Energy prices in Europe are shattering records. Trading in German electricity for delivery next year reached prices of over $1.00 per kWh today.
A month ago I said "I would not be surprised to see housing park itself at current prices for two to five years before the next major move." Perhaps even that was too optimistic. Today Zero Hedge has advanced the idea that the housing FOMO surge has topped out:
The narrative we have a housing shortage is begging to crumble. It is likely many buyers are shifting into a wait-and-see mode. The false housing narrative of shortages is breaking down. The cheap money flowing from Wall Street has stopped flowing in and in some places has begun to retreat.
Affordability has plummeted with much higher mortgage interest rates and a tightening Fed now grim and determined to kill inflation with higher reserve rates. 10-year Treasuries, seemingly tamed after their surge in June, have resumed their upward march at 3.11% today.
From CNBC comes a report on a paper that reminds us (again) that inflation is a product of both monetary and fiscal policy, and that the Fed can fail in its mission to lower inflation if Congress continues to spend too rapidly, including spending on student loan forgiveness.
Barron's reports that Berkshire Hathaway, which owns some stocks (KO, AXP) that are highly appreciated and has held for decades, may be subject to paying capital gains under the new tax laws. Speculation: If BRK has to pay tax on KO even without selling it, why wouldn't it then sell it? KO is an extremely mature equity and trades more like a preferred stock or a bond than it does a large cap stock.
Perhaps I've been reading too many books about media (like Bad News and The True Story about Fake News), but the lack of available objective news coverage in the U.S. is not likely to improve any time soon. There is no impending service or mechanism that could diminish the divisiveness one sees in current society. The internet and social media have increased the amount of data people are exposed to, and many of those bits are dedicated to convincing people of what they already believe. I don't say "information" because social media data is often skewed or just cheer-leading, not actual news, and rarely is it objective. This applies to the mainstream media as well. I'm not breaking any ground complaining about the amount of garbage that MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, NY Times, and Washington Post distribute. I'm skipping Fox, OAN, etc. because liberal readers already think those are garbage. After 2010 and Facebook all media have been engaged in a fight for their lives and they have all devolved by publishing enormous amounts of clickbait. The toxic level of complaints about alt-right is nauseating because most of the material complained about is either never seen or is obviously not believed, but since it fits the outrage generator, the complaints churn along with derogatory labeling, false accusation, and mischaracterization of others.
A couple of years ago I encountered a rather poorly done academic paper (which I will not link to here) that established through a survey the symmetrical result that while the "right" denies evolution, but believes in gender differences, the "left" embraces evolution but denies gender differences. (Another article here, unrelated to the aforementioned paper.) Since my belief system fits neither of these categories, as I think evolution almost certainly generates gender differences, at one time I was willing to attempt to parody the extremists on both sides by labeling myself on social media as inhabiting the "radically polarized center". But since no one seemed either entertained or appreciative of this fine joke, I terminated it.
Of what possible use is this in Vorpal Trade? I'll venture that these distractions slow economic growth, at least a little. Politicians are driven to extreme measures in which they spend excessively in order to grant favors to special interests and damage the economy in ways that the other party cannot undo. Such actions undermine actual economic growth and teach people to hunker down and adopt shorter time horizons (and higher implied interest rates).
Within the media world, since there are no easy answers to censorship within corporately-owned social media, the Alphabets, Metas, and Microsofts of the world will continue to have commanding ownership of social communications, which they will use to inculcate, protect, and advance left-leaning information flows. The future of society will look much more like dystopian science fiction novels and 1984 than politicians would like to take credit for. You can buy GOOGL and META, but because of special super-voting classes of stock in each, you cannot ever take them over in order to fix them, even if you have a trillion dollars.
Perhaps we complain too much? The invention of the printing press caused massive societal disruption. Newspapers and television also caused disruption. We just don't remember or notice it because of desensitization, or we were dazzled by the miracle of those technologies, or (worst) we grew up with them and so think they are absolutely normal. While today we complain about fake news and corrupt media, it really is the case that journalists have always been corrupt, and the print and TV media were always filled with garbage. There is one important difference: the change level of information flow that was brought to use by newspapers and the printing press was very significant. The change of information flow going from old-school newspapers to the internet is not significant. We've gained little new info, but lost a lot of information integrity. The rewards for generating outrage are titanic. This is not a "them" issue. Your side does it too. People who operate within civilized rules are viewed as old-fashioned or clueless.
One cannot escape the personal data advertising espionage system. It is not only not possible to be truly anonymous within the internet data/advertising system, the system works very hard to manipulate your behavior to force you to categorize yourself. Do you think that by not clicking on the clickbait that you can escape? Well, they have a solution for that. If you fail to click on enough of the hot girl/hot guy, LGBT/cis, leftist/rightist, redneck/urban dweller, racist/anti-racist clickbait stories, then they will assign you a category that is falsely accusative, and then reveal to you via advertising that you have been mislabeled in a way that irritates you. And if necessary, they will use AT&T or Verizon cell phone location data to finish the job. (On second thought, this article is probably more clickbait than news.)
The advertising system doesn't just irritate users, it's also designed to charge extra to advertisers. When you are a good customer of company A, then you see multiple ads for company A just after having bought your year-long supply of their product, when you are no longer interested in buying anything more. Company A has wasted its money. Clearly the internet ad broker knows this, and has manipulated the advertiser into spending more money than they needed to market their product appropriately.
Useful Hunger?
While I'm off topic, I may well pass along this analysis of hunger as an enslavement mechanism. The controversy is over a United Nations article that was published on the internet and remained for 14 years before a sudden stirring on Twitter brought attention to it and it was deleted.
“I never intended it as satire,” Kent said. “I did not hope that it would be read as praise for hunger. My main point was and still is that some people benefit from the existence of hunger in the world. That helps to explain why hunger is so persistent in many places.”
There are numerous ways to interpret this analysis, most constructive or informative. You could be "outraged" too, but that is not how I recommend reading it. Instead, consider that hunger is useful to despots as a mechanism of control over their population, and this phenomenon is very well described in The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics. Third World hunger relief schemes often run into the problem that the despot and his henchmen need to get a cut of the distributed aid, and they have an incentive to fail to deliver the full measure of the food relief to those who are hungry. So if you provide charitable food aid, be aware that a significant fraction will be lost to extortion or withheld by elites in order to ensure continued political control.
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