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The Economy

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by TigerVols, May 14, 2020.

Page 93 of 462
  1. BTExpress

    BTExpress Well-Known Member

    Certain brands of wet cat food (Fancy Feast, in particular) have been troublesome. You can always get something, but the shelves are typically 20% what they usually have.
     
    BTExpress, Jan 27, 2022
    #1105
  2. Hermes

    Hermes Well-Known Member

    We live in a golden age of substitutes when it comes to shortages. There are so many workarounds when it comes to food that were never available before. The only things we haven’t been able to find is Philadelphia cream cheese and Pillsbury cinnamon rolls. Knockoffs are pretty easily found, though.

    And frankly it’s better for me that neither are ever available to me again.

    At work, we haven’t run out of parts in four weeks. We’re shipping more product than the company ever has. I think we’re turning the corner. (Famous last words!)
     
    Hermes, Jan 27, 2022
    #1106
  3. sgreenwell

    sgreenwell Well-Known Member

    Kind of like how global warming doesn't mean we can't have cold days, supply chain interruptions just mean irregular and erratic price jumps. Like, my HEB hasn't had regular sized cans of Coke Zero available online for a month now and asparagus is close to $4 a pound, but salmon and pork have been on deep sale at various points.
     
    sgreenwell, Jan 27, 2022
    #1107
    OscarMadison likes this.
  4. Brooklyn Bridge

    Brooklyn Bridge Well-Known Member

     
    Brooklyn Bridge, Jan 27, 2022
    #1108
    OscarMadison likes this.
  5. Octave

    Octave Well-Known Member

    BTE, I have a cat with a skin allergy. Can only eat duck with bits of peas and carrots and shit in it. The supply crunch has affected the vet, but not the health food store.

    That place has gotten hundreds from me just since we got sent home from work. I used to buy all of that on my commute.
     
    Octave, Jan 27, 2022
    #1109
  6. goalmouth

    goalmouth Well-Known Member

    Cream cheese shortage at Publix in Dade County, my sister says, so I advised seeking it at a bagel place. Because if they don't have it, they're out of business.

    Also, haven't seen Pure Leaf Decaf Tea, my favorite, since 2020. Notice on Lipton site advises shortages, but I have switched to Snapple, altho it doesn't offer decaf. Arizona does, but only in jugs.

    Also, Stewarts diet root beer MIA since 2020.
     
    goalmouth, Jan 27, 2022
    #1110
  7. DanOregon

    DanOregon Well-Known Member

    What's crazy is that capitalism - the market economy - isn't really functioning if consumers DON'T seek better deals and are just locked in on one specific product. Tired of high gas prices? - drive down the block and buy from the place selling it for three cents a gallon cheaper.
     
    DanOregon, Jan 27, 2022
    #1111
  8. Neutral Corner

    Neutral Corner Well-Known Member

    The local Piggly Wiggly has ground round at $5.99/lb. I went and found a big bag of frozen pre-made meatballs to put in our spaghetti sauce, far cheaper. Chicken leg quarters at $2.99.

    We can live without hamburger for a while.
     
    Neutral Corner, Jan 27, 2022
    #1112
  9. doctorquant

    doctorquant Well-Known Member

    An optimist: Well, things can't get any worse!

    A pessimist:

    [​IMG]
     
    doctorquant, Jan 27, 2022
    #1113
    OscarMadison likes this.
  10. Hermes

    Hermes Well-Known Member

    This is where my theory on the stock market during crashes comes in, that you might as well go all in when things collapse.

    Can it get worse than this pandemic and current inflation? Oh, of course it can. But if it does, I’m not going to be worried about the price of gas going up 40 cents. We’re all going to be living in Thunderdome.

    Also, I have so much less to lose mentally. My whole life I’ve had the creeping sense that at some point I’ll have to live out of a car. It’s like my default mentality. I think making $9 an hour for 10 years at a newspaper did that. So, everything else is kinda gravy.
     
    Hermes, Jan 28, 2022
    #1114
    2muchcoffeeman and sgreenwell like this.
  11. Noholesin1

    Noholesin1 Active Member

    A long-time writer friend was in town this week and we got together for dinner last night at a high-end place where you have to work at getting out of there for less than $75 a person. The online reservation system said I got the last one between 4:45 and 8:30. From the moment I got there until the moment I left, there was a steady pool of 20-30 walk-ups waiting for a table. People are spending, that’s for sure.
     
    Noholesin1, Jan 28, 2022
    #1115
  12. The Big Ragu

    The Big Ragu Moderator Staff Member

    I think your "theory" is pretty sound. U.S. equities have gone up in value more than 70 percent of years. And the S&P 500 has had an annualized return of more than 10 percent since the late 1950s. Prices (and valuations) overshoot for a variety of reasons. ... both on the upside and the downside. And on whatever time frame you want to look at stock prices (except very short time frames), when prices get too far away from their mean, they tend to revert to the mean.

    That means when things "collapse," it makes pretty good sense to bet that they will revert back to the mean. Put in psychological terms, you have greed working against fear. When prices are rising quickly, greed takes over and as more and more people with dollar signs in their eyes pile in to get their riches, the price acceleration increases, causing overshoots to the upside. When that reverses, fear takes over, and the weak hands bail, creating opportunities to "go all in," as you said, on an oversell.

    A lot of it is easier said than done, though, and not as simple as it sounds.

    When things get excessively overbought, it has always been due to excessive leverage. And we are in a period of the most excessive leverage ever. And markets have been distorted (sending prices higher) for longer than periods like this in the past. Money has been artificially cheap in a manipulated way for decades and it has blown asset prices through the roof. On any valuation metric.

    Anyone who saw overbought conditions along the way and bet that things would revert to the mean (go down) has gotten run over by a locomotive named the Federal Reserve, which has created a put underneath the market.

    It will reverse, and not in a pretty way, but because the amount of leverage they have created is so large, you could get something very messy, and a longer process on the way down than people have been conditioned to expect. Think in terms of what happened to the stock market in 1929. In nominal terms, at least, it took decades for the Dow Jones Industrial Average to revert back to the mean. Or more recently, if you had gotten sucked into individual stocks during the dot.com bubble, you were likely never made whole.

    The Fed has created a massive distortion unlike anything these markets have seen, and a generation of investors and traders have been conditioned to expect them to bail them out quickly. It's the "buy the dip" mentality that became the joke on here, because within hours or days or a month, of course you'll get a recovery and the instant gratification they feel it's their job to ensure.

    I'd just throw out a what if to people. What if. ... They can no longer artificially inject liquidity into markets they way they have (because the debt bomb they have built explodes), or if they simply lose the will (not likely, they are politicized cowards who will do destructive things to avoid blame, but what if?), it's not going to be that quick snap back people now expect. And what if we were talking about lost decades (think Japan when their central bank blew a bubble in the 1980s and has since refused to stop trying to prop it up, to where it took 30 years for the Nikkei to regain its peak in 1989). ...

    If that happened here (I know, it's unthinkable), would people think going all in (on a bet of reversion to the mean) had been a smart move?
     
    The Big Ragu, Jan 28, 2022
    #1116
    Hermes likes this.
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