Factoids for 2020

Coal is not coming back.  China and India will stop buying coal in the future

Over 7 million jobs have been lost in manufacturing.  Yet manufacturing has doubled since 1979.  That means the robots have taken over.  The manual assembly line is not coming back.

Neither are jobs in textiles which are more efficiently manufactured with machines

GM builds more cars today than in the 1970s with 600,000 less workers.  That trend will continue.

Technology will make the robots even more efficient, which may bring companies to America to invest and build.

The economy in the world cannot increase faster than population growth.  Hence there are winners and losers.

The world-wide economy means that natural disaster can disrupt the supply chain.

Manufacturing growth, orders and short-term borrowing costs are the best indicators of economic health.

The stock market lies to you about the economy.  It reacts, it does not lead.

If the US population growth slows (as it has), and that loss of growth cannot be made up by immigrants (as it has in the past), our economic growth will slow.

The 1970s stagflation was caused by running out of markets to sell to.  Hence Nixon opened up China’s billion customers.

A trade deficit means we are buying more than we are selling.  But the revenues are neutral so we are trading something other than goods.

The steel industry is over 40% larger than is was in 1997, despite losing 265,000 jobs

The climate is changing – and we have no good answers to alter the course

There is no planet we can conveniently escape to.

 

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