Farmer Diaries

American Q1/2014 GDP growth that was to be 3% (when discussed in late 2013) was finalized last week....drum roll; its -0.7% (I presume that the media will blame the weather).  Why is the economy underachieving what everyone believes to be the right way to go? There are several reasons:  First off, median income continues to fall, America's middle class is seeing real wage contraction and has done so since the mid 1980s.  There is no doubt that the contraction in high paying blue collar jobs is a culprit, personally I blame the financial services that accounted for less than 5% of GDP in 1980 and today accounts for nearly 10%.  This "value added" has to be paid for. Looking at machinery from cars to telephone via white goods (washer etc) one inescapable truth is that the craftsman is a dying breed.  Two years ago my range oven "died" it was $900 to replace the electronics or $1,200 for a new range oven.  Guess what I did -- I bought a new oven.  Wor...

Last week StatsCan announced that jobs were down 29,000 in Canada for the month of April!  That's not good news with Quebec and the Atlantic province suffering the most.  In  fact, Quebec accounts for 110% of all job losses in Canada -- the province actually lost 32,000 jobs -- but the rest of Canada made up the difference. This is not good, and in fact, will probably probably cause the Loonie to drop some more over the next few days (which it did). Sometime not only is the Nominator in the equation an issue, sometime its the denominator that has an impact.  As an example, Europe has seen no real changes to its economic fundamentals, France's government budget deficit is going to be huge, again!  Greece has seen no reduction in its overall debt burden, in fact it continues to worsen.  Italy that has a new government (and seem to want to tackle some hard issues), the market has given an unusual sign of confidence with historical low borrowing rates, but th...