Productivity vs real earnings in the US — what happened ca 1974?

CategoriesIssue Dec'22, Issue Jan'23, USA Politics_, World Finance News, World Finance News_, World Governance

Somewhat related to the most recent US elections, I’ve been researching the whole “white working class” situation, and one strange anomaly has popped up.

When one looks at a graph of productivity (for the US) vs real wages, there is a marked “disturbance in the force” around 1974.

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US bitcoin miner Core Scientific files for bankruptcy

CategoriesIssue Dec'22, Issue Jan'23, The Crypto Unraveling_, The Crypto Unraveling.

tl;dr:

  • Core Scientific reiterated it could run out of cash before the end of the year as lawsuits are piling up.
  • Core Scientific has been affected by the bankruptcy of lender Celsius’s mining arm, one of its biggest clients.
  • Two other companies sued CORZ in November: Sphere 3D (ANY) and McCarthy Building Companies. A class-action lawsuit was filed in the same month in Texas courts alleging failures to disclose important information to investors.

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Who runs the world? Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street

CategoriesFinance., Homepage, Issue Jan'23, World Governance

The premise is this: Not only small brands are owned by large umbrella corporations (Unilever owns 400 brands, Nestle owns 2000 brands), and large companies deeply penetrate our lives (you drive your apple car to the apple store to buy some apples with apple pay that you access through your apple watch while listening to iTunes on your iPhone), all of them are largely owned by institutional investors, of which just a handful hold the majority voting rights. Effectively Blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street hold voting rights (and therefore control) of near everything that exists under the sun. Agriculture, manufacture, logistics, communications, defense, everything. So it is concerning and… is currently the state of the art of things. What conclusions can be drawn from this? What action should be taken, if any?

I should also add, that nowadays I believe it’s money that is the biggest power, followed by the military. Military is not the biggest power because although it could have the final say, it almost never does, in day-to-day operations. It’s job is just to sit there, as a detriment. Money runs the world. It sounds trivially obvious. And of course a successful asset manager / fund will strive to absorb / internalize competitors and monopolize the market. It’s obviously rational in the game that is corporate survival. And it’s happening now.

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