The Nation's Financial Condition

[foreverlax]

As I am rapidly approaching my 4th decade in the financial services industry...having thought I had seen just about everything, this just blows me away.

MAGA -POLITICALLY RESPONSIBLE INVESTING®

The POLITICALLY RESPONSIBLE INVESTING® strategy, offered exclusively by Point Bridge Capital through the Point Bridge GOP Stock Tracker ETF (symbol: MAGA), gives investors the ability to align their investments with their conservative political beliefs. Money matters in politics. Corporate political action committees (PACs) and employees are contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to help elect candidates. For the first time, investors who want to elect Republicans to federal office, including the Presidency and Vice Presidency, can support that effort through their investments. By purchasing shares of MAGA, investors can align their investments with companies whose employees and PACs are highly supportive of Republican politics.

What the heck does that even mean??

The POLITICAL BETA® methodology is a proprietary, rules-based investing methodology created and offered exclusively by Point Bridge Capital. The methodology builds an index of investible securities based on analysis of the political contributions of the individual companies within the index. Using this methodology, Point Bridge Capital has created the Point Bridge GOP Stock Tracker Index and the Point Bridge GOP Stock Tracker ETF (symbol: MAGA), which tracks the performance of the index.

How would you explain this methodology to an investor??
___________________________________________________________________
Performance YTD - -5.84
Assets under management - $34.5 million
Gross Revenue to owner - around a quarter million annually.

Here is the managers view of which companies will MAGA and their respective performance YTD

O'Reilly Automotive Inc 49.19
Boston Scientific Corp 47.84
W.W. Grainger Inc 34.21
CSX Corp 33.45
TransDigm Group Inc 31.30
ResMed Inc 30.25
Abbott Laboratories 29.58
CME Group Inc Class A 29.55
FirstEnergy Corp 27.50
The Cooper Companies Inc 25.50
Arthur J. Gallagher & Co 25.35
HollyFrontier Corp 23.16
ConocoPhillips 22.99
Cintas Corp 22.11
Copart Inc 19.80
Exelon Corp 19.77
ONEOK Inc 19.30
Aetna Inc 19.02
Norfolk Southern Corp 17.95
Ecolab Inc 17.36
AutoZone Inc 17.20
Intercontinental Exchange Inc 16.75
SCANA Corp 16.62
NextEra Energy Inc 16.13
Fidelity National Information Services Inc 15.75
Boeing Co 15.40
Hess Corp 15.40
Evergy Inc 15.27
Union Pacific Corp 15.02
Yum Brands Inc 14.16
Cincinnati Financial Corp 10.90
Extra Space Storage Inc 10.11
Berkshire Hathaway Inc B 9.73
Duke Energy Corp 8.47
Pinnacle West Capital Corp 7.93
American Electric Power Co Inc 7.04
Duke Realty Corp 6.93
JPMorgan Chase & Co 6.06
Aflac Inc 5.72
Mid-America Apartment Communities Inc 5.65
BB&T Corp 5.57
Waters Corp 4.67
PPL Corp 3.68
NiSource Inc 3.39
Huntington Bancshares Inc 3.30
US Bancorp 3.14
CF Industries Holdings Inc 2.89
Lowe's Companies Inc 2.72
Sherwin-Williams Co 2.41
Marathon Petroleum Corp 1.73
Morgan Stanley Instl Lqudty Govt Instl 1.47
AmerisourceBergen Corp 1.05
Southern Co 0.85
Emerson Electric Co 0.47
Walmart Inc 0.27
Eaton Corp PLC 0.25
SunTrust Banks Inc -0.31
Honeywell International Inc -0.67
Anadarko Petroleum Corp -0.67
Textron Inc -0.67
Occidental Petroleum Corp -0.86
Marathon Oil Corp -1.42
United Technologies Corp -1.57
Deere & Co -1.61
United Parcel Service Inc Class B -1.64
Helmerich & Payne Inc -1.70
The Travelers Companies Inc -1.98
Chevron Corp -2.05
Exxon Mobil Corp -2.34
Bank of America Corporation -2.37
Kinder Morgan Inc P -2.68
Zions Bancorp NA -2.91
Regions Financial Corp -3.07
EOG Resources Inc -3.13
Allergan PLC -3.64
The Home Depot Inc -4.21
Zimmer Biomet Holdings Inc -4.35
Nucor Corp -4.39
PNC Financial Services Group Inc -4.63
Lockheed Martin Corp -4.71
Phillips 66 -5.36
Raytheon Co -5.77
Regency Centers Corp -5.91
KeyCorp -6.17
PPG Industries Inc -6.27
FedEx Corp -6.37
Dominion Energy Inc -6.46
Comerica Inc -6.46
Cardinal Health Inc -7.37
MetLife Inc -7.54
Wells Fargo & Co -7.71
Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc -8.31
Fifth Third Bancorp -8.50
General Dynamics Corp -8.74
Johnson Controls International PLC -8.74
Equifax Inc -8.99
Citigroup Inc -9.80
Valero Energy Corp -10.11
Charles Schwab Corp -10.22
PACCAR Inc -11.23
Morgan Stanley -11.55
FMC Corp -11.60
Conagra Brands Inc -11.65
Raymond James Financial Inc -11.84
Eastman Chemical Co -12.82
Northrop Grumman Corp -13.12
Williams Companies Inc -13.55
Harley-Davidson Inc -13.70
Parker Hannifin Corp -13.89
Franklin Resources Inc -14.08
Apache Corp -14.12
Caterpillar Inc -14.93
Campbell Soup Co -14.99
Philip Morris International Inc -15.06
Concho Resources Inc -15.06
Leggett & Platt Inc -15.73
Illinois Tool Works Inc -15.74
AT&T Inc -15.79
JM Smucker Co -15.86
McKesson Corp -17.77
Fluor Corp -17.85
DowDuPont Inc -18.06
Molson Coors Brewing Co B -18.19
PulteGroup Inc -18.77
International Paper Co -19.10
TechnipFMC PLC -19.10
Macerich Co -19.76
Altria Group Inc -19.97
Goldman Sachs Group Inc -21.22
Dollar Tree Inc -22.36
Whirlpool Corp -22.46
Stanley Black & Decker Inc -23.48
WRKCo Inc A -23.75
American Airlines Group Inc -24.39
Baker Hughes, a GE Co Class A -25.22
Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co -26.12
Masco Corp -26.30
Perrigo Co PLC -26.62
Brighthouse Financial Inc -31.00
LKQ Corp -31.08
Wynn Resorts Ltd -31.46
Celgene Corp -31.99
Halliburton Co -33.07
Devon Energy Corp -34.57
Freeport-McMoRan Inc -36.08
L Brands Inc -39.92
Invesco Ltd -40.15
Affiliated Managers Group Inc -43.98
Newfield Exploration Co -44.53
General Electric Co -53.58

[Trinity]

https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/29/politics ... index.html

Number of Uninsured children is going up during period of full employment.

[Typical Lax Dad]

“The POLITICAL BETA® methodology is a proprietary, rules-based investing methodology created and offered exclusively by Point Bridge Capital. The methodology builds an index of investible securities based on analysis of the political contributions of the individual companies within the index. Using this methodology, Point Bridge Capital has created the Point Bridge GOP Stock Tracker Index and the Point Bridge GOP Stock Tracker ETF (symbol: MAGA), which tracks the performance of the index.


How would you explain this methodology to an investor??”

Sounds like a re-branded Trump Investments.

[a fan]

Get ready for months of "I told you so" from "a fan". Now you get to find out why cutting Federal taxes to half their historical effective rates, and lending to 18 year old kids with no collateral is moronic. Then there's home loans, car loans, etc. Buckle up for the ride.



https://www.newsweek.com/stock-market-1 ... LtXCsR4T7c

[RedFromMI]

How about this one:

Trump on Coming Debt Crisis: ‘I Won’t Be Here’ When It Blows Up

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-on- ... t-blows-up

[holmes435]

How about this one:

Trump on Coming Debt Crisis: ‘I Won’t Be Here’ When It Blows Up

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-on- ... t-blows-up

Yeah, it seems to be a common refrain from a lot of politicians, especially from one party, not to think long term.

We have come up with a few solutions to this on the boards, the problem is how do we get Washington to adopt any changes to the election system, cycle, term limits and cash and power influencers.

[Trinity]

Trump has the same attitude about the climate.

[foreverlax]

a fan, this one is for you -

The Debt Threat to the Economy

The same driving forces have propelled every strong American economic recovery since World War II: a sustained rise in business investment and increases in new-home building. The resulting increases in the demand for credit have driven up interest rates. As the current recovery builds and extraordinarily low interest rates normalize, the economy will begin to feel for the first time the effects of the unparalleled borrowing of the past decade. Exploding debt-servicing costs and the new federal borrowing could crowd out private borrowing at levels never before experienced in any of the 10 previous postwar recovers.

During the weak Obama recovery, business investment lagged behind the norm, and new-home construction remained at the recessionary level. Today business investment is at the highest level in a decade, and housing starts are up 42% from the average level of the Obama era. With the economy now growing at the average postwar rate of 3.5%, interest rates also should be expected to rise toward their postwar norms as government and the private sector compete for available credit.

Nominal interest rates in the postwar period were highly affected by inflation, which rose at an annual rate of 3.8% from 1948-2008. Interest rates surged when inflation approached double-digit levels from 1977-82, and Treasury borrowing costs reached their highest postwar levels, averaging 10.6%. If that six-year period is set aside as an anomaly, the Treasury’s average borrowing cost from 1948-2009 was 4.8%. For the entire 1948-2008 period, real Treasury borrowing costs—the nominal borrowing costs minus the inflation rate—were 1.2%.

This suggests that if the Fed could meet its 2% inflation target during this recovery, Treasury borrowing costs might stay close to the 3.2% range. But because interest on 10-year Treasurys is already above 3%, it may be optimistic to assume that the Fed could hold rates at this level during another five years of strong recover even if inflation stays around 2%.

If the economy continues to grow at the normal postwar rate, growth-driven federal revenues will overwhelm the costs of the tax cut, paying for virtually all of its originally projected 10-year revenue losses in just five years. But if Treasury borrowing cost normalizes to 3.2% over the next five years, the cost of servicing the federal debt will more than double, from $316 billion this year to $666 billion in 2023.

If borrowing costs rose to 4.8% over the next five years, federal debt-servicing costs would more than triple, reaching $1.1 trillion in 2023. In that scenario, the cost of servicing the $7.5 trillion increase in the public debt incurred during the 2009-16 period alone would cost $362 billion—more than the current cost of servicing the entire federal debt.

Even with the strong revenue gains that would come from sustained 3.5% growth, a 4.8% average borrowing cost by 2023 would force the Treasury to borrow $1.3 trillion, 5.2% of gross domestic product. If the Fed could hold inflation rates in the 2% range and Treasury borrowing costs only grew to 3.2%, total federal borrowing by 2023 would still be $985 billion, 3.7% of GDP.

Federal borrowing levels between 3.7% and 5.2% of GDP annually would be quite similar to the Obama-era average of 4.6%. But 40% of that era’s unprecedented new borrowing was offset by the Fed’s purchases of Treasury debt and mortgage-backed securities. Also, in the failed recovery, the economy had little pulse and never felt the fever of high interest rates that would have come from such massive federal borrowing if private demand for loanable funds had matched the levels experienced in other postwar recoveries.

In postwar America before 2009, gross private domestic investment averaged 17.5% of GDP while federal borrowing absorbed only 1.6% of GDP (including the high-deficit Reagan presidency, when federal borrowing averaged 1.8% of GDP). By comparison, Congressional Budget Office projections of federal outlays plus normalized rates would produce Treasury borrowing by 2023 that could pre-empt 3.5 times the amount of credit as a percentage of GDP that federal borrowing pre-empted on average during other strong postwar recoveries.

With an already bloated balance sheet and banks holding huge levels of excess reserves, the Fed would risk spiking inflation if it tried to hold interest rates below the level dictated by public and private demand for capital. But even in a divided government, where compromise and legislative success will be difficult, the Trump administration can act unilaterally to soften the headwinds of rising interest rates that will threaten the recovery.

Every dollar the federal government doesn’t spend is a dollar it doesn’t have to borrow. The caps on discretionary spending should not be lifted in 2019, and any new spending program should require a real spending offset. An acceleration of the administration’s deregulatory effort, especially in the financial sector, would enhance efficiency, expand growth and reduce federal borrowing.


Strong economic growth and rising interest rates will attract foreign capital, which can help prevent a surge in inflation rates that could derail the recovery, but foreign capital will come at a cost of higher trade deficits. President Trump is obligated to make China live up to its World Trade Organization commitments and end the piracy of American technology. But fighting a trade war and maintaining a strong recovery may be mutually exclusive objectives. To ensure the U.S. has sufficient capital resources to sustain the recovery, the president needs to cut his deal with China. It’s time to make peace on trade and wage war on the deficit.

[jhu72]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careers ... spartandhp

[HooDat]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careers ... spartandhp

That economy will favor the holders of capital even more than today's - and that is potentially very troublesome. the ride from here to there will be turbulent.

[kramerica.inc]

In the defense industry, Fridays are already a slow day. Most gov't customers are gone by noon on Friday. Lots of people working compressed work weeks, taking off every other (or every Friday).
If you dont get it done by Thursday, you have to wait till next week.

I think it's a good thing for the white collar world. IMO, if you're job makes you tethered to a cellphone, email blackbury outside of the usual 9-5 workday, weekends should be longer.

[foreverlax]

Johnson & Johnson knew for decades that asbestos lurked in its Baby Powder

Oh boy....stock is down 14 pts

[a fan]

In the defense industry, Fridays are already a slow day. Most gov't customers are gone by noon on Friday. Lots of people working compressed work weeks, taking off every other (or every Friday).
If you dont get it done by Thursday, you have to wait till next week..

In the defense industry? Try ALL industries where people are working in cubicles, and are on salary.

On Fridays, rush hour starts in Denver at around 1pm. My brother and I laugh at the "reports" that Americans work harder than any other nation.....yeah, right. For self reported work, sure. And they don't count leaving early every Friday, and all the ridiculous holidays. If I had a dollar for every time my brother had to call me, laughing, and asking "they bank's closed, what the hell holiday is today?"

In short: 40 hour work week, my butt.

It's why I laugh at those who give teachers grief for not working year round, yet somehow my facebook feed is filled with people on vacation all year round.

[HooDat]

In the defense industry, Fridays are already a slow day. Most gov't customers are gone by noon on Friday. Lots of people working compressed work weeks, taking off every other (or every Friday).
If you dont get it done by Thursday, you have to wait till next week..

In the defense industry? Try ALL industries where people are working in cubicles, and are on salary.

On Fridays, rush hour starts in Denver at around 1pm. My brother and I laugh at the "reports" that Americans work harder than any other nation.....yeah, right. For self reported work, sure. And they don't count leaving early every Friday, and all the ridiculous holidays. If I had a dollar for every time my brother had to call me, laughing, and asking "they bank's closed, what the hell holiday is today?"

In short: 40 hour work week, my butt.

It's why I laugh at those who give teachers grief for not working year round, yet somehow my facebook feed is filled with people on vacation all year round.

having had teams from London, Paris, and Singapore report to me at times in my career, I can tell you that in my experience the US works far more hours than our European counterparts, but probably less than Asian. And US companies/bosses expect actual RESULTS far more often then any other regions.

[a fan]

I don't doubt what you're saying----but it ain't 40 hours per week, every week. Not even close. A handful of industries...high finance....have those stereotypical 60 hr. American work weeks.

My experience is the same as Kramerica's-------Friday is dead. It's like it doesn't exist. And a three day weekend due to a Federal holiday is usually a four day weekend, because why not?

As for Europe, you just have to treat all of August like it's Friday, and forget getting anyone on the phone for anything on or around the month of August.

Unions rule the day in the EU.

[HooDat]

forget getting anyone on the phone for anything on or around the month of August.

you got that right!

[foreverlax]

Apple doing a $1b deal....just another $349,000,000,000 to get to Trump's number.

How are those 9 steel plants coming?

Rep. Brady should have his Tax 2.0 bill ready to pass the house anytime now.

Assets classes have been hammered this year....

[a fan]

Good thing we have a guy who "understands business" in the White House, foreverlax.

Predicted GDP for the year, 3%

Predicted GDP for next year, 2.7%

Gee, just like JHU72 and I told the Hooray for the Tax Cut crowd at the Water Cooler. But, of course, that's un-possible. How could we possibly know that massive tax cuts on the global 1%ers wouldn't trickle down to workers and spur demand for goods and services?

Wow. I must be amazing to have figured this out in advance. Either that, or I can add and subtract without much help.

[cradleandshoot]

https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/te ... 4b-deficit Our nation seems to keep following this same effed up pattern. The nation continues to collect record taxes. The nation continues to spend more than it brings in... by a long shot. Where do we find the solution here? Both parties want to spend like drunken sailors albeit on different agendas. A fan is enamored with raising taxes. Nobody here besides my self is enamored with cutting spending. When you continue to raise record tax revenue and continue to spend more than you take in, even with record tax revenue added in to the mix, you don't have a Democrat problem, you don't have a Republican problem, you have a national crisis looming right in front of you. This isn't a Trump problem, Obama problem, Bush problem, Clinton problem.

This is a problem ingrained in the simple fact that none of these folks in Washington DC have the integrity/honesty to tell the American people we all have to suffer a little bit to get back on the strait and narrow. The can has been kicked down the road as far as it can go. America has reached a dead end. I am all for 2 solutions... raise taxes and cut spending. Both solutions have to be done with the cold hard reality that we have no other choice. One can't work without the other. It is easy to raise taxes. When you talk about cutting spending, and I mean cutting spending... not baseline budgeting, The discussion becomes much more complicated. No one in Washington DC ever wants to face the reality they have to do more with less. That is not the kind of crazy talk that gets one re-relected to anything.

[foreverlax]

https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/te ... 4b-deficit Our nation seems to keep following this same effed up pattern. The nation continues to collect record taxes. The nation continues to spend more than it brings in... by a long shot. Where do we find the solution here? Both parties want to spend like drunken sailors albeit on different agendas. A fan is enamored with raising taxes. Nobody here besides my self is enamored with cutting spending. When you continue to raise record tax revenue and continue to spend more than you take in, even with record tax revenue added in to the mix, you don't have a Democrat problem, you don't have a Republican problem, you have a national crisis looming right in front of you. This isn't a Trump problem, Obama problem, Bush problem, Clinton problem.

This is a problem ingrained in the simple fact that none of these folks in Washington DC have the integrity/honesty to tell the American people we all have to suffer a little bit to get back on the strait and narrow. The can has been kicked down the road as far as it can go. America has reached a dead end. I am all for 2 solutions... raise taxes and cut spending. Both solutions have to be done with the cold hard reality that we have no other choice. One can't work without the other. It is easy to raise taxes. When you talk about cutting spending, and I mean cutting spending... not baseline budgeting, The discussion becomes much more complicated. No one in Washington DC ever wants to face the reality they have to do more with less. That is not the kind of crazy talk that gets one re-relected to anything.

You give yourself too much credit regarding the spending habits of congress....you are not alone on that topic.

You first, what are you willing to give up, candy-wise?