Post Free Market—PFM—is part of a larger networking effort I am initiating at my young age. In this present effort, I am asking you to read a very learned economic essay published in Seeking Alpha, that I also publish in. The essay was written by a group of professors from Holland, Shareholders Unite, who are worth following.
I think of them as a European bit more conservative “Keynesian” Paul Krugman: http://seekingalpha.com/article/2831296-the-day-the-central-bank-powers-came-to-an-end?v=1421969328. At the end of this essay, there are a number of comments (at the time of writing this email there were 72 comments). The very last comment was by me, under Zoltan Kiss. Several comments before that, there was an other comment by me, answered by the Author. My last comment, he did not answer.
I hope this is the beginning of a discussion, which in a humble way will also be the beginning of finding solutions, and help establish first of a franchise, SSEC. This is also the purpose of the “postfreemarket” web site. Any comments you want to send to the web site, please do so.Thank you and Welcome to our compessionate enterprise SSEC, to create jobs for us all who are in need to work!
Respectfully, Zoltan Kiss
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an 21, 2015. 03:45 PM
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The Day The Central Bank Powers Came To An End [View article]
Shareholders unite
Help.
I have always enjoyed your articles on any topics, even if I did not fully understand.I saw the consistency of your arguments and in any specific discussions with the commenter I found your side of the arguments more compelling.I am not an economist. Also understand that all professions language is a conspiracy against layman. At best I am a layman. Help me with some of my questions, just because there are no bad questions. The first two of my many questions/answers.
The reason there is high unemployment, because there are no jobs. We have enough of our human necessities covered, food, shelter, clothing and all the new non-necessities, iPhone 5,6,7 etc are made by robots and due to the wealth distribution, fewer and fewer people can buy them. In the jobs that are created, mostly service jobs, some of my engineer friends are flipping hamburgers at McDonald’s, or are driving taxis.
Second question:
Why should the 1% invest their money to create jobs, when you can only make real money with money? As Forbes pointed out in one of their articles, the upper 100 billionaire in the US, increased their wealth by about 20% each year, creating more wealth in the last two years than the total GDP growth during the Obama years in the US. Than someone pointed out that wealth created by these 100 billionaires is not even counted in the GDP.SU, I know you can say this has nothing to do with the topics you discussed.But please you tell me. Your article and my perceived reality must intersect. How? Where?
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20 Jan, 05:20 PMReply! Report AbuseLike0
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Author’s reply » Robots, AI and cheap overseas labor do create problems for the labor market but the past 200 years show that productivity increases normally translate into higher earnings, profits, or both, which increases markets for goods and services that are not so easily automated or shifted abroad.
This time the negative effects might well balance, or even outweigh the positive effects though.
Wealth is not counted in GDP, only income is. I think one of the basic problems is inequality, which shifts money from low to high savers and removes incentives to invest in additional productive capacity. High saving countries export their problems to the rest of the world by exporting surplus savings and importing demand (these are flip sides of an accounting identity, as it happens).
Have to run now, but feel free to ask additional questions
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The Day The Central Bank Powers Came To An End [View article]
SU
Thank you for rewarding my unprofessional questions with serious answers. You also have emboldened me to ask the same two questions in different forms.If we define unemployment “People who want to work, but either can not find a job, or could only find an inadequate part time job, or are working full time in positions that neither satisfies their financial needs, nor does it utilize their education and work capacities”….. I estimate that number in the US is about one third of the work force, or about 60 million people (justification of this number some other time).
From experience in Germany, (from the time when East Germany was absorbed in the West), the cost of creation of one sustainable job was about 1 million Euros.
The cost of creating 60 million jobs in the US, $60 trillion, is just not within the capabilities of the present capitalist system. To talk about the various economists, their theories etc. I feel is not addressing the real issues.On the second question. I also ran companies for a time. I understand the difference between income and shareholders value, “assets”. But we could only increase shareholders value from operations, by bringing profits after taxes down to assets.
The 100 US billionaire assets were much greater (5 times the 20% change in assets).
We are only talking about the change in assets in the last two years, which presumably were their after tax profits, so it should have shown up in the GDP, OK not as assets, but as income. The example in question; the 100 US billionaire have earned 20% per year over 1.48 trillion assets, or about $600 billion over two years, which is comparable to the growth of the GDP throughout the 6 years of the Obama presidency. What gives?
