General Investing and Economics Discussion - No Politics

[Milwaukee]

You are in Wisconsin and the max unemployment benefit is $370/week. Are people staying home for that temporary amount? Maybe you should be paying them more???

I’m in WI and people “were” getting $960/wk. Not sure if it still is. Look it up.

 

[Deleted member 2897]

You are in Wisconsin and the max unemployment benefit is $370/week. Are people staying home for that temporary amount? Maybe you should be paying them more???

In Wisconsin, they currently get $670/week. It was $970 a week until a few months ago. Its still the equivalent of $17/hour right now. If you had a manual labor job and could earn $15, $20, even $23/hour versus doing nothing and making $17....an awful lot of people would take the latter. Especially considering this math is based on 40 hours a week. A job might only give you 30-35 hours and you'd have to make an even higher wage to beat the current unemployment.

 

[awbuzz]

You are in Wisconsin and the max unemployment benefit is $370/week. Are people staying home for that temporary amount? Maybe you should be paying them more???

Of course we recognize it if everybody's paid more that the cost of the service or products they produce will have to increase, don't we?

With all the increases I'm expecting to see no more dollar menu items at McDonald's or any other fast food. I guess the low price now will become $2 items so we can pay absorbent wages for jobs that do not deserve that amount of pay.

 

[GCdaJuiceMan]

Of course we recognize it if everybody's paid more that the cost of the service or products they produce will have to increase, don't we?

With all the increases I'm expecting to see no more dollar menu items at McDonald's or any other fast food. I guess the low price now will become $2 items so we can pay absorbent wages for jobs that do not deserve that amount of pay.

It's funny you say this. I drove through a McDonalds last week. I got the 2 double cheeseburgers for $3 deal like I usually do and added on a small fry because of course I have to... Look at my receipt when I get home and they are charging 1.99 for a small fry right now. I never remember a small fry being anything more than $.99 or a little over. Its now double that.

 

[Deleted member 2897]

Inflation speeds up in April as consumer prices leap 4.2%, fastest since 2008

The Consumer Price Index rise for April from a year earlier was the sharpest since September 2008.

www.cnbc.com

It will be interesting to see what the Fed does...or doesn't do. They've more than missed the boat on this one, as inflation was rearing its head quite awhile ago. Rather than take very small, muted moves along the way that the market would probably ignore, now their back is up against the wall. Increasing interest rates will likely lead to a large move in the stock market. Letting inflation continue unabated will cause major economic disruptions. Whats surprising to me as a slightly older person is that we've been here over and over and over and keep making the same mistakes. And what's worse is that it feels like each time we make the same mistakes in a more pronounced way.

 

[Deleted member 2897]

Largest economy ever. Largest tax revenue ever - up 15% YoY. Deficit so far this year 7 months in: $1.9T. Crazy. I wonder how much longer interest rates and the dollar can withstand all this.

 

[GCdaJuiceMan]

It's funny you say this. I drove through a McDonalds last week. I got the 2 double cheeseburgers for $3 deal like I usually do and added on a small fry because of course I have to... Look at my receipt when I get home and they are charging 1.99 for a small fry right now. I never remember a small fry being anything more than $.99 or a little over. Its now double that.

McDonald’s Is Raising Wages Amid Worries Of Worker Shortage

The pay increases are only for company-owned stores, not franchises.

www.forbes.com

Entry level workers will make between $11 and $17 per hour and shift managers will make between $15 and $20 per hour, depending on location.

The changes only apply to the small fraction of McDonald’s stores that are company-owned, not franchises.

Makes me wonder if the location I visited was a Franchise or company owned.

 

[GT33]

Various threads have been killed multiple times by the Mods due to the nature of some comments by the users. I guess they changed the title in this thread to have a reminder for people to avoid certain topics.

Ok, just curious. Sometimes on other sites a thread will get locked down or some posts nuked. I'm pretty new on here so I didn't know. Who would have guessed financial investments would spark a fire.

 

[Deleted member 2897]

Ok, just curious. Sometimes on other sites a thread will get locked down or some posts nuked. I'm pretty new on here so I didn't know. Who would have guessed financial investments would spark a fire.

It sparked a fire with mods. I haven't seen any users on here in fights, launching personal attacks, or anything untoward.

 

[orientalnc]

It sparked a fire with mods. I haven't seen any users on here in fights, launching personal attacks, or anything untoward.

I would like to clarify, and, perhaps shed some light on what the mods are doing.

This thread began as an investing thread, but wandered off into economic topics not directly related to investing. I considered splitting the thread into two sperate threads, one on economics and one one on investing. But, I took the easy way and changed the thread to General Economics Discussion. After some discussion among the mods, the title was changed again to include investing and economics. None of the mods had any issue with the posts, it was simply trying to keep the discussion on topic.

 

[dtm1997]

What's everyone gambling on at the crypto craps table these days?

 

[LibertyTurns]

What's everyone gambling on at the crypto craps table these days?

Still got my doggie. Can’t say it hasn’t crossed my mind to sell 2k shares and just keep playing with house money, but that would just make it that much harder to become a doggie millionaire. Going to keep walking the dog.

 

[dtm1997]

Still got my doggie. Can’t say it hasn’t crossed my mind to sell 2k shares and just keep playing with house money, but that would just make it that much harder to become a doggie millionaire. Going to keep walking the dog.

I'm in a bunch of different cryptos, but many of them for less than $150 each. Even if they all went bust, I'd be OK with that.

 

[RonJohn]

I'm in a bunch of different cryptos, but many of them for less than $150 each. Even if they all went bust, I'd be OK with that.

I "invested" $200 in Dogecoin. All crypto currencies are extremely speculative, if not downright gambling. I would question anyone who puts more money into them than they could lose and not have it affect them. There are serious issues with all of them. Currently bitcoin almost uses as much electricity as the state of New York, and the power requirements continue to rise. Dogecoin is considering changing the reward so that power usage will go down, but Dogecoin rewards are currently equivalent to about $5,500 per minute. So, 12 million dogecoins are added every day. Even if it does become a stable currency, that level of addition will have an inflationary effect(or deflationary depending on how you look at it).

 

[dtm1997]

Doge has been a real gambling success story. I still haven't bought any because of access, but getting in under a penny is an amazing trajectory.

I do have some bigger chunks in ETH & BTC, but nothing I can't stand to lose. The ETH actually has utility for potentially buying something, but it's doubled from where I bought it, so might as well ride it out.

This has been like a craps table that just keeps going. Keeps it fun.

 

[Dress2Jacket]

It's funny you say this. I drove through a McDonalds last week. I got the 2 double cheeseburgers for $3 deal like I usually do and added on a small fry because of course I have to... Look at my receipt when I get home and they are charging 1.99 for a small fry right now. I never remember a small fry being anything more than $.99 or a little over. Its now double that.

Fries have been a huge profit source for Mickey D's for years. Yes, the small used to be $0.99, but that was years ago. Now, fries are probably the biggest gouge on their menu, since the drinks are all $0.99. And that $0.99 pro'lly ain't gonna last much longer.

Of course, it is hard to complain about being gouged at McD's given that you can get a full meal there and a thousand calories for $7, which can't be said at many places.

 

[LibertyTurns]

To be clear, I’m not really investing in doggie. It’s all emanated from a night of drinking and a claim I wasn’t man enough to put my money where my mouth was after incessant heckling of the cryptos. I made a comment WTTE of I could probably make more investing in doggie than you bastards in bitcoin. Week or two later I had a jacked up day at work & was sitting at home sipping some whiskey, saw an article on Musk & doggie. I had dumped some Paypal after I got 50% out of it so I was only playing with house money & had some cash laying around with little I really liked. Took just a hair over a grand and figured out how to buy doggie. So far I’m kicking their ***.

 

[dtm1997]

To be clear, I’m not really investing in doggie. It’s all emanated from a night of drinking and a claim I wasn’t man enough to put my money where my mouth was after incessant heckling of the cryptos. I made a comment WTTE of I could probably make more investing in doggie than you bastards in bitcoin. Week or two later I had a jacked up day at work & was sitting at home sipping some whiskey, saw an article on Musk & doggie. I had dumped some Paypal after I got 50% out of it so I was only playing with house money & had some cash laying around with little I really liked. Took just a hair over a grand and figured out how to buy doggie. So far I’m kicking their ***.

Define "make more". If based on returns, they never stood a chance against a DOGE purchase with an increase in price.

 

[LibertyTurns]

Define "make more". If based on returns, they never stood a chance against a DOGE purchase with an increase in price.

They thought doggie was a joke & it is. At some point gravity will take over, just depends on how dumb investors are in general. For the time being I’m having fun with it. When you can have unlimited supply of a cryptocurrency, it fails to become a supply & demand proposition.

Edit: Forgot to answer your question. We were talking rate of return not $$.

 

[Deleted member 2897]

Gundlach: The Fed has been manipulating markets for a long time

Gundlach sees a trend of non-U.S. equities outperforming U.S. stocks.

finance.yahoo.com

Really interesting point I'd never heard before:
"We've had a relationship between the Fed growing its balance sheet and the value of the S&P 500 that's been in place for years now ever since they started quantitative easing, and it's almost like a law of physics. It's like if you take the capitalization of the S&P 500 and you divide it by the Fed's balance sheet, it looks a lot like a constant."

That's very well said, and also why its best to never try and predict which way the market will go. If the market is very overvalued (it is), but the fed artificially holds interest rates down (it does) and buys bonds from corporations and the treasury and mortgage companies at the tune of $150B/month (it does), it keeps propping the market up. After all, that's indeed why they do that in the first place.