Salvation Army, eat your heart out

Consignment shop chain Snooty Fox in Cincinnati has achieved $5 million annual sales and 11 outlets. It imitates clothing boutiques but with zero inventory costs and, of course, low prices. Is used clothing moving upscale, or is America moving downscale?

What? Me worry?

Niall Ferguson et al, reports the WSJ, provided the following chart at a conference in Portugal. He said that we shouldn’t worry about it.

In space they can’t hear you scream.

Also in today’s WSJ, Sayuri Shira, board member of Japan Central Bank, worries that inflation will not be high enough next year.  (The target is 2% by spring 2015.)  Meanwhile, the Brazil central bank kept rates at 11% even though inflation is higher than it would like. In Turkey, the central bank cut interest rates 0.5% to 11.5% despite the fact that inflation is likely to exceed the bank’s 5% target by a wide margin, but Prime Minister Erdogan is not pleased.  He called the cut "a joke" and wants more aggressive cuts to stimulate investment.

”I want inflation to be higher than I want it to be.”

So says, in effect, San Francisco Fed President John Williams, who is quoted in the WSJ today as arguing forcefully that the “optimal policy should trade off a transitory period of excessive inflation. . . in order to bring the broader measure of underemployment to normal levels more quickly.”

And the winner is. . .

In the race to the currency bottom, this year’s losers are the yen and the won, both up 3% versus the dollar.  The Renmimbi wins; it’s down 3%.  Ultimately, the winner will be the currency that first achieves zero value.

In the Ivory Tower, computers never crash.

In a curious, nay bizarre, article in today’s FT (p9), Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard argues that there is too much paper money (i.e. cash) around, which is about $4,000/capita in the developed world.  (His recent book argued there was too much debt.)  He proposes doing away with it, beginning with the $100 dollar bill.  This will increase the government’s ability to monitor and, eventually, control every aspect of our spending, which he views as a good thing.

Is it taxes, regulation, or just old age?

U.S. Business failures have exceeded startups since 2009.  The rate of business failures seems relatively steady, while startups have been declining since at least 1978.  If a loss of 2%/year were to continue, there wouldn’t be any businesses left in fifty years. (Economist.)