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Dozens of container ships are piling up outside Germany’s largest seaport by volume, known as the Port of Hamburg. It’s the third busiest port in Europe and the 15th largest globally and could be plunged into chaos next week as dockworkers may strike.

German newspaper Die Welt reports congestion at Hamburg is worsening, and container ships have to wait two weeks before entering the port.

“The waiting times are unsatisfactory,” a spokesman for shipping company Hapag-Lloyd said, referring to Hamburg.

Hamburger Hafen und Logistik AG (HHLA), a top European port and transport logistics company, said the reason for increasing congestion is a slowdown in the processing of containers, especially imports from the Far East not being transported fast enough by truck and train.

Besides congestion, Kiel Institute for Economic Research estimates that around 2% of the global container load is stuck at the port. There are also mounting concerns dockworkers could be ready to strike.

“There could be additional problems from next Tuesday. Many reckon that dockers could then go on strike in order to increase the pressure on the ongoing wage negotiations. The next round of negotiations is scheduled for June 10, but the peace obligation has already expired,” Die Welt said.

According to the Verdi services union, the strike could begin next Tuesday. The last time strikes hit Hamburg was in the late 1970s, a period when the world suffered from disastrous stagflation, similar to the economic climate today.

A shipowner told the German newspaper Hamburger Abendblatt: “If it comes to that, we’ll have a super meltdown in Hamburg.”

The timing of the proposed strike by dockworkers comes as consumer prices in Europe’s largest economy surged 8.7% YoY last month (the highest since the start of the monthly statistics in 1963).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

US Consumer Prices Soar At Fastest In 39 Years, Real Wages Tumble For 9th Straight Month

January 12, 2022

US Consumer Prices Soar At Fastest In 39 Years, Real Wages Tumble For 9th Straight Month

Consensus was convinced – with barely any outliers – that this morning’s consumer price index would print with an astonishing 7.0% YoY (and notably 7 of the last 9 releases have come in above consensus) and they nailed it with the 7% print at its highest since June 1982 (when ET was launched in the US)…

Source: Bloomberg

That is the 19th straight monthly rise in headline CPI and Core CPI also surged to its highest since Feb 1991 (printing hotter than expected at +5.5% YoY)…

Source: Bloomberg

Under the hood, commodities, shelter, and new-and-used cars and trucks saw prices jump the most. Energy actually saw a modest 0.4% retracement (that will not be the case in January)…

Source: Bloomberg

The cost of putting a roof over your head is accelerating once again. Shelter inflation rises to 4.13% Y/Y from 3.84%, the highest since Feb 2007…

In fact, while Services inflation rose to +3.7% – its highest since Jan 2007 – Goods inflation soared 10.7% YoY – its highest since May 1975…

Source: Bloomberg

Finally, and perhaps most importantly for Main Street, real average hourly earnings fell (down 2.4% YoY) for the 9th straight month…

Source: Bloomberg

So the next time a politician tries to tell you to be grateful that your wages are going up or you can move to a new higher paying job, just remind him that the surge in the cost of living is outpacing wage gains, thanks to The Fed’s money-largesse and Congress’ lockdown policies and helicopter money have crushed the quality of life for millions.

Dollar Purchasing Power Plunges. Inflation +6.2%. For Urban Wage Earners +6.9%, Highest in 40 years, Most Monstrously Overstimulated Economy Ever.

November 12, 2021

Dollar Purchasing Power Plunges. Inflation +6.2%. For Urban Wage Earners +6.9%, Highest in 40 years, Most Monstrously Overstimulated Economy Ever.

Fed still printing money and repressing “real” interest rates to negative 6%, new vehicle prices spike by most since 1975, housing CPI jumps, food & energy soar.

The broadest Consumer Price Index (CPI-U) spiked 0.9% in October from September, and by 6.2% from a year ago, the highest since November 1990 (6.3%) and since 1982, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics today.

The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W) spiked by 6.9% in October year-over-year, the highest since June 1982, nearly 40 years ago:

This CPI-W is the index upon which the Social Security COLAs are based, which are determined by the average during the third quarter. The Q3 average of 5.9% set the COLA for 2022 at 5.9%, the highest COLA since 1982, and there was some jubilation among beneficiaries a month ago. But now inflation is blowing right past that COLA.

As Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic pointed out, “transitory has become a dirty word.” This massive inflation occurred while the Fed still had its foot fully on the accelerator – $120 billion a month in money printing and near-0% short-term interest rates, meaning “real” short-term rates are at negative 6.0%.

The Fed has been saying over and over again ad nauseam for seven months that inflation will slow down somehow on its own, even as the Fed had the foot fully on the accelerator, and every step along the way, the Fed has grossly underestimated the surge of inflation, and continues to do so. The Powell Fed has unleashed a monster.

Here is Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s reaction to this inflation monster blowout, as captured by cartoonist Marco Ricolli for WOLF STREET:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

This is not 1997

October 26, 2021

This is not 1997

Not that minimum wages are anything new. The USA introduced its Federal Minimum Wage as far back as 1938; although today each state sets its own rate. And the general consensus is that minimum wages help raise wages in general with little or no impact on employment as a whole. The broad theory being that by increasing wages at the bottom – where people’s propensity to spend is higher – we increase demand across the economy. As the economy grows, demand for labour increases and forces wages up still further. And so, demand rises and promotes further growth.Although introduced to the UK by a Labour government, the National Minimum Wage is closer to the Tory approach to economic policy. This is because it passes the costs onto someone other than the state immediately. In this case, Britain’s employers. Labour governments, in contrast, have generally sought the politically easier approach of passing costs onto future generations via public borrowing… which was often the better policy if a combination of inflation and growth served to lower the real cost of the debt even as the state’s ability to repay it became easier.

This was no doubt the outcome desired by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown when they were elected in 1997. After two decades of suppressed wages – first under James Callaghan, and then under Thatcher – and despite the deregulation of the City of London and the increasing revenues from North Sea oil and gas, it was hoped that a legal minimum wage would generate the growth needed to lift people out of poverty. In neoliberal terms, it would “make work pay.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Who determines prices?

September 12, 2021

Who determines prices?

One of the consequences of the response to the pandemic and the disruption from Brexit is that labour shortages are appearing across the low-paid sectors of the economy. So much so that even the metropolitan liberal Guardian has begun to wonder whether the benefits of higher wages for the low-paid might outweigh the cost of having to pay more for a plumber or an au pair. As John Harris puts it:

“For decades, large swathes of the labour market have been run on the assumption that there will always be sufficient people prepared to work for precious little. But here and across the world, as parts of the economy have been shut down and furlough schemes have given people pause for thought, the idea that they need not stay in jobs that are exploitative and morale-sapping has evidently caught on.

“In the UK, meanwhile, Brexit remains a disastrous and chaotic project – but, among its endless and unpredictable consequences, leaving the EU has cut off employers’ access to a pool of people who were too often exploitable. Time has thereby been called on one of the ways that our dysfunctional labour market was prevented from imploding.”

Harris points to sectors of the economy – mostly low-paid – where employers have been obliged to increase wages in order to fill vacancies. And there is certainly some room for wage increases across the economy. But the emerging narrative is that this is a bad thing because it will create price increases. Much of the thinking around this issue though, is based on experiences and on economic models that last saw the light of day half a century ago. And with this in mind, we should take mainstream narratives with a pinch of salt.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Want To See What Stagflation Looks Like?

August 14, 2019

Want To See What Stagflation Looks Like?

Another undoubtedly firm inflation report as the tariff effect works its way through the pipeline. This means one thing; the stagflation narrative only strengthened today as the US economy slows in the face of supply side inflation.

Want to see what stagflation looks like?

6m Avg. NFP = green
Non-Manufacturing PMI = black
Leading Index (YoY) = blue
CPI ex-food and energy = pink

In theory this puts the Fed in a quandary. In reality, you should recognize that:

1) The data today implies Core PCE (the Fed’s inflation metric which they derive policy from) at somewhere in the 1.60% to 1.65% range. Firmer than where we were in 2Q, but still below the Fed’s mandate. Therefore, today’s data does not hold the Fed back from easing.

2) The new core of the Fed has a completely new mindset when it comes to inflation where they intend to “make up” for the time core inflation remained below 2% by letting inflation run hot. For example:

Williams: “my view is any way that keeps the average inflation rate at 2%”
Evans: “ought to communicate comfort with 2.5% core inflation”
Brainard: “we make some pre-commitments to making up so that inflation gets to 2% on average over time in a more sustained basis”

So the Fed will not pivot policy by any means with their preferred measure of core inflation not only below their mandate on a one-off basis, but nowhere near their new Average Inflation Targeting mindset.

3) At this stage of the cycle (very late with some recession signals), is supply side inflation positive for the economy? It could actually add to the malaise especially with wages now off the highs as seen in AHE, ECI, and even the latest real AHE which is down to 1.3% from a high of 1.9% earlier this year.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Workers’ Struggle in India to ‘Make the Land Proud’ as Global Unrest Spreads

January 15, 2019

Struggles That Make the Land Proud: The Second Newsletter (2019)

Over two days—Jan. 8 and 9—more than 160 million workers went on strike in India. This has been one of the largest general strikes in the world. The workers, exhausted by almost three decades of neoliberal policies and by the attack on their rights, came onto the streets to make their case for better livelihoods and workplace democracy. Blockades on train tracks and on national highways closed down sections of the country.

In Bengaluru, information technology workers joined the strike. In Himachal Pradesh workers gathered to demand an end to precarious employment in government service. Workers from a broad range of sectors, from manufacturing to health care, joined the strike. There has been no response from the government. Please read my report on the strike.

My report is written from Kerala, where almost the entire workforce went on strike. This strike comes after the powerful Women’s Wall that was built on Jan. 1. For a fuller sense of what brought 5.5 million women to form a wall along Kerala, see my report. The title for this newsletter comes from a well-known poem by the late radical poet Vayalar Ramavarma (1928-1975). When workers struggle, Vayalar wrote, “isn’t it something to make the land proud?”

Morocco, Sudan, Nigeria and Los Angeles

This two-day strike comes as workers around the world greeted 2019 with a wave of demonstrations—from the “month of anger” launched in Morocco by trade unions, to the protests in Sudan over rising prices; from teachers’ strike in Los Angeles, to the potential general strike in Nigeria over wages. An International Trade Union Confederation report from last year showed that ‘More countries are excluding workers from labour laws’ – 65% of countries, at last count, excluding migrant workers and public sector employees and others from the rights afforded to them. There is every indication that the attack on workers’ rights and workplace democracy will continue despite the unrest amongst workers.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Politics of Debt-Serfs and Tax Donkeys: Our Only Choice Is the Least Bad Option

November 27, 2018

The Politics of Debt-Serfs and Tax Donkeys: Our Only Choice Is the Least Bad Option

The reality is there is no avenue left for advocacy, grievances or redress in a system dominated by global corporations and self-serving political insiders.

What’s striking about the protests in Paris against higher fuel taxes is the universality of the protesters’ expressions of being fed up with a status quo that no longer listens to them. Their commentaries of frustration are echoed around the world, from the U.S. to China: ‘People are in the red. They can’t afford to eat’.

The basic problem is obvious: wages have stagnated while taxes, interest on debt and costs of essentials have soared. When officialdom claims the higher fuel taxes are an expression of concern for the environment, it’s difficult not to gag at the hypocrisy: where are the higher taxes on the corporate and private jets, and the bunker-fuel burning freighters that ply the seas in service of globalization?

People are frustrated because debt-serfs and tax donkeys don’t have any real political options: with all the political parties mere variations of a sclerotic, self-serving elite, our only choice is to either not vote at all or vote for the least bad option.

In the original version of feudalism, peasants armed with pitchforks knew where to go for redress or regime change: the feudal lord’s castle on the hill. Though you won’t find this in conventional narratives of the Middle Ages, peasant revolts were a common occurrence; serfs weren’t always delighted to toil for their noble masters.

In the present era of corporate dominance, where can serfs go to demand redress and financial freedom from the neofeudal system? Nowhere. The global corporations that own the land and the productive assets have no castle that can be stormed; they exist in an abstract financial world of stock shares, buybacks, bonds, lobbyists and political influence.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Here’s Why the Market Must Continue to Rip Higher — Everything Depends On It

October 18, 2018

Here’s Why the Market Must Continue to Rip Higher — Everything Depends On It

Rarely discussed, corporate and government pensions, are barreling towards disaster. For some reason, there is an assumption that what ails the government, with their $20 trillion in debt, isn’t something that ordinary folk need to worry about. After all, times are good and corporate stock prices are near record highs, people are working, and even wages have been increasing.

But beneath the shiny veneer is a sickness that is festering, a red nightmare of underfunded pensions, both on a government and corporate level. They menace over markets like an explicit threat, a promise of crisis that is both maturing and spoiling with equal violence.

Former Dow component, and once upon a time great American company, has an underfunded pension of $31 billion and a business that is in the midst of restructuring. The stock has been cut in half over the past year.

But at a time when General Electric Co. is facing what amounts to an existential crisis, a $31 billion deficit in its pension plan may complicate any turnaround that involves a breakup of the 126-year-old icon of American capitalism. Divvying up the obligations won’t be easy.

After all, GE owes benefits to at least 619,000 people. And retirees aren’t the only ones at risk. Ideally, breaking up a conglomerate as sprawling as GE would unlock value for shareholders, who have seen their stock fall 40 percent since the CEO took the reins from Jeffrey Immelt in August. Stronger divisions wouldn’t be dragged down by weaker ones, and each business would stand on its own financially.

Here’s a nice genteel list of the top corporate pension deficits in America. The municipal deficit is far more insidious, $6 trillion in the hole.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Ban Share Buybacks

August 5, 2018

Mario Tama/Getty Images

Ban Share Buybacks

American corporations are simply raking in profits. Some are so bloated and cash-rich they literally can’t figure out what to do with it all. Apple, for instance, is sitting on nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars — and that’s down a bit from earlier this year. Microsoft and Google, meanwhile, were sitting on “only” $132 billion and $63 billion respectively (as of March this year).

However, American corporations in general are taking those profits and kicking them out to shareholders, mainly in the form of share buybacks. These are when a corporation uses profits, cash, or borrowed money to buy its own stock, thus increasing its price and the wealth of its shareholders. (Big Tech is doing this as well, just not fast enough to draw down their dragon hoards.) As a new joint report from the Roosevelt Institute and the National Employment Law Project by Katy Milani and Irene Tung shows, from 2015 to 2017 corporations spent nearly 60 percent of their net profits on buybacks.

This practice should be banned immediately, as it was before the Reagan administration.

The most immediately objectionable consequence of share buybacks is they come at the expense of wages. Milani and Tung calculate that if buybacks spending had been funneled into wage increases, McDonald’s employees could get a raise of $4,000; those at Starbucks could get $8,000; and those at Lowes, Home Depot, and CVS could get an eye-popping $18,000.

Some economists are skeptical of this reasoning, arguing that wages are set according to labor market conditions. But if you set aside free market dogmatism, it is beyond obvious that this sort of behavior is coming at workers’ expense. Wall Street bloodsuckers are not at all subtle about it, screaming bloody murder and tanking stocks every time a public company proposes paying workers instead of shareholders.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

If the Economy is So Good, Why are Wages Flat?

August 4, 2018

If the Economy is So Good, Why are Wages Flat?

Photo by Nathaniel St. Clair

We are supposedly seven years into a “recovery” from the global economic collapse that commenced in 2008. The latest evidence offered to promote this oft-peddled mantra is that U.S. gross domestic product showed a strong uptick for the second quarter of 2018, an annualized rate of 4.1 percent, nearly double that of the first quarter.

Coupled with the ongoing decline in unemployment (although standard unemployment rates greatly underestimate the true rate of employment), orthodox economists, conservative propagandists and apologists for the Trump administration would have use believe happy days are here again.

So why aren’t our wages increasing?

In part, it is because the true unemployment rate is not nearly so low as the “official” unemployment rate used by governments around the world, and thus the ranks of unemployed and underemployed are sufficiently large that there is no upward pressure on wages. Orthodox economists, dedicated as they are to ignoring any evidence that doesn’t match their models designed to “prove” that all manners of capitalist excess are as natural as the tides of the ocean — and thus in practice the professional wing of conservative propagandists — have various excuses for stagnant wages and ever increasing inequality. A favorite among these is an alleged “skills mismatch” — too many unskilled workers and a shortage of skilled workers for the high-tech jobs of today.

The data tells a different story, however. A 2014 report by the National Employment Law Project found that low-wage jobs were created at a faster pace than higher-paid jobs were lost in the first years to that point. The Project reported this breakdown:

* Lower-wage industries ($9.48 per hour to $13.33) constituted 22 percent of the 2008-2010 losses, but 44 percent of jobs gained since then.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Housing Bubble and Everything Bubble in One Simple Picture

July 8, 2018

Housing Bubble and Everything Bubble in One Simple Picture

To understand the magnitude of the housing bubbles simply compare the index of wages to the index of prices.

How Did We Get Here?

That’s easy.

Average Wages vs CPI

Note the correct CPU comparison for this chart is CPI-W not CPI-U, not that it matters much.

No matter what official CPI one uses, the chart is a joke. Why? The CPI only reflects rent, not actual housing prices.

The Fed made this mistake during the housing bubble and they made it again from 2011 to present.

More bubbles will burts and that is very deflationary. By chasing its tail, the Fed creates the very conditions it seeks to prevent.

Price Deflation Not a Problem

For years, the Fed desperately sought more inflation. However, a BIS Study on the Historical Costs of Deflation shows routine price deflation is not a problem.

According to the BIS, “Deflation may actually boost output. Lower prices increase real incomes and wealth. And they may also make export goods more competitive.”

My Challenge to Keynesians “Prove Rising Prices Provide an Overall Economic Benefit” has gone unanswered.

Meanwhile, people keep faith in the Phillips’ Curve. It’s pathetic.

Related Articles

The Case For a Gold Currency Part 2: Wages and Growth: Higher Under Classical Gold Standard

April 6, 2018

THE CASE FOR A GOLD CURRENCY PART 2: WAGES AND GROWTH: HIGHER UNDER CLASSICAL GOLD STANDARD

When the world was on the gold standard, the fastest rate of economic growth happened between 1870 and 1914, when the gold standard was suspended in Europe because of WWI. Not only that, but blue collared workers then saw vast increases in their purchasing power. Had we stayed on the classical gold standard, wages would be higher and the middle class would continue to grow.

For example, in 1915, Henry Ford paid his workers $5 per day. At that time the price of gold was set at $20.67/oz. This means that in terms of gold (which was a legitimate form of payment and was easily redeemable into paper money) a blue collared factory worker was paid 0.242 oz. of gold per day. Assuming a 5-day work week and 40 weeks of work in a year, Ford workers could be paid 48 oz. of gold per year. Today the price of gold is $1200/oz; this means the Ford workers were paid $57,600/year in today’s money. This is significantly higher than what manufacturing jobs pay today.

Similarly, in 1965, the minimum wage was $1.25/hr (5 silver dimes) and under the Bretton Woods Agreement, silver was $1.25 per ounce. Today silver is $15/oz and hence workers would have had a purchasing power of $15/hour in today’s money.

Inflation

This implies that it is government control over a nation’s monetary system, which has allowed the middle class’s income to be eroded by inflation. While the CPI may show us that central banks have kept inflation under control, once we use precious metals as a measurement, the cost of goods and services have gone up much higher than what current inflation would suggest.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Problem with a State-Cartel Economy: Prices Rise, Wages Don’t

April 2, 2018

The Problem with a State-Cartel Economy: Prices Rise, Wages Don’t

The vise will tighten until something breaks. It could be the currency, it could be the political status quo, it could be the credit/debt system–or all three.

The problem with an economy dominated by state-enforced cartels and quasi-monopolies is that prices rise (since cartels can push higher costs onto the consumer) but wages don’t (since cartels can either dominate local labor markets or engage in global wage arbitrage: offshore jobs, move to lower-wage states, etc.)

Think about the major expenses of the typical household: Internet, telephony, cable and other digital services: cartels. Airlines: cartel. Healthcare insurance, providers and Big Pharma: cartels. Defense weaponry: cartel. Higher education and student loans: cartels. Mortgages: cartel. And so on.

The economy is now dominated by two consequences of state-enforced cartels:

1. High profits / high incomes for the owners and managers at the top who reap most of the gains of the cartel: high-income individuals pay most of the income taxes and fund most of the political class’s campaign contributions. No wonder the political class insures that the state protects cartels from competition: it’s called self-interest.

2. Debt. i.e. credit for consumers, so they can continue to borrow more to pay the ever-higher costs of living.

But debt has a cost, too, and even at low rates of interest, eventually the interest on ever-larger mountains of debt crimps households’ spending and their ability to borrow more.

When consumers aren’t earning more and can no longer borrow more to support additional consumption, consumption and the rate of new debt expansion both decline, guaranteeing recession.

Cartels don’t really have competition, and so there is no pressure to lower costs; cartels have no incentives to innovate in ways that radically reduce costs and improve their services. Consumers see this most dramatically in healthcare and higher education, where costs just keep rising year after year.

If consumers can’t borrow more to pay higher costs, then cartels lobby for the government to pay their rising costs via deficit spending, i.e. the government borrows more to fund the cartels.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What is Wrong With the Popular Definition of Inflation?

March 12, 2018

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE POPULAR DEFINITION OF INFLATION?

According to Mises,

Inflation, as this term was always used everywhere and especially in this country, means increasing the quantity of money and bank notes in circulation and the quantity of bank deposits subject to check. But people today use the term `inflation’ to refer to the phenomenon that is an inevitable consequence of inflation, that is the tendency of all prices and wage rates to rise. The result of this deplorable confusion is that there is no term left to signify the cause of this rise in prices and wages. There is no longer any word available to signify the phenomenon that has been, up to now, called inflation.^[1]

What is today called inflation is the general rise in prices, which is in fact only the outcome of inflation. Consequently, anything that contributes to price rises is now called inflationary and therefore must be guarded against. Thus, a fall in unemployment or a rise in economic activity are all seen as potential inflationary triggers and therefore must be restrained by central bank policies.

Some other triggers such as rises in commodity prices or workers’ wages also regarded as potential threats and therefore must be always under the watchful eye of the central bank policy makers.

If inflation is indeed just a general rise in prices, then why is it regarded as bad news? What kind of damage does it do?

Mainstream economists maintain that general price increases cause speculative buying, which generates waste. Inflation, it is maintained, also erodes the real incomes of pensioners and low-income earners and causes a misallocation of resources.

Despite all these assertions regarding the side effects of what they define as inflation, mainstream economics does not tell us how all these bad side effects are caused.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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