Showing posts with label Market Economics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Market Economics. Show all posts
Friday, February 26, 2010
BOY Are They Going To Be Mad When They Find Out They Can't Have All The "Stuff"! Narrowing The Gap Between The Rich and Poor In China
WORLD NEWS: "China's Efforts Narrow Gap Between the Rich and Poor," by Andrew Batson, Wall Street Journal, 3 February 2010.Good chart on income inequality in select countries (Gini index):
(In his commentary about it, Barnett is just plain wrong assuming this is good for the other nations and especially the planet due to rising affluence.)
Just wait till the same per-capita percentage of the Chinese population can afford to buy cars and drive them like Americans do.
According to numbers published in Harpers Magazine a number of years back, if the per-capita hypotheses held true, at that time, the global supply of oil would have lasted FIVE DAYS. It's probably a shorter period of time now that the major oil companies have all dramatically re-calculated their reserves downward and they still can't replace current usage with oil-being-pumped-at-the-wellhead.
Further, according to a BBC interview with the Chinese transportation minister a few years ago, that percentage should be reached by 2040 (using simple math).
Just wait till those billions of Chinese citizens find out they've been sold a 'bill of goods' (all the Western trappings of so-called 'civilization') they will never be able to attain.
BOY! Are They going to be mad!.
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Saturday, February 13, 2010
Products and Services for the Permanently Unemployed Consumer - ClubOrlov
Does permanent job loss mean that someone is no longer a consumer? In some cases the answer is yes: (But) some people continue to spend as if they still had a job, and the inevitable result is eventual destitution. Once they run out of unemployment benefits, savings and credit, their purchasing ability decreases to the barest minimum provided by food stamps. I don't mean to sound harsh, but this makes them rather uninteresting from a new product marketing perspective.
Friday, February 12, 2010Also see: Closing The Collapse Gap by Dimitry Orlov (@ Energybulletin.net), a point by point comparison of the collapse of the Russian economy compared to what might happen under similar circumstances in the U.S.
Products and Services for the Permanently Unemployed ConsumerDeveloping and marketing products for a shrinking market poses an interesting set of challenges. Even if a company does an outstanding job and is able to steadily grow its market share, these gains are negated if the market itself continually shrinks by an ever larger amount. For instance, a company might have an outstanding electric vehicle design, but it is destined to fall by the wayside during a time when the number of consumers that qualify for a car loan is trending downward, the used car market is glutted by repossessions, and federal, state and municipal governments are unable to upgrade their car fleets because their budgets are far in the red.
Consumer product development caters to individuals who live in houses or condos, have jobs to which they commute by car, and generate a steady stream of disposable income. This is the group to which the business press often refers collectively as 'the consumer': one often reads that the consumer is retrenching, that the consumer's credit is tapped out, that the consumer's disposable income is shrinking and so on. The consumer is not growing.
What is there left to do except design and manufacture fewer and fewer products?
The answer is as simple as it is surprising...
In Full @ ClubOrlov
In full @ Energybulletin.net
Friday, December 25, 2009
Predictions For The United States of America During The Second Decade Of The XXI Century
.H/t to Dimitry Orlov @ ClubOrlov:
Da Buffalo wants to note: These ARE NOT 'apocalyptic' predictions... Just predictions of change in a rather uncomfortable and unwanted direction for the citizens of America, and also, perhaps at some point in the not-too-distant future, for the rest of the industrialized world.
As Sweatshop Union exclaims in this video, it's 'ALL ON US'...
Sweatshop Union @ MySpace. The lyrics. Their Wikipedia entry.
An evolutionary HipHop soundtrack is available @ archive.org
...for blithely going about living in a materialist fantasy land since... the beginning of the industrial revolution? But CERTAINLY commencing in it's greatest haste (for the benefit of "the greatest generation", who disregarded their narcissistic and short-sighted
Wikipedia has the basics on "Market Capitalism" and Consumer-based economies, but I recommend this article at the Boston Globe: "Why capitalism fails (The man who saw the meltdown coming [Hyman Minsky] had another troubling insight: it will happen again)".
Quote: "This wasn’t a Minsky moment. It was a Minsky half-century.”
...and this was the snake oil image we were being 'sold':
That said... Dimitry Orlov:
Around this time of year, some brave souls venture to put their reputations at risk by attempting to predict what the next year will bring. Some do so with uncanny accuracy, others — not so much. Being a serious author who hardly ever makes jokes, I generally sit out this annual bout of frivolity, but, noting that a new decade is about to burst upon us, I thought it reasonably safe to paint a picture of how I see the next decade. (In the unlikely case that my predictions turn out to be completely wrong, I would think that they will have been very thoroughly forgotten by the time 2020 rolls around.) And so, without further ado, here are my predictions for what it will be like in The United States of America during the second decade of the XXI century.The decade will be marked by many instances of autophagy, in business, government, and in the higher echelons of society, as players at all levels find that they are unable to control their appetites or alter their behavior in any meaningful way, even in the face of radically altered circumstances, and are thus compelled to consume themselves into oblivion, as so many disemboweled yet still ravenous sharks endlessly gorging themselves on their own billowing entrails.
Governments will find that they are unable to restrain themselves from printing ever more money in an endless wave of uncontrolled emission. At the same time, rising taxes, commodity prices, and costs of all kinds, coupled with a rising overall level of uncertainty and disruption, will curtail economic activity to a point where little of that money will still circulate. Inflationists and deflationists will endlessly debate whether this should be called inflation or deflation, unconsciously emulating the big-endians and little-endians of Jonathan Swifts Gulliver's Travels, who endlessly debated the proper end from which to eat a soft-boiled egg...
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Friday, September 25, 2009
Market Capitalism 101: Constantly Expanding Markets Are A Must, Despite The Cost To Your Society
BUSINESS AS USUAL
Economic crises are not natural disasters. They are brought about by the actions of bankers, officials, and developers, not to mention ordinary folks struggling to get by in a world we didn’t choose. They appear beyond our control, but they are not inescapable facts of life.
For all the talk of collapse, capitalism itself is as healthy as ever. The fundamental relationships remain unchanged: employers and employees, politicians and voters, police and policed. Our masters may loan us cars or houses to pacify us, but we still lack control over our own lives.
Crises like this are part of the protection racket that keeps them in business.
They profit on the industries that heat up the earth’s atmosphere, and when hurricanes destroy our neighborhoods they replace them with condominiums and sell us energy-saving light bulbs.
They profit on the invasions that secure more resources for the economy, and also on the occupations in which our friends and relatives die.
They profited from the subprime mortgages that contributed to the latest disaster, and now they’re profiting from the bailout.
Imagine another kind of crisis, one that could really pose a threat to their precious market: neighbors defending each other from eviction, workers seizing the goods they need, people building communities based on cooperation and self-determination.
Imagine a world in which we’d never be vulnerable to the whims of the market again.
As far as we’re concerned, it can’t come soon enough.
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