{"id":84387,"date":"2024-08-24T01:00:08","date_gmt":"2024-08-24T08:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lenpenzo.com\/blog\/?p=84387"},"modified":"2024-08-28T08:03:56","modified_gmt":"2024-08-28T15:03:56","slug":"black-coffee-24-aug-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lenpenzo.com\/blog\/id84387-black-coffee-24-aug-2024.html","title":{"rendered":"Black Coffee: Cooking the Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"It’s time to sit back, relax and enjoy a little joe …<\/em><\/p>\n

Welcome to another rousing edition of Black Coffee, your off-beat weekly round-up of what’s been going on in the world of money and personal finance.<\/p>\n

I hope everybody had a wonderful week. And with that, let’s get right to this week’s commentary, shall we?<\/p>\n

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Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

– Mark Twain<\/strong><\/p>\n

Don’t trust any statistics you didn’t fake yourself.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

– Winston Churchill<\/strong><\/p>\n

Credits and Debits<\/strong><\/p>\n

Credit:<\/strong><\/span> Did you see this? Grocery chain Kroger is expanding its use of digital price tags<\/a> known as electronic shelving labels (ESLs). A typical supermarket has roughly 30,000 items; as a result, the company says that ESLs can reduce grocery stores’ labor expenses by allowing stores to reallocate the time and labor of stockers who would be manually changing labels to other activities. That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of people who are against it …<\/p>\n

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Credit:<\/strong><\/span> Speaking of prices, here’s sagacious macro commenter Franklin Sanders: “Of all the well-known facts from history and economics, at the top of the list stands this one: Price controls never work<\/a> and always create shortages.\u201d Remember that the next time you hear a politician propose them to control prices, as one of them did last week regarding soaring grocery and meat prices. Sadly, there is a large segment of any society that never seems to learn \u2026<\/p>\n

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(h\/t: @DanielDiMartino)<\/p><\/div>\n

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Credit:<\/strong><\/span> By the way, Mr. Sanders also reminds us that, “Y\u2019all can confidently expect the shortages to appear<\/a> even before such controls are imposed, since any whiff of controls will prompt the prudent to hoard while there is still something to buy. The only abundance socialism can create is an abundance of shortages \u2014 oh, and corpses.\u201d Amen. In the meantime …<\/p>\n

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Debit:<\/strong><\/span> In other news, the fast-food value-meal war has been going on for a while now, and the Subway sandwich chain has become a casualty in the spiraling price battle. Why? Because an emergency meeting<\/a> was called with franchise owners last week to discuss plummeting sales. Business has been so bad that one Subway owner said same-store sales were down 5% to 10% in recent weeks compared to the prior year, while “gross sales are not even at 2012 levels – and profit then was five times what it is today.\u201d Yikes. That\u2019s certainly stressful for Subway\u2019s franchisees, but nowhere near as bad as this …<\/p>\n

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Debit:<\/strong><\/span> Of course, fast food sales aren’t the only economic weak spot in America at the moment – the job market is too. In fact, the US government is now admitting that the labor market is – and was <\/em><\/strong>– far weaker than they’ve been claiming during the past 12 months. That’s because the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced this week that its worthless bureaucrats had overstated payrolls<\/a> by 818,000 jobs over the last year. Heh. Imagine that. Then again, something tells us this<\/strong><\/em> “revision” will be “revised” further downward early next year. On the bright side, the government says the US still isn’t in a recession either. For what that’s worth.<\/p>\n

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Credit:<\/strong><\/span> Believe it or not, before the US dollar’s (USD) gold anchor was broken in 1971, there was almost zero<\/strong><\/em> credit card debt; it\u2019s $1.1 trillion today. Sadly, macro analyst Doug Casey observes that today, “The average guy no longer thinks about producing more than he consumes<\/a> and saving the difference. He can\u2019t do that with a rapidly inflating paper currency. He just tries to keep his head above water with debt. And if he has a few extra bucks, he tries to get lucky in the stock market.\u201d Yep. Or one of those highly-speculative crypto coins.<\/p>\n

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Debit:<\/strong><\/span> On a related note, global debt reached another all-time high in the first quarter of 2024 – the latest figure is officially $315 trillion. Now for the punchline: Debt has surged worldwide by 21%<\/a> since the pandemic, boosting global debt by $54 trillion. More than $94 trillion of that debt today is held by non-financial corporations, while governments are $91 trillion in the hole, and the financial sector owes $70 trillion. Incredibly, households around the world are also drowning in a $59 trillion sea of red ink. We’re sure things would be a lot different if only people would pick up a personal finance book and read it\u00a0 …<\/p>\n