patrick.net

I agree with that on service jobs - lots of service jobs are very high paying. High end hairdressers are one example. CPAs I believe are service workers and they're generally high paid.

Also, some of the stuff you'd never suspect, pay quite well. over at the NCN (national caricaturists network) site many have come into that field because it paid more with a lot less hassle than what they did before. These street performers of various types out on the streets around the BA were making more than they did as engineers, it's all in line with the warehouse guys making more than the skilled repair tech.

But most service jobs are low-paid, it's true.

Is debt servicing a highly-paid "job?" :)

I worked as an attorney: that's a service job. Same thing for doctors.

POTUS is also a service job, though not highly paid.

So little faith in muni bond insurers currently. Less faith in the quality of the rating guys.

Our local governments and public entities might all need revisited from ratings guys in light of the contagion of a declining real estate market. With declining economic activity and tax base erosion, ratings downgrades expected. Man we got us credit contagion.

Our local government can't borrow cheaply to pay for schools, roads, prisons, libraries, and all the other non-sense. Wow.

That's an economic death spiral if I've ever seen one. Faith and trust in our economic institutions cannot be rebuilt overnight, and maybe this gets at the core of this problem.

If you say so.

But it could also be that what elites and institutions DON'T say is more informing than what they DO SAY.

And what they don't say, is anything about M-3, but some economists try to estimate it anyway.

http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data

If all those dollars hafta come home, well then that's what happened after we went off the gold standard, too.

Service industry, eh? Like the big retail banks. Or the airlines. Or the "legal profession", or the cable company. Yeah, sometimes you might feel like someone did a service job on you.

From http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/service , among the eleven different definitions for "service":

9: the act of bringing a legal writ, process, or summons to notice as prescribed by law

10: the act of a male animal copulating with a female animal

@sybrib

lol defintions. Well done.

@OO

Don’t worry, FED will go back and re-hash another mechanism to get everybody take the money.

Is that "take the money", or "take the debt"? When I read the first analyses several months ago that highlighted the difference between liquidity and solvency in our current situation, I did a double-take before I wrapped my head around what the analysts (mainly Mish) were trying to point out.

I look at it this way, and hopefully I've got it right. The Fed (and other central banks) cannot inject wealth. At best, they can inject markers for future claims upon wealth; i.e., debt. Pushing on a string is the market telling the central banks that all foreseeable wealth creation in the market at the moment is spoken for, and the market doesn't want any more debt to service additional wealth creation activity because it can't find any additional wealth creation activity.

apostay,

the Fed cannot inject wealth, it can only make the debt cheaper, temporarily.

However, the government CAN inject, well, not wealth but money into your pocket through government job creation and government socialist programs.

US national debt as a % of GDP still has way to go before the final blow-up. Our national debt is *only* 37% of GDP, compared to Japan's 160% (or 180% as of the latest) of its GDP, and Japan is far from collapsing.

Which brings to my point, wrt to US government printing money trying to get us out of the mess, you ain't seen nothing yet. We still have at least another 100% of our GDP to print before we go over the cliff.

apostay,

the Fed cannot inject wealth, it can only make the debt cheaper, temporarily.

However, the government CAN inject, well, not wealth but money into your pocket through government job creation and government welfare programs.

US national debt as a % of GDP still has way to go before the final blow-up. Our national debt is *only* 37% of GDP, compared to Japan’s 160% (or 180% as of the latest) of its GDP, and Japan is far from collapsing.

Which brings to my point, wrt to US government printing money trying to get us out of the mess, you ain’t seen nothing yet. We still have at least another 100% of our GDP to print before we go over the cliff.

The fact that despite Japanese government's effort to reflate, all the extra money pumped into the system went straight into carry trade shows that the government can print, but cannot direct where the money goes. So Japan's deflation is also partially caused by this Yen "leakage" to more lucrative avenues.

Money, once created out of thin air, has a mind of its own. Those closest to the money will find better use, usually on speculation of some asset with good fundamentals, rather than paying off debt. It is not the Americans who invented Yen carry-trade, it is the Japanese financial institutions themselves that pioneered this lucrative arbitrage.

When US government reflates with unprecedented scale, the money will find its own way into some sort of US dollar carry trades as well.

Deflation is the end game, but before deflation, there will be lots of reflation, inflation and stagflation. If you don't play the game of reflation, inflation and stagflation, your wealth will be reduced to nothing when we eventually arrive at deflation. In other words, if you stay in cash from today onwards, you won't get to reap the benefit of deflation, even if you are right about the end, you miss the details of how we get there.

@OO 7:41pm post

That's good and interesting stuff.

What if the Fed decides to reflate and inject via new and creative channels to counter this dilemma you describe?

For instance, how about a massive government VC effort. The DOD and CIA have both embraced early stage VC model to incubate early stage tech in which they have a strategic interest. Interesting jobs plan to go that route with an "injection".

Probably we will not be that smart.

Hey it's time for a giggle....

Someone on Craig's List came up with this idea, names for the week like:

Mail in the keys Monday
Teardown Tuesday
Walkaway Wednesday
etc.

Maybe we can think of a good set of day-names for the new housing regime we're in!

OO,

That brings up an interesting point. Is it not the relatively modern concept of free flow of capital that is the reason that the Japanese government could not re-inflate the economy. With some new restrictions on international capital flow, could not this "problem" be avoided?

How did this use to work before the age of gloabl and free-wheeling hyper-captitalism?

justme Says:
How did this use to work before the age of gloabl and free-wheeling hyper-captitalism?

As recently as the 1980's, many countries of the developing world had current-account controls that prevented or inhibited bulk conversions of currency. However, western currencies (USD, GBP, FFR, etc.) were still freely convertible, so my guess is that the opportunity to arbitrage was limited until the Japanese adopted ZIRP.

NVR,

Perhaps one of the reasons for the public works created during the great depressions of the 1930s was that they were guaranteed to have a domestic economic effect, rather than the money flowing elsewhere in search of bigger gains.

SP,

That;s they way I remember it, too, but I think even some western countries had currency limits in 1980.

# justme Says:
That;s they way I remember it, too, but I think even some western countries had currency limits in 1980.

I guess it is relative. It was a huge hassle to convert from a controlled currency to USD/GBP/etc. - I remember my dad used to leave large amounts of local currency (worth like 100 USD) to tip hotel staff instead of bothering to fill out a dozen forms for the local bureaucracy.

The western currencies seemed very free in comparison. Even in France :-) , it took only about 15-30 minutes at a bank to exchange a couple of thousand in travelers checks.

New thread has been started. This one will be closed shortly. Thanks a lot everybody, for a very interesting discussion.
SP

Thread closed. Thanks for your participation.

I deleted some posts that I felt were inappropriate, and I hope you found the rest of the discussion as useful and informative as I did.
SP