Again, these are PUBLICLY traded companies, with sales of low millions at the lowest. Not corner family-owned paint and body shops.
A college prof like you should easily see that a national minimum wage is a ridiculous idea. Ditto for a state minimum wage. Living expenses vary so much from area to area. Wages should be determined by productivity and not legislative fiat.
You believe in price fixing? That is what minimum wage is- fixing the price of wages. Do you believe you are God that can determine the “right” wage that everyone should demand? It is none of your business what I or anyone else choose to sell their wages for.
Kinda what I feared. There are some metrics, I think, likely census business surveys, but they’re not reported as often.
Perhaps you’d like to live in the 1920s when that was the prevailing view, in the courts at least. Child labor, no safety standards, no fire escapes. Good times.
What have all those things got to do with wage fixing?
I ask you again: do you honestly believe your intelligence is so superhuman that you can determine a price for labor IN THE WHOLE USA under which people should be prohibited from selling their labor?
Even if you had such supreme intelligence, what would give you the right to dictate that to other people?
You don’t think wages and working conditions are related? They’re both about setting a floor, below which we in an advanced wealthy nation will not allow people to sink. It’s about basic human dignity.
I claim no supreme intelligence, but I’m not the one setting the wages.
Know what else just smashed $30K?
Bitcoin.
It’s too bad I am banned from the CH forums, where the illusion of politeness is more important than honesty. I would be dancing on Clark’s face right now.
But that’s ok. His sycophants can take comfort in being wrong on principle. And the principle is, apparently, having primary faith in & allegiance to government monetary ponzi schemes.
The price of labor and the conditions of labor are different things entirely.
By the way, as unfortunate as it is, some child labor is necessary in societies with very low productivity rates. It is a tribute to capitalism that it has raised productivity enough to eliminate child labor in most countries.
But I demanded labor of my own children. Sometimes I paid them for it and sometimes I didn’t. Did that required labor hurt my children? Does labor actually damage children, as long as it does not interrupt schooling? Children doing productive work certainly beats the smoking dope or wasting time playing on their smart phone. Made a ton of money cutting grass during my childhood.
Oh, so you are not the one with the Supreme Intelligence who is willing to ascertain the value of labor on a national scale? Well tell me, who is the superhuman genius who does? And why does he know better than individuals what their own labor is worth?
Wish I understood more about Bitcoin. I have stayed out of it. Its popularity now is probably due to:
- Falling confidence in national currencies.
- Desire for financial privacy.
- Frictional costs of trading precious metals.
Those are dead on, all three.
If government fiat could manage to result in anything but inflationary theft, Bitcoin never would have been invented.
But “no government can resist the temptation to finance profligacy through printing.” —Andreas Antonopoulos
Government fiat is a multinational race to the bottom, which shows no sign of abating in our lifetimes.
And sadly, COVID has dramatically accelerated the race.
Long ago I forecast there would be a day where governments would not even have the pretense of taxing enough to pay for the bread and circus. That day is now. NEXT PHASE: Modern Monetary Theory. Might as well do away with those pesky intermediaries, the central banks.
Bitcoin will certainly have another correction, likely within the next few months. But each peak is higher than the last, and each subsequent low is higher as well.
I don’t judge anyone for being cautious. But it is the naysayers, who dismiss it as junk — FOR NO REASON AT ALL, I might add, other than doubting anything that isn’t the status quo, & dressing up their clichéd opinion with nonsequitur details they parrot from the tabloid media — that I find to be the most useless members of the discussion.
They declared Bitcoin dead when it corrected off of $20K three years ago. One CH board member told me I was simply trying to cut my losses by trying to pump up enthusiasm…on a forum with a few dozen active members. 
Another member — hchang, utter piece of shit, don’t miss him one bit 
— made it his mission to spew the most banal clichés on the topic any chance he got. Nothing but offhand dismissal, coming from a place of complete & total ignorance.
Now it is over 50% higher off of that previous peak. These people have tons of egg on their face, but of course they are lying low & pretending they never dismissed it in this way. They will certainly cast aspersions when it corrects again, ignoring their consistent track record of wrongness.
People are seeking a stable measure and store of value. I have seen this on the ground in Ecuador and Argentina, to name a couple of places. They naturally want to fall back to other nations’ currencies like the US$. What will happen when the value of these drop as well. What will people turn to?
Maybe Bitcoin or another crypto. Trouble is, in other countries people don’t have so many electronic registers and credit card readers. More deals are done in cash. Small pieces of gold or silver might suffice for currency. Perhaps the asset-backed Chinese experiment will succeed.
What if your occupation is construction and every yardstick started shrinking in length? It would be a pain to use. If meter sticks were more constant in length, one would switch to those.
The next few years will be interesting as ALL the major currencies are debased. First place the inflation goes is real estate and other financial assets. That will make asset-holders happy, until they figure out they are real no richer than before, except measured in debased currency.
LOL!!! Locking down the economy does not scare you about the future, but not debasing the currency ENOUGH with helicopter money you think will be certain doom! You are too funny!
Meanwhile, every employer I talk to can’t get enough reliable employees. And you think the solution is paying people even more NOT to work!
What a comedian!
I know all of you are waiting breathlessly to hear my investment plans. I did take my 401k out of stocks when I started this thread but got back in after new stimulus was announced a few weeks ago. I lost almost 4% during my time out but I’m okay with that.
I sold my short term travel stuff and bought oil stocks which has worked out so far.
Soon I will write a longer post about the stock market.
Short version is although it is overvalued, the highest correlation is with the Fed balance sheet, which is growing fantastically.
So the market, however overvalued it is, really cannot go down much, because the first place newly-created money goes is financial assets like real estate and stocks.
Even though new money will support the stock market, the rise in equities typically lags the inflation rate. Often times you do not see the market quite keep up with inflation.
People will be happy not to see their portfolios decline, but what really is happening is their portfolio is not growing in buying power, only in nominal dollars.
The coming year will be very interesting as inflation comes to consumer prices. It has already occurred on the wholesale level, as yet another retailer confirmed to me today.
The irony here is that there’s nowhere else to go. All we can do is ride it out and wait for the chaos.
Although I’d like to tell people to sock away a ton of money into crypto, that is still largely speculative. Can’t in good conscience say it is a wise move in lieu of stocks & bonds. But 5-10% of the portfolio as a hedge might be wiser.
I became irrationally hopeful that Trump would get us back onto the gold standard, but now realize what a pipe dream that was. Too many powerful forces depend on the Fed’s theft from the working class through printing. It is a massive welfare system for rich people, and they’ll give it up on a cold day in hell.
Crypto may turn out to be our salvation, but it is not certain. On the other hand, precious metals have stood the test thousands of years. Platinum is such a value now. Precious metals are the only sure hedge.
You are right. Too many forces, especially real estate moguls, depend on the Fed easy money machine. Same was true for the 2nd Bank of the US. It is a miracle we got rid of that.
Talked to a couple of high net worth friends this week. One told me he was sitting on 7 figures of cash right now. He said he didn’t want to put it in the market, he had all he wanted in stocks, bonds weren’t paying anything, and neither are banks. The other guy said he was sitting on more cash than he ever had before and same situation, what do you do with cash right now. On a lesser scale, I’m in the same situation. Sitting on more cash than ever. Not happy getting .5% apr at the bank. Real estate is at a peak, stocks are at a high, bonds are low.
The point of this post is, are we outliers or is there a ton of people out there right now sitting on large amounts of cash? If so, where does it end up going? Crypto, not a consideration. Precious metals, only a very small percentage. What else is there? All of us are over 60 which tends to mean we are more conservative.
Anecdotal but I sold my Jeep on FB MArketplace a guy from a middle to upper/middle class neighborhood down the street from me paid cash on MLK birthday when the banks were closed