Blues for Donald in D# Major

The most important news out of Tuesday, not widely discussed that I've seen, is that right-to-work got drowned by a blue tsunami in Missouri, the 'Show Me State'. It seems that lots o folks there have figured out that The Manchurian President has been lying all the time. As Rachel Maddow tells us, "watch what they do, not what they say".

The Manchurian President keeps taking from the many poor and giving to the few rich. "Vote for George O'Brien, get Charley off the MTA".

Real growth can only happen if aggregate demand grows, and that has never happened while income and wealth concentrate as they have over the last few decades. Rich people don't buy/spend as much of their moolah, per dollar, as the poor. They chase instruments, and they've had a big appetite for high-return/low-risk such; not that such actually exist, naturally. Which gave us the Great Recession. What will be next? I don't have a firm answer. May be soon.

Along that line, we have this reporting that Treasuries are inching toward 3%, and the pundits are losing their minds. Let's see. Warren is sitting on $116 billion. How much is corporate America sitting on? $1.9 trillion as of the end of 2017. The Smartest Guys in the Room can't figure out how to make real investment. In due time, not much IMHO, they'll go back to chasing Treasuries and driving up price once again. Rates will collapse.

Why? Well, my frenemy Neil Irwin reveals why he's sorta, kinda Luddite.

I think most digital technology is more mature than we think. People have been using personal computers since the 1980s, and smartphones for more than a decade. And the thing about a mature product is that improvements tend to be marginal rather than transformational.

What these missives have been naming, 'The Asymptote of Progress' for a long while. Marginal 'improvements' don't generate significant growth or return, naturally. The latest iPhone doesn't have the impact of the steam engine. That pesky asymptote gets flatter by the day.