case, assumed +$10K annual comp increase per employee, that’s +$22BN/yr increase in expense, which wipes out the EBIT. So WMT would need substantially higher revenue, likely via substantially higher prices. Maybe the lesson is that wage inflation not only causes, but requires, goods/services inflation.
The food service labor shortage finally felt real to me this afternoon where I live in S. Florida. I was taking my elderly mother out to lunch and the first place she wanted to eat had a 1/2 wait at 1pm on a Friday afternoon (never had to wait for lunch anywhere around here). Then we went over to Chilis where the restaurant was about 25% full and were told it was a 20+ minute wait. They only had 2 servers and 1 bartender working the whole restaurant. Pretty surprising for what is normally the slow season here as the snowbirds have all flown North already. My own suspicion is that all the food service workers pre-pandemic are trying to find anything else at all to work at before they go back to their last resort choice.
Interesting take by Cedric Durand in New Left Review https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/1979-in-reverse?pc=1348
At this point it is amazing exactly how pointless it is to try to work for a living. If you figure you need child care the minimum wage necessary to go to work and basically earn nothing at all if practically $20/hr. My wife works in high end medical manufacturing, about the highest pay I’ve seen with only a HS degree (her other degree’s are not recognized in America) outside of heavy labor like construction and that is barely $20 per hour.
So exactly what is the entirety of the population meant to do? It isn’t go to college given there are way more graduates than are needed in just about every field and those educations come only at insane costs these days. It can’t be trade schools, I mean they are great options for some but not everyone needs to be a plumber or electrician. It seems at the moment the answer is work one job to pay for the ability to go to work, then work a second job to pay for your ability to be alive, then work a third to take care of your kids. This is insanity.
H
Once again you are spot on with your views on this topic. I’ll add a couple of recent pieces of data. You noted: “Everyone quickly becomes insolvent except for people like Jamie Dimon.” Interesting that Dimon reported his bank collected $1.5 bil in overdraft fees from those near insolvent “great unwashed.” It was also interesting that after that data was published several of JPM’s competitors loosened their overdraft fee policies. One large bank eliminated those fees entirely. Kind of like lawyers on the bottom of the sea — a good start.
Then this morning I saw a piece from the Guardian that reported the most outrageous item I’ve seen in my memory. It seems that MIcrosoft has a subsidiary in Ireland that has only one function, to collect royalties from licensed MS products. This subsidiary is incorporated in Bermuda, housed in Ireland, has no employees except its directors and made a profit for its latest year of $320 bil while paying not one dollar of tax to anyone, anywhere. This profit represents something over three quarters of Ireland’s GDP. The sub sent two dividends totaling a bit over $40 billion to the parent company which reported only $143bil in revenue in the latest year. In other words, this massive royalty income, more than twice what the company reports as total sales, is essentially invisible. More than $270 bil of this money is hiding in a cash account somewhere. Not on the balance sheet of the parent. How many MS workers could get a 10% raise from this “petty cash. I’m sending a nice potload of money to the IRS this week while these bastards escape tax entirely on $320 BILLION in profits that they just disappear! That’s enough of this nonsense. Enough!