Eyes on US retail impulse; many central bank rate reviews; eyes on respiratory illness outbreak in China; merchandise trade sinks; freight rates retreat; UST 10yr 4.45%; gold holds and oil recovers; NZ$1 = 60.7 USc; TWI-5 = 69.6

I'd take that as an indicator that the world has faith NZ can pay it's debt back. Now to walk the walk

Import wise, my situation in march this year, we had double the amount of stock we would normally hold, A lot of this was down to the massive logistical issues we faced in 2021, we stocked up to mitigate this happening again last year. This year we have imported roughly half of the previous years imported stock. I would say we arent alone in this. Its about driving inventory down to the long term average, not a slow down in draw through.

Strange, I just read above that Indonesia, South Africa and the Swedes didn't raise their rates....

Said people buying said crap also seem to like to get stuck in their cars leaving the mall, its a comedy situation......

A few years I remember my French friend remarking at how strange it was to hear about their colleagues doing all the Christmas shopping on credit. I think it is an anglosphere phenomenon, but no doubt has spread further since 

They;re still buying it and more, they;re just using Temu and Aliexpress now so they can maintain the same level of consumerism. Not surprised either, NZ cannot compete with these in a number of categories, even KMart.

Michael Hudson - Understanding America’s Post-Industrial Economy

Well, you said that the United States has lost its competitiveness. And actually, it’s worse, the United States decided it didn’t want to compete. And this goes back to the Clinton administration in the 1990s. The Clinton administration’s objective, and that of the Democratic Party, was basically a class war against labor. How do we lower the wages of labor so that we can increase the profitability? Well, the way America had of lowering the wages of labor was, let’s hire Asian labor, especially Chinese labor. Let’s let Chinese into a trade relationship with us into the WTO. And then instead of having to bid up the price of labor in our industrial centers, Detroit and the South and the Midwest, we’ll hire products made by Chinese labor that will keep down wages here. And America can be in a post-industrial economy.

During the 1980s and 90s, all of the economic discussion was, how do you have a post-industrial economy? They didn’t want to industrialize. They thought that industrial labor was blue-collar labor. And in America, you’re not going to have college graduates or even high school graduates wanting to have a blue-collar job. They want a service industry job. They want to make jobs, something that’s not industrial, a managerial job. So a new phrase came into being, the professional managerial class. Technology.

The idea of American economic growth from the 1990s on was, instead of producing manufactured goods, we will develop intellectual property monopolies, especially in information technology, in pharmaceuticals. And America will make its economic growth in GDP, not by making profits to employ labor to produce more and more goods and services, but to have monopoly rents for our pharmaceuticals. So we can make pills that cost 10 cents each and sell them for $500 each. We can make computer programs for automatic artificial intelligence and for computer chips and for all of the information technology we have at enormous markups. And we can live on our economic rents, live off the fat of the land, as they used to say. We don’t have to have blue-collar jobs. Everybody can work in an office and make money that way.

So in a way, what’s happened today is exactly what America wanted. And all of a sudden, they’ve woken up to the fact and said, how can America run the world and be number one if it doesn’t have a manufacturing power, if it’s dependent on other countries for its manufacturing and now for its technology, and if all of this is financed by running into debt that the economy runs up for the military spending abroad to prevent other countries from competing with the United States, when actually it’s the United States that has decided we want you to compete because your production and competition with us is what’s winning the class war against labor. Your competition is what’s holding down the price of labor. So they haven’t really thought, what does a post-industrial economy mean? Well, it turns out to be a financialized economy.

You have today, as the election for 2024 is being prepared, the bewilderment of the Democratic Party here. If you look at the GDP, President Biden says, you’re doing so well, look at GDP. And the vast majority of Americans, according to every poll in every part of the country says, we’re not doing well at all. We’re doing awful. And it turns out that when you look at what is the American GDP, well, almost all of it is the growth in prosperity, the growth in financial benefits for the 1%, maybe for the 10% of the population. And the 1% and the 10% has increased its wealth so much since 2008 led the Federal Reserve to slash interest rates that the 1% and the 10% gain is larger than the loss for the 90%. So all that the President Biden can say is, who are you going to believe? Are you going to look at the statistics or are you going to look at your own life and what you have to spend at the grocery store and what you have to spend on rent and housing as America turns away from a homeowner’s economy into a rental economy?

There’s a huge concentration of land and housing in the hands of absentee landlords instead of private homebuyers who now cannot afford to buy a home when the interest rates are soaring to over 7.5%, in which case, if you buy a home with a 10-year mortgage, in only 10 years, the bank makes more money for the mortgage than the seller of the house makes.

So indeed, America has found that, yes, what is the post-industrial economy? It’s a financial economy. And a financial economy has savings on the asset side of the balance sheet and debt on the liability side. But the savings on the asset side are held mainly by the 1%. And the debt on the liability side is owed by the 99%. So when President Biden said, and the economists profession, Paul Krugman and the Nobel Prize winners all say, well, you don’t have to look at debt because we owe it to ourselves. Well, the we who owe it are the 99%. And the ourselves are the 1%. And that’s what is leading the United States to be not a very happy economy these days.

lately if i need a pump I google "pump NZ closing down sale" and have found some great buys...   Liquadations running at GFC levels now and be worse after xmas.

On ya

I sorted the small amount of clothing I need for 2024 at the Barkers ‘Singles Day’ (lol) sale a few weeks back. 60% off!

Will get a handful of basics at Uniqlo in Japan, too

One thing useful is that any marketing email list I inadvertently subscribed to either knowingly or not, it's a good time to be reminded to hit those unsubscribe links. Although I sometimes need to put my +2 specs on to find it.

You might like this..

https://www.thepress.co.nz/nz-news/350114487/countering-crass-consumerism-black-friday

His company makes great products too.