THE ERA OF TRUMP

[Smitty-48]

Portugal is booming right now, coming out of the Euro Crisis, they cut taxes and spending in half, bounced back right into a boom by Portugal's standards.

Unemployment in Spain is twice what it is in Portugal, Spain is growing at 0.7%, Portugal at 2.7%.

[TheReal_ND]

I'm not sure 2.7% unemplorment is desirable unless it's a socialist country like Portugal. I've heard it said that the sweet spot, in slightly less socialist America, is around 4%. The thing is, you need some free labor to pump up booms when investors start speculating on big projects.

[Speaker to Animals]

It's a really good sign, actually. But depends upon how they measure it. A lot of unemployment figures are worthless.

[Smitty-48]

2.7% growth rate, their unemployment rate is like 8.9%, but that's not actually bad by European standards, it's 18% in Spain.

See what happened was, Portugal cut spending so they could cut taxes, soon as they cut taxes, investment flowed in, the Socialists are running Spain, so they refused to cut spending, as they are beholden to the unions, so now Portugal is the much better tax jurisdiction and the money in Iberia is flowing across the border to them.

[TheReal_ND]

Spain isn't a serious country anymore.

I would be hard pressed to find a serious country in Europe that wasn't a former block.

[TheReal_ND]

Also, been meaning to post this.

Overtime has jumped up at my mill. We are hiring more people for second shift again.

There are over two hundred train cars sitting in the port waiting to be shipped in to the mill by rail. That's not including trucks and that's only this month.

We are back to boom town in oil states and a year ealry.

Going to try and get seventeen hours tmrw. I have all the hours I can take on the table right now. I never seen this before.

[Smitty-48]

I think the price is just fluctuating due to intermittent restraint, they hold oil back, price recovers a bit, then they dump oil back onto the market, and the price comes back down again.

Near term US inventories have dropped on strong US growth, but there's still a big surplus kicking around out there.

[TheReal_ND]

Yeah I'm not getting my hopes up for four dollar gallons again knowing what I know now about the camel fuckers. I'm not sure that it really coincides with the return to 60 dollar barrels as much as the influx of dumb money now that people don't even know what to do with their 20% tax decrease. Wal-Mart is just handing out thousand dollar bonuses. They legitimately had no plans for this.

[Smitty-48]

If the price goes back up again, US shale will come back online, and then the price will drop again, and US shale will bust again, it's a catch-22, but strategically, the demand for oil is on a downward trend, may not see an oil boom like the last one, ever again.

[Smitty-48]

The Chinese are building lots of cars, but they're going big into electric, so it's actually coal which is booming not oil, because the "clean cars" are actually powered by coal fired electric plants.