The Unintended Consequences Of Unintended Consequences; Declining Prices Do Not Destroy Wealth; They Enable Its Creation; Mass Layoffs Come To Wall Street: Citi Fires "Dozens" Of Investment Bankers
"Antidemocratic" Just Means "Something the Regime Doesn't Like."; Jeff Bezos, Charity, and Economic Well-Being: Wealth Creation Reduces Poverty
“Decades of central bank distortions and regulatory / market-share capture by cartels and monopolies have completely gutted "markets," destroying their self-correcting dynamics...
Unintended consequences introduce unexpected problems that may not have easy solutions. An entirely different set of problems are unleashed as unintended consequences have their own unintended consequences. This is the problem with complex emergent systems such as economies, societies and global supply chains: the system's feedback, leverage points and phase-change thresholds are not necessarily visible or predictable, yet these dynamics have the potential to cascade small failures into systemic collapse.
The unintended consequences of unintended consequences are called second-order effects: consequences have their own consequences.
So for example, you juice your economy with massive stimulus after a lockdown that upended consumers and global supply chains, crushing both demand and supply, and suddenly you have rip-roaring inflation as demand comes back while supply chains remain tangled.
Shifting critical industrial production to frenemies so corporations could maximize profits while reducing the quality of goods and services seemed like a good idea until the potential costs of that dependence on frenemies become apparent.”
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Declining Prices Do Not Destroy Wealth; They Enable Its Creation
“Falling prices ultimately lead to an increase in savings and to the creation of new wealth.”
“In contrast, Austrian economists such as Murray Rothbard have believed that in a free market the rising purchasing power of money—i.e., declining prices—is the mechanism that makes the great variety of goods produced accessible to many people. Rothbard wrote:
Improved standards of living come to the public from the fruits of capital investment. Increased productivity tends to lower prices (and costs) and thereby distribute the fruits of free enterprise to all the public, raising the standard of living of all consumers. Forcible propping up of the price level prevents this spread of higher living standards.
Also, according to Joseph Salerno:
Historically, the natural tendency in the industrial market economy under a commodity money such as gold has been for general prices to persistently decline as ongoing capital accumulation and advances in industrial techniques led to a continual expansion in the supplies of goods. Thus, throughout the nineteenth century and up until the First World War, a mild deflationary trend prevailed in the industrialized nations as rapid growth in the supplies of goods outpaced the gradual growth in the money supply that occurred under the classical gold standard. For example, in the US from 1880 to 1896, the wholesale price level fell by about 30 percent, or by 1.75 percent per year, while real income rose by about 85 percent, or around 5 percent per year.”
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Mass Layoffs Come To Wall Street: Citi Fires "Dozens" Of Investment Bankers
“The cuts impacted staffers globally within the investment-banking group, which includes its capital-markets arms, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is private.”
“With tech companies "unexpectedly" firing thousands of highly-paid, woke millennials as the US economy crumbles into the worst recession since Lehman...”
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"Antidemocratic" Just Means "Something the Regime Doesn't Like."
“Those who are labeled ‘undemocratic’ are those who, like the ‘counterrevolutionaries’ of old, have been deemed—rightly or wrongly—threats to the status quo.”
“‘In the old Marxist regimes, anything that displeased the ruling communist regime was said to be contrary to ‘the revolution.’ For example, in the Soviet Union, national leaders spoke regularly of how the nation was in the process of ‘a revolutionary transformation’ toward a future idealized communist society. Many years after the actual revolution and coup d'etat in Russia in following the collapse of Tsarist Russia, the word ‘revolution’ had ‘positive connotations and was considered a source of legitimacy in official ideology.’
Revolutionary became a synonym with ‘a thing we like,’ and it's no surprise that a 1952 soviet legal manual lists ‘counterrevolutionary’ activities as among the "political crimes ... deemed generally dangerous crimes against the order of the state.’ Moreover, in the early 1950s, when Mao Zedong launched new efforts to consolidate communist power, he called the effort a ‘campaign to suppress counterrevolutionaries.’ Other regimes adopted similar practices as well. Castro's Cuba frequently launched investigations and campaigns against ‘antirevolutionary’ dissidents and Ethiopia's Marxist governments in the 1970s described domestic opponents as guilty of ‘anti-revolutionary crimes.’"
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Jeff Bezos, Charity, and Economic Well-Being: Wealth Creation Reduces Poverty
[I am not a fan of Bezos; however, that has nothing to do with the accuracy of this article. - JRD]
“Billionaire Jeff Bezos has become a target of ridicule because his ex-wife MacKenzie Scott has been doling out colossal sums to charity. Compared to Scott, Bezos’s donations are quite slim and many are painting him as stingy. But are critics misguided in how they perceive the utility of philanthropy? Numerous lives have been transformed due to the exploits of charitable people, so Scott cannot be faulted for her philanthropy.
However, philanthropy is no substitute for market-based innovations that increase incomes, improve living standards, and promote prosperity. Wealth creation is the engine that sustains philanthropy, so it’s unsurprising that America is the richest and most philanthropic nation on earth. If Jeff Bezos did not launch a gamechanger like Amazon, MacKenzie Scott would not have billions to lavish on charity.”