How a ‘Strong Dollar’ Causes Low AG Prices and How to Fix It

By Michael Stumo

In recent months, President Trump has imposed much-needed tariffs to address China’s 24-year trade war and commercial espionage campaign targeting America. Instead of changing course, China has imposed tariffs on fairly-traded goods from the United States. While President Trump’s moves are aimed at helping U.S. manufacturers, we need additional strategies to help farmers and ranchers. America’s manufacturers and farmers happen to share a major export problem - an overvalued U.S. dollar that makes their goods more expensive overseas. If Congress and the administration can buckle down to pass legislation addressing this “strong dollar,” we could see corn, soybean and beef prices increase by 25 percent or more. [more...]

Tariff Job Gains Exceed Losses By 20:1

By Michael Stumo

Earlier this week, the Coalition for a Prosperous America (CPA) published details of its new ‘Tariff Job Creation Tracker’ that tallied U.S. manufacturing jobs gained in the wake of recent tariff actions. We keep hearing stories about the sky falling because of President Trump’s strong hand in enforcing existing U.S. trade laws. But the past six months have shown impressive job creation in skilled, high-wage sectors against only very negligible, accompanying job losses. The early returns show strong positive job creation. And there will undoubtedly be greater job growth as more sectors receive attention from the administration. [more...]

Mapping the U.S. Farm Subsidy $1M Club

By Adam Andrzejewski, Author of “Operation Drain the Swamp”

During the Great Depression, farm subsidies were created to keep the family farm afloat and ensure a stable national food supply. Today, these subsidies have grown so lucrative that wealthy investors, large corporations, and farm-estate heirs use taxpayer money to maximize their personal return on investment. Since 2008, however, the top 10 farm subsidy recipients each received an average of $18.2 million – that’s $1.8 million annually, $150,000 per month, or $35,000 a week. With the median household income of $60,000 a year, these farmers received more than 30 times the average yearly income of U.S. families. It was never the intent of Congress to create a new class of millionaires through federal farm subsidies. Yet, the subsidies continue to flow. [more...]

Tariff Job Gains Exceed Losses By 20:1

By Jeff Ferry

As of today, job gains exceed job losses by a 20:1 ratio. This week we’re showing gains of 11,100 jobs in four major sectors affected by tariffs. Tariffs are creating far more jobs than they are sacrificing.  The tariffs are working. So far, we have identified 514 job losses specifically due to tariffs. All job gains and job losses refer to job changes that have either happened or have been publicly announced as planned to happen by the companies involved, with specific numbers included. We have not estimated any of these numbers; they all come from the companies concerned. We do not include threats of potential job losses, such as the threat of sacrificing an alleged 4,000 future jobs recently made by the CEO of Chinese-owned Volvo Cars. Many corporate leaders are making vague threats or forecasts with clear political motivations. We are going deeper and looking at facts and facts only. [more...]

2018 Great for Mergers & Acquisitions

By Michelle Seiler-Tucker

2018 has been a great year thus far for M&A. The number of deals is down, but the deal sizes are increasing. Record-breaking deals are being proposed and executed both in the United States and globally. Just in the last week, Sprint and T-Mobile announced a $26 billion merger, and Marathon Petroleum announced a $36 billion acquisition. Other potential deals include Walmart and J Sainsbury, Walmart (or Amazon) and Flipkart, and Bayer and Monsanto. To provide a better idea, as of mid-last week, there have been 11,828 deals valued at $1.71 trillion globally. Deals are valued to be 63% larger on average than last year. [more...]

Amazon and Walmart - Who Will Take India?

By Michelle Seiler-Tucker

The two American giants’ fight for Indian territory has started to intensify. Amazon and Walmart have been competing to acquire majority stake in India’s largest e-commerce company, Flipkart. Recent developments suggest Walmart has proposed a $10-12 billion offer for a 51% stake; the deal could close by the end of June. On the other hand, Amazon has marked its presence by attaching a breakup fee of up to $2 billion. A breakup fee is a penalty established in the deal process that requires payment if the purchaser or seller backs out. In this case, Amazon will pay a hefty fee if the deal is incomplete for whatever reason. Nonetheless, the deal structures emphasize the seriousness of both parties. [more...]

Welcome to the Class War

By Lowell Ponte

In the Great Class War between the “rich” and the government, whose side are you on? This week MarketWatch reported that by 2030, “the richest 1%” are on track to “control nearly 66% of the world’s money.” This is approximately $305 trillion, it reported, based on data from the hard-left British newspaper The Guardian, best-selling French Marxist economist Thomas Piketty, and other sources with comradely views. The activist group Oxfam warns that “just eight billionaires have as much wealth as 3.6 billion people – the poorest half of the world.” [more...]

Spreading the Wealth Trump Style - Get Ready for More Tax Cuts

By Kerry Lutz

I’m no proponent of runaway government spending and the headlong rush into national insolvency. But, if the government is going to do it anyway, we as citizens should get to hold onto every last red cent, regardless what it might eventually be worth. And, who knows, perhaps the added attention to the deficit will help the Congress to return to fiscal sanity. It’s doubtful, but we always hope for change we can all believe in. Like clockwork, President Trump raised the prospect of more tax cuts during the Republican Congressional Retreat. He recently delivered, promising Phase 2. [more...]

The U.S. Surprises Estimates by Adding 313,000 Jobs

By Michelle Seiler-Tucker

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released the employment report for February 2018. It surpassed and surprised analysts’ estimates by adding 313,000 jobs. The unemployment rate remained at 4.1% for the fifth consecutive month, the lowest rate in 17 years. Analysts had expected that the U.S. had added about 200,000 jobs and that the pool of potential workers has been depleting. These new figures suggest otherwise; the last time the U.S. experienced large gains with low unemployment was during the economic boom of the 1990s. The U.S. has added over 500,000 new jobs since the start of 2018, and the labor force participation rate has increased as well - its best one month gain in over 8 years. [more...]

How Facebook Can Help Rebuild U.S. Manufacturing

By Jeff Ferry

How could Facebook regain public and political support? Here’s a simple proposal: the company is investing $14 billion this year on capital spending. That’s a huge sum of money (and double its 2017 spend). The vast majority of it goes on the data centers Facebook is building in the U.S. and worldwide. And the vast majority of that money goes to the servers, storage, and networking gear crammed, floor to ceiling, into those data centers. Today, virtually all that money is going to Asian-manufactured IT equipment, simply because all that equipment is manufactured over there and almost none of it here. What if Facebook said it would spend a quarter of its data center budget on U.S.-manufactured equipment? If Facebook committed to spend one quarter of its IT budget on U.S.-made product, and was followed by other Internet giants, the U.S. might soon have some 3 million people working on manufacturing the products that make the Internet hum. [more...]

The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again?) of Bitcoin

By Kerry Lutz

This wasn’t supposed to happen. As this article is written, Bitcoin is trading around $11,200. It’s up from breaking the $6,000 barrier, but this could well be a dead cat bounce. That’s down from nearly $20,000 in mid-December. After all, everyone knows that Bitcoin only goes up.... just like the stock market and housing prices. What gives? What’s happened in cryptocurrencies was completely predictable. In fact, I wrote an article about this very scenario back on December 25, 2017. Bitcoin and all of its Johnny-come-lately followers are in for some more tough times ahead. If it retraces 80-90 percent of its gains the past year, that will put it in a range of $3,800-5,600. Such a pullback would not be out of the realm of experience. When a bubble pops, it’s look out below. [more...]

When it Comes to Entrepreneurship, Age 40 is the New 20... and Always Has Been

By Carl Schramm

The truth is that the average entrepreneur is nearly 40 years old. There are more Baby Boomers (ages 53 to 71) starting businesses than millennials (ages 20 to 36) and even more entrepreneurs in Generation X (ages 37 to 52). What’s more, your odds of starting a company that experiences scale growth, becoming really profitable, only increase with age. The “Mozart Myth” leads us to believe that if you haven’t started your first company in your twenties then you’re never going to be an entrepreneur. But age, financial security, and experience — most often at an established company — are far more likely predictors of an entrepreneurial career. It turns out that corporations are often far more effective in training entrepreneurs than are most business schools or incubators. [more...]

Older Entrepreneurs Do It Better

People over 35 are more likely to start a business... and much more likely to succeed at it

By Carl Schramm

We all know today’s script for entrepreneurial success: A super-bright college student, impatient with classwork, drops out to pursue his big idea. Venture-capital funders chase after him, and he gathers smart pals around him to launch his startup.

Sensational growth soon follows for the company - and riches for its founders - and the youth-driven innovation economy notches yet another success. It’s a powerful narrative, and it has shaped lots of thinking about how to spark economic growth and prosperity. [more...]

In his new book, BURN THE BUSINESS PLAN: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do, bestselling author and economist, Carl Schramm, applies his decades of experience in the world of entrepreneurship to offer a myth-busting guide packed with tools and techniques to launch any business. Illustrated with stories of real entrepreneurs who started successful businesses, he debunks some of the most commonly held beliefs surrounding startups and business development - starting with the supposed importance of a business plan.

Stumo in USA Today: Trade Predators Destroy U.S. Jobs

By Michael Stumo

For too long, America has been led by a naive embrace of free trade that overlooks the predatory behavior of our trade competitors. Widespread trade cheating and poorly designed trade deals have led to persistent U.S. trade deficits causing job losses, manufacturing decline and income stagnation. Many nations push their currency values lower, and the dollar higher, to gain a price advantage in global market at our expense. Their governments subsidize manufacturing in order to “dump” product in the U.S. market at below cost. These predatory practices violate world trade law and destroy American industries. Thankfully, President Trump appears willing to confront such abuses by punishing trade violators and renegotiating job-killing trade agreements. [more...]

NAFTA Withdrawal Likely to Boost Stock Market

By Michael Stumo

Withdrawal from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is likely to boost stock prices, employment and economic growth. Republican Senators told the White House earlier this week that NAFTA withdrawal will harm the stock market. But that claim is based on outdated, incorrect views on trade and investment. America’s economy and wages grew faster before the modern trade agreement era. But our manufacturing members saw substantial growth last year in part because of trade agreement uncertainty and a new focus from business on finding sources of supply within the U.S. The new approach is raising production and employment at U.S. manufacturers. Their biggest problem now has become finding skilled workers to meet new demand. [more...]

Expert Predictions for 2018 - Pt. II

By Lowell Ponte

I predict, in the January 2018 issue of Real Money Perspectives, many factors may devastate the American economy in the New Year. Most of Europe’s nations are being dissolved into the new empire of the European Union, in which national borders no longer control immigration or trade. As I explained in Money, Morality & The Machine, this “Superstate,” as founder Jean Monnet envisioned it, was to be created piecemeal, by deception, with Europeans denied a democratic vote on whether to undo their national identity. The EU would be - and now is - run by an elite of unelected progressive Eurocrats. [more...]  [Read Part I here...]