In the West we currently live in a world where more and more of our industrial activity is driven offshore. The United States in particular, once a power house of industrial activity now can barely support the very automotive industry that it created.
Companies continually justify off shoring their manufacturing as being good for the economy. It is worth a thought to see if this is actually true. For that you need to have to be able to answer the question of “What is the value of a company to an economy?”
The more or less abstract view I currently have of an economy is of a pool of circulating tokens called money and counter circulating items called product. In simple terms you exchange money for product. Money moves one way and product moves the other. You could in fact hide the view of one or the other and see either flowing tokens, or flowing value added raw materials. Imagine for a second raw iron coming out of the ground, being shaped into steel, further shaped into components, coming together to form a car and ending up in your driveway.
Without loss of generality we will discuss token flow here – while keeping in mind that we could equivalently look at the flow of value added materials. In this view the value of a company to an economy is its value as a pump of sorts. Money (tokens) flow into a company and then are pumped out to other parties who in turn distribute money to other parties.
With this view in mind, the value of a company can be considered to be the gross amount of money that flows into the company. Forget taxes, forget profits, forget everything except the flow of tokens into the company’s coffers.
These tokens then get distributed to various parties. Shareholders, Suppliers and Government. Here staff are classed as suppliers and retained profits as he company distributing profits to itself as a shareholder. As companies tend to collect taxes for employees the government component will include all taxes, tariffs etc that the company as an entity pays to the government. Denote each of these quantities as; , , respectively.
This allows us to say the gross value of a company is
Where a company does business in several different economies, we can split this up and sum it over each of the N different economies to give
Where the is simply a shorthand way to write “sum up all the terms”.
With that you have a picture of a company being a pump of sorts, that sucks money in and then pushes it out to various parties. The value of a company to a single economy is the amount that is distributed to shareholders, government and suppliers within a single country.
So What Is Happening
The issue we have at the moment is that Western companies are reducing the amount they are paying out to suppliers and government in the economies they are based in so that they can increase the amount being paid to shareholders. The total gross is the same in the sense that the amount of money coming in is unchanged, but how it is distributed does change.
With that concept in mind I have to argue that while the value of a company to shareholders may increase the value of a the company to an economy decreases unless the payments to shareholders within an economy meets or exceeds the lost payments to suppliers and associated tax revenue – which includes income tax paid to employees that is lost to an economy when labor is off shored.
In a sense I am repeating earlier posts where I have argued that in a welfare state where people are protected the government also has to protect the revenue streams that pay for the medicine, pensions, roads, defense of the modern state.
The shortfall is debt as the developed world is finding out in no uncertain terms.
As I have argued before you can not have a welfare state and low cost goods and services. If you wish to have the benefits of a welfare state, you have to accept that product produced within that economy will have a higher tax burden associated with it. Worse you not only have to accept that local products will cost more, but you have to be prepared to pay for them. No money, no welfare as simple as that.
The counter argument does exist that off shoring manufacturing results in companies within other economies spending their wealth within your economy. In a nation like Australia which is resource based that may hold to an extent, although you need to be careful with profits distributed to offshore shareholders and taxes paid by companies based in foreign economies. But with a nation like the United States which has more of an industrial rather than resource profile then this loss of economic value as their industries collapse is a total disaster. For reference General Motors and Chrysler have both gone into bankruptcy in the last couple of weeks.
To get back to the point. The value of a company to an economy is a different kettle of fish entirely to the value of a company to shareholders. While off shoring actions by companies may increase shareholder value, they decrease the value of a company to the economy in which they are based. These companies do have a legitimate argument that they simply can not compete against companies that manufacture in non welfare state economies. This is an issue for government.
We have a couple of choices. We do away with the welfare state to reduce our cost of business to levels that are competitive with the third world. This means reducing social infrastructure to third world levels. or we protect our economies by burdening up third world products with the delta between the welfare state burden they are carrying and the amount we are carrying. In simple terms it means that we penalize economies that do not provide social support for their populations by imposing a burden equivalent to the one they would be carrying if they did. At the moment we are in a reverse protection situation where the social costs we carry ourselves act as a tariff on our own product which tends to protect countries that do not protect their own people.
It might also help stem the flow of economic refugees who are seeking the social benefits of the West that are not provided within their own economies. Why would they want to come to the West if they could get equivalent levels of social support, education, medicine and opportunity in their own lands?
In any case I see no other choices. The West either loses everything it has worked for since Napoleon ended the Holy Roman Empire of the Ostragothi and bought the enlightenment and humanist law to Europe or we impose the values, principles and cost burden of the modern liberal humanist state upon our less burdened competitors.
We are all used to looking at the price of gold in USD. It is interesting to think of how much gold a single $USD will buy you. Even though we no longer use the gold standard there is a reasonable argument that the value of gold is effectively constant and currencies vary relative to it.
The chart below (click on it for a larger version) shows how much gold one $USD buys. The interesting thing to note is that it has been falling like a stone ever since April 2001, which if I recall correctly is before Sept 11 and the current War so we can’t blame that. In fact it lines up with the first NASDAQ bottom of the Tech Wreck.
It seems the US never really recovered from their IT industry crashing. (Probably because they sent all their work to India afterwards – but that is a different story).
In stock market terms this is about as straight a line as you can get by the way. Just remember this is over 8 years of relentless decline.
It reflects a steady and massive erosion in US buying power that has only just leveled out thanks to various games being played with currency in the current crisis. Rumors are that the US does not want their currency to go below a thousandth of an ounce (0.001 on the chart) which is where it has paused. Whether this is simply a dead cat bounce or not only time will tell.
If this makes you feel worried, then remember that your currency is probably only a fraction of the $USD
Thor found the following information about the worlds biggest debtors on CNBC’s website the other day. It is something the West really needs to have a good hard look at. In simple terms it is a list of the top debtor nation ranked as a percentage GDP. What is interesting and what grabbed Thor’s immediate attention is that with the exception of Hong Kong and we can blame British influence there, this looks like a roll call of Thor’s beer guzzling, lactose digesting, dog loving, war mongering, errant flaming Anglo Germanic children.
Ranking
Country
External debt (as % of GDP):
External debt per capita: $(USD)
Gross external debt: ($USD Bn)
Gross GDP ($USD Bn)
1
Ireland
815
549,819
2,322
285
2
United Kingdom
337
153,616
9,388
2,787
3
Belgium
327
155,362
1,618
495
4
Hong Kong
295
93,539
660
224
5
Netherlands
268
145,959
2,439
910
6
Switzerland
265
171,478
1,304
493
7
Austria
191
100,787
827
432
8
France
168
78,070
5,001
2,978
9
Denmark
159
107,026
589
370
10
Germany
138
63,767
5,250
3,818
11
Spain
137
57,091
2,313
1,683
12
Sweden
129
73,245
664
513
13
Finland
117
62,579
329
281
14
Norway
115
118,353
552
481
15
United States
95
44,258
13,627
14,330
Unranked – Included for interest
Australia
71
35,869
764
1,069
Canada
48
22,418
751
1,564
Russia
28
3,463
485
1,757
Not Happy
Take it from me your lighting wielding, chariot riding, wench loving ancestral deity who managed to pull his beard out of his mead long enough to log on to CNBC is furious. You lot are in so much shit. Not only does he find you on your hands and knee’s worshiping Semitic gods, but you are in debt!.
Let me quote “Which bit about avoiding usury at all costs did this fucking mob not understand!!” which was followed by his usual tirade about Semites, money lenders and those idiots in Rome. The bit he is really pissed about – and which you had better get your story straight about real fast is “How the fuck did this mob manage to control most of the worlds primary resources, all of it’s air space, it’s law, it’s armies, it’s medicine, it’s universities and not be able to turn a simple fucking profit!!”.
After calming down long enough to relight his ever present and omni potent stogie, pour another ale and scratch under his sporran for a while he has some “advice” for you if you get my drift.
All this social welfare, medical, legal, educational and military infrastructure that you have spent the last few thousand years developing is good stuff. But what you need to understand is that there is a cost to it. Every time government comes up with a “great idea” it has to be paid for and under your economic system that means governments recoup the cost as a tax spread across everyone. In simple terms it is an overhead that gets added to the cost of business. Whether it be a transaction tax, an income tax, company tax, a tariff, whatever. In the end it is a burden that gets spread across the economy. This means that goods produced in economies that have the burden of a welfare state are more expensive.
Now all this is fair enough, you chose to have a welfare state, which means that as individuals you have chosen to pay that burden in order to receive the benefits. What you can’t do, and this is the source of all your problems is now say you won’t buy goods that carry that burden. When you decide to buy cheaper goods from markets that are unburdened by these costs you are left with a net debt. This in turn forces up taxes because the government has to cover costs which in turn makes your goods even more expensive to the point that your businesses fail.
You can’t have it both ways. You can not have cheap goods and a welfare state. If you choose to do without the welfare state then your tax burden drops and your goods can compete. If you impose a welfare state and associated burden on external markets then you can achieve parity – but will result in a general raising of the cost of living because you are now paying the burden from external markets.
What you can not do is do nothing. Nor can you hide behind your individual “nations” try and say Ireland’s problems are not Australia’s problems. Like it or not blood is thicker than water and we sink or swim together.
Take the Irish for example, admittedly a worst case. Each and every man, woman and child in Ireland owes $USD 549k. This will take generations to repay. It is the equivalent of a good house for each person, and you are paying interest on all this.
I suggest you lot do something fast before Thor finds the keys to his chariot.
With boat loads of refugees turning up in Australian waters once again I find the situation to be a perfect example of the “Paradox Of Civilization” highlighted previously.
Now normally I would revise the definitions and try to express the issue in terms of the some concepts I have been playing with lately. Intellectual masturbation though makes for a boring read. So this time I will leave the philosophical wank for another post and just get to the point.
We have all seen the images of burning boats and bandaged people being rescued by the Australian Navy. What is not being discussed is that this whole asylum seeker issue the world over is an abuse of civilization. To force the civilized into a situation where their own moral and ethical standards are used against them is abhorrent. It is simply emotional blackmail, no different to the beggar breaking his child’s legs to get more money from passers by.
“Let me into your country or I will set myself on fire….”.
The debate that must occur.
A more serious issue behind all of this is that of closing the borders. It is a debate that must occur, but which because of the Paradox of Civilization the civilized world world finds extremely difficult to do.
Unfortunately whether it occurs this year or in a hundred years it is inevitable but in a democracy where the personal desires of an immigrant population affects political policy is a debate that may be impossible in a century. The simple mathematics of an exponentially growing world population on a finite and fixed land mass mean that there will always be increasing numbers of less fortunate wanting to cross your borders and those you do bring in will always find ways around your laws to sponsor their friends and family.
The Paradox of Civilization pushes us into a position where if we don’t open our borders then we according to our own standards are behaving in an uncivilized manner, but if we do then we put stresses on our infrastructure that damages ourselves.
The pain associated with this debate does not lessen by deferring it. At some point nations will be faced with the choice of pushing their own social and physical infrastructure beyond breaking point or saying no. If they take the first option then they themselves become the “less fortunate” and will become a burden on neighboring countries resulting in the whole house of cards collapsing.
Western infrastructure is already close to breaking point. Whether it be laziness or stupidity in the West I do not know, but we are currently unable to meet our own demands for medical and engineering skills and rely on skills from the developing world to supply our own needs. We no longer are able to manufacture our own products and rely on other nations to provide them for us.
Taking skilled resources away from the countries that need them is a serious issue. An Indian doctor on Harley St filling a gap that an Anglo Saxon is unwilling or unable to fill is not helping raise India’s standard of health. An African engineer building western oil platforms is not helping to develop Africa’s infrastructure. And that in turn increases immigration pressure.
This is a key problem. The asylum seeker and refugee issue will not go away until the developing world builds enough of it’s own infrastructure to support it’s own population. That can’t occur while the skilled from the developing world turn their back on their own to seek greener pastures elsewhere.
At some point an individual has to have loyalty to their own culture and history and put their own people ahead of personal wealth and status.
From a longer term Western view we need to reduce the immigration pressure and to do that we need to take steps to ensure skills are retained within the developing world. We also need to have a real hard look at ourselves to work out why with all the education, resources and opportunity we have why our own children won’t do mathematics, science and engineering. Why is it we have a demand for skilled labor we are unable to meet? Do we think of ourselves as some “elite” ruling class for whom doing real work is somehow something for those “brown and yellow people” lower down in the international pecking order.
Many of you have arts law history – have a think about what happened to the old European ruling classes last time the “I am too good for that” attitude became popular….
Well the Dow has turned down again. Technically it was overbought so this was due to happen, but we are also seeing the rumor mill go into overdrive with everything from “leaks” of the financial stress tests over at the Turner blog, to theories of China trying to escape toxic US debt.
Underlying this is the continual blame for this mess on the credit market meltdown. Well folks you are looking at the car wreck and blaming the telegraph pole. As I began discussing back in Park Bench Mortgages the meltdown in the credit market is a symptom not a cause. You should be asking yourselves why the driver didn’t see the pole in the first place.
The financial meltdown occurred because the pressure came off the housing market resulting in a situation where the value of the assets was not rising enough to cover the loans. All those “Sub Prime” loans were perfectly good as long as the demand for housing kept up. It would not have mattered if our friend on the park bench defaulted. The lender could have sold the property and covered themselves.
The real issue is the fact that demand for housing slowed and no one saw it coming and for that I have to blame the absolutely crappy level of mathematics education amongst our business, economics, banking, financial and political leadership. How many of them have at least two years uni level mathematics – or in fact how many of them have good enough high school mathematics to even get into first year uni math….
To see where I am coming from remember back a bit to all those home improvement shows that swamped TV a few years back during the real estate boom. “Auction Squad”, “Room for Improvement” etc. We were at a period in history in which the Baby Boomers were in the family home and their children where getting married and buying their first homes. Both these groups were competing in the same housing market. Once the after boomers had their new home their minds turned to having families and the demand cooled. At the time you could see the pregnant bellies morph into new mothers turning up at work to show off their latest, which morphed into masses of prams on the sidewalk, then pushers and demand for day care centers.
All of this is was predictable to anyone with even the slightest level of mathematics. Population versus age data is obtained by all the departments of statistics across the western world. All it would have taken to work out that the real estate demand was going to cool off and to adjust lending and risk management appropriately would have been for someone to look at the data.
It would not have been hard to ask “what do people in the twenty to thirty age group do”. “What will the effect on real estate of the baby boomers children themselves settling down be”…
You could literally see it happening around you at the time.
Why the mathematics? Quite simply because the leadership of the western world are mathematically challenged. They can not think in terms of data that is represented by anything more complex than . They don’t think first to look at the data and try to understand cause and effect. Statistics to them is a tool to highlight their opinion rather than a tool that should be used to form the opinion in the first place.
This is all compounded by the fact that all these guys have MBA’s. They all have masters level degrees implying a higher level of education. Did they learn anything or was it simply a case of paying their $20k for a ticket to senior management that the universities were happy to take…..
I don’t know about you, but I have known a lot of these guys. They are not smart. Well connected, well spoken and aggressive yes. Some of them are canny and street smart, but you wouldn’t want them in control of anything more complicated than a profit and loss statement for a fish and chip shop.
These guys aren’t good enough. Your lives depend upon their decisions. They make a mistake you get hurt.
I found this YouTube video that is worth thinking about. The author goes a bit over the top at the end trying to whip up support for his YouTube channel, but I think his heart is in the right place.
With the worry about the US auto industry I thought I would trot over and have a look at General Motors website. Now I understand all too well the near impossibility for Western manufacturing to compete against countries that do not have to contend with the welfare and social costs that we consider the norm, but the General Motors product portfolio is pure insanity.
Keep in mind I am an Aussie and all I see of GM is their Australian flavour Holden. In the US though they have Buick, Cadillac, Chevorlet, Pontiac, Saturn and SAAB all of which are essentially what you would call a normal car. Cadillac of course being up market and SAAB being Swedish. Add into this GMC and Hummer.
All of Buick Cadillac, Chevorlet, Pontiac and Saturn sell the same bloody thing!!! They are competing head on in exactly the same bloody marketplace. Doh! No wonder the individual product lines are not profitable. Then to compound the error GMC and Chevy compete with light trucks and the whole bloody lot of them seem to sell SUV’s.
There aren’t even very many key product differentiators here. It’s not like comparing Honda with Mazda with Toyota. Three brands all of which offer significantly different cars. Can someone tell me what the difference between these brands are? Particularly between Buick, Pontiac and Saturn.
And they don’t seem to export them. In fact that is a US problem in general. Chrysler recently dipped it’s toe back into the Australian market after an absence of thirty years, but imported American cars simply are not on Australian roads. American products are simply not on Australian shelves. But then again American products are probably becoming scarce on American shelves as well.
I have no idea what the management of these companies learned at MBA school or did they just pay their $20k+ in fees for a ticket to an executive job…..
So advice guys, it is not Just Pontiac that needs to become a niche car. They all do. Work out where you have duplication in your product placement and which brand that product should live under.
With the cars that you keep, they have to be better. Better design, better engines, better performance, better handling, better everything. A production line can make a great car with the same effort it can make a lousy one.
Take the real niche sports cars and design, build and sell them from a single factory. That should be a business in it’s own right and should target export heavily. There would be people all over the world that would pay good money for a ‘vette.
Find out who in the management tree has held back innovation in design and fire them. Then fire the suck arses who supported them. Rehire they guys you did fire for challenging the status quo.
In fact get a whole lot of new blood into management anyway. Get rid of all the people responsible for product and development and strategy. It hasn’t worked so why reward them.
This blog has been quiet for a while, nothing has grabbed me enough to write about that I havent already vented by frustrations on, but an old topic has reared it’s head again. Printing Money……
I still fail to understand what our economists get taught at uni. You can not print money and hope it solves problems. I don’t care if you go about it by selling bonds that you plan to pay back later or whether you simply crank up the printing presses and hand it out on street corners. It doesn’t work.
Let’s try to understand some basics. Money itself in this day and age is in fact worthless. A note, a coin, a dollar is simply an intentionally cheap token that is used to have a number written on it. The number represents the economic value of something.
Once upon a time the token itself was gold and had an intrinsic value itself, but those days are gone. In fact money does not even have to have a physical representation in this day and age of electronic commerce. It’s effectively an IOU written on a little yellow sticky thing.
The value of money is obtained from the economy it is associated with. It is the value of your economy divided by the number of tokens on issue. Increasing the money supply by printing money, or selling bonds – which themselves are government IOU’s does nothing apart from devalue the currency already on issue.
Remember the money itself is worthless. It is just a label, a token that represents the value of your economy.
Money Supply
To increase the money supply you have to increase economic activity. You have to make something, sell something, add value to the economy. That means increasing manufacturing, the supply of services, the supply of raw materials.
The problem in the West at the moment is that economic activity is stalling. Manufacturing and jobs flowing out of the West corresponds to economic activity flowing out of the West. As I have written about before, our previously closed bucket of an economy has a hole in it. Compounded by an aging population our economic activity is reducing and the money is disappearing.
Printing money to attempt to fix the problem without fixing the hole is simply a disaster. Particularly as the money in our Western bucket is largely borrowed in the first place. Borrowed money represents future economic activity. It represents work that will have to occur in the future to repay the debt. Adding to the problem by selling government bonds to increase the money in the bucket means creating IOUs that will have to be paid for out of future activity.
The leak in the bucket has to be stopped first. That means you have to stem the flow of money – economic activity – jobs – manufacturing etc out of your economies. You have to retain an industrial base that generates economic activity that repays the debt. You can not repay debt out of someone else’s economic activity. Someone else’s economic activity belongs to someone else’s economy.
What is needed is literally for the hole in the bucket to be plugged and the bucket then given a good stir. You do not need to increase the number of tokens in the bucket to increase activity. You simply have to increase the amount of business that is taking place. Increase the rate at which tokens change hands.
The State itself can provide that stimulus simply by building infrastructure – provided of course that the infrastructure is produced internally to the economy. As bad as it may sound a war would be good for us. The arms production stimulus would do wonders for our manufacturing base. Think the 1950′s compared to the 1930′s. It need not be a war though. Another Snowy Mountains scheme would do the trick, Another space program. Whatever it is it has to be BIG, ambitious and local.
The West has a lot to learn.
Primary amongst them is that non Western nations don’t particularly care what happens to us. In fact they don’t particularly like us. They don’t like our quality of life compared to theirs, they don’t like our political and military control of this planet, they don’t really like us. They put up with us because we have money or more to the point in this day and age because we owe them a lot of money….
Third world engineers don’t like designing and building household equipment and luxury items for less skilled people that they themselves can not afford. They deeply resent the inequality and that is something the touchy feely “lets all hold hands and be friends” West just has not gotten it’s brain around. As much as most Westerners resent the worthless snotty nosed toff with the rich parents who does nothing and lives a life of luxury , the rest of the Worlds resents us.
Remember that emotion of hatred that you feel towards those who through luck more than skill are protected from life’s bumps. Who have all the wealth and just fritter it away. Well that is the way most of the world feels towards you.
The West has to learn to protect itself. That means protecting jobs, protecting social standards, protecting labor standards, protecting pensions, health care, education. Protecting all those things that our competitors who don’t much like us don’t have.
To do this the West has to protect the economic activity that is used to pay for all these things. It has to protect the tax base – income tax, goods and services tax, company tax that pays for schools education and defense.
Salary paid to a foreign worker does not contribute to your tax base and their activity does not contribute to your economy. When you send labor offshore, you are also giving away the economic activity that is used to pay for your children’s schooling, your parents pension and your local police force.
The developed nations with a high social infrastructure burden need to close the doors and only trade with other nations that carry a similar burden.
Pity I didn’t have any cash in the market to trade it. Anyway a picture is worth a thousand words. The 7500 support line has been broken, and going by the Dow’s 3.4% fall last night I figure I wasn’t the only person with a mental checkpoint at 7500.
It is still very bearish going by the MACD which has not been this negative on the DOW ever in the range of my data (1980 onwards). The possible light at the end of the tunnel is the Volatility index, the VIX that shows that volatility is decreasing in the short term. The medium term weekly view is still ugly. In fact with a pennon forming which is a very bearish pattern.
A Pennon forms when there is a large move (the flag pole) followed by consolidation. The range of the indicator narrows in a triangular manner to a point after which it can get no narrower and has no choice but to break up or down. (The alternative would be sideways meaning no trade) Generally it breaks in the direction of the trend, which in this case would be upward implying an increase in volatility – hence downward price motion.
Perhaps we will get a bit of a breather for a few weeks before it takes off – downward again.
With that said, until people start seeing value in the market and we start getting a lot of M&A (Merger and Acquisition) activity I will leave my target for the Dow in the 5500 range +/- about 500 each way.
The M&A activity is warming up by the way. It is starting to get the occasional mention in the media as the only area in banking that is actually hiring. But early days yet, deals would only just have been tabled and it will take a while from them to work through board rooms and get closed. Once they do then I will take off my rather uncomfortable Bear suite and see if I can find the old horny Bull costume in the back of the wardrobe.
Well the Dow has fallen through the 7500 mark that I was saying would be the critical point. If it found support at that level we could have expected a horizontal move for some months and then a slow recovery, but with the 7500 mark being penetrated then 7500 now forms a new ceiling.
I now have a loose technical target of the DJIA in 5500 to 6000 range. By loose I mean it is not a real strong trend line. For the Australian ASX200 I am seeing 2700 as a floor based on the 2003 low. Again weak, but putting these together is consistent. It means another 20% to 25% fall in the market value moving forward.
When will it end?
Mergers and Acquisitions.
OK all you young guys whose memories of the 1987 crash are non existent, being an old fart has some benefits at times. To understand what will happen and what the signs are that a bottom has formed you need to understand what has happened to the market.
In simple terms the economy in the West has contracted. It is smaller. Essentially the growth driven by the baby boomers and their off spring both being in the market and in particular the real estate market at the same time has ended. When they were both competing with each other it created demand that garaunteed an increase in real estate values. This was why the dodgy loans made sense at the time. Even if the lender defaulted the demand in the sector itself garaunteed the loan. So remember that the credit crisis is a symptom of a contracting market, not a cause. If the market pressures had remained then the loans would not have become toxic. It is also why governments are flooding our countries with migrants to try and create artificial demand…
With the concept of a contracting market in mind you need to understand what that implies. In simple terms it means less people buying things, less people making things and a general slow down in activity. The end result will be that when you divide the economic activity up amongst all the market participants there will not be enough work to go around. In that understanding is the solution.
If we had less companies then we can divide the economic activity that is not profitable when divided up amongst say three companies and find it would be profitable when divided up amongst two.
First what we will see is a wave of companies that were on the edge go out of business. That is already happening.
Then we will see a wave of Mergers and Acquisitions such as the Hutchinson and Vodafone one here in Australia, when two companies who would be doing it hard on their own either voluntarily or forcibly in the case of hostile take overs merge.
If you remember the 1987 crash and the heady days of the 1990′s this has happened before. So keep an eye out for M&A notices. When you start hearing about “Corporate Raiders” buying companies, stripping assets and moving on. Hostile takeovers and lots of mergers then we are at the bottom. The end result will be a reduction in the number of participants and an increase in value for those that remain. That increase in value will drive the market up.
There is a way to go yet, but at least I can see a way forward.
, 
,
respectively.
of a company is
is simply a shorthand way to write “sum up all the terms”.
. They don’t think first to look at the data and try to understand cause and effect. Statistics to them is a tool to highlight their opinion rather than a tool that should be used to form the opinion in the first place.
