Credit Suisse Warns That Workers Are Gaining Ground and U.S. Equities May Suffer | Hacker News Reader

Credit Suisse Warns That Workers Are Gaining Ground and U.S. Equities May Suffer

bloomberg.com

64 pointsdismal259 comments

I understand the business implications of a higher cost for labor and that the primary intent of the advisory is positive, but yikes, this perspective is so pro-business that it reads like a caricature.

Straight out of Das Kapital... Only backwards

An old friend used to always point out to me that if you want to know what's really happening in the world, read the 'bourgeois' financial press, not the 'news'. Ideologues can and will lie and distort at will in tabloids and on TV news, but if your customers are businesses looking to make money, you have to tell things closer to the truth, that's what they're paying for.

Exactly. I tell them the same thing. A good example is how the various media and politicians describe our system to public vs what Citigroup's analysts secretly described to rich investors:

http://politicalgates.blogspot.com/2011/12/citigroup-plutono...

Secret got out and is quite the confirmation of what many suspected. Of course, we rarely get info that good. So, have to read the same publications as the titan's of industry do for their investments to try to reverse engineer it out so to speak.

Like the economist or something else?

Analysts being full of shit is a running joke as far as I know

Wall St journal, annual reports... things like that. They focus on what business is actually doing and to benefit who. Also lots of indirect effects. Whereas, corporate media just say BS wholesale on these topics. No surprise given who owns them and pays ad revenue. ;)

No, the economist is nearly all commentary and investigative reports. I still like the Wall Street Journal.

Just compare the current front page of both to see the difference. wsj.com economist.com

Marx got a lot of things wrong but he was spot on in his descriptions of capitalism.

He certainly didn't understand how wealth is created and confused a temporary situation with an abstract truth.

It is not socialism that has brought millions of people across the world out of utter poverty in the last 20-30 years.

"Economists with the National Bureau of Economic Research released a working paper in 2009 on global poverty concluding that the world had seen a significant decrease in extreme poverty—defined at the time as living on $1 or less per day—between 1970 and 2006. While even a significant decrease in extreme poverty still leaves much room for additional gains, the decrease in rates of extreme poverty during this period of time is stunning. "

http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2013/11/whats-behi...

http://www.cesj.org/resources/articles-index/karl-marx-the-a...

Great example of this is how climate change deniers protect their businesses from the effects of climate change:

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/donald-trump-climate-c...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_cont...

Unlike corporations, people don't hoard their money. They spend it. So this is a good thing for everyone long-term.

I like how the report talks about political instability and risk as though this is a thing that "just happens". I guess it didn't occur to anyone working on that report, that maybe the piss-poor situation the middle and working classes find themselves in might contribute somewhat to that political instability? I mean, I know people who work in research in finance - they aren't this stupid. I don't know any that work at Credit Suisse, though.

Yeah, of course a more equitable distribution of resources will be better for everyone long term. If you work in research at Credit Suisse and are too stupid to grasp the purely economic case, at least try working out how a Reign of Terror will impact corporate profits, maybe.

Unless someone is literally putting their money under the mattress, the money is in a bank which is loaning most of it out, so the money is almost never actually "hoarded".

Or its in a non-productive asset like being parked in vacant real estate in a world city or any number of other non-productive assets that remove it from circulation.

The money is not "parked" in the real estate, it has been transferred to the seller.

But the ongoing value derived from use of the real estate is lost. If someone were living there, both the seller and the local economy would benefit -- the seller got paid for the real estate, and the local economy benefits from the resident's own economic activity.

As long as property taxes are paid on time, the local economy has probably extracted bulk of renumeration from that property. In the age of giant corporate retail chains and Amazon, how much of the locals' spending goes towards their local butcher, seamstress, blacksmith, cobbler, milkman and vacuum repairmen anyways?

That's true and I chose a poor example.

including the trillion dollars the top 5 firms are holding offshore?

Which is in a foreign bank, many of which have U.S. subsidiaries. What's your point?

That they are hoarding money, not loaning it.

Most US-traded companies prefer to limit their foreign currency exposure and keep their offshore assets in USD by buying short-term US government debt, so in effect they are loaning it.

except since 2008 business loans have only go up 400b and consumer loans are flat or have gone down some. The problem with the idea that banks loan out what isn't spent is wrong because they have underwriting and can't just loan it to credit unworthy borrowers. don't get me wrong it would have caused inflation and a bigger stock bubble if more money flowed into the US. But it's my theory why we haven't seen the massive inflation predicted from quantitative easing.

Great, so the banks can loan more money to people who can't afford anything.

Excess reserves are near a record high: https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/EXCSRESNS

Banks are just sitting on their cash. Also, the Fed is paying the banks not to loan out this money, currently 0.5%.

The solution is negative interest rates for banks and corporations, positive interest rates for individuals.

Forces business investment (or dividends), but promotes savings for individuals.

what if us-corps keep most money offshore?

Aren't most first world central banks going negative interest rates already? I guess they could always try to park cash in Venezuela.

It's actually higher prime interest rates. Sure, people can borrow at 3% interest (or whatever is provided) but why would banks want to necessarily want to loan out at such a low interest rate?

I don't understand the question. Are you asking why would banks use negative rates?

Pretty much. What's in it for the banks to loan out at incredibly low rates? Remember that there isn't only an aversion to high interest rates for people trying to secure loans. The banks want higher interest rates to make loaning worthwhile.

Modern corporations (at least those with cash balances that matter) have a choice of monetary systems, and will overweight those competing for their money and underweight those penalizing them.

On a multinational scale penalizing Apple and Ford cash reserves, but not extending the same penalties to Samsung, Xiaomi or Toyota, gives the foreign players greater flexibility.

That is one of the economic maxims (Phillips curve is another one) that used to be true, but are no longer axiomatic. Availability of cheap revolving credit (ironically) distorts the spending cycle - people spend when times are tough and deleverage their debt when their wallets get fatter, e.g. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2016/04/16/why-l...

As with all economic data, hard to tell what is what. Coming out of a horrible recession, I have to think a lot of people are still trying to get their head above water, which could be preventing more discretionary spending.

Heavens -- can't let that happen, now can we?

Someone better think of a way to nip this trend in the bud, before things... get out of hand.

Many comments are painting this as a bunch of monocle wearing old money aristocrats lamenting the peasants demanding more.

In reality what the report is saying is this: businesses are having to hire more people at higher wages without the corresponding increase in earnings. Earnings in excess of costs is the point of equity markets. Ignore that and you have Venezuela. The evil capitalists that you all describe would happily double worker wages if it meant doubling earnings.

> The evil capitalists that you all describe would happily double worker wages if it meant doubling earnings.

fair point. but another point is that, for the last 20 years or so, they've been increasing return to owners (to capitalists) without an equivalent return to labor. now that it's starting to shift a little bit more towards labor relative to capital? oh noes!

EDIT: mine plus aaronbrethorst's point: 1+1=3

think of it as a equation. if you increase both sides, its not an increase.

the only way workers wage increase is if the other side do not increase together. if it does, just call it inflation.

Looking at earnings is obsolete in times of creative bookkeeping for tax evasion. Look at the pay and bonuses for managers, as they are rising since years it seems those companies have rising earnings. Else those bonuses wouldn't rise every year about 10%. If I compare that against the wages for common worker I think there should be enough space for a few crumbs for common workers.

Where does the money from the higher wages go?

25 of the 26 highest-earnings quarters ever reported have occurred since 2000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_corporate_prof... (yes, adjusted for inflation). I think there's been plenty of increase in earnings without corresponding increase in worker wages. Not for us. I think we're generally doing fine. But for everyone else.

Would they, though?

For which business is employee wages 100% of costs?

This makes me feel dirty for being an index investor. I want my index funds to make me money, but not at the expense of American workers' quality of life.

> We noticed that you're using an ad blocker, which may adversely affect the performance and content on Bloomberg.com. For the best experience, please whitelist the site.

Actually, it speeds up performance and makes the content easier to read by removing distractions. Thanks for your concern though.

Coming from a site with an obnoxious auto playing video that's really ironic

It's not an ad blocker, it's malware protection.

Exactly. I can live with advertising. I can't live with advertisers who think they own my computer.

I recently discovered a master list of sites to block at the host level.

http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

I still use UBlock Origin, but it doesn't seem to do much anymore. The Internet is way better like this.

I am not using an ad blocker but I still got that message... slowing performance and making my experience worse ;-(

Same, but I imagine it's because I have plugins disabled.

Neither am I, though I am finding that that message makes it easier to not read any Bloomberg articles.

Are you accessing the internet via a corporate, institutional, governmental connection or vpn?

Protip: Ad-block the Ad-blocker Container.

NoScript is blocking their little popup on mine as intended. :)

Whenever I see this sort of thing, I click the "Close" button on the tab instead of "Continue" (even though I may read the article later) because I don't want their analytics to think this is an acceptable practice.

The number of time when I don't read the article later has slowly begun to increase :)

That's why I love IE11 build in add blocker, never gets detected.

It's not actually blocking the requests then. Bloomberg knows you are using a proper adblocker because it intentionally serves you some script that will be blocked and checks for the existence of it once the page is loaded. I

http://imgur.com/zdI2jkZ

I don't know about that, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't downloaded them.

I guess it depends on who's performance they're talking about.

I still don't understand this need to tell everybody that you are using an adblocker.

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