I'll update the article, but it was the buy in by the hedge funds I'm referring to, not the original acquisition.
Love how Wall Street rewards evil deeds. Every time. They should ban trades on a stock on layoff news or doing something to stop a guaranteed increase in the stock price the minute a company decides to screw over their employees.
Safeway did not close Dominick's shortly after purchase...they have owned the chain for several years.
However, Afta (and someone else) did get some nice profits.
Check the stock price. Afta bought in to Safeway from July to early September (per Chicago Tribune report). Then, in the 5 days prior to the announcment of that purchase, the price of Safeway stock jumped about 20%. By the time Safeway announced the closings, the stock had peaked at $34/share, Afta sold off about half of its stake for about 40% profit on that chunk of change. I am surprised that that little price jump hasn't been talked about more.
there i said it.... of course it was in the works among right wing think tanks going back to at least the early '70's you can say Ronny Raygun made it acceptable to eviscerate as much of the new deal as possible and usher in the decade of greed is good and pounded the first nail into the casket of the middle class.... the rest was followed up by Clinton and his corporate democrats ....
i figured that even if December PCE was flat, (ie, goods sales down 0.2%, services up 0.1), PCE would still be up at a 3.8% annual rate in the 4th quarter...
even though some are marking up their 4th quarter estimates, most are still expecting a weak 4th quarter, mostly on inventories; i dont see it, and i havent seen a negative report yet; most are slightly positive, like the increase in durables inventores you cover here..
My friends were involved in the recent Kroger labor dispute. They had been working without a contract for a year. Then this fall there was a union dispute where the managements offer was a pie in the sky wish list for hedge fund managers. Limiting holiday pay and getting rid of paid sick leave, eliminating health benefits and so on. It turned out that Safeway was driving the lopsided offer and it went up to the day before the planned strike that they finally saw sense. So this comes as no surprise to me.
This is most amusing, the NSA routinely intercepts computers, hard drives and other technology to modify them and add their spyware and exploits.
Thing is, while corporate America was so fast to manufacture in China, this enables China to add their spyware at the time of manufacture! Seriously, huge security risk and finding things at the firmware, bios level is really tough.
Manufacture in China also guarantees one's product will be reverse engineered.
So much for early reports of mass consumerism holiday sales claiming they tanked. Mastercard just reported sales were up 2.3% vs. 0.7% from last years gain. I'll go with the original point we're going to see a very strong PCE for Q4.
Finding women over 80 probably are not on social media that much, but laudable goal. I imagine there are many who are horrified at what has happened to their country.
There's a reason I have the motto "Charity is no substitute for justice" in my memory bank. Whenever I hear about the wonderful libraries Carnegie founded I think of where the funds came from.
Perhaps I'm tilting at windmills but I've been working on Project Granny D (Google her) and plan recruiting women over 80 to march to state capitols to overturn Citizens United inspired by Doris Haddock and MoveToAmend. I can't afford a 60 Minutes segment so must do it myself. Any takers????
I agree completely! When I heard Google was going to be tapped to fix the mess, I didn't understand why Amazon was also asked. Isn't Amazon.com over in the Herndon, VA region where Healthcare.gov is being created? Yes! Google is on the other side of the US. None of this makes sense. Why Google when Amazon is so proficient with ecommerce? Also, Ebay is right over in Philly and that's a heck of a lot closer than San Francisco, which is where Google is based. Perhaps Google has a few small offices in the DC area, but still.... the way this entire thing has been managed is a true joke. It symbolizes why we need to stop believing India has all the answers. All India has is really good at doing is fouling its own nest. Now it's encroaching on ours.
just remember what happened; a deep low developed in Oklahoma and came right up the Mississippi/Ohio valley and into the Northeast over that weekend; watching the storm track, i'd guess states from Missouri & Illinois to the Northeast all got smacked with 8 inches or more that weekend, with a foot or more in the Northeast...it was too deep to shovel here; i had my driveway plowed both saturday the 14th and sunday the 15th...
But if you put all of other retail sales together it might be an impact. I have a pie graph, not updated since 9./13, which shows retail sales by volume.
If one takes GM, online (I thought online exceeded), and some of the other where foot traffic would matter, say Liquor stores, it could counteract the growth in auto sales. But the auto industry is doing their Xmas marketing thing as well, so, TBD.
I believe people are smarter shoppers and wages, income are still flat, repressed, the unemployed group static, millions and millions not counted who need a job, i.e. middle class tapped out.
Wall street forgets there are limits on credit cards. ;)
if they're tracking big box stores, that's not where the strength has been in retail; autos, which is 20% of retail, has carried the group; ex-auto, ex-online, sales of everything else have been very normal...of course we saw that in November real PCE, with durables up 2.2%...
if it's lousy compared to other christmases, though, seasonal adjustments will write it down big time..
That said, we'll see with online, which has been growing dramatically and after Xmas sales. I think the typical shopper has wised up and isn't buying so many ugly sweaters and slippers no one will wear this year.
Still real time reports doesn't bode well for retail sales and consumer spending might be impacted, although so much more goes into PCE.
quite coincidentally, we benchmarked our own inflation guages of CPI components to the year 2000, the same year as these indexes are benchmarked to, so we can see that the housing component of the CPI is up 38% since then…
I'll update the article, but it was the buy in by the hedge funds I'm referring to, not the original acquisition.
Love how Wall Street rewards evil deeds. Every time. They should ban trades on a stock on layoff news or doing something to stop a guaranteed increase in the stock price the minute a company decides to screw over their employees.
Safeway did not close Dominick's shortly after purchase...they have owned the chain for several years.
However, Afta (and someone else) did get some nice profits.
Check the stock price. Afta bought in to Safeway from July to early September (per Chicago Tribune report). Then, in the 5 days prior to the announcment of that purchase, the price of Safeway stock jumped about 20%. By the time Safeway announced the closings, the stock had peaked at $34/share, Afta sold off about half of its stake for about 40% profit on that chunk of change. I am surprised that that little price jump hasn't been talked about more.
I'm very surprised to hear just the iPhone being mentioned. Stands to reason the NSA has completely hacked Android as well.
was in full swing starting with the Reagan administration. In today's world Nixon would be considered a liberal as well as Eisenhower.
there i said it.... of course it was in the works among right wing think tanks going back to at least the early '70's you can say Ronny Raygun made it acceptable to eviscerate as much of the new deal as possible and usher in the decade of greed is good and pounded the first nail into the casket of the middle class.... the rest was followed up by Clinton and his corporate democrats ....
i call 'em as i see em ... good luck
This is why we have to fight to keep our Unions strong in this country or we might as well just succumb to China and be communists
i figured that even if December PCE was flat, (ie, goods sales down 0.2%, services up 0.1), PCE would still be up at a 3.8% annual rate in the 4th quarter...
even though some are marking up their 4th quarter estimates, most are still expecting a weak 4th quarter, mostly on inventories; i dont see it, and i havent seen a negative report yet; most are slightly positive, like the increase in durables inventores you cover here..
My friends were involved in the recent Kroger labor dispute. They had been working without a contract for a year. Then this fall there was a union dispute where the managements offer was a pie in the sky wish list for hedge fund managers. Limiting holiday pay and getting rid of paid sick leave, eliminating health benefits and so on. It turned out that Safeway was driving the lopsided offer and it went up to the day before the planned strike that they finally saw sense. So this comes as no surprise to me.
This is most amusing, the NSA routinely intercepts computers, hard drives and other technology to modify them and add their spyware and exploits.
Thing is, while corporate America was so fast to manufacture in China, this enables China to add their spyware at the time of manufacture! Seriously, huge security risk and finding things at the firmware, bios level is really tough.
Manufacture in China also guarantees one's product will be reverse engineered.
So much for early reports of mass consumerism holiday sales claiming they tanked. Mastercard just reported sales were up 2.3% vs. 0.7% from last years gain. I'll go with the original point we're going to see a very strong PCE for Q4.
bear this out as well, still such a large increase in Q3, what goes up usually goes down.
Retail sales look like they won't be good for Dec. from Xmas sales reports.
both shipments and unfilled orders are growing at a faster rate than inventories...
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?graph_id=153037&category_id=0
Finding women over 80 probably are not on social media that much, but laudable goal. I imagine there are many who are horrified at what has happened to their country.
There's a reason I have the motto "Charity is no substitute for justice" in my memory bank. Whenever I hear about the wonderful libraries Carnegie founded I think of where the funds came from.
Perhaps I'm tilting at windmills but I've been working on Project Granny D (Google her) and plan recruiting women over 80 to march to state capitols to overturn Citizens United inspired by Doris Haddock and MoveToAmend. I can't afford a 60 Minutes segment so must do it myself. Any takers????
I agree completely! When I heard Google was going to be tapped to fix the mess, I didn't understand why Amazon was also asked. Isn't Amazon.com over in the Herndon, VA region where Healthcare.gov is being created? Yes! Google is on the other side of the US. None of this makes sense. Why Google when Amazon is so proficient with ecommerce? Also, Ebay is right over in Philly and that's a heck of a lot closer than San Francisco, which is where Google is based. Perhaps Google has a few small offices in the DC area, but still.... the way this entire thing has been managed is a true joke. It symbolizes why we need to stop believing India has all the answers. All India has is really good at doing is fouling its own nest. Now it's encroaching on ours.
just remember what happened; a deep low developed in Oklahoma and came right up the Mississippi/Ohio valley and into the Northeast over that weekend; watching the storm track, i'd guess states from Missouri & Illinois to the Northeast all got smacked with 8 inches or more that weekend, with a foot or more in the Northeast...it was too deep to shovel here; i had my driveway plowed both saturday the 14th and sunday the 15th...
But if you put all of other retail sales together it might be an impact. I have a pie graph, not updated since 9./13, which shows retail sales by volume.
If one takes GM, online (I thought online exceeded), and some of the other where foot traffic would matter, say Liquor stores, it could counteract the growth in auto sales. But the auto industry is doing their Xmas marketing thing as well, so, TBD.
I believe people are smarter shoppers and wages, income are still flat, repressed, the unemployed group static, millions and millions not counted who need a job, i.e. middle class tapped out.
Wall street forgets there are limits on credit cards. ;)
if they're tracking big box stores, that's not where the strength has been in retail; autos, which is 20% of retail, has carried the group; ex-auto, ex-online, sales of everything else have been very normal...of course we saw that in November real PCE, with durables up 2.2%...
if it's lousy compared to other christmases, though, seasonal adjustments will write it down big time..
ShopperTrak is reporting 21% less traffic in stores, sales down 3.1% and for three weeks Christmas sales are way down from last year.
MarketWatch has some figures.
That said, we'll see with online, which has been growing dramatically and after Xmas sales. I think the typical shopper has wised up and isn't buying so many ugly sweaters and slippers no one will wear this year.
Still real time reports doesn't bode well for retail sales and consumer spending might be impacted, although so much more goes into PCE.
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