What Goes Around Comes Around -- June 30, 2021

Amazon: Jeff Bezos is/was a huge anti-Trumper. He succeeded in getting Joe Biden elected. LOL.

Now, Bezos has a bigger problem. Amazon seeks recusal of the FTC head Lina Kahn as the antitrust probe ramps up. Pretty funny.

Paris: on another note, JP Morgan makes Paris its post-Brexit European trading headquarters. Link here.

Dividends 101: ordinary dividends vs qualified dividends. Key data point:

Regular dividends paid on shares of domestic corporations are generally qualified as long as the investor has held the shares for a minimum period. 

The Internal Revenue Service rule says the shares have to be owned for more than 60 days during the 121-day period that begins 60 days before the ex-dividend date. 

For preferred shares, the stock must be owned more than 90 days during the 181 days starting 90 days before the ex-dividend date.

Sort of reminds me of how Easter Sunday is calculated: first Sunday after first full moon after  spring equinox, or something like that. 

Jobless benefits:

The fruits of the decisions by a score of Republican governors to cut short the federal enhancements to unemployment benefits appeared in the ADP private payroll report on Wednesday, June 30, 2021. 

Private-sector employers added 692,000 workers to their payrolls, easily beating the consensus estimate for 550,000. Notably, 332,000 of those new workers were in the leisure and hospitality sector, which employs many workers at pay levels making them most likely to be disincentivized to work by very high unemployment benefits. It's worth pausing for a moment to get specific about just how much the jobless were receiving on enhanced unemployment. 

The precise amounts received by workers varies from state to state and depends on how much a worker earned before being laid off. But on average, jobless benefits pay around $320 per week, the equivalent of around $13.33 per hour. That's not very much to get by on, and it isn't meant to be. It's meant to bring in some income for a short time until a new job can be found. 

The federal enhancement brought the weekly average up to $600 per week, the equivalent of nearly $18 an hour. That's more than a lot of entry-level jobs pay, including many jobs in restaurants and hotels around the country. And in states like Washingon and Massachusetts that are especially generous with unemployment benefits, average enhanced benefits amount to almost $800 per week or more than $23 per hour. The effect was to put millions of workers out of reach of employers. 

Keep in mind that it's not enough for employers to simply beat the prevailing jobless wage. An employer paying $25 an hour in Washington—which is an annual wage of $45,500—is really only paying $2 an hour more than not working. You don't have to be especially lazy to decide that working 35 hours a week for an extra $70 is not as attractive of an offer as not working at all but being paid well. 

If benefits pay enough, there may be no wage that would lure a substantial portion of the population into a job.

Alex Marlow & John Carney
Breitbart News Network

And will avoid marriage: link here.