Monday
I stayed pretty busy today with other things but I did take notice of a few things that went on today. One thing I couldn’t miss was that AMD was up something like 50 dollars today. There was a reasonable recovery for many of the stocks but I think the technology stocks were the biggest winners. Nobody I saw was as big as AMD though. At least not of the stocks that I own. Intel was up about 12 dollars, and most of the others were 2 to 5 dollars but still they were in the plus side.
I tend to just watch my stocks and I haven’t really paid that much attention lately to the indexes or the different categories. I don’t know, I guess I got pretty depressed watching everything going down for the first part of the month. It’s probably a good time to buy the dip I suppose but I haven’t found anything that excites me yet.
The Economy
I have been trying to learn more about how the economy works, and I am finding out just how complicated it is. The way that the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve Bank work, and how Congress is supposed to hold the purse strings but just don’t seem to care. I think it’s despicable that Congress is just shut down when there are bills that Johnson doesn’t like. They should be out there fixing problems, not just avoiding them.
I have been trying to understand things like GDP and CPI and all those other reports that come out with job reports and inflation reports, and I think it’s funny that they take the two biggest factors out of the inflation reports (gasoline and groceries) so it doesn’t look so bad! I know that we feel the pinch of gasoline at the pumps but we are only beginning to see how it affects the groceries and prices of everything else, since gasoline and diesel are used throughout the supply chain of everything.
I think I have started to understand why the president wants to bring manufacturing back to the US, though I don’t think his grammar school playground bully methods were the right way to go about it. His idea (I think) is that since our Debt to GDP ratio is about 125% which basically means that we spend more than we make, so we either have to spend less (not likely with this administration) or make more. If we start making more products here, then that would increase the amount of money that we make. and if we can keep our spending at the same level we could change that Debt to GDP ratio down under 100.
I also understand the supply vs demand relationship, where if the supply is smaller than the demand, the prices go up, and if the supply is greater than the demand, the prices go down. That was sort of the idea behind Reaganomics where they gave tax breaks and even money to the corporations to encourage them to increase the supply so prices would go down. Unfortunately, that didn’t factor in human greed, so the companies just took the money and added it to their executive year end bonuses and kept the prices high.
But now we’ve made it even worse because the supply is kept low because of tariffs and trade wars and geopolitical conflicts like the war in Iran that is diminishing our ability to increase supply to bring prices down. That has really put us in quite the pickle!
I’m getting a better grasp on what inflation means and how it works but I’m not ready yet to discuss it because it’s still a little over my head! But I’m getting there! I’m pretty sure that there is a solution, but it would require that all the world leaders put their egos in a closet, and work together rather than everyone trying to be “the winner.”
The United Nations
There is a meeting at the United Nations this week and I think that the president of China will be here soon. We may not see too much of them since our president kicked out the big networks from his press conferences so I hear other press organizations are just not going to cover him either. It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy! He lives for the cameras and if they just all turned away, it would serve him right.
But at this meeting, I think the president of Iran is supposed to be there, and he might meet with our president. That could be a fireball. Maybe we can get JD Vance to tell the president of Iran that he hasn’t said “thank you” to our president enough. (OK, that was mean!)
The president of Ukraine is supposed to be there too, and that should be interesting. Ukraine has been hitting Russia pretty hard with destroying the oil refineries and that is another thing that is driving up the global price of diesel around the world too. But Russia should never have started this mess.
But I hope that the meeting goes well and they start to figure some things out to try to bring peace. We have other things like floods and wildfires and droughts to worry about.
We will see what tomorrow will bring!
I’m not making any drastic changes this month and maybe not until after the Midterm Elections. Who knows what kind of fiasco that will be!
