The trade and economy mega-thread (3 Viewers)

[superchuck500]

Is there a trade deal with China? Is it really a deal or just a pull-back to status quo ante? Is Trump advancing US interests in this well-executed trade battle plan or was this poorly conceived from the start . . . and harmful?

I think the jury's still out, but I haven't seen that the Chinese are offering much in compromise - and it's not even clear if there's going to be an agreement. But it's clear they are working on something and I'm sure Trump will sell it as the greatest trade deal ever. The proof will be in the details.

 

[efil4]

@Sendai @TampaJoe

Both of you need to take a class on a concept called CSR "Corporate social responsibility". There are books, and for you, youtube videos that go into WHY corporations engage in this behavior.

To put it simply for both of you: Al Capone ran soup kitchens. Was he a good guy?

You are personalizing corporations. They are profit making organizations. The fact you are both arguing for "good" corporations means you fundmentally don't understand the world you live in.

They understand it just fine.

They simply will defend their careers regardless of what the truth really is. It made their careers, so they simply won't speak in a bad tone about what led them to provide for family and ultimately retirement.

In a way I get it. I'm in insurance. If folks think Allstate or State Farm spend all that money on gitchy commercials, sports sponsorships etc because they are altruistic, then the marketing worked.

Until their policy gets non renewed because they live in a region the company took a loss on in a cat event.

 

[TampaJoe]

@Sendai @TampaJoe

Both of you need to take a class on a concept called CSR "Corporate social responsibility". There are books, and for you, youtube videos that go into WHY corporations engage in this behavior.

To put it simply for both of you: Al Capone ran soup kitchens. Was he a good guy?

You are personalizing corporations. They are profit making organizations. The fact you are both arguing for "good" corporations means you fundmentally don't understand the world you live in.

I understand that corporations are run by human beings. They are owned human beings. They employ human beings and they serve human beings. It’s not all that different from government or unions or any other organization run by humans.

You argue as if it’s impossible for them to have any concept of social responsibility. It isn’t. Just like anything involving people, some are better than others.

So you can keep your books and YouTube videos. I’m not gonna deny that profit isn’t a motivation. I’m not gonna argue that is is the primary motivation. Again, I will simply point out that it isn’t the only motivation and the profit and being a good socially conscious corporate citizen is not mutually exclusive. You are welcome to believe otherwise. We simply do not agree on that point. We don’t have to.

 

[cuddlemonkey]

I understand that corporations are run by human beings. They are owned human beings. They employ human beings and they serve human beings. It’s not all that different from government or unions or any other organization run by humans.

You argue as if it’s impossible for them to have any concept of social responsibility. It isn’t. Just like anything involving people, some are better than others.

So you can keep your books and YouTube videos. I’m not gonna deny that profit isn’t a motivation. I’m not gonna argue that is is the primary motivation. Again, I will simply point out that it isn’t the only motivation and the profit and being a good socially conscious corporate citizen is not mutually exclusive. You are welcome to believe otherwise. We simply do not agree on that point. We don’t have to.

Yes, it is vastly different, as has been explained to you. Please attempt to understand the points being made before spewing the same crap ad nauseam.

 

[efil4]

I understand that corporations are run by human beings. They are owned human beings. They employ human beings and they serve human beings. It’s not all that different from government or unions or any other organization run by humans.

You argue as if it’s impossible for them to have any concept of social responsibility. It isn’t. Just like anything involving people, some are better than others.

So you can keep your books and YouTube videos. I’m not gonna deny that profit isn’t a motivation. I’m not gonna argue that is is the primary motivation. Again, I will simply point out that it isn’t the only motivation and the profit and being a good socially conscious corporate citizen is not mutually exclusive. You are welcome to believe otherwise. We simply do not agree on that point. We don’t have to.

Lol it's like a broken record. Attempt to move the issue (profit is THE driving factor) to something more palatable ( it's A factor, but other factors and social responsibility is just as important).

Not one person here said they "can't be socially responsible". Every top 500 company has an entire division for projecting social responsibility. It's called marketing.

But everything a corporation does is for one reason only...profitability.

If the division you worked in for your company wasn't profitable, it gets shut down. If your division had 100 employees and 50 get repurposed and 50 laid off, where is the social responsibility for the 50 laid off? Severance pay?

 

[TampaJoe]

Yes, it is vastly different, as has been explained to you. Please attempt to understand the points being made before spewing the same crap ad nauseam.

Please feel free to ignore that which you do not like.

 

[MT15]

Lol it's like a broken record. Attempt to move the issue (profit is THE driving factor) to something more palatable ( it's A factor, but other factors and social responsibility is just as important).

Not one person here said they "can't be socially responsible". Every top 500 company has an entire division for projecting social responsibility. It's called marketing.

But everything a corporation does is for one reason only...profitability.

If the division you worked in for your company wasn't profitable, it gets shut down. If your division had 100 employees and 50 get repurposed and 50 laid off, where is the social responsibility for the 50 laid off? Severance pay?

And they won’t have to spend near as much money on appearing socially responsible now, will they? This admin is telling them to get rid of these efforts and quite a few have already bent the knee. You can count on one hand those corps who have said they will be keeping their diversity programs.

If social responsibility was so important to them, why did they abandon diversity within 2 months of Trump taking over?

Because social responsibility takes a back seat. What more proof would you ever need?

 

[J-DONK]

I understand that corporations are run by human beings. They are owned human beings. They employ human beings and they serve human beings. It’s not all that different from government or unions or any other organization run by humans.

You argue as if it’s impossible for them to have any concept of social responsibility. It isn’t. Just like anything involving people, some are better than others.

So you can keep your books and YouTube videos. I’m not gonna deny that profit isn’t a motivation. I’m not gonna argue that is is the primary motivation. Again, I will simply point out that it isn’t the only motivation and the profit and being a good socially conscious corporate citizen is not mutually exclusive. You are welcome to believe otherwise. We simply do not agree on that point. We don’t have to.

"No, no, no I won't learn anything new today. I would rather continue to argue from my own ignorance."

I put you on ignore for what you did in this reply. You prop up your own ignorant opinion as equal, and then say "We can just not agree". No Joe, you are wrong. I gave you the name of the behavior, and one simple google search would give you all your answers as to WHY. It has nothing to do with "good people" that work in these companies.

 

[TampaJoe]

Lol it's like a broken record. Attempt to move the issue (profit is THE driving factor) to something more palatable ( it's A factor, but other factors and social responsibility is just as important).

Not one person here said they "can't be socially responsible". Every top 500 company has an entire division for projecting social responsibility. It's called marketing.

But everything a corporation does is for one reason only...profitability.

If the division you worked in for your company wasn't profitable, it gets shut down. If your division had 100 employees and 50 get repurposed and 50 laid off, where is the social responsibility for the 50 laid off? Severance pay?

We have lots of divisions that aren’t profitable. They are called “overhead” or “general and administrative”. They don’t have a dollar in sales but the company won’t run without them. They add value that you can’t easily put a dollar figure on.

And yes, you can be socially responsible in how you terminate someone’s employment.

If you are saying that businesses can be both profitable and socially responsible, then we are in agreement.

 

[TampaJoe]

"No, no, no I won't learn anything new today. I would rather continue to argue from my own ignorance."

I put you on ignore for what you did in this reply. You prop up your own ignorant opinion as equal, and then say "We can just not agree". No Joe, you are wrong. I gave you the name of the behavior, and one simple google search would give you all your answers as to WHY. It has nothing to do with "good people" that work in these companies.

If you can’t deal with people who disagree with you then perhaps “ignore” is a good strategy for you.

 

[efil4]

We have lots of divisions that aren’t profitable. They are called “overhead” or “general and administrative”. They don’t have a dollar in sales but the company won’t run without them. They add value that you can’t easily put a dollar figure on.

And yes, you can be socially responsible in how you terminate someone’s employment.

If you are saying that businesses can be both profitable and socially responsible, then we are in agreement.

Lol we aren't talking about administrative line items. Nor overhead.

What we are talking about, and you keep trying to tack to some other argument, is simple.

No profit, no general administrative costs, no overhead.

You just said you are an accountant. Tell me, if you were my accountant and saw I was spending $500,000 annually on being socially responsible and having a $100,000 negative net profit and I asked what I could I do to get to the black, what would you recommend?

 

[Optimus Prime]

Donald Trump keeps saying he inherited a terrible economy from Joe Biden and many Americans believe him, even though that’s not true. During his White House marketing event for Tesla on Tuesday, Trump said the US and its economy “went to hell” under Biden.

Last week, in his national address to Congress, Trump said: “We inherited from the last administration an economic catastrophe and an inflation nightmare.”

But the truth is that by standard economic measures, the US economy was in excellent shape when Biden turned over the White House keys to Trump, even though most Americans, upset about inflation, told pollsters the economy was in poor shape.

When Biden left office, the unemployment rate was a low 4.1%, and during Biden’s four years in office, the average jobless rate was lower than for any president since the 1960s.

Trump has repeatedly railed against the high inflation under Biden, but the fact is that by the time Biden left office, the inflation rate had fallen to just 2.9% – down more than two-thirds from its peak and near the Federal Reserve’s inflation goal.

Not only that, the nation’s GDP growth has been impressive, rising at a solid 3.1% rate at the end of Biden’s term.

Ever since the pandemic ended, economic growth in the US has been considerably stronger than in the UK, France, Germany and other G7 nations. Shortly before election day, the Economist magazine ran a story saying the US economy was “the envy of the world” and had “left other rich countries in the dust”.

Trump often says job growth under Biden was terrible, but the fact is that the US added 16.6m jobs during Biden’s presidency, more than during any four-year term of any previous US president.

Under Trump, job growth was far worse – during his first four-year term, the nation lost 2.7m jobs overall, making Trump’s presidency the first since Herbert Hoover’s during which the nation suffered a net loss in jobs.

The pandemic was largely responsible for this, but even during Trump’s first three years in office, before the pandemic hit, job growth was only half as fast as it was under Biden.

Recently, Trump has repeatedly boasted how his tariffs will bring back manufacturing. Trump fails to note, however, that Biden had considerable success in bringing bring back manufacturing and factory jobs.

Under most recent presidents, the US lost manufacturing jobs, but under Biden, the nation gained an impressive 750,000 factory jobs, the most under any president since the 1970s.

A big reason for this was that as a result of Biden’s green jobs legislation and the Chips Act to boost semiconductor production, manufacturing investment boomed, more than doubling during Biden’s four years in office……..

Trump says the economy ‘went to hell’ under Biden. The opposite is true

By standard measures such as job and GDP growth and the stock market, the US economy was in excellent shape

www.theguardian.com

 

[Optimus Prime]

Guess this can go here
=================
Many shoppers know about the so-called pink tax – a needless markup on products marketed to women, even if those products are essentially the same, just cheaper, when sold to men.

Personal care items such as razors, deodorants and shampoo fall into this category. But shoppers may be less aware of “pink tariffs”, or taxes on imported goods labeled as “women’s items”.

Pink tariffs are one reason women’s clothing tends to cost more than men’s at the checkout counter, and why some women might buy sweatpants or oversized sweaters technically made for “men” – it could save them some cash.

As first reported by the 19th, two Democratic House members, Lizzie Fletcher of Texas and Brittany Pettersen of Colorado, introduced a bill this session calling on the treasury department to study pink tariffs, and publish any findings on how these taxes might lead to a gender bias in retail.

The move comes amid Donald Trump’s continued tariff war, when more Americans are paying attention to how tariffs work and affect their day-to-day lives. (On TikTok, young people especially balked at how the taxes on China-made goods might affect Temu or Shein fast-fashion prices.)

Ed Gresser, vice-president and director for trade and global markets at the centrist thinkthank Progressive Policy Institute, said in a statementthat the bill “will help us design a better and fairer system”, noting that gender bias in clothing “likely costs women at least $2.5bn per year”.

Fletcher noted that women pay 3% more in tariffs than men, though in some cases it could be more.

Things don’t get easier if shoppers head to a genderless aisle: unisex clothing, the 19th also reported, gets taxed the same rate as womenswear.

Pink tariffs can also apply to personal care items, sneakers and toys marketed toward young girls as opposed to boys.

Sheng Lu, a professor of fashion and apparel studies at the University of Delaware, says the wide margin between tariffs on women’s and men’s clothing are “the results of decades-old negotiations” influenced by simple misogyny.

“Men dominated these discussions, and women were not fully considered in these negotiations, and that’s a very important reason for the impact and legacy of the pink tariffs.”………

‘Financial microaggressions’: why ‘pink tariffs’ hurt women more than men

Women’s goods are taxed at a higher rate than men’s, an invisible bias that is estimated to cost women $2.5bn a year

www.theguardian.com

 

[TampaJoe]

Lol we aren't talking about administrative line items. Nor overhead.

What we are talking about, and you keep trying to tack to some other argument, is simple.

No profit, no general administrative costs, no overhead.

You just said you are an accountant. Tell me, if you were my accountant and saw I was spending $500,000 annually on being socially responsible and having a $100,000 negative net profit and I asked what I could I do to get to the black, what would you recommend?

If I were consulting with your business, I would recommend you cut your expenses. I would not tell you which expenses to cut. You are the business owner. It’s up to you to set priorities.

If being socially responsible is important to you and your business then you may need to cut some other expense.

 

[efil4]

If I were consulting with your business, I would recommend you cut your expenses. I would not tell you which expenses to cut. You are the business owner. It’s up to you to set priorities.

If being socially responsible is important to you and your business then you may need to cut some other expense.

Cut expenses. Thank you. And i suspect, as a paid consultant, that if my social responsibility expenses were $2 for every $1 spent on administrative and overhead, you would kindly suggest i look there first, yeah? Or would you recommend i fire 10 employees to save $400,000~ ?

In the end, cutting expenses should do what? Thats right, increase profitability.

Ergo, as we have been saying since this topic was introduced, EVERY SINGLE move a corporation makes is to increase profitability.( profit )

Thank you for finally coming thru with an honest answer that ends my conversation on this topic.

That was the entire premise of every post on this topic. That a corporation, big or small, will always prioritize profit over all else, because without it, THERE IS NO corporation. Unless its 501c3 of course ( but thats a whole other topic )

 

[UncleTrvlingJim]

If you want to know a company's values, look at what their incentives are. How much do they reward people based on share price and profits vs. things like most honest employee, or whatever. How are bonuses structured?

Things like honest, integrity, great products, happy employees etc - are often part of a companies culture, but usually as a method to achieve long term profits.

This is neither good or bad... but I've never seen a company sacrifice long term profits for some more nebulous moral value. They may sacrifice short term profits, if they happen to have a particularly patient board of directors, but even that is rare. It's why we had the 2008 financial crisis -- all incentives were for short term profit, so long term risk was ignored. It's why we have regulations to prevent toxic waste dumping, b/c basic game theory and profit incentives lead to companies dumping toxic waste if they aren't forbidden to do so.

 

[bird]

If you want to know a company's values, look at what their incentives are. How much do they reward people based on share price and profits vs. things like most honest employee, or whatever. How are bonuses structured?

Things like honest, integrity, great products, happy employees etc - are often part of a companies culture, but usually as a method to achieve long term profits.

This is neither good or bad... but I've never seen a company sacrifice long term profits for some more nebulous moral value. They may sacrifice short term profits, if they happen to have a particularly patient board of directors, but even that is rare. It's why we had the 2008 financial crisis -- all incentives were for short term profit, so long term risk was ignored. It's why we have regulations to prevent toxic waste dumping, b/c basic game theory and profit incentives lead to companies dumping toxic waste if they aren't forbidden to do so.

One very small quibble…

Companies do not have values. They cannot have values because they are non-living legal constructs. Management can claim that their company has values which is simply advertising/agitprop bullschlitz. Management always seeks cover to hide from their left hand what their right hand is doing. That includes hiding from labor.

 

[TampaJoe]

Cut expenses. Thank you. And i suspect, as a paid consultant, that if my social responsibility expenses were $2 for every $1 spent on administrative and overhead, you would kindly suggest i look there first, yeah? Or would you recommend i fire 10 employees to save $400,000~ ?

In the end, cutting expenses should do what? Thats right, increase profitability.

Ergo, as we have been saying since this topic was introduced, EVERY SINGLE move a corporation makes is to increase profitability.( profit )

Thank you for finally coming thru with an honest answer that ends my conversation on this topic.

That was the entire premise of every post on this topic. That a corporation, big or small, will always prioritize profit over all else, because without it, THERE IS NO corporation. Unless its 501c3 of course ( but thats a whole other topic )

Unless you as the owner decide to make a capital contribution. You don’t pay the bank with profits. They want cash and there is more than one way to increase cash flow.

But my point has never been that profit isn’t important. It is. I haven’t heard said as much many times. My point is simple. That being a good business person and being socially responsible aren’t mutually exclusive. I’m not gonna tell you that sometimes those priorities don’t compete for the same funds. They often do. But to many owners giving back to the community is important and is a priority.

I attached a listing earlier of the top 100 philanthropic organizations. Many financed by successful business owners. I once worked for a high net worth individual who went thru a reorganization and almost lost his business. During the entire process, he still maintained a scholarship fund for low income students in the community. Other things took a back seat but not that fund.

Nothing run by humans is perfect in all respects or free of abuse and over reach. Not business. Not government.

 

[Sendai]

You try to make an argument from a point of experience. You worked in a corporate world of filing cabinets, and literal paper trails. The world has changed Sendai.

Again, name the companies. You won't because this is fiction.

I eliminated those filing cabinets.