Tag: economics

A seller’s experience being ripped off by a buyer with the full legal assistance of the payment processor shows how the Internet economy is increasingly post-contractual.

So I went back to court today with the impression that I would have a quick and simple trial with the buyer. A couple of amateurs. It was before the same judge as my trial with PayPal. So the judge consolidated the two cases. So I was again met by a high-priced attorney representing PayPal. We end up in the court room for another 2 1/2 hr trial in what can only be described as a legal menage a trois between myself, Paypal, and the buyer. Three different parties, three different interests. To open, PayPal‘s attorney presents about an inch thick file with all of the research and case law as he sees pertains to the previous trial that is still under consideration. At one point, the judge made a comment that PayPal has to have spent more than $14,000 to defend a small claims case. I suspect that PayPal is taking this so seriously because for $70 and no experience, I think I have made a worthy case to punch holes in their user agreement. I suspect this may have much larger implications and consequences on the line for them.

I found it somewhat awkward and put me at a disadvantage to first have to argue that I fulfilled all of my obligations to the buyer as a seller. There are many unnecessary details to this case that I won’t go into detail here, but in our communication, the buyer was offered insurance and declined and agreed to be responsible for the risk of shipping. So I had to argue that he was responsible for any potential loss. At the same time, I had to argue that the transaction between the buyer and myself was complete. It was PayPal who came in after the fact to reverse those charges and take the money from me. And I argued that this was done in breach of their contract as it specifically does not cover financial product or investment of any type. The buyer argued that since he paid with PayPal, he believed he was under the terms of PayPal which required confirmation of shipping, signature confirmation, etc. The judge also made the comment that the buyer could say he completed his obligation by making payment. It was PayPal that took the money from me, not the buyer. This was something he would have to consider. PayPal argued that because we were both in breach of contract and had a dispute between us, that it is their right to arbitrarily decide.

In short, it is a triangular mess but with some important points to consider for the judge and PayPal as a whole that could have much wider ranging implications. The judge states that he will have to research the decision and it would be 3 to 4 weeks, at a minimum, before he would have a written decision….

I received a 24 page verdict from the judge.  I have honestly not read it in its entirety as it has many references to previous case law and legal minutia that does not interest me.  In summary, unfortunately things did not break my way.  My first case against the buyer was dismissed for the small claims court lacking jurisdiction over a Canadian citizen.  There are many pages of explanation, but basically I can file in a Canadian court, if desired.  In reading the judge’s commentary and perhaps reading between the lines, I believe I would win the case.  The question is would it be worth the hassle.  I will consider whether or not to refile in a Candian small claims court, or their equivalent.  I do not believe I will be shipping to Canada again in the future.  Not worth the hassle. 

As for the case against Paypal, again the verdict did not break in my favor.  While I was successful in showing precious metals are in fact not covered under the Buyer’s Protection Program, ultimately the judgement states I can not say Paypal was in breach of contract while I myself was also in breach of the same contract.  By failing to acquire pre-approval for shipping of precious metals, I breached the contract.  This breach, in essence, gave Paypal the right to decide at their discretion.  In summary, I do not plan to accept or utilize Paypal for any transactions involving precious metals in the future.  I see posts that others view this as a “red flag” and they would not enter into a transaction with a seller who does not accept Paypal.  I suppose I am more than willing to pass on those buyers.

Hope this can help someone else in the future.

One thing that is now eminently clear is that both judges and arbitrators only give lip service to the idea that the consumer cannot reasonably be expected to be aware of all the legal fine print. Arbitrators in particular will absolutely hold the consumer responsible for every jot and tittle they know perfectly well that he hasn’t read, and they will do so despite being completely unfamiliar with their own arbitration rules. And by “completely unfamiliar”, I mean literally not knowing what the actual Rule 1 says. This is why the California legislature is regularly passing stronger and stronger protections for consumers, because both the legal system and the private judging system refuse to accept the reality of the corporate deck being stacked completely against the consumer.

Thus, they will readily ignore the contract, the law, and even their own rules in order to let the corporation off the hook if they can find any excuse to do so. Fortunately, the law, especially in California, is considerably harsher on corporate misbehavior than people commonly believe, so it is very far from impossible to beat them in court, so long as no obvious mistakes are made. For example, it is obvious that a state court has no jurisdiction over a Canadian, although of course if the seller had originally filed in Canada, Paypal’s lawyers would probably have argued that the seller had no standing in Canada and who knows what a Canadian judge would have to say about that.

Anyhow, this post-contractual legal environment spells eventual disaster for the neo-liberal global economy, and is another indication of the shift to nationalism and localism.

And it’s probably going to make 2008 look like a walk in the park, if these valuations are any guide:

Hedge fund manager David Einhorn warned of dangers for retail investors that he sees in the market, and one of his main examples was a tiny New Jersey deli with a market capitalization of more than $100 million.

The Paulsboro, New Jersey-based Your Hometown Deli is the sole location for Hometown International, which has an eye-popping market value despite totaling $35,748 in sales in the last two years combined, according to securities filings.

“Someone pointed us to Hometown International (HWIN), which owns a single deli in rural New Jersey … HWIN reached a market cap of $113 million on February 8. The largest shareholder is also the CEO/CFO/Treasurer and a Director, who also happens to be the wrestling coach of the high school next door to the deli. The pastrami must be amazing,” Einhorn said in a letter to clients published Thursday.

Hometown, which appears to have begun trading in 2019, according to FactSet, has shares that trade over the counter and rarely has more than a few hundred shares change hands per day. Often, there are no trades logged in an entire trading day.

Still, the company’s market cap is just over $100 million, according to FactSet.

If $18k in annual sales is worth $100 million, then I’m a multibillionaire. On paper. In Clownworld. Sadly, what passes for Clownworld’s money is observably less legitimate than Zimbabwe’s. And there are already numerous TV ads for stock-investing apps, which should send shivers down the spine of anyone even vaguely familiar with socionomic theory.

UPDATE: It appears a credit crunch is already underway. If the banks aren’t extending consumer credit, particularly to consumers with excellent credit scores, it’s usually because they are having trouble selling or servicing their own debts.

Outraged customers have hit out at Barclaycard after thousands had their credit card limits slashed – some by as much as 99 per cent.  One longstanding customer, who has never missed a payment, said his credit limit was cut from £11,000 to £300, another saw theirs drop from £11,800 to £250, and in the biggest cut seen yet a 62-year-old said his limit dived from £25,000 to £300.

Thanks to the GameStop defense, hedge fund short sellers have lost nearly 27x more in the last month alone than all short sellers combined did in the average month last year.

Wall Street investors are sitting on estimated year-to-date losses of $70.87 billion on their bets against U.S. companies following massive surges in some of the heavily shorted shares, data from analytics firm Ortex showed on Thursday.

Some shares such as in video game retailer GameStop have jumped more than 1,000{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} in the past week, driven primarily by retail investors trading on online apps and sharing tips on social media messaging boards

Such gains have forced short-sellers to buy back stock to cover potential losses in what is dubbed a short-squeeze. Moves were exacerbated by more retail investors piling into the stock.

Ortex data showed that as of Wednesday, there were loss-making short positions on more than 5,000 U.S. firms.

Shorting GameStop may have cost $1.03 billion year-to-date, Ortex estimates, while those shorting Bed, Bath & Beyond were looking at a $600 million loss.

Its short interest data, sourced from submissions by agent lenders, prime brokers, and broker-dealers, showed that around 62 million GameStop shares with a value of $2.2 billion were out on loan as of Wednesday.

To put this in perspective, the average monthly profit/loss for short sellers in 2020 was $2.7 billion. Now you know why Wall Street is shrieking like little girls for the government to stop the public from being able to do what they do.

One thing is clear from all of this. The America public is not going to support another bank bailout once the next financial crisis begins. They’d rather see Wall Street burn, and rightly so.

 NASDAQ does not enjoy playing by #GamerGate rules.

NASDAQ PRESIDENT ADENA FRIEDMAN SAYS WE MONITOR SOCIAL MEDIA CHATTER AND WILL HALT STOCK IF WE MATCH CHATTER WITH UNUSUAL ACTIVITY IN STOCKS – CNBC

$GME

$AMC

$BB

$NOK

So they’re going to try to out-Smart Boy the autists. Yeah, good luck with that. Spacebunny once observed that she’d never seen me back down the way I downright hastened to make things right with a world-class individual a few years ago.

Even dark lords know their limits….

Netherflix is seeing its subscriptions collapse due to popular disgust at its pedophistic support of the film Cuties.

Netflix’s disappointing third quarter earnings was the result of subscribers canceling their service at eight times the usual rate because of anger over the controversial French film Cuties, it has been reported.

Data unearthed by two analytics firms indicate that there was a sharp uptick in the number of people who cancelled their subscriptions at around the same time that calls were growing for a boycott of Netflix over its airing of Cuties. 

Antenna, a data analytics firm that tracks Netflix subscribers, reported a ‘meaningful spike in churn rate’ shortly after the hashtag #CancelNetflix went viral. ‘Churn’ measures the number of subscribers who cancel pay services like Netflix for any reason, according to USA Today. In mid-September, Antenna noted that Netflix was losing five times as many subscribers in the days after the release of Cuties than the company lost in the previous month.

The media loves to proclaim that boycotts don’t work and that conservative consumers are all bark and no bite. But the reason they push this falsehood is precisely because boycotts are extremely effective, and the media is trying to stop them before they start.

Don’t ever provide any support to those who hate you, your faith, and your nation.

Whether the US government will permit them to go under, or whether it will attempt to kick the can further into the future like it did in 2008, is the only real question. This is a very good article on The Atlantic addressing how the banks have changed their debt-drug of choice from Collateralized Debt Obligations to Collateralized Loan Obligations. To translate that into English, the U.S. banking system has replaced its fragile foundation of homeowner debt with corporate debt:

After the housing crisis, subprime CDOs naturally fell out of favor. Demand shifted to a similar—and similarly risky—instrument, one that even has a similar name: the CLO, or collateralized loan obligation. A CLO walks and talks like a CDO, but in place of loans made to home buyers are loans made to businesses—specifically, troubled businesses. CLOs bundle together so-called leveraged loans, the subprime mortgages of the corporate world. These are loans made to companies that have maxed out their borrowing and can no longer sell bonds directly to investors or qualify for a traditional bank loan. There are more than $1 trillion worth of leveraged loans currently outstanding. The majority are held in CLOs.

Just as easy mortgages fueled economic growth in the 2000s, cheap corporate debt has done so in the past decade, and many companies have binged on it.

I was part of the group that structured and sold CDOs and CLOs at Morgan Stanley in the 1990s. The two securities are remarkably alike. Like a CDO, a CLO has multiple layers, which are sold separately. The bottom layer is the riskiest, the top the safest. If just a few of the loans in a CLO default, the bottom layer will suffer a loss and the other layers will remain safe. If the defaults increase, the bottom layer will lose even more, and the pain will start to work its way up the layers. The top layer, however, remains protected: It loses money only after the lower layers have been wiped out.

Unless you work in finance, you probably haven’t heard of CLOs, but according to many estimates, the CLO market is bigger than the subprime-mortgage CDO market was in its heyday. The Bank for International Settlements, which helps central banks pursue financial stability, has estimated the overall size of the CDO market in 2007 at $640 billion; it estimated the overall size of the CLO market in 2018 at $750 billion. More than $130 billion worth of CLOs have been created since then, some even in recent months. Just as easy mortgages fueled economic growth in the 2000s, cheap corporate debt has done so in the past decade, and many companies have binged on it.

Despite their obvious resemblance to the villain of the last crash, CLOs have been praised by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin for moving the risk of leveraged loans outside the banking system. Like former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan, who downplayed the risks posed by subprime mortgages, Powell and Mnuchin have downplayed any trouble CLOs could pose for banks, arguing that the risk is contained within the CLOs themselves.

These sanguine views are hard to square with reality. The Bank for International Settlements estimates that, across the globe, banks held at least $250 billion worth of CLOs at the end of 2018. Last July, one month after Powell declared in a press conference that “the risk isn’t in the banks,” two economists from the Federal Reserve reported that U.S. depository institutions and their holding companies owned more than $110 billion worth of CLOs issued out of the Cayman Islands alone. A more complete picture is hard to come by, in part because banks have been inconsistent about reporting their CLO holdings. The Financial Stability Board, which monitors the global financial system, warned in December that 14 percent of CLOs—more than $100 billion worth—are unaccounted for.

I have a checking account and a home mortgage with Wells Fargo; I decided to see how heavily invested my bank is in CLOs. I had to dig deep into the footnotes of the bank’s most recent annual report, all the way to page 144. Listed there are its “available for sale” accounts. These are investments a bank plans to sell at some point, though not necessarily right away. The list contains the categories of safe assets you might expect: U.S. Treasury bonds, municipal bonds, and so on. Nestled among them is an item called “collateralized loan and other obligations”—CLOs. I ran my finger across the page to see the total for these investments, investments that Powell and Mnuchin have asserted are “outside the banking system.”

The total is $29.7 billion. It is a massive number. And it is inside the bank.

You’ll note that I correctly predicted this year’s economic crash… although the financial aspect has yet to show up despite an economic contraction of nearly one-third. The CLO meltdown is how the economic crash is most likely to translate to the inevitable financial crash, whether it happens before or after the end of the calendar year.

In case you don’t fully appreciate how fragile the global economy is, notice that the banks have rendered themselves almost entirely irrelevant now thanks to the tsunami of debt they have created:

The Bank of England indicated Thursday that it could cut interest rates below zero for the first time in its 326-year history as it tries to shore up a U.K. economic recovery that is facing the dual headwinds of the coronavirus and Brexit.

After unanimously deciding to maintain the bank’s main interest rate at the record low of 0.1{5274a41d3bd2aa3d5829764fe19e8a7ecbc79c108731aad5f1ff2d292e60e2b4}, the nine-member rate-setting Monetary Policy Committee said it had discussed its “policy toolkit, and the effectiveness of negative policy rates in particular.”

In minutes accompanying the decision, the rate-setters said a recent wave of virus infections has “the potential to weigh further on economic activity, albeit probably on a lesser scale than seen earlier in the year.”

Though the committee noted that recent economic data have been a “little stronger than expected” at its last meeting in early August, it said it is unclear what that says about the future “given the risks.”

One clear concern relates to whether Britain, like others in Europe, will reimpose broad restrictions on businesses and public life after the recent flare-up in virus infections across the region. Already social gatherings are being restricted and certain areas of the U.K. are seeing localized lockdowns.

The British economy suffered one of the deepest recessions in the world this year when many sectors were effectively mothballed to help contain the pandemic. Though it recouped some ground in the summer as lockdown restrictions were eased, the economy was still around 12{5274a41d3bd2aa3d5829764fe19e8a7ecbc79c108731aad5f1ff2d292e60e2b4} smaller at the end of July than it was in February, when the pandemic started in Europe.

Debt jubilee is the only way out. Debts that cannot be repaid will not be repaid. The key to the solution is to make sure that those who are responsible for this epic debacle are forced to bear the primary consequences and are prevented from attempting to recreate the situation.

This sort of regular reshuffling is why there is no point tracking the Dow Jones Industrial Average, or any other stock market index, over time:

Exxon is being kicked out of the Dow Jones Industrial Average index, where it has had a place since 1928. The reason: the Dow needed to make space for other, more valuable companies – and Apple’s stock split, CBS News reports.

The change will be effective on August 31.

Exxon, which was the oldest member of the index for the last two years after Dow removed GE, has been one of the most valuable companies in the US and the world for decades. That is until Big Tech showed up and began changing the world, its stock reflecting this change by swelling market caps.

Energy, which featured solidly on the index and in people’s lives a few decades ago, is being booted out by technology – Exxon’s replacement on the DJIA is a software company, Salesforce.

It was the realization that stock market numbers simply were not what I had been taught they were that first set me upon the path of becoming a stock market contrarian. The annual turnover in the NASDAQ is often on the order of five percent, which renders comparisons from one year to the next, let alone to previous decades, entirely meaningless.

Bet at the casino if you like, so long as you understand that it is no more “investing” than playing the slots at Caesar’s Palace.

Never, ever, bet on the prize winners. Remember, Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for LITERATURE without ever even WRITING A BOOK! In his paper entitled “The Appallingly Bad Neoclassical Economics of Climate Change”, Steve Keen, arguably the greatest living economists, critiques the prize-winning work of the 2018 winner of the Fake Nobel in Economics, Steve Nordhaus

Read the whole thing if you’re economically inclined, but I anticipate that even non-economists will find his concluding section below to be both informative and amusing.

When I began this research, I expected that the main cause of Nordhaus’s extremely low predictions of damages from climate change would be the application of a very high discount rate (Nordhaus, 2007)11 to climate damages estimated by scientists (Hickel, 2018), and that a full critique of his work would require explaining why an equilibrium-based Neoclassical model like DICE12 was the wrong tool to analyse something as uncertain, dynamic and far-from-equilibrium as climate change (Blatt, 1979; DeCanio, 2003).13 Instead, I found that the computing adage ‘Garbage In, Garbage Out’
Figure 10. Kahn and Mohaddes’s linear extrapolation of the temperature: GDP relationship from 1960–2014 out till 2100 (Kahn et al., 2019, p. 6).

(GIGO) applied: it does not matter how good or how bad the actual model is, when it is fed ‘data’ like that concocted by Nordhaus and the like-minded Neoclassical economists who followed him. The numerical estimates to which they fitted their inappropriate models are, as shown here, utterly unrelated to the phenomenon of global warming. Even an appropriate model of the relationship between climate change and GDP would return garbage predictions if it were calibrated on ‘data’ like this.

This raises a key question: how did such transparently inadequate work get past academic referees?
Simplifying assumptions and the refereeing process: the poachers becomes the gatekeepers
One reason why this research agenda was not drowned at birth was the proclivity for Neoclassical economists to make assumptions on which their conclusions depend, and then dismiss any objections to them on the grounds that they are merely ‘simplifying assumptions’.

As Paul Romer observed, the standard justification for this is ‘Milton Friedman’s (1953) methodological assertion from unnamed authority that ‘the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions’ (Romer, 2016, p. 5). Those who make this defence do not seem to have noted Fried-man’s footnote that ‘The converse of the proposition does not of course hold: assumptions that are unrealistic (in this sense) do not guarantee a significant theory’ (Friedman, 1953, p. 14).

A simplifying assumption is something which, if it is violated, makes only a small difference to your analysis. Musgrave points out that ‘Galileo’s assumption that air-resistance was negligible for the phenomena he investigated was a true statement about reality, and an important part of the explanation Galileo gave of those phenomena’ (Musgrave, 1990, p. 380). However, the kind of assumptions that Neoclassical economists frequently make, are ones where if the assumption is false, then the theory itself is invalidated (Keen, 2011, pp. 158–174).

This is clearly the case here with the core assumptions of Nordhaus and his Neoclassical colleagues. If activities that occur indoors are, in fact, subject to climate change; if the temperature to GDP relationships across space cannot be used as proxies for the impact of global warming on GDP, then their conclusions are completely false. Climate change will be at least one order of magnitude more damaging to the economy than their numbers imply – working solely from rejecting their spurious assumption that about 90{fb585635b9f6189e33442b25caac15ec2544d7054f182b4f92840c6cee65accd} of the economy will be unaffected by it. It could be far, far worse.

Unfortunately, referees who accept Friedman’s dictum that ‘a theory cannot be tested by the ‘realism’ of its ‘assumptions’’ (Friedman, 1953, p. 23) were unlikely to reject a paper because of its assumptions, especially if it otherwise made assumptions that Neoclassical economists accept.

Thus, Nordhaus’s initial sorties in this area received a free pass.

After this, a weakness of the refereeing process took over. As any published academic knows, once you are published in an area, journal editors will nominate you as a referee for that area. Thus, rather than peer review providing an independent check on the veracity of research, it can allow the enforcement of a hegemony. As one of the first of the very few Neoclassical economists to work on climate change, and the first to proffer empirical estimates of the damages to the economy from climate change, this put Nordhaus in the position to both frame the debate, and to play the role of gatekeeper. One can surmise that he relished this role, given not only his attacks on Forrester and the Limits to Growth (Meadows, Randers, et al., 1972; Nordhaus, 1973; Nordhaus et al., 1992), but also his attack on his fellow Neoclassical economist Nicholas Stern for using a low discount rate in The Stern Review (Nordhaus, 2007; Stern, 2007).

The product has been an undue degree of conformity in this community that even Tol acknowledged:

it is quite possible that the estimates are not independent, as there are only a relatively small number of studies, based on similar data, by authors who know each other well … although the number of researchers who published marginal damage cost estimates is larger than the number of researchers who published total impact estimates, it is still a reasonably small and close-knit community who may be subject to group-think, peer pressure, and self-censoring. (Tol, 2009, p. 37, 42–43)

Indeed.

Were climate change an effectively trivial area of public policy, then the appallingly bad work done by Neoclassical economists on climate change would not matter greatly. It could be treated, like the intentional Sokal hoax (Sokal, 2008), as merely a salutary tale about the foibles of the Academy.

But the impact of climate change upon the economy, human society, and the viability of the Earth’s biosphere in general, are matters of the greatest importance. That work this bad has been done, and been taken seriously, is therefore not merely an intellectual travesty like the Sokal hoax. If climate change does lead to the catastrophic outcomes that some scientists now openly con-template (Kulp & Strauss, 2019; Lenton et al., 2019; Lynas, 2020; Moses, 2020; Raymond et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2019; Xu et al., 2020; Yumashev et al., 2019), then these Neoclassical economists will be complicit in causing the greatest crisis, not merely in the history of capitalism, but potentially in the history of life on Earth.

Or is it death watch?

Based on Walt Disney’s balance sheet as of May 5, 2020, long-term debt is at $42.77 billion and current debt is at $12.68 billion, amounting to $55.45 billion in total debt. Adjusted for $14.34 billion in cash-equivalents, the company’s net debt is at $41.11 billion. Walt Disney has $206.29 billion in total assets, therefore making the debt-ratio 0.27.

The Q3 report as of June 27 has long-term debt at $54.2 billion and current debt at $10.22 billion, amounting to $64.42 billion in total debt. Adjusted for $23.12 billion in cash-equivalents, the net debt is $41.3 billion vs $207.65 billion in total assets.

In other words, while the balance sheet doesn’t show the impact of Corona-chan on the organization yet, Disney is having to borrow a LOT of money in order to keep enough cash on hand to pay its bills. Keep in mind that less than two years ago, the Devil Mouse had $3 billion less total debt than it currently holds in cash.