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Wal-Mart's CEO Provides The Starkest Visual Of The Modern Bread Line Yet
In today's Art Cashin Comments there is a stunning admission by none other than the CEO of Walmart on what modern day bread lines look like. To wit:
Profits And Baby Formula – Our pal, Rich Yamarone, over at Bloomberg picked up an eye-opening statement made by the Wal-Mart CEO last week.
I don't need to tell you that our customer remains challenged…You need not go farther than one of our stores on midnight at the end of the month. And it's real interesting to watch, about 11 p.m. customers start to come in and shop, fill their grocery basket with basic items – baby formula, milk, bread, eggs – and continue to shop and mill about the store until midnight when government electronic benefits cards get activated, and then the checkout starts and occurs. And our sales for those first few hours on the first of the month are substantially and significantly higher.
Talk about shopping only for necessities. The mid-night trip for baby formula says it all.
Luckily the NBER said the recession ended. Hurray:
So The Recession Ended 15 Months Ago – A Bloomberg report on lagging jobs got superseded by the FOMC statement. Here’s the opening line from the Bloomberg report:
Payrolls dropped in 36 U.S. states in August, led by Michigan, indicating the labor market will take time to rebound from the worst recession since the 1930s.
A little later in the article, it was noted how broad the job weakness was:
Texas lost 34,200 jobs, and California eliminated 33,600, the Labor Department said. The number of states where payrolls dropped was the highest this year.
More job losses in more states. Thank the gods that the recession’s over.
The country is collapsing everywhere and all the leaders can do is lie to their electorate that things are great. Images of the Titanic come to mind.
And some other observations from Art Cashin:
You Must Be At Least Four Feet Tall To Go On This Ride – For most of Tuesday’s trading session, the averages looked like the EKG on a Maine Potato.
From the opening bell, stocks snaked around the unchanged level for four and a half hours. The numbing lull was in anticipation of the 2:15 FOMC statement.
When the statement hit, things got really whacky.
In the first two minutes, stocks plunged. Then, suddenly, they reversed and began to spike higher. Within five minutes, the Dow was up 50 points.
That rally stopped on a dime. In the next two minutes, trading turned choppy. Then stocks began to retreat. That retreat lasted about five minutes.
Suddenly, the bulls returned, spiking the Dow to the plus 82 level. The bulls had no chance to pop the champagne cork. The rally ended instantly and stocks began to fade and by about 3:40, the Dow had turned mildly negative.
If you thought the frenzied trading in stocks was jaw-dropping, all you had to do was to look at other assets.
The dollar got pounded. Gold soared and then eased off somewhat. Treasuries rallied sharply with the yield on the ten year dipping below 2.60% (a record low). It was a stunning pyrotechnic display.
By the closing bell, stocks seemed exhausted by the spastic trading. They limped to a mixed and uncertain close.
We’ll Be There For You – That seemed to be the message that the FOMC tried to deliver in its statement yesterday.
They tried to walk a fine line, avoiding looking too worried while noting some concern.
The key phrase (to us) was in the fourth paragraph when the FOMC said it “is prepared to provide additional accommodation if needed to support the economic recovery and to return inflation, over time, to levels consistent with its mandate.”
While not specifically detailing their concerns about deflation, they strongly hinted at it by the suggestion that they wanted to return inflation to an appropriate level.
The image of the Fed actively seeking to promote inflation helped crush the dollar and spike gold. The wild-eyed saw risks of a Weimar-like inflation. Treasuries chose to ignore it.
Cocktail Napkin Charting – Today marks the Autumnal Equinox which brings historical aspects of volatility, as we noted last week. In addition, there is a full moon and an unusual proximity of the planet Jupiter. Keep your telescope handy.
Yesterday’s unusual action had several aspects of a reversal day. Additionally, there are mounting indications that the September rally may have been propelled by a short squeeze. We’re still checking out the hypothesis.
For today the napkins hint resistance in the S&P at 1148/1151 and then 1156/1160. Support looks like 1129/1132 with a backup at 1118/1122.
AN ENCORE PRESENTATION
On this day in 1776, an American legend was born. Well maybe that's not exactly correct. The guy was born about two decades earlier.
This guy was a bright young fellow from Connecticut. He had graduated from Yale University (where some schoolmates thought him a bit of a showoff at games). Nevertheless, he was a good scholar and had a real gift for the classics. He became a schoolteacher and looked to be headed for the role of solid citizen. Then the American Revolution broke out and he (and five of his brothers) immediately joined the rebel cause.
He rushed about trying to get into whatever was the battle du jour. Somehow, he always seemed to be a day late. And when, in the final week of August, the troops of Washington barely avoided defeat by slipping out of New York City, he was one frustrated guy.
So, when Washington asked for guys who might sneak back into New York City to set fires and map the defenses, the schoolteacher was first in line. And, when his fellow officers asked how big a unit he would need, he said he'd go alone, in civilian clothes, using his Yale diploma to prove he was a schoolteacher.
For two days, he roamed successfully making detailed drawings of British defenses and describing them in notes of classic Latin to confuse anyone who questioned him. Then he bumped into his cousin, Samuel, who was working for the Tories. Sam said, this is my cousin, Nathan Hale, he’s a rebel spy. Hale was so proud, he said, "Yup, that's who I am!" (Or the Yale equivalent.)
So, on this day, the Brits hung him. The Rebs remembered his last words as --"I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country." It made him a martyr and a hero. Revisionist scholars would claim that what he said was --"It is the duty of every soldier to obey his commander."
But given Hale's classic education, it is more likely that he used the first version since, as you know, it is as a paraphrase of "Cato."
There was nothing classic or quotable in Tuesday’s action. There was a lot that was confusing however.
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The UK's tax gap visualised - http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/sep/22/tax-gap-information-beautiful#
Warning: The Guardian is a socialist rag. It's the BBC's little sister.
I don't even notice The Grauniad any longer. Note: the deliberate misspelling is a reference to the low quality of editorial work in the 70s and 80s at the aforementioned publication. Its become redundant, like many of its readers will be by the time the dust settles.
Aside from your little ideological stone throwing comment at the end...
Tax gaps are one thing (they can be corrected rather quickly), debt repayment, on the other hand, is a bit trickier. And given that it's PRIVATE debt, not PUBLIC debt that's really taking the US down, well.. I refer back to my first sentence of showing the real inanity of things.
Maybe reading something more meaningful, like this recent Steve Keen article:
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2010/09/20/deleveraging-with-a-twist/
Thanks for playing!
It is worth pointing out that the quotation in question came from a presentation that Bill Simon (the Wal-Mart CEO) gave at a Goldman Sachs retail conference sponsored by Thomson Reuters a week ago on September 15. The text of those remarks is available here in its entirety:
http://media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/irol/11/112761/WMT-Transcript-...
See the middle of page two for the quotation cited above.
Given Goldman Sachs' own role in creating the economic conditions which CEO Simon describes, it is particularly ironic that they were the host of the venue in which these remarks were delivered.
Love em or hate em, GS is still a player.
GS is a 'player' in what, picking the last scrap off the USA carcass?
List of Walton's family fortune as of March, 10, 2010 published by Forbes.
again, Wal-Mart hires "crew members" whose minimum waged hours can vary from 12-20 weekly, no guarantees, and they advise their newbies to get on benefits immediately. . . hardly surprising that even when unemployed, people continue to shop at their stores. . .
all part of the overall "plan" - how can it be otherwise?
the rewards of playing their game are evident.
There is one thing you forgot. No employee is allowed to sit down. Everyone must stay on thier feet. Also if you watch carefully early evening shift about 8 or so, you will find a horde of walmart cashiers having just clocked in tearing down a 8 foot pallet of goods stacked on one side of the entry doors to do manual labor before they actually get behind a register to hump more stuff.
Why, that's a picture of the great American Dream, look at all those hard-working individuals! See, just work hard enough and we can ALL be billionaires (yeah, at the rate they are going to cause the USD to hyperinflate to, we too can be numerically rich like this!).
Thanks for doing the research and providing the link.
Thanks for the lead. I'm always looking for individuals in need for what little I can provide.
Stopped by the quickie mart last week to buy some cold beer. There were about six people lined up at the register in front of me. Every single one of them was handling some kind of lottery ticket purchase: cash three, easy money, lotto, you name it. It's not like it was the night of a big drawing. Then it occurred to me that most, if not all of these people could be on unemployment, food stamps/ebt, or welfare. Is this a great country or what?
the poor buy lottery tickets with their food stamp money, the rich buy gold on their credit cards? Who is getting the better deal?
A stealth tax on the stupid, thats all lottery tickets are.
I have a dear friend who used to be involved in a business and witnessed the poor waving entire paychecks sinking it all into booze and lotto tickets hoping for that one big win where they dont have to ever work again.
Some of the first hand stories I have been told when combined with our Arkansas Lottery System that was voted into Law and now is in operation, you still see the very poor do whatever it takes to get the good tickets.
It really slows down getting gasoline. So What I do is get to the gasoline very early in the AM on a Tuesday when the Police are also there filling up on Gas. It is nice how empty the place is and things are done promptly.
Poverty tax
I have less fear of them than of some alcohol-consuming fool such as yourself.
fear
That's a fucked-up way to relate to people. Be not afraid.
Any of these people standing in line who voted for George W Bush have absolutely nothing to complain about. Their next line should be in front of their Republican Congressperson. They should demand to know where Republican tax cuts have created jobs in their county. If no jobs have been created, they should look the Republican in the eye and call them a liar.
Note to Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, and Sarah Palin: these are the people you must convince to vote Republican. LOL.
Looks like the fascists are out flagging again...
-Michelle-
Hmmm...roles reverse around 12, 13, 14 years of age.
Your mileage may vary...
BTW blessings on you both and the little one!!!
Though a cliche, it is still true: time flies by, savor it. Sometimes you are in and out of the money, but they are yours only one time, make the most of it, as you no doubt will. .
Thank you! We will.
Total bleeding heart bullshit.
A bag of rice and beans cooked in water served with a cut of fresh vegtable of some sort is half the price of a greasy burger and fries and a coke.
You are full of crap.
How many of these wal mart shoppers are illegal aliens.
No one speaks English in the wal mart closest to my area, 25 miles away.
I agree with you Swamp its all bleeding heart bullshit theyre all illegal aliens at my Walmart eating high off the hog for free.
That may be so, but stop at the Gallup Walmart or perhaps one in Arizona at what I remember to be Kingman and you will find that nothing but Native Indians sometimes.
In fact some lands out there, US Law under soveriegn territory does not apply, only tribal law will apply to you personally if you... shop lift something.
I've been to Gallup, yep in the early 70's buying pawn and turquoise with Charlie Knight, in TeePees. gatherings. quite spiritual with the elders. Gallup is a Wallup†
Junked for not ganging up on people of "color?"
Yup, the jackbooters are out in force...
Most American families of 4 to 6 can live off of $100/month for food if one spouse stays at home.
ttp://www.hillbillyhousewife.com/70dollarmenu.htm
$70 Low Cost Menu for 4 to 6My $45 menu has been so popular that I’ve taken a shot at another one. I tried to duplicate the $45 price tag, but it was just too hard. Instead I’ve developed a relatively low cost menu. This one has much more meat, a few more fruits and veggies and a greater variety.
Note the inflation rate though...
2006 $70/month
2009 $89.90/month
2010 $100/month (my estimate)
Wife and I are currently eating on about 40 dollars a week more or less. But no matter how we cut it or adjust it the costs keep rising. that is ok too because we are just about free and clear of debt in general and can withstand rising costs for a long time.
So, do you think that this would still hold true if all those city dwellers headed for the hills?
Without knowing where people are, seeing what their local housing costs are, it's not a very meaningful comparison...
Lies, Man said yesterday that the recession ended in June of '09 "So that means it will not be a double dip if there is another recession!" He was almost jubilant at the fact that this technicality may save him his ego. I expect nothing less from MSM bobble heads.
Stupid motherfucker was surprised by check day?
What a chump.
If you're gonna depend on the poor huddled masses for your McMansion, Merc, and annuities, the least you can do is understand how you're feeding at the government trough too, bitch.
What's next? Is he is going to be surprised that there are no manufacturing jobs left in US!
Hey Mr. CEO, you and Wal-mart are responsible for this, no! On the other hand, why aren't these people starting up stem cell research engineering jobs for rich peoples' genetic defects(if they could only find a cure for psychopathy) or design guidance systems for Chinese nukes? There is really no downside to job opportunities in liposuction, tit implants ,growing marijuana or picking up cans out of garbage cans. Oh, it is against the law to grow marijuana and laking things out of some one's garbage is stealing, so I guess with a .38 you can always get job as a 'robbing' man, it might be technically illegal, but I am sure it will satisfy most people here: it is job afterall and not unlike most other high level jobs in US.
Think of it as "ballistically proactive".
Thanks in particular, Tyler, for the Nathan Hale story. RIP!
One minor point (but one which is increasingly important, given the tendency of government-worshippers to co-opt historical figures in order to try to perpetuate their rape of humanity)...
I am led to believe that Nathan Hale has been systematically misquoted as a result of an abridgement to the 'original' quote in a re-editing by William Hull.
The original quote did not mention 'country' (a stupid tribalist primitive concept that has nothing to do with liberty)
Obviously Hull was alive to the rather American idea of 'brevity in preference to accuracy' that has characterised its media ever since.
Today, Hale (and Jefferson, and Paine) would be advocating that good men make every effort to unseat the parasitic vermin that infest our lives to an extent that George III would only have dreamed about - taking half the proceeds of our labour, and claiming the right to terminate us on a whim, without due process.
Cheerio,
GT
+ 1
Many thanks for setting the record straight. The Best were never fond of any institution. And, thanks for metioning Paine- of all the people of the past that I'd most want to talk to, he'd be number one: I like to think that I operate the same as him- pissing off ALL sides!
"You Must Be At Least Four Feet Tall To Go On This Ride – For most of Tuesday’s trading session, the averages looked like the EKG on a Maine Potato."
Sweet Jesus, that line is seriously funny...
Bottom line: Hide your kids, hide your wife, and hide your husband cause they're rapin' everybody up here...
I know how to eat cheaply and well (had to learn as a student) and was a vegetarian for around 5 years (cheaper and you start looking at protein in a different way.)
Tons of Indian food is nutritious. As a student one of my regular meals was dahl (red lentils, chicken stock, onions and a little bit of curry) served with yogurt and rice (with raisons and nuts) and as a treat Major Grey's Chutney.
I also found out that fresh mussels were cheaper than kraft dinner (at least in Montreal at that time). Moules in a tomato, garlic (and if you could afford a trip to the dep) wine sauce with bread - priceless - and very healthy.
Am I ready to give up my Parmigiano Reggiano and New Zealand lamb - No! But if I have to I know how to deal with it.
I think a lot of these choices come down to education - people don't know how to make good food choices or even how to cook it. Along with basic financial literacy, food literacy shoud be taught in every school.
While I agree with the above, there are quite a few OTHER things not being taught effectively at schools -- like reading (with comprehension), writing (legibly by hand, let alone in cursive), basic algebra. Ossified teachers' unions the problem? Lack of consensus even on a regional, let alone national level about curriculum, methods aims? I dunno, probably all of the above. But what I AM seeing is general trend toward being taught how to fill in particular bubbles on sheets, how to slip timecards into clock-in machinery -- and fuck-all in terms of responsibility on the part of the citizenry to do something substantive about CHANGING all of the above.
(sung airily) They are the very model of the modern age of general hell!
Surprise...
... the "poor" figure out how to game the system just like the "rich".
Here is a solution -- a system without blatant exploit vectors. Utopia ... I know.
Any time that you have levers of power they will be pulled, end of utopia... Solution? No power centers.
thread "roll call"...
del
Heh, that's me "Wild-eyed"!
The other side of this, that I think about, is the huge artificial upward price pressure created by these enormous government programs. I believe its something along the lines of 45 million Americans who are receiving food stamps today, which is just the participation in one single program. This means that the federal government is directly subsizing 15% of not only the food bills of Americans, but also subsidizing 15% of the grocery industry, as well. Given the margins in grocery, could Kroger or even Walmart sustain a the loss of a 15% government corporate welfare check?
This is all speculation that I have been thinking up for sometime, but it seems to me that in our fiat system, the primary purpose of government "welfare to the poor" is not to combat poverty, but to combat deflation. I would love to know exactly how much of Walmart's grocery sales are covered by the state or federal governments. Think about it: this "economy" is 67% based on consumer spending. De facto, if consumer spending decreases, the economy constricts: if consumer spending falls enough, you might even get deflation--if the Fed's printing press wasn't popping out another $1 Trillion every chance it has. Through all of these programs, specifically Section 8, food stamps, and other programs aimed directly at the non-optional spending (food, housing), the federal government is supporting a price level that is obviously too HIGH for 15% (or more) of Americans to afford. In other words, what would be a natural downward pricing pressure (the lose of wealth and spending power of your customers) is quelled and covered by the government's blank check, rendering the downward pressure not only gone, but actually introducing an upward price pressure. How is this not just another intrusive, anti-free enterprise government intervention?
Even if it is NOT the real motive--that "social" policy is actually economic policy--it certainly provides for a dual role, in the very least. This is even more accurate with housing, of course, because it is munificently clear that government subsidization of mortgages contributed greatly to the artificial increase in average home price. Is it just me, or are these welfare programs not, in fact, rotten old FDR-style price supports?
Tyler, Hi,
Whenever you have your markets tied to a computer program which ignores and/or protects against negatively impacting, real time floor input and sentiment, have you a rigged game which will crash catastrophically with a beautifully crafted worm/virus, which may or may not be a Stuxnet creation .... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/22/stuxnet_worm_weapon/
Forewarned is forearmed, but there is nothing you can do to prevent a correction of a corruption and perverse artificial manipulation, by smarter beings, and why would any supposed Intelligence want to try, in order to perpetuate a myth which would then be a global scam, in support of the overthrow of free market wishes with a computer program delivering false PROMISes.
There's bugs in the system and they're gremlins of colossal extraction stealing wealth wholesale from the nation.
"You can fool yourself, but the markets never lie, they will always tell you the truth, and they will always win out in the end because the millions of consumers that consume things every day, are the markets, and they will relentlessly seek out and pursue what they desire until the need is eventually satisfied, telling you what they want, which is precisely how the markets are defined" -- Milton Friedman
of course the food queues that start at midnight also don't tell you everything that 47 million people on foodstamps are buying that stays gresh for a month..I will give you a clue...tinned food, and they are suspiciously more pets now than 3 years ago..
Short signals detected yesterday have now increased.
http://stockmarket618.wordpress.com
Oh Great Grand Supercycle-BOT...
I just wanted to say...
Those folks at Offensively Binary really take the f-bomb to the next level.
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Actually - those Wal Mart types are riding the recession out quite nicely
http://www.forbes.com/lists/2010/10/billionaires-2010_The-Worlds-Billion...
12, 15, 16, 18...So new stores coming to austerity hit UK soon then?
Make that 147!
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-23/wal-mart-s-asda-may-sell-47-net...
They even admit their food sucks!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/aug/17/asda-age-of-austerity-fal...
And who could forget this masterpiece (of epicurian prowess and timing?)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1023674/Asda-unveils-2p-sausage-...
Funny that ;o
urgh. . . Asda's tuppenny sausages, check the ingredients, water coming in a close second, with starchy binders to follow. . .
and people wonder why folk are getting fatter - ponder that these "fuds" are created and marketed for families, and the children who have zero choice but to eat what they're served are setting up their metabolisms & fat cells for life. . . not to mention eating habits.
and yeah yeah, I know all about the post-war "piece & jam" or lard on toast stories, but now we get all kinds of chemical "additives" to create "mouth feel" - not to mention GMO & growth hormones. . .
*sighs*
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