The Economy

When there is a supply shortage, but the demand for the thing is very strong, prices go up. Supply and demand.

Tyson saw 24 percent revenue growth. They did it on volumes that were weak due to what they have called "a challenging labor environment." They can't find enough workers. To do that tired "cartel / monopoly" idiocy yet again, you have to live in a kindergarten world where there is only supply at work, not demand.

Those supply chain problems brought about lower volumes, and higher production costs, which they pass along. Tyson can't thrive in that environment, if consumers stop buying from them because prices have gone up. But that isn't happening. This is how a wage - price spiral happens.

This isn't complicated. There is less chicken and beef available, and the price of what is available is getting bid up to a price where the people who want what is available the most, are getting it at the price they are willing to pay.

That is a great environment for Tyson. Just as it can also turn into a bad environment for Tyson if the supply chain problems continue to limit their volumes and consumers instead stop buying because the prices have gotten too high. In which case you'll see low volumes and declining profits. But whenever that happens, you don't have this same tired bullshit.

This political narrative that food companies set prices unilaterally and that rising prices happened out of the blue because everyone colluded is beyond primative. It's also dangerous, because of the ignorance it feeds to what really has caused the higher prices.

It's amazing how all these companies that never used their supposed monopoly power suddenly got "greedy" when Joe Biden got elected president. He will demonize food companies or energy companies, but it couldn't have had anything to do with trillions of dollars of freshly printed money (we inreased the money supply by 40 percent in 2 years, which was reckless) being dumped directly into the economy via the trillions of dollars of fiscal spending he insisted he needed to do (and that a lot of clueless people thought was such a great idea). We are now reaping what we sowed.

 

There are a few dozens countries exploring this, with China leading the way. Their goal is probably what you are afraid of.

In a way, we already have a digital currency, because they are not literally printing paper to expand the money supply, they are pressing a button to create credit that gets injected into the banking system and gets released to the broader economy as money, much of which gets shuffled around by people using private digital means. This would just take it the next step and bring it directly to everyone.

Yeah, it is Big Brotherish, but there is a natural check on what they could do to control our lives, because a currency is only as good as its usage. And with where we are headed now, people could just switch to a non-centralized digital token that does not put them under the watch of Big Brother if it became restrictive or oppressive (assuming we don't become an iron curtain kind of autocracy, in which case we have bigger problems).

The problem for me is not the idea of digitally transacting. That is progress. It allows us to do things instantaneously, in a more secure way, so people don't have to blindly trust their counterpart in a transaction. My problem is that it doesn't matter if we have digital dollars or ones printed on linen and cotton paper, when it can be continually devalued by a central bank by fiat.

From a tech perspective, there have been other stories floating something that they are doing with MIT that can do something like 2.7 million transactions per second and settles in 2 seconds. Compared to the various cryptocurrencies, that sounds like a miracle, but that is because they are really comparing two different things. Cryptocurrency networks are decentralized (which is the appeal to people). Centralize the transactions and you automatically solve a huge component of the time per transaction lag.