Stocks gave up about half of the drifting higher advance of the prior nine days.
China took actions to dampen the very obvious equity bubble in their markets. Their dilemma is the same as most areas: they wish to stimulate growth, without creating dangerous asset bubbles.
Almost everyone is failing at this, because the plutocrats and oligarchs keep stimulating through the top down financial sectors, which are still fairly corrupt and predatory, and then cannot understand why growth isn't feed through to the masses in order to create more aggregate demand.
You might have heard of something called Say's Law from classical economics. It states that increased production is the source of growth in demand. According to Say's Law, when an individual produces a product or service, he or she gets paid for that work, and is then able to use that pay to demand other goods and services.
A product is no sooner created, than it, from that instant, affords a market for other products to the full extent of its own value.As each of us can only purchase the productions of others with his own productions – as the value we can buy is equal to the value we can produce, the more men can produce, the more they will purchase.
This is the typical kind of theoretically compact, model bound, hair-splitting nonsense that economists like to put forward, and is related to memes like the wealthy few are the job creators. This a more elegant way of saying 'build it and they will come to buy.' And they will buy because you have paid them equitable wages, and they will want what you happen to build.
It makes no allowance for fraud, theft, financial oppression, slavery, and all the panoply of human vagaries that do not fit into perfectly rational models that propellers heads can dream up.
I don't suppose Monsieur Say every considered labor arbitrage, predatory management, and global arbitrage in his fantasy, or the propensity of producers to pay as little as they dare by some fairly untoward means and methods. I don't want to bet much on the rational benevolence of those who are motivated primarily by greed.
Given the stagnation of real wages for the past thirty years, I would suggest that anyone who still puts this forward should be shamed out of the room. See the utopian assumption in there? Whoever builds things will pay a living wage and increase those wages as productivity increases.
It had its latest incarnation as 'supply side economics.' Which is a load of rubbish especially in a global economy.
Economics is so often such a carney game.
Here is Jesse's Law.
Unregulated greed will rise to exceed and overwhelm all rational expectations of theoretical market behavior over time, always and everywhere, because men are no angels. And since money is power, the greater the concentration of money in a society, the less free it will become, and the less reliable all decision based market-based models of it will be. Rational expectations, and therefore market forces, will fail when undermined by the unbridled greed for money and power. Passion and obsession will trump reason, unless reason arms itself against the excesses of human nature. History proves this.
Have a pleasant evening.
