John T. Reed’s news blog

This is my answer to a facebook reader question:. My Schwab money is not insured by FDIC because it is in a Schwab index fund and a Schwab REIT index fund. FDIC insures against loss of the deposit, not the deposit’s purchasing power disappearing. In hyperinflation, $250,000 will buy you a candy bar. . In hyperinflation, dollar-denominated assets like savings accounts become worthless—guaranteed by definition. In that event, FDIC is irrelevant. The Schwab index fund is not guaranteed to do better than zero by contract, but stock market history in hyperinflated countries was that stock markets in those countries went...

The government thought it was in control of the economy. They could turn it off. And they could turn it back on..Nope. the economy is not in the control of the government. It is controlled by consumers world wide, business world wide, governments world wide. Furthermore, politicians and American laymen seem to think all businesses are very powerful and have profit margins in the 60% range..Supermarkets used to have 1% profit margins, that was why they refused to take credit cards then. Many other businesses have single-digit profit margins..Politicians and laymen also think the small businesses and many of the...

Tenants are not paying their rent today. Landlords are asking for the federal government to pay them. Trump has said, “If it’s not your fault, the federal government will pay.” Job loss is not the tenants fault so they are entitled to steal free residency from their landlord. It is not the landlord’s fault either so they are entitled to demand the rent be paid by the federal government. Overnight, with that “it’s not your fault” logic, Donald Trump has turned into not Bernie Sanders but AOC. Overnight, he has turned millions of Republican voters into full on socialists. And...

 Soft-peddle headline in the WSJ reveals monster money printing by fed..There is one agency of the Federal government that is responsible to prevent inflation or deflation: the Federal Reserve Bank. No other agency has any authority, tools, or responsibility for the stability of the US dollar..The headline is “Fed Breaks Its Taboos To Prop Up The Economy.” Google it to read it..The proper role of a central bank was established by Walter Bagehot. Walter Bagehot ( 3 February 1826 – 24 March 1877) was a British journalist, businessman, and essayist, who wrote extensively about government, economics, literature and race....

Is it possible that some of the stuff we are not buying these days is stuff we should not have been buying?.When I was a kid, we ate at a restaurant about twice a year. All other meals were at home or a bag lunch at school. Fast food restaurants did not exist then, but I lived in Wildwood, NJ and our parents would sometimes buy us a hot dog and a Coke on the boardwalk in summer..Now, before the shutdown, I probably ate an average 1.5 meals per day in restaurants. My wife was complaining about the total when...