If this adds a useful perspective
Click here to send this page to a friend

Price Fixing: The Depression Amplifier

Saturday’s Peoplenomics starts with the market’s slide into what I called “dangerous levels” Friday—and then asks the larger question: If another Depression is forming, what will make this one different from 1929? The answer may involve a nasty combination of managed prices, leveraged infrastructure, food and water stress, and an AI buildout whose revenue requirements are beginning to look larger than the available paying market.

The new paper, “Price Fixing, Access Fixing, and the Last Liar Standing,” runs the numbers on the server-rack gold rush and explains why prices can remain deceptively firm while volume, employment, credit, and cash flow quietly collapse underneath. Then the 36-page ChartPack maps a possible run toward the 200-day moving average by Labor Day—with the warning that a failed bounce from there could open the door to something historically ugly.

Add the News Compressor, Gulf desalination attacks, Texas floodwater, oil risk, cyber trouble in the food chain, and the week ahead. So yes: materially above the average $40/year letter—and embarrassingly above many charging several hundred dollars.

More for Subscribers||| Master Index 2018 to Present ||| Master Index 2001 thru 2017 ||| Missing out? SUBSCRIBE NOW!!! |||

Consider subscribing to our deeper work.
If this article added a useful perspective...

Peoplenomics is where George does the deeper work.

For about 11 cents a day, you're not buying another newsletter — you're buying back some of your time.

See what you've been missing.

15 thoughts on “Price Fixing: The Depression Amplifier”

Comments are reviewed by a human because the web is crawling with spammers. Submissions after 4 PM Central usually appear the following morning. After you click Post Comment, you’ll jump back to the top of this article, but your comment is queued up here. We’ve got a robust community and your participation is invited. Some commenters are brilliant. Read a few and judge for yourself. Imagine. You could be one.

  2. “Last Liar Standing” was well done., well thought out and well written. I copied it to my files – and am considering letting J.A.R.V.I.S. take an analytical critique at it and see what he can derived from it – and what our collective future may look like.
    If I do.., I’ll let ya know the outcome.

    – Well done., sir.

    • Yeah, I debated how far to go with the math – because in neither case did I get into customer acquisition costs and I think that could be the IED in AI, lol. There are enough people who are dead-set against AI that customer acquisition costs could harbor a HUGE UGLY surprise for the pitch-deck crowd. Hard telling this week who’s blowing more smoke: The forest fires or the AI pitch deck crowd. Glad you got something from it. I would love to see JARVIS run the big math – along with an estimation of “the Ure gap” (the nonlinearity between acq cost of true beliefs versus total skeptics) and mash that into a 5 or 6 year payback window…

  3. On page 5…Washington joins the pricing industry…this morning at shift report..my relief.. was talking about price of those staying there and a plumbing repair that’s needed..a friend of mine built the place in the hopes of giving elderly a nice place to live out their remaining years..neighbors still next door to neighbors.. they went bankrupt in two years..how many people have a quarter million in checking..when the house farm or business is sold off and that money spent on living and then astronomical medical expenses..the piece of equipment my wife needs is the cost of a Cadillac escalade.. got the exact same thing from China for three hundred what the one has that this doesn’t is an internet connection that a therapist reads…( coming Wednesday)
    some of the patients on government assistance the facility only receives three dollars a day..for twenty four hour care..the plumbing problem is going to break them..thats why the place is sold every three years..the present owner has had the facility just about a year now..the fix to healthcare would be to use the trillions of dollars spent on insurance and the hundred billion plus given as research grants to pharmaceutical industry to discover new medications…( that us consumers are charged tens of thousands of percent more than anywhere else ) a six hundred dollar inhaler that sells in another country for ten bucks..r the birth dollar tylenol…just because the pharmacy puts it on a card..
    the scary part is it could be fixed..we already have long waiting periods..patients turned away from hospitals and clinics just because they don’t have the cash in hand..unfortunately.. the fix would put the other industries in the same boat..damed if you do..damed if you don’t

  4. …., we are not the only ones:
    DRAMMEN, Norway (AP) — The largest residential fire in modern Norwegian history destroyed more than 100 homes and forced hundreds of people to evacuate. [ 500 to 600 reported ]
    The fire in southern Norway started in a townhouse in the city of Drammen around 3:30 p.m. Friday, police said. It then spread quickly through the area and into nearby forests
    The Norwegian Directorate for Civil Protection said Saturday that it was the largest fire of its kind in modern times.
    Drammen is roughly 21 miles southwest of Oslo.

  5. re: newsflash
    feat: Black Canary

    Cue the orange smoke pall!? “There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear…” Thank you DJ George for the Buffalo Springfield flashback.

    Ukraine’s minister of defense may be out. However his advisor on military radio technology The Flash, Serhiy Beskrestnov UT7UD, received summons for an audience and photo op with the President of the Ukraine. The President expressed wishes to “cooperate closely” with the Flash. The latter offers a public channel at the following link:

    https://t.me/serhii_flash/7468

    Meanwhile youthful protests in central Kyiv concerning the defense minister’s ouster has prompted video coverage by “The Guardian”. Homebrew cardboard signs carry messages in Ukrainian. “Get out of the path…We’re coming again…”. A TV comedy picture board set amidst the brouhaha depicts a “fairy” who becomes president.

    Tucked in the crowd a house mom or perhaps mature student dressed in black carries a petite sign in caps which translates as “PAID STUDENT”.

    • Only left a single question unanswered, AG: “Where the money going to come from?” I feel bohica taxpayer on thr esy. Saidi the guy still waiting after five years for the rural broadband fiber in a heap in his fronT yard to be attached to something – hell ANYTEHING!

  7. George, Your “Price Fixing . . . .” paper today was excellent and fleshed out some concerns I had intuited but not organized. As I prospect for investments, I have been deluged by analysts (or shills–hard to distinguish which) telling me to buy companies that supply energy, might supply energy, or supply components that energy suppliers or chip makers might need. This old paranoid remembers spending $1800 for a 64K Osborne 1 circa 1980; my $30 smart watch has more power today. I keep seeing graphs of projected power demand for AI data centers and I keep wondering, “Will they really need all of that power?” I suggest your readers might want to replicate my query this morning to ChatGPT with their own favorite LLM. Let’s just say I’ll look for a 10-bagger elsewhere. A bit of substantiation for the idea that LLMs suitable for doing heavy lifting will not dominate the future of AI is the planning being done by my son’s company to install a locally hosted slim AI.

    PROMPT: I’m looking for possible reasons why data centers will not need as much electricity as projected. What kinds of research might reduce demand i.e. could AI programs become more efficient? Could future AI chips use less power? Any way to guess the odds?

    • In various news reports a number of countries after looking at their HUMONGOUS AI Billings from the US AI companies that use that heavy iron are quickly switching to the Chinese AI models that are much more software based and do NOT NEED that heavy iron so as to do the type of work most companies need.

      Do most people really need all that computing power so as to give them the answers that used to be in a single set of Encyclopedia Britanica, the CIA Fact Book, and the Merck Manual of Medical Information: Home Edition … oh maybe add in the Old Farmers Almanac too? (availble merely by pulling the relevant book off the shelf – looking at the index – and opening and reading it.)

      The CASH FLOW to pay for all those data center buildouts, let alone give a return to the “investors” is going to disappear faster than the winter snow does in the spring as companies and people move to the Chinese “Lite” versions of AI. (just imo of course)

      • “Do most people really need all that computing power so as to give them the answers that used to be in a single set of Encyclopedia Britanica, the CIA Fact Book, and the Merck Manual of Medical Information: Home Edition … oh maybe add in the Old Farmers Almanac too?”

        I must be getting old — I have all four on my shelf. It’s generally faster to pull the book and flip the page than it is to fire up the handheld confuser and sort through the data until the useful bit shows its face…

      • Nein,nein,nein..

        You seem to have forgotton Wall Streets time honored tradition of packaging SHIT inside of expensive looking shiny flashy newly collateralized CDO’s. Just like they did with all those triple A rated underwater Mortgages.
        Dont remember punch line ?

        In the end the Rain Did Not Come Down, only the Peoples net worth got slammed while the 1% got Enriched, TWICE…thanks to Obongo the Peoples president..bwaaaahahahahah

        Back to the Mines, Puny Human Resources..

        CitLon/Globalist – “deepstate” Demands more Lives, More Blood. The question then becomes For Whom the Bell Tolls?
        What Bells – all the Bells from Tartaria have removed and destroyed. Last Tartarian city = Dresden, now you know why Firebombed out of existence and why “they”- deepstate are trying right now to destroy the last vestiges of Tartaria.

        GEE, I wonder WHY ?

        : )

  8. VERY interesting essay on the Last Liar Standing!
    I was thinking about how this applies to the pricing of physical gold; It works the opposite from investment in businesses and services, right? You have BIG players like China who are quietly accumulating physical gold while the investment brokers are advising everyone to buy index funds that are tagged to gold prices, or anything but the physical gold product. And then if the economies collapse, the physical product price goes thru the roof — but also becomes very dangerous to own… No easy solutions, I suppose…

Comments are closed.