Month: May 2019

High Interest Rates Are Hobbling Growth – WSJ

High Interest Rates Are Hobbling Growth – WSJ

The problem with growth in the US economy will be immediately be solved the day that we stop the trade war with China. We don’t need the Fed to counter-balance a political battle between China and the US. Mark my words, when this trade war is over, the economy will almost immediately overheat.

Also, you can guarantee that POTUS will turn off the trade war by the first quarter of 2020 so that the economy is running at top speed for the November election. The Chinese know this and they know they just have to hold on 6 more months and our political will for the trade war will vanish.

Source: High Interest Rates Are Hobbling Growth – WSJ

There’s an increasingly strong case that the Federal Reserve should cut interest rates to weaken the U.S. dollar and encourage greater exports—and that it should do it soon.

A strong dollar makes it cheaper for Americans to purchase foreign goods and more expensive for those using a foreign currency to purchase American goods. The dollar has strengthened relative to foreign currencies since the second quarter of 2018, and U.S. exports have essentially stagnated. While the U.S. economy surged in 2018 thanks to tax cuts, deregulation and a declining oil price, gross domestic product could have grown faster. Preliminary GDP growth over the past three quarters has been a strong 2.9%, but had real exports grown at a 3% annualized rate—which they did from 2009 to 2018—GDP would have grown by 3.2%.

The Fed’s tightening of the money supply contributed to this decline in export growth by making the U.S. dollar more valuable. The Fed has increased the federal-funds rate nine times since beginning the rate increases at the end of 2015, which boosted the demand for greenbacks. The greater the federal-funds rate, the greater the return on investments made in dollars. The Fed also ended its expansive monetary policy as the economy improved, constraining the money supply and further enhancing the dollar’s value.

How to Stop Spam Phone Calls

How to Stop Spam Phone Calls

The number one feature that I would like for the iPhone is the ability to have a special ringtone for anyone that was not in my Contacts. That ring tone would be silent so that if a spammer got through it wouldn’t bother me, they would just go to voicemail. If it was a legitimate call then they would go to voicemail as well and I would call them back.

As it is, I hear my phone ring, see that it isn’t someone I know and manually silence my phone. By having a “silent” ringtone for non-Contacts, I would skip this step.

I think this is possible in Android and it is probably the only reason that I would buy an Android phone over an iPhone the next time I want to update my phone.

Source: How to Stop Spam Phone Calls

The phone rings. Do you assume it’s an actual human person, trying to reach you? I generally assume it’s a robot, calling to “inform” me that my car warranty is about to expire or that I’ve “earned” a free trip to the Caribbean.

And I’m not alone. There were an estimated 26.3 billion robocalls to US phone numbers in 2018, which was a massive increase from the year before. Most of these spam calls come from scammers using software dialers to call as many phone numbers as possible. Enough people fall for these scams for the practice to be profitable, which is tragic in and of itself. The rest of us, meanwhile, are getting more spam calls than actual calls, interrupting our daily lives, including during work hours—and the problem is only getting worse.