News from AJ4Value

Loblaws is a public company so their audited financials are available freely online.

I'm not in the UK -- I know nothing about Loblaws and what they sell in the stores. You can't do a simple revenue to profits (net profit margin) calculation to determine the profit on groceries... Quite often the highest profit items in these shops are items like alcohol or toys or other non-grocery items. Again, I'm not claiming to know the answer -- I just want to highlight the answer isn't as simple as the above analysis.

As a tech startup founder, I can comment on why SVB was all the rage to put all of your capital in as a startup.

Relationships in banking are very important. It is shocking and scary that SVB failed so badly as basic bank. They took massive and unhedged duration risks. The fact they lost billions holding US Treasuries is shocking. The comment about SVB being "tech savvy" is a statement about understanding the need of a customer -- not about running a bank.

But when Social Security began, the tax was (IIRC) 2%. Now it's 12.4%. You can have whatever feelings you want about that tax, but factually it shored up the system. Yes, the system might have to cut benefits, but not even by as much as I said: I looked at the data again (I was working from memory of research I did 10 years ago) and it turns out that things have gotten better--when the trust fund runs out, taxes will be able to pay 80% of current benefits, not 70%. (

I see at least 2 major issues here. First, you are taking more and more money from each tax payer -- a 6 fold increase for now. Second, you are lowering the benefit in a system that doesn't currently supply enough money for people to live.

"We can take money from elsewhere..." You comment on increasing tax rates and say the cuts did not have economic benefit. There is no basis for your statement. Prior to the pandemic economic growth was high and we had the lowest unemployment rate for Black, Hispanic, Asian, female and disabled workers. Post pandemic we have the lowest unemployment rate on record and the highest tax revenues on record. Prior to the pandemic we had the highest real income increases in 35 years and for the first time in 35 years blue collar workers were receiving higher increases than their bosses... All of the suggests that lowering tax rates increased economic activity and enriched society.

This is basically what is already happening. Providing people with raises and promotions (higher wages per hour) is paying for better labor productivity. For many simple jobs or starting jobs there is little differentiation between efficiency of workers and for many jobs (like assembly line) the output is very quantifiable and workers are expected to stay in a production range.

The natural rate of GDP growth is working population growth plus efficiency increases. Thus, if efficiency increased faster than the decline in the population there could be growth. I could get creative with where the resources would come from... assume reuse/recycle.

The most effective way to bring people out of poverty is to maintain the nuclear family (no need to get into sex/gender of parents... let us just say having 2 parents). This has been proven in many studies. Yet, our system of welfare provides greater benefits if a family breaks up and increases benefits if the family has more kids.

Frist you should read "The Communist Manifesto" by Marks and Engels. It is only 48 pages.

About 10+ years ago many companies changed their focus from Shareholder capitalism to Stakeholder capitalism. This was supposed to mean that they were focused not just on maximizing profits, but also on employees, consumers and the community.

The video ends by questioning the World Bank as being profit oriented -- they don't seem to understand what the World Bank is. The arm of the World Bank that is focused on poor nations is the International Development Corporation -- they provide interest free loans to poor nations -- there is nothing profit oriented with interest free loans.

If you follow the experts -- fixed income managers and economists not associated with the government. There was plenty of information stating that inflation was going to get bad. I believe Jeremy Siegal stated (based on his analysis) he expected 17% inflation needed to flow through the system.

I'm not going to get much credit here because I can't relocate the source... I read recently that the US has the highest transfer payments from wealthy to poor (via taxation) of any other country at 9%. This would mean the US pays more people to not work and keeps our deficits too high.

In a market based society the less disruption from theft the better it should function. The cost of production is "fixed" to some degree. The price of the object is set by the cost to produce plus some profit margin. If a number of the objects are stolen or destroyed after production the cost of production will have to be divided among the remaining units -- this will increase the sales price per unit.

From an economic point of view there are three things people can do with their income. Spend, save and invest. Money spent goes into the economy to provide work for others. Savings goes into the banking system -- the higher the savings rate the more money is available to be lent to individuals and businesses. This in turn will result in lower interest rates (which benefit borrowers, both to spend and grow businesses). Investing is putting money at risk to create and grow businesses. Like savings, the larger the pool of money available to invest the lower returns the money will be seeking and the greater number of businesses will be started or enlarged.

Good answer. So when you see all these wildly popular posts linking articles from mainstream outlets saying stuff like "if we taxed the billionaires at 5% we could lift 2 billion people out of poverty", is there any way to respond to that or is it such flagrant ignorance of wealth and economics that its all but hopeless to reason with? Or do they have some actual proposal that I'm missing as to how they'd implement this aside from a crude calculation that if you were able to capture 5% of all the billionaire's wealth as cash in a single instant and redistribute it amongst x number of folks that they'd be x amount richer ignoring the fact that even if you forced them to liquidate 5% of their assets to support this it would probably crash the prices of said assets

It is questionable to state that redistribution of wealth actually brings more people out of poverty. From a psychological point of view if you have two people with similar income where one works and the other receives government payments the person who works is almost always happier. Also of note the children of people who work have proven to be more likely to work and the children of people who don't work (and receive government aid) are more likely to not work as adults.

I trained at what is considered the best school for value investing (it is also called the birthplace of value investing). I then spent my investing career as a value investor...

First it is important to point out that the unemployment rate was 3.5% in January 2020 -- just prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. So, it is not at 50 year lows it is at the pre-pandemic level.

What are you trying to tax? Just the land and not the improvements? Are you taxing land that hasn't been improved and not adding more taxes to improved land? There is already a real estate tax in every state in the nation, so are you just increasing the tax?

Good question. The answer is not all that simple. If you take away a resource from a country it is going to harm that country if that country was going to use the resource...

Simply put -- you tax things you do not want. A vacancy tax is a tax on existing real estate. It is a cost of maintaining rental property. The result of this policy has to be that it is more expensive to maintain the property. These costs have to be passed onto the renter.

I was hoping to see the comments of others first... There are 6 comments but none are visible.

Ahhh, not quite sure the response is being completely fair to defined benefit plans, as many pension funds were raided when companies could show there was sufficient or excess capital to meet the funds future obligations. You know if they could show the fund was solvent and could pay retirees, the company could just take part of the fund. This happened regularly when the stock market was up (as it could easily show how solvent the fund was) but when the market tanked, did they put the money back? Nope. So defined benefit plans aren’t/weren’t “too expensive” (these are very common for public employees still today) it’s that the were mismanaged by the company for the company’s benefit and to their retiree’s detriment.

You are correct that companies raided over-funded pension funds. If they were that profitable don't you think they would have kept them? In the end they are just too expensive.

Well I disagree that public retirement funds are “hidden” from the public. They are pretty much out in public, literally.

You are correct in as much as the information is available... I challenge any to go out and ask the general public what the pay and benefits are for public workers -- I don't believe people have any idea what the numbers are.

In general you have to choose for 3 things when you earn money: 1, consumption. 2. Savings, and 3 Investment.

To anyone who has studied the full supply chain and looked into the amount of pollution associated with the mining of materials needed for batteries... You will see that full EV is not a solution (or at least not a solution with current battery technology). We are doing more harm to the environment trying to make enough batteries than if we just used the most up to date gasoline technology.

They want to sunset the benefit and cut off anyone born after a certain year. This would be amazing for boomer Republicans. They love closing the door someone else opened for them after they pass through. Most selfish generation and it's not close at all.

Where do you get your information? This is complete fabrication!

This is a complete lie by President Biden! One Senator released the first draft of a proposal that all spending be reviewed by Congress on a 5 year basis. The proposal was never made. It was never signed onto by anyone... Biden is just lying!