The only thing missing is the acknowledgement a majority of those most suffering voted for this. Home owners as well as those in households making over $200K/ year voted for Trump by a decent margin. Those renting as well as those making less than $100K/ year voted for Biden by a decent margin.
When I still had Facebook shortly before the 2020 election some high school friends/ classmates were discussing the election. We are ages 38-40 now. Both the person who started the thread and I are “1%’s” trying to get people to look past the media narrative (not very successfully). We are not rich or ultra rich, but we have income and assets that scoot both our households into the bottom of the 1% (and we both did it on our own, not inherited). Anyway, it was us against 20+ people. All our classmates cared about was punishing us. Claiming we didn’t “pay” our fair share. Orange man bad. The whole deal. I remember writing:
“How is us paying more in taxes going to help you all or anyone else? How is a 2% increase on a small portion of our income, combined with an over 5% SALT deduction on almost all of our income, going to do anything except disguise a tax break for us by having less income taxed at a tiny fraction of a higher rate? You have no idea you are really pushing a tax break for us.
Beyond that we are going to have inflation either way with all the free Covid money, but it’s going to be much much much worse if Biden is elected. He will promote more wasteful spending, regulations to crush certain sectors of the economy like energy, and there is going to be a lot more than 100 more days of Covid nonsense crushing the economy under Biden. Inflation is the most regressive tax that can be imposed on a population, and it’s going to be huge if Democrats control national policy or the executive branch.
Even if our liquid investments drop a bit for while, they will still produce income. Moreover, we own 2 homes which are assured to skyrocket beyond the price hikes we’ve already seen. Our interest rates are 2.5% and 2.75%. We have a far greater percentage of disposable income. I can assure you the inflation tax will harm many of you more than a 2% increase on a bit of our income even without a SALT deduction and inflation will impact us.
Add to the economy rising crime and wide open borders suppressing wages. We are all in for a rocky road with negative impacts on quality of life. My kids have been back in school full time since mid August. If Cooper or Biden win, yours won’t see a classroom for months, and when they do, they’ll still be masked like Taliban women. Girls sports and private spaces will be under full blown attack by delusional gender ideologies (just look at Biden’s website). Don’t try to claim you weren’t warned. This is fundamental and incredibly predictable.
And that’s just domestic policy. Weak US leadership creates geopolitical instability. Putin was kept at bay through engagement by Trump. But he’s aging and might be eyeing another land grab - I have no idea if it’ll be eastern Ukraine, some K country, or part of Finland’s tundra. Hopefully not a thriving young democracy that is a former Soviet state. Heaven forbid China makes moves on Taiwan to assure WW III. However unlikely, this crap is more likely to happen under weak U.S. leadership. Biden is weak.
I hope I’m wrong, but if Biden wins and this stuff starts happening, there will be no orange man to blame. When you all go hunting for people to blame, start by looking in the mirror.”
The guy who started the post agreed while everyone else called us crazy conspiracy theorists and I’m pretty sure there were several accusations of being racists. 😂
I deleted Facebook because it’s toxic, but some days I wish I hadn’t just to tag this conversation and say “don’t blame me, I voted for Trump.” 🤷♀️
Except Trump’s policies are at least as culpable as Biden’s at creating this mess we are now in. Why Trump believed he could hand out those dollars through Covid programs and not have the consequences we are facing today is beyond me.
Trump’s policies are partly to blame for inflation. No denying that. But Biden’s are more to blame. Vaccine mandates sparked the great resignation and supply chain disruptions. School masking, ongoing closures, and woke ideological indoctrination are why millions of US school aged children are now being home schooled that were not before Covid (which requires an adult).
Biden’s energy regulations contributed to gas inflation long before Russia/Ukraine. Biden then antagonized Russia pontificating about Ukraine joining NATO despite 3 decades of U.S. promises to the contrary knowing it would play out just like Georgia after Merkel’s pontificating about Georgia joining NATO a decade and a half ago.
Biden’s first spending pork bill passed once in office is enormous and mostly waste (I would have preferred just handing Americans cash over doing that plus Biden’s cronies tens of billions in pork). Biden’s Russia/ Ukraine policies are creating food price inflation my generation and younger has never seen before. Millions of Africans are going to starve. The increases are bound to get worse based on current planting and expected yields.
I stand by what I said. We were going to have some inflation because of Covid cash (which was under Trump - this was fall 2020). With Biden in office it is much, much, much worse due to Covid nonsense, school closures, incompetent foreign policy, and intentionally hamstringing domestic energy production. Biden was not vague about his policy goals before going into office, but for a dude claiming to be the most popular president in history, very few that voted for him seem to have bothered to look at his woke campaign website that promoted the destruction of US energy independence and intentional aims to drive up energy costs - what did people think was going to happen???? .........
Biden and crew have been very clear they intend to drive up energy costs to “transition” to unworkable and unreliable and not all that clean “renewables” like solar and wind. I’m not going to blame Trump for the Biden administration intentionally causing the inflationary problems by energy cost increases that Biden was very open about wanting to cause before the election and seems perfectly content with (and has said as much).
I just subscribed to your newsletter after reading these two responses. I'm wondering if you're in Union County with me since you said your kids were back in school. I didn't look at your name until you said if Cooper or Biden wins, you own't see a classroom for months. It's very frustrating to be called names and ridiculed knowing you're right, and it's not much comfort being right when this is where we are. You tried.
I’m not in Union county. I’m a decent bit north of you, but I do agree. I would much rather have been wrong and not be watching my country fall apart and members of my community struggle for daily needs and friggin baby formula.
My kids attend a private Christian school that was back in person on time mid August 2020. The public school kids in our district didn’t go back at all until 2021, and even then, they didn’t actually go back on any consistent schedule until late August 2021, and they still had random “online learning” days while being masked like Taliban women until late March/ early April for this just finished school year.
Indeed. Some of this inflation was certainly baked in because of Trump (although those dollar-raining bills DID have veto-proof majorities), but Biden kept spending like the emergency was ongoing, and would have spent trillions more if he could have gotten away with it.
Honestly it sickens me to think about this. I keep shaking my head in bewilderment. It’s not logical, it’s not intelligent, it defies common sense. How are people not realizing this?
Trump literally begged the Federal Reserve to print more money to 'stimulus' his economy. Same failure as all politicians. Didn't learn Austrian economics.
Never would have happened to this extent had it not been for "Covid". We were doing pretty well economically before "two weeks to flatten the curve." By the way, when are we going to seriously investigate the origins of Covid? Who is responsible? I have some ideas.
I liked the aspects of warp speed that were treatment based. I didn’t mind the vaccine push to try for older people, but the mandates and othering by Biden for clot shots that don’t work was insane. I read Dr Atlas’s book. Im annoyed with Trump for seeming to notice Fauci, Brix and crew were politically driven morons, but Trump still not pushing back more forcefully. Im glad Trump has shut up about the shots, but his past affinity for them I don’t get. They were turned into an authoritarian disaster and it was clear by June 2021 they didn’t work but Trump still praised them until at least the fall.
I’d vote for Trump over any Democrat, but Im annoyed with the vaccines and him being unwilling to fire Fauci then or call out big pharma on their constant lies today.
I hear these comments a lot about Trump - vax, operation warp speed, covid relief. It’s valuable to add context to these Trump failings. For example, with the internal bureaucracy of DC sabotaging Trump, the MSM rabidly attacking him 24-7, and in the midst of their great pandemic how exactly was he supposed to fire Fauci, Birx, et.al. And how exactly would the CDC/NIH/FDA swamp have responded if he had?
Why should he not assume that in the midst of this health emergency, the public health agencies and doctors that are supposed to protect Americans were corrupt. He foolishly believed (as I did) that American Exceptionalism would apply itself to this crisis - just as it did throughout the country’s history. His entire term was an X-ray that exposed the ineptitude, corruption, and banality that now characterizes our government and society.
His entire 'team', excepting maybe Bannon and a couple of others, WAS the corruption. To rule, you need a gang aligned with you. Trump never had that gang, so he could achieve very little. That he managed to achieve some good things despite being subverted at every turn was pretty impressive.
Consider the court nominations. He got some decent judges appointed but Kavanaugh was a complete subversion. That guy was a prime architect of the PATRIOT ACT, ffs. A traitor to the constitution - rewarded with a Supreme Court appointment, under the flag of conservatism.
I thought 'Operation Warp Speed' was all Trump promoting the gene-jabs. Can't expect him to know everything, or to have a clue about a new disease after all.
Health care should be an individual choice, not government policy.
Not at all. The monoclonal antibodies were part of it. Pushing for the “right to try” looking at HCQ and Ivermectin were part of it. It wasn’t just the jabs, though that was the most expensive and failed part.
Trump attempted to stop the lockdowns which he knew we killing the economy. His major efforts were an attempt to save smaller businesses that were being crushed and family fortunes in those businesses destroyed. He was trying to maintain commerce. There were places eager to accept economic collapse if it meant Trump gone. They could easily see policies elsewhere were allowing the economy to reopen successfully without serious consequences despite the narrative of widespread contagion. He expected the short term help would be enough and it was. Most of the economy was in the process of recovery afterwards.
He was constantly badgering for schools to reopen. And he made a point about what Florida was doing. He pushed for Michigan to end their insane policies.
You are of course correct. Then president Trum said lockdowns are great for the economy and we must continue to lockdown. He wasn't trying to push for reopening and talking about reopening every chance he got.
The first sentence should perhaps be: President Trump pushed for reopening but met resistance at the state level by certain states. He knew extended lockdowns would be bad for the economy and this country, but the federal government doesn't have absolute power over the states.
That is true and he also was vax champion - big mistake - and we do not know how he would have responded to the economic situation if he had had a second term. (And had he had a second term, would the FDA have dragged its feet over their approval, and would the Dems and the Establishment been avowed anti-vaxxers, because… Trump?)
However we do know it was not Trump’s policy, but IS Biden’s policy to drive up electricity prices and motor fuel prices, to move towards a command economy and replace private capitalism with State capitalism, increase the flow of wealth from its creators to the non-productive, and drive up inflation to inflate away the huge debt being built up to finance what is a (ruinous) Socialist economic plan.
As Thomas Sowell said, he could never understand why wanting to keep the money you earned was greed, but wanting to take somebody else’s money to use for your own purposes wasn’t.
Maybe I read this wrong but, "we own 2 homes which are assured to skyrocket beyond the price hikes we’ve already seen". Home prices move inverse to interest rates. In a period of increasing interest rates (right now), home prices will come down. The total mortgage payment will stay the same but because the interest portion of the total monthly payment is more, the house price portion of the mortgage payment will come down. I also wonder if everyone has almost moved who wanted to move. I am starting to see price cuts on houses in Florida. So this could also just be the area that I have been looking at.
As far as the article goes, if we just take all the inputs out of the core CPI calculation, inflation looks great!! Gaslighting people when they know, with their own pocketbooks, that prices have gone up and continue to go up every trip to the gas station and grocery store is terrible.
Not exactly on home prices. Home prices move mostly based on the price of new home construction and overall housing demand. Increasing interest rates will slow demand and move towards a better equalization of buyers and sellers, but overall inflation will continue to drive up the cost of new construction and renovations because both the material and labor inputs now require more dollars to build (though lumber has finally dropped a bunch). Cooling off of the housing market, or even price cuts on asking prices, doesn’t mean actual final sales prices are going down at anywhere near the rate at which interest rates are going up - it means they aren’t shooting up as quickly and the market is coming back into balance which slows the rate of inflation - it doesn’t reverse it. Except for regional/ location specific outliers, the dollar value of your home in August 2022 will be higher than the dollar value of your home in January 2021 even though interest rates could easily have double over that time frame.
If your assertion were true, the cost of entry to buying a home wouldn’t be up 44% in just over a year (half the increase from the actual dollar price, and half from the increase in the cost of borrowing those dollars).
The housing bust in 2008 was caused in part by sub-prime lending that allowed investors and home buyers to pay a temporary market interest rate well below the actual market interest rate. When the teaser rates expired, the owners discovered they couldn’t actually afford their purchase. Buyers overbought the actual market which created a bubble driving up home prices. When the teaser rate expired, the bubble burst as lots of owners and investors put their now unaffordable homes on the market, voluntarily or via foreclosure, and supply > demand, so dollar prices of homes actually went down. We don’t have that issue today - the majority of new home mortgages since the crash are fixed rate, qualifications have tightened, and as a result of inflation paying an existing fixed mortgage is getting easier, not harder. There is no looming rate adjustment to drive out existing owners.
Home prices aren’t going down until there are a lot more sellers than there are buyers, and there is no indication we are anywhere near that point. If home prices were going to reverse simply because interest rates were going up, they would have actually reversed months ago. A market coming back into to balance between buyers and sellers is a good thing for the economy, but it’s not a reversal of the inflation that has already happened.
Yeah, it’s either that, large-scale debt defaults or a debt jubilee. Historically, those are the only ways out of the inflationary trap once it’s gone this far. If Obama and Bernanke had had the stones to not bail out banks and bondholders during the financial crisis the defaults would have been painful (particularly for Wall Street and private equity, but also for retirees depending on pension funds) but left us in a much more sustainable position once all the bad debt was cleared off the books. But of course they couldn’t do that, it would have benefited Main Street at the expense of Wall Street.
Ditto! It's the only proven way to pay back the mess they created. We will have to dig in, after years of putting money away, into our savings. The ominous "rainy day" has arrived and it's a monsoon of biblical proportions for many.
...except that rising interest rates are going to inflate the National Debt, creating a restriction on Government spending/investing further complicating matters....just sayin..
That's true but not all interest rates are equal, and state intervention and central bank intervention distort all prices -- including the time-price of money.
Does the US federal government really need to 'go to market' to borrow money? OFC not. The fed can buy as much treasury debt it wants, with keypresses on a computer -- and that, at any interest rate it wants to set. It's a completely farcical, political system that's pretending to be a market.
Probably the two best books on the subject of how badly distorted the world gets when you allow the moneyprinters to take control are :
You're right it's not going anywhere, it's just that $30 trillion won't be a lot of money when they're done. ;)
Edit: Just like you will get 'full benefits' from SS that won't actually buy you anything. Government doesn't care. They promised you $x/month, not the ability for those dollars to buy anything.
Property valuations are only good, if you property is mortgaged and/or you are looking to sell. My proposed tax valuation for the next year is an increase of almost 30%.
Thank goodness for proposition 13 here in California (passed in 1978 by voter initiative), yearly property tax increases are capped by law at 2%.
I remember very clearly in the mid-70's my parents worrying about having to sell the house as they could not afford the property taxes. Those in charge literally viewed property value increases as a windfall for for them to go on a spending binge. Prop 13 stopped that (thank you Howard Jarvis RIP).
There's a lot wrong with California but this was one thing we got right.
Yeh but property tax should be zero. If the community needs to provide water, sewage, pay fees for those or don't. If you want to send a kid to a school, pay for that. Dont tax owning a home.
I don't pay 'property tax' i my country. I pay for services I use.
We have personal property taxes in Missouri. Our vehicles are taxed very year. We received a letter from the state telling us that out car taxes are going up because the market value (sorry if I used the wrong economic term; I am new to this) of used cars has gone up. WTF?!!
I lived in KC when I was young and then again from 2008 to 2020. I don't know what happened to that town. One of my offices is there and I still see twenty-somethings running outside with their mask on.
I honestly would've never thought. I'm serious. What a disappointment
1) For a century, the word INFLATION meant THE INCREASE IN FIAT (artificial) MONEY SUPPLY.
2) The SYMPTOM of the artificial increase of money supply, is PRICE INCREASES.
3) The central bank regime managed to redefine 'inflation' to mean "consumer price increases", thus hiding the cause of price increases (their moneyprinting).
It's a real conspiracy, the history and theory of which is described by Austrian Economics. It is worth taking time to study seriously: Free resources at https://mises.org
When speaking of inflation, I think it’s best to do it in two different terms: Monetary inflation, which is a rise in the money supply (the DuckTales scenario), and price inflation, which is a rise in prices. Though intertwined, these things are quite different.
First, monetary inflation. This is a pretty basic measurement. How many dollars are floating around out there?
As you can see, monetary inflation has been increasing and accelerating since Nixon went ‘full fiat’ in the 1970s. Since then, the number of dollars in the system has been doubling about every 11 years, with covid rapidly accelerating that trend.
Price inflation is often related to and affected by monetary inflation, though MANY additional factors impact price inflation. A shortage of goods, additional cost of links in the supply chain, rising labor costs, and additional regulations all negatively affect price inflation. On the other side of the equation, improved efficiency, cheaper materials, reduced regulations, or increased automation tend to drive prices down (though rarely enough to actually see price decreases).
In a way, monetary inflation provides a sort of ‘baseline’ price inflation rate to the economy. Think of it as a wave pool with variable settings. At a low rate of monetary inflation, it’s easy to move. The higher the rate, the more you have to ‘fight’ to move forward. Set the machine too high and you’ll be overcome. Monetary inflation is the ‘rising tide’ that lifts all prices.
In modern times it's best to differentiate exactly as you do: Monetary Inflation vs Price Inflation.
The Monetary Inflation side is unfortunately more complicated than just 'how many dollars floating around' since different debt instruments have varying degrees of 'moneyness'. Economists debate which monetary aggregate is most meaningful (M2, M3, MZM etc). It's way out of scope to elucidate in the brief comments here.
True, but I don't think anybody can deny that when you double the money supply every 11 or so years, it's not too long before the fake economy of being close to the literal money-makers overtakes the real economy of voluntary trade of goods and services.
Since you're into this, I have a theory that ought to be investigated by a more sober and serious economist.
Since there are a lot of different types of 'dollars' floating around, and the amounts of different types of money can be increased or decreased differently, the classes of people holding those different types of money will result in varying degrees of price increases in different types of assets.
For example in the 'meltdown' of 2008 and 2009, many economists were predicting price inflation, but the didn't consider what different classes of people would be getting the new dollars. The new money went to the 0.1%, leading to increased real estate and stock and art prices, but the price of hamburger didn't shoot up -- because the bulk of the working-class people didn't get much of that new money.
Now consumer-grade price inflation is launching due to the double whammy of policy-driven economic breakage (lockdowns, supply-chain disruptions), combined with mountains of loans and cash to the erstwhile-working classes.
As others have said - losers are those who work and save.
The enemy's tactic is to differentially privilege those who leech, rob, borrow and steal. It's quite conscious, and diabolical.
Yeah it first hit me when i worked in finance in the 90s. I saw how it was more profitable for our company to borrow from a bank than to save-up profits. That's degeneracy fueled by fiat money - a ... scheme... by... the... enemy...
I’m probably at the extremist end of prognosticators. I don’t expect the dreadful economic (& most other aspects of life) storm we’re entering to get better.
That’s because it’s my belief that the entire situation has been manufactured, deliberately, with the intent of destroying economies & sovereign currencies.
By destroying the old, introducing the new financial system becomes not only more acceptable but essential. Cashless digital money/ CBDCs = slave system.
Each to their own, but please give some weighting to this scenario.
I agree. I’m planting a lot of potatoes, but I feel fatalistic. The last couple of weeks I put up a chicken house. I wonder how I will get chicken feed six months from now. They are choking off the supplies of food, gasoline, electricity. Right now mostly just with precipitous price increases, but I soon expect serious flat-out shortages. Actually they are already here. I shop at an upscale organic food store that I noticed kept not having any tortillas lately. After coming up empty every visit for a couple of months I finally complained to a manager. WTF is going on here? Why can’t you keep a basic staple (This is California) in stock? He said, we are ordering but only are receiving 50% of what we ask for…throws up his hands. I said you better start rattling some cages man because we are being culled by Klaus Schwab and other minions. Welding supplies—the supplier suddenly starts not having welding gas. When “COVID” hit, all the serious dust protection masks (that can seal well to your face) disappeared for more than a year. This is a great way to undermine anyone who works with physical material for a living. I could see a temporary jog in demand needing to rebalance, OK. But it went on and on. I don’t believe there is an innocent explanation. I think the choke is on for the “excess people.”
So it looks like planned collapse. Just drain the water out of the aquarium so the fish can’t function, then roll up all the defaulted loan property.
Everywhere I ask, similar stories, adjacent to their field of work.
Even early in mid 2020, my regular woodman, who’s replaced every door & window in my rural home in Kent over a decade, said he couldn’t schedule my last commissions, because he couldn’t get quality timber.
Later, a tiling guy couldn’t get specialist cutter bits (German or Japanese).
Auto parts ditto. Racing clutches not available which are commonly used in AudiSport.
Ironically, my hobby, vintage 1970s Suzuki Motorcycles, no shortages! So a fair bit of 2020, I sorted jobs I’d allowed to pile up. It wasn’t the usual enjoyment, because I was pretty sure the old world had gone & would never return. Sadly, I was correct.
So I fixed & sold a project bike I’d had since 2012, because it was the least emotional for me to see go. Then I sold my only “new bike” (I’d bought it new in 2007).
The last two I’ve owned forever, the GT380 since 1978. I’ve not sold it, but lodged it long term in the secure garages of a mate who has vintage Kawasakis.
This is why I was filmed in my shed in 2020!
But it’s unequivocal that what we’re experiencing is entirely deliberate & there’s no plausible explanation that’s benign. What has happened under the pretence of public health has been to kill a lot of people. Just the NPIs from lockdown onwards was medical murder. The “vaccines” are far worse. The complicity of the medical establishment has been the equal of doctors in Nazi Germany. I have no doubt that this crime is far bigger & will be seen as such in due course.
I’m trying to wake up a critical mass of people. Too few on our side will even hint that what’s happening is deliberate. I don’t understand why they won’t call it out.
Perhaps you will want to consider a Kawasaki KLR. Some call it “the Apocalypse Bike”. Dual sport. Good on highways, good on dirt. Only one design change in 44 years of production and many of them out there, so you can buy two or three of the same generation and cannibalize them for parts. The US Marine Corps used them for many years.
I am not a scientist. I do watch events though, with an interest in how they will impact the course of things. It’s sort of a family thing—expecting a return to hard times.
I told the people I cared for at the beginning of all this that normal is dead—granted, it was for the wrong reason. The hype that a novel virus was killing people in the streets did what it was intended to do.
But bogus info or not, it became clear that the world we knew had been shot in the head—nothing for it now but to watch the lumbering giant collapse, making whatever preps we can.
How others see it differently is beyond me.
A Titanic moment it seems. The starboard bow is mortally holed but the deck seems level enough and the lights are still on.
To your point that this is all planned and deliberate, it seems scarcely deniable except for the credulous and incurious.
It’s been too systematic, too many glaring indicators of evil intent. Too many actual planning sessions, too much video of the planners think-tanking.
It certainly is deliberate, and the entities possessing the wherewithal to pull off this global catastrophe are not going to be easily stopped—maybe somewhat hindered.
I think the US will somehow manage to retain national sovereignty as a constitutional republic, but I can only guess as to how. And the global storm will certainly impact us heavily.
All of my reason for such hope is based on two cryptic verses in Daniel and The Apocalypse. Nothing that I’m seeing in events in the world and the nation gives me any cause to anticipate a good outcome.
It seems such an unbalanced struggle, and our institutions are patently compromised.
I do feel the limits of potential upsides from speaking out are being reached. Arguably that happened some time ago.
I had expected that a small but obvious proportion of the population would actively seek to organise to oppose the malign forces around us.
However, it seems that the proportion that both recognises the threat and is willing to work with objectives beyond their own immediate survival is so small as to constitute no real resistance in prospect.
Censorship & keeping us all divided has doubtless assisted that impression.
I had thought in any case that time would come when it would only make sense to focus on “acting locally”. Incremental benefits from doing another dozen interviews are surely very small. But the cost in terms of distracting from local organising is now acute.
Accordingly, while I won’t entirely abandon the attempted broadcast aspect, my first considerations now are organising with the aim of buying time to choose, when the SHTF arrives (assuming there’s ever a moment when that becomes apparent!).
We’re in Florida & that’s probably the best start we could have had in this effort.
Where are you & what do you plan, broadly?
I regret to say that as soon as one delves below the superficial, albeit non trivial, actions one could take, a deep question arises: do you actually want to survive what’s coming, given the majority are going to do exactly what the perpetrators plan?
If you need a tile with a hole in it you might get a local potter to make a tile with the hole where you need it and hopefully they can also copy your glaze close enough to work. I make tiles for my projects pretty often to get exactly what I want.
You may have to grow food for your poultry if you have the room and the physical energy. They eat practically anything. I worry about my birds’ food. I can do only so much. Anatolian shepherds protect them from the many predators in my area, so they range and forage all day. But I have to feed the dogs.
If my flock of sheep increases they can provide for a lot of those needs.
Fatalistic moods assail me from time to time too. All I can do is keep plodding on in the homestead endeavor.
“The prudent man sees the evil and hides himself; the simple keep going and suffer for it” Proverbs 22:3.
Beautiful poetry. And very apropos, I fear. Thanks for sharing it. I do wish I were 20 years younger going into this dread time. The national forest all around me would seem more welcoming, less challenging.
Existential crises don’t threaten our species just every day, though, so the fateful time falling in one’s prime years is something one can not count on.
You're not alone with that assessment. The Global Predators know that the system is already comatose and something drastic has to be done - whether it makes sense or not. As of today, if you liquidate everything the US has, including the land and all other assets, each American will be worth ~ (-$200,000).
Let me detail the statistics that prove your point. I bet you may not have seen these stats before. The date of my estimates is at the bottom.
US Total Unfunded Liabilities : $169, 586, 872, 950, 543.0 (fed+states). 15 digits!
US Total Debt : $90, 905, 683, 245, 654.0 (fed+states). 14 digits!
US Total National Assets: $194, 767, 783, 583, 435.0 (everything between Mexico and Canadastan + US worldwide assets). 15 digits!
Global US Account Balance: -65,724,772,612,762.0 (-$66 Trillion!!!). 14 digits!
It's a rare gift, I think, to be able to explain complex things with real clarity yet not talk down to your audience. I always try to avoid leaving even the slightest slugtrail of slimy sycophancy but--excellent as always.
RE Boomers have it easy. I'm a late boomer and so graduated from college and law school in very much down-times; the late seventies and the early eighties, the era of stagflation. Few jobs to be found. Auto loan rates were high. When we bought our first home in 1989, the price of housing was rising every month, interest rate on our mortgage was almost 9% and you HAD to have a ten percent down-payment in order to get a mortgage. It was very difficult for us to get our first modest house and we were only able to afford it because it needed a lot of work.
Our oldest bought a house in late 2020 in the Dallas area and they did get into the market just in time---the same house plan is now selling in their development for $150,000 more than they paid.
Our youngest doesn't have a prayer of buying a house in THIS market but I think it's safe to say that they will be able to eventually.
I graduated law school in 91 at the height of the first Bush recession, spent a year looking for a job and supported myself with my typing skills as a temporary secretary. It was pretty brutal for a number of years.
I saw the coming inflation last year and wanted to move but was unwilling to pull my 11th graders out of their current school before graduation. Dec 31, 2021 I signed a contract on a house under construction in SC (getting out of NJ!!!) and got approved for a mortgage at 3.5%. Unfortunately due to the awesome supply chain problems the builder couldn't/wouldn't give a closing date until mid April and I couldn't lock in the mortgage. When I finally could, I'm now at a 5.1% rate :(. On the upside, I've already got 2K of gains in the house as the appraiser valued it at 2K over the contract price. Granted my 5.1 is still better than your 9%, but is still ouch compared to where it had been.
Sorry about your inability to lock-in at 3.5%! Our daughter who bought the house in Texas is now having other family interested in moving there. Her husband's sister had the exact same thing happen to her mortgage as you---they decided to move to Texas to be near our daughter and contracted for a new house being built. But construction was delayed for a few months and as a result they lost their ability to get a mortgage in the 3's; instead they ended up with 4.85% and they feel fortunate to have locked that in.
What's cool is that more extended family, including us, are seriously considering moving to Texas to be near each other and be in a freer state. I don't want to leave my beloved Pennsylvania but "I ain't blind and I don't like what I think I see" in the Northeast.
Thanks. There's definitely a flood of people moving out the Northeast. I never imagined that I'd move out of NJ. I've never in my 55 years lived anywhere else, including college and law school (commuted to that in NYC). It was the reaction of King Phil to the pandemic that left me convinced that I need to get the hell out of this state. I really really really wanted to go to DeSantis' Florida, but couldn't convince my 18 year olds to go there. We compromised on SC which I found respectably red and free. The insanely low property taxes were a bonus.
The extended family all have plans to move out of the northeast now. My parents are going to sell their NJ house next year and move to SC as well (unfortunately they are dyed in the wool democrats and will continue to vote blue no matter how often I point out to them how far left their party has moved). Since two of their three daughters will be in that state. The third is in Lancaster County PA and is planning to move too, just needs to figure it out timing wise as she has kids a bit younger than mine who just started high school.
Wondering why your sister wants to move from Lancaster? That's an area that husband and I would consider moving to (from Philadelphia) to get away from the worst of the woke if we stay in Pennsylvania. Is the area bad, or she would just like to join everyone in S.Carolina?
Partially to join the rest of the fam in SC. She definitely doesn't have the worst of the woke like you do in Philly or me here in Bergen County NJ. She loves her area though her poor kids were stuck wearing masks in school as long as my kids were. Spring 2022 was when my governor finally lifted the in school mask mandate and iirc her kids were finally unmuzzled around the same time. She's currently in a townhouse development with a rather brutal HOA. She really would like to get a bigger piece of land where she can grow and raise things.
It's almost as if they saw this coming for the last 10-20 years. Obama raised the fed. minimum wage significantly and locked in increases over many years to help disguise the reality. And so many other laws that tried to ease us into this mess, the full consequences we have yet to see. It's like Madoff plugging holes in the Ponzi scheme for as long as he could until the dam broke. Meanwhile, Gates buying all the farm land and Blackstone and Vanguard buying residential homes over market price. You will own nothing and be super happy!
They really don't want to get me to the point where I am on the verge of owning nothing. When you have nothing more to lose, you might become quite unpredictable.
You mean like the Second Horseman having the power to “take away peace from the earth, that men should slaughter each other”? That kind of rise in aggressive crime?
I have been saying since the start: Unless you fix the money, you're going to win the 'fight for $15' and immediately have to start 'fighting for $25'.
Yes, definitely. Ron Paul tried to raise that fundamental sound money issue. It was sickening to see how the media ignored him during the debates for the nomination. Unfortunately he did not have the kind of vital force needed to bull his way into being heard. Trump later demonstrated how to do that. He performed a great service exposing the fake news problem, at least. Just that was a great accomplishment, imho. After that he went down under a pack of hyenas, and finally, I think, took a dive “voluntarily.” His stance on “vaccines” made no sense at all.
Ron Paul was a real challenge to the system because he served up ideas and ideals. Drump was a showman. Decent guy though, tried to reduce wars and conflicts. Just not a Ron Paul.
You'd have that fight no matter what the economy was. Soon as you hit $15 mandated, those earning it (well, those who can anyway) adjusts their cost of living to $17 so to speak.
Wage pressure explanations of price inflation are theoretically weak. There's probably a bit of an effect, but if there's no consumers to pay the increased product prices, those jobs mostly fall away and shortages result.
Oh, we've got shortages too, now. But very few politricksans understand economics. Remember most of them are pretty ignorant or stupid - just the kids from high school who won popularity contests.
I'm part of the weird generational slice that people with too much time on their hands named "Xennials."
My husband and I bought our first home in the normally-overpriced NYC during the '08 crisis, refinanced in around '11 when rates were even lower, and when we had dual incomes, we poured extra cash into paying off our principal, and threw every gift from parents or bonuses from work at it. We paid off about 3 years ago, and last year sold it at a roughly 45% profit to get out of the progressive dumpster fire that NYC will be for the foreseeable future. We bought a lot more house in a cheaper rural market that was still, compared to usual, moving lightning fast (houses were going off the market within hours).
Despite not having a mortgage- a fact we're extremely grateful for, in our early 40s- we are keenly feeling the increase costs in fuel, energy, and food as much as anyone. If my husband hadn't found a new job this year, our energy and gas bills alone would probably wipe out our savings within a year.
And now we're being told this is A) a figment of our imagination, B) for our own good, and C) a sacrifice we're called on to make to benefit... someone.
I'm not going to say we're poor. But pretty much my entire life as an independent adult, I've been pretty sure I could be financially destroyed in the blink of an eye by politicians deciding to annihilate the economy that year.
If we lived in a mansion, I'd probably still be stocking a shelter with dented soup cans for $0.20 like I am now.
It must be said: you and your husband did and does what everyone /should/ be doing, as opposed to what the vast majority for whatever reason is actually doing.
The "Escape from New York" is becoming more and more common in western nations overall, I believe. The ones who like you knows smoke means fire gets out soon as, and now the moderately effluent middle-class has started to follow. When enough of them has left, one of two things may happen:
a) The cities get leadership which tries to actually fix the problems using harsh zero-tolerance measures, which might as in maybe turn the flow.
b) The cities get leadership which blames everyone who's left /and/ who's moved away for all the problems, asking for support from the federal level and lobbying at federal level for nationwide taxes to be diverted to "fix problems of income inequality and standards of living" between different states and counties" - which is a nationwide welfare-trap and nothing but.
We have such a system. Well-run communes (what we call our counties) are forced to pay part of their taxes to poorly run communes, which can then squander said taxes on stuff like potty-mouthed trashcans, gender-neutral playgrounds or gays only nursing homes like my old hometown of Malmö. Malmö has gone from needing 2 000 000 000:-/yearly in communal welfrae in 2010, to 6 000 000 000:- last year (remove a zero to get a rough estimate in dollars). That's a city of some 330 000 inhabitants, all ages.
You can expect New York's current mayor to start blaming surrounding outlying prosperous areas any day.
Oh, no need to blame the "outlying prosperous areas." It's been a NYC tradition since before I was born to blame the failure of progressive policies on "Wall Street not paying its fair share."
During the worst stages of the NYC COVID lockdowns- around the time we put our house on the market- our then-mayor (Di Blasio) was actually publicly begging departed millionaires to return, promising them lavish dinner and cocktail parties to thank them for bringing back their tax dollars.
By Heimdal's nine mothers, that man had no shame obviously! He is elected to lead and cries and begs, offering paltry trifles and enetertainment a slivver of what these people sees as regular and commonplace?
That he did not died of shame outright!
We have quite a lot of that kind of stupid politicians. One became infamous by stating that "we" needed to tax "the rich" harder. When pressed on what she meant by "the rich", she infamously stated "retired workers buying mobile homes and having them as legal residences to dodge residential real estate taxes". These retirees are virtually always old contruction workers, plumbers, lower tier civil servants and such, lower end of middle income bracket, having saved up to a mobile home instead of a cottage somewhere.
That she did not consider her paycheck as PM, more in one month than ten returees together, as "rich" just added to the feeling of "I loathe you but please shut up hearing you speak is so embarassing I might die from secondary shame".
I have one and periodically bring it out to show as a warning to my few remaining left-leaning friends. One hundred trillion dollar note, technically worth about 48 cents USD.
Regarding your house as an asset: One of the things I learned from reading books like Rich Dad, Poor Dad, is that if it is NOT bringing in income, it is not an asset. If it is costing you money it is a liability. So your house is actually a liability, not an asset. It only becomes an asset when it is sold. A lot of people don't understand this concept. So they overbuy in the hopes of making a profit down the road, only to run into trouble should the market tank at the time they need to sell.
Another, related, concept is that of "phantom wealth". This is what most retirement vehicles are based on. What I learned in economics class in college and what I have learned studying personal finance on my own, is that the value of something is driven by what the buyer is willing to pay, not the price the seller puts on it. Now when it comes to necessities like food and energy you are pretty much at the whim of the seller because there really aren't any alternatives for these things. Investing in the market, on the other hand, is optional. So if there are no or few buyers, the price has to go down. What this means is that you may have X amount of dollars in your 401k on paper, but when it comes time to start withdrawing, if the market is not good, you aren't going to get as much as what you thought you had. Back in the mid-90's I "lost" $17,000 in pension funds due to some shenanigans by a dishonest CEO who ran a thriving company into the ground six months after he took over the reins. In January my statement said that the paper I held in company stock was worth $17,000; by July those same pieces of paper were worth less than toilet paper and not nearly so useful! That's phantom wealth.
I am afraid that there is going to be a reckoning down the road, because the only way we can keep things like 401k's and even Social Security going is if there are more people paying in (buying) than there are people taking out. When places are hurting for workers, that means less people paying in to the system. Younger workers also frequently don't have the money to put aside in 401k's either. I've had quite a few discussions with coworkers lately about retirement. I think my generation (Boomers) will be the last to really retire. I also see some of my younger and not-so-younger colleagues make some really scary financial decisions, I mean some really, really bad stuff; they're living paycheck to paycheck, in debt, poor credit rating, bankruptcies, missed payments. This stuff has a nasty habit of catching up to you when you can least deal with it. "Oh, but I've got time to turn things around." Not really.
I could write a whole lot more on this subject, such as the industries and institutions that prey on poor people (and there are a LOT of them). I am going into retirement in a lot better shape than most of my peers and that is because I made a deliberate choice to avoid some of the bad choices they made. There are people I don't look upon with envy; these are the people who have gotten involved with drugs/alcohol, had run-ins with the law, or are struggling to raise children on their own while drifting in and out of a series of bad relationships. No, I don't say "But for the grace of God there go I" when I hear these stories. I don't find anything attractive about that kind of life at all.
Just read an article about how they are trying to make "green steel" now, because the production of steel is one of the major emitters of carbon. One small problem with that, it will make steel much more expensive. And as you can imagine there's steel in almost everything, from construction to cars to appliances to kitchenware.
Just another upcoming contribution to inflation, along with still rising energy and food prices etc.
"inflation is a tax on savers and a subsidy for borrowers."
--------
And nobody borrows as much as the USG. They are going to inflate away the debt. Plan accordingly.
The only thing missing is the acknowledgement a majority of those most suffering voted for this. Home owners as well as those in households making over $200K/ year voted for Trump by a decent margin. Those renting as well as those making less than $100K/ year voted for Biden by a decent margin.
When I still had Facebook shortly before the 2020 election some high school friends/ classmates were discussing the election. We are ages 38-40 now. Both the person who started the thread and I are “1%’s” trying to get people to look past the media narrative (not very successfully). We are not rich or ultra rich, but we have income and assets that scoot both our households into the bottom of the 1% (and we both did it on our own, not inherited). Anyway, it was us against 20+ people. All our classmates cared about was punishing us. Claiming we didn’t “pay” our fair share. Orange man bad. The whole deal. I remember writing:
“How is us paying more in taxes going to help you all or anyone else? How is a 2% increase on a small portion of our income, combined with an over 5% SALT deduction on almost all of our income, going to do anything except disguise a tax break for us by having less income taxed at a tiny fraction of a higher rate? You have no idea you are really pushing a tax break for us.
Beyond that we are going to have inflation either way with all the free Covid money, but it’s going to be much much much worse if Biden is elected. He will promote more wasteful spending, regulations to crush certain sectors of the economy like energy, and there is going to be a lot more than 100 more days of Covid nonsense crushing the economy under Biden. Inflation is the most regressive tax that can be imposed on a population, and it’s going to be huge if Democrats control national policy or the executive branch.
Even if our liquid investments drop a bit for while, they will still produce income. Moreover, we own 2 homes which are assured to skyrocket beyond the price hikes we’ve already seen. Our interest rates are 2.5% and 2.75%. We have a far greater percentage of disposable income. I can assure you the inflation tax will harm many of you more than a 2% increase on a bit of our income even without a SALT deduction and inflation will impact us.
Add to the economy rising crime and wide open borders suppressing wages. We are all in for a rocky road with negative impacts on quality of life. My kids have been back in school full time since mid August. If Cooper or Biden win, yours won’t see a classroom for months, and when they do, they’ll still be masked like Taliban women. Girls sports and private spaces will be under full blown attack by delusional gender ideologies (just look at Biden’s website). Don’t try to claim you weren’t warned. This is fundamental and incredibly predictable.
And that’s just domestic policy. Weak US leadership creates geopolitical instability. Putin was kept at bay through engagement by Trump. But he’s aging and might be eyeing another land grab - I have no idea if it’ll be eastern Ukraine, some K country, or part of Finland’s tundra. Hopefully not a thriving young democracy that is a former Soviet state. Heaven forbid China makes moves on Taiwan to assure WW III. However unlikely, this crap is more likely to happen under weak U.S. leadership. Biden is weak.
I hope I’m wrong, but if Biden wins and this stuff starts happening, there will be no orange man to blame. When you all go hunting for people to blame, start by looking in the mirror.”
The guy who started the post agreed while everyone else called us crazy conspiracy theorists and I’m pretty sure there were several accusations of being racists. 😂
I deleted Facebook because it’s toxic, but some days I wish I hadn’t just to tag this conversation and say “don’t blame me, I voted for Trump.” 🤷♀️
Except Trump’s policies are at least as culpable as Biden’s at creating this mess we are now in. Why Trump believed he could hand out those dollars through Covid programs and not have the consequences we are facing today is beyond me.
Trump’s policies are partly to blame for inflation. No denying that. But Biden’s are more to blame. Vaccine mandates sparked the great resignation and supply chain disruptions. School masking, ongoing closures, and woke ideological indoctrination are why millions of US school aged children are now being home schooled that were not before Covid (which requires an adult).
Biden’s energy regulations contributed to gas inflation long before Russia/Ukraine. Biden then antagonized Russia pontificating about Ukraine joining NATO despite 3 decades of U.S. promises to the contrary knowing it would play out just like Georgia after Merkel’s pontificating about Georgia joining NATO a decade and a half ago.
Biden’s first spending pork bill passed once in office is enormous and mostly waste (I would have preferred just handing Americans cash over doing that plus Biden’s cronies tens of billions in pork). Biden’s Russia/ Ukraine policies are creating food price inflation my generation and younger has never seen before. Millions of Africans are going to starve. The increases are bound to get worse based on current planting and expected yields.
I stand by what I said. We were going to have some inflation because of Covid cash (which was under Trump - this was fall 2020). With Biden in office it is much, much, much worse due to Covid nonsense, school closures, incompetent foreign policy, and intentionally hamstringing domestic energy production. Biden was not vague about his policy goals before going into office, but for a dude claiming to be the most popular president in history, very few that voted for him seem to have bothered to look at his woke campaign website that promoted the destruction of US energy independence and intentional aims to drive up energy costs - what did people think was going to happen???? .........
Biden and crew have been very clear they intend to drive up energy costs to “transition” to unworkable and unreliable and not all that clean “renewables” like solar and wind. I’m not going to blame Trump for the Biden administration intentionally causing the inflationary problems by energy cost increases that Biden was very open about wanting to cause before the election and seems perfectly content with (and has said as much).
All of this, plus remember that if Biden had his way, we'd have spent roughly $6T more.
I just subscribed to your newsletter after reading these two responses. I'm wondering if you're in Union County with me since you said your kids were back in school. I didn't look at your name until you said if Cooper or Biden wins, you own't see a classroom for months. It's very frustrating to be called names and ridiculed knowing you're right, and it's not much comfort being right when this is where we are. You tried.
I’m not in Union county. I’m a decent bit north of you, but I do agree. I would much rather have been wrong and not be watching my country fall apart and members of my community struggle for daily needs and friggin baby formula.
My kids attend a private Christian school that was back in person on time mid August 2020. The public school kids in our district didn’t go back at all until 2021, and even then, they didn’t actually go back on any consistent schedule until late August 2021, and they still had random “online learning” days while being masked like Taliban women until late March/ early April for this just finished school year.
Indeed. Some of this inflation was certainly baked in because of Trump (although those dollar-raining bills DID have veto-proof majorities), but Biden kept spending like the emergency was ongoing, and would have spent trillions more if he could have gotten away with it.
Honestly it sickens me to think about this. I keep shaking my head in bewilderment. It’s not logical, it’s not intelligent, it defies common sense. How are people not realizing this?
You couldn't run your household budget on this fuzzy math, could you?...
No, I have long said that if we ran our homes the way the government run, we would all be in jail
Trump literally begged the Federal Reserve to print more money to 'stimulus' his economy. Same failure as all politicians. Didn't learn Austrian economics.
Never would have happened to this extent had it not been for "Covid". We were doing pretty well economically before "two weeks to flatten the curve." By the way, when are we going to seriously investigate the origins of Covid? Who is responsible? I have some ideas.
This
Indeed. While I liked some of Trump's policies, he was a huge failure in others--spending and operation Warp Death being the two worst.
I liked the aspects of warp speed that were treatment based. I didn’t mind the vaccine push to try for older people, but the mandates and othering by Biden for clot shots that don’t work was insane. I read Dr Atlas’s book. Im annoyed with Trump for seeming to notice Fauci, Brix and crew were politically driven morons, but Trump still not pushing back more forcefully. Im glad Trump has shut up about the shots, but his past affinity for them I don’t get. They were turned into an authoritarian disaster and it was clear by June 2021 they didn’t work but Trump still praised them until at least the fall.
I’d vote for Trump over any Democrat, but Im annoyed with the vaccines and him being unwilling to fire Fauci then or call out big pharma on their constant lies today.
I hear these comments a lot about Trump - vax, operation warp speed, covid relief. It’s valuable to add context to these Trump failings. For example, with the internal bureaucracy of DC sabotaging Trump, the MSM rabidly attacking him 24-7, and in the midst of their great pandemic how exactly was he supposed to fire Fauci, Birx, et.al. And how exactly would the CDC/NIH/FDA swamp have responded if he had?
Why should he not assume that in the midst of this health emergency, the public health agencies and doctors that are supposed to protect Americans were corrupt. He foolishly believed (as I did) that American Exceptionalism would apply itself to this crisis - just as it did throughout the country’s history. His entire term was an X-ray that exposed the ineptitude, corruption, and banality that now characterizes our government and society.
His entire 'team', excepting maybe Bannon and a couple of others, WAS the corruption. To rule, you need a gang aligned with you. Trump never had that gang, so he could achieve very little. That he managed to achieve some good things despite being subverted at every turn was pretty impressive.
Consider the court nominations. He got some decent judges appointed but Kavanaugh was a complete subversion. That guy was a prime architect of the PATRIOT ACT, ffs. A traitor to the constitution - rewarded with a Supreme Court appointment, under the flag of conservatism.
Clown World.
I thought 'Operation Warp Speed' was all Trump promoting the gene-jabs. Can't expect him to know everything, or to have a clue about a new disease after all.
Health care should be an individual choice, not government policy.
Not at all. The monoclonal antibodies were part of it. Pushing for the “right to try” looking at HCQ and Ivermectin were part of it. It wasn’t just the jabs, though that was the most expensive and failed part.
Trump attempted to stop the lockdowns which he knew we killing the economy. His major efforts were an attempt to save smaller businesses that were being crushed and family fortunes in those businesses destroyed. He was trying to maintain commerce. There were places eager to accept economic collapse if it meant Trump gone. They could easily see policies elsewhere were allowing the economy to reopen successfully without serious consequences despite the narrative of widespread contagion. He expected the short term help would be enough and it was. Most of the economy was in the process of recovery afterwards.
Can you show me how Trump attempted to stop lockdowns? I missed that.
He was constantly badgering for schools to reopen. And he made a point about what Florida was doing. He pushed for Michigan to end their insane policies.
You are of course correct. Then president Trum said lockdowns are great for the economy and we must continue to lockdown. He wasn't trying to push for reopening and talking about reopening every chance he got.
The first sentence should perhaps be: President Trump pushed for reopening but met resistance at the state level by certain states. He knew extended lockdowns would be bad for the economy and this country, but the federal government doesn't have absolute power over the states.
Yeah the Deep State™ went into a four-year tantrum with Trump, along with their lackey media. Much of what he attempted was completely blocked.
Did you know he ordered troops out of Syria twice, and they just disobeyed him?
That is true and he also was vax champion - big mistake - and we do not know how he would have responded to the economic situation if he had had a second term. (And had he had a second term, would the FDA have dragged its feet over their approval, and would the Dems and the Establishment been avowed anti-vaxxers, because… Trump?)
However we do know it was not Trump’s policy, but IS Biden’s policy to drive up electricity prices and motor fuel prices, to move towards a command economy and replace private capitalism with State capitalism, increase the flow of wealth from its creators to the non-productive, and drive up inflation to inflate away the huge debt being built up to finance what is a (ruinous) Socialist economic plan.
‘ Claiming we didn’t “pay” our fair share.’
As Thomas Sowell said, he could never understand why wanting to keep the money you earned was greed, but wanting to take somebody else’s money to use for your own purposes wasn’t.
Maybe I read this wrong but, "we own 2 homes which are assured to skyrocket beyond the price hikes we’ve already seen". Home prices move inverse to interest rates. In a period of increasing interest rates (right now), home prices will come down. The total mortgage payment will stay the same but because the interest portion of the total monthly payment is more, the house price portion of the mortgage payment will come down. I also wonder if everyone has almost moved who wanted to move. I am starting to see price cuts on houses in Florida. So this could also just be the area that I have been looking at.
As far as the article goes, if we just take all the inputs out of the core CPI calculation, inflation looks great!! Gaslighting people when they know, with their own pocketbooks, that prices have gone up and continue to go up every trip to the gas station and grocery store is terrible.
Not exactly on home prices. Home prices move mostly based on the price of new home construction and overall housing demand. Increasing interest rates will slow demand and move towards a better equalization of buyers and sellers, but overall inflation will continue to drive up the cost of new construction and renovations because both the material and labor inputs now require more dollars to build (though lumber has finally dropped a bunch). Cooling off of the housing market, or even price cuts on asking prices, doesn’t mean actual final sales prices are going down at anywhere near the rate at which interest rates are going up - it means they aren’t shooting up as quickly and the market is coming back into balance which slows the rate of inflation - it doesn’t reverse it. Except for regional/ location specific outliers, the dollar value of your home in August 2022 will be higher than the dollar value of your home in January 2021 even though interest rates could easily have double over that time frame.
If your assertion were true, the cost of entry to buying a home wouldn’t be up 44% in just over a year (half the increase from the actual dollar price, and half from the increase in the cost of borrowing those dollars).
The housing bust in 2008 was caused in part by sub-prime lending that allowed investors and home buyers to pay a temporary market interest rate well below the actual market interest rate. When the teaser rates expired, the owners discovered they couldn’t actually afford their purchase. Buyers overbought the actual market which created a bubble driving up home prices. When the teaser rate expired, the bubble burst as lots of owners and investors put their now unaffordable homes on the market, voluntarily or via foreclosure, and supply > demand, so dollar prices of homes actually went down. We don’t have that issue today - the majority of new home mortgages since the crash are fixed rate, qualifications have tightened, and as a result of inflation paying an existing fixed mortgage is getting easier, not harder. There is no looming rate adjustment to drive out existing owners.
Home prices aren’t going down until there are a lot more sellers than there are buyers, and there is no indication we are anywhere near that point. If home prices were going to reverse simply because interest rates were going up, they would have actually reversed months ago. A market coming back into to balance between buyers and sellers is a good thing for the economy, but it’s not a reversal of the inflation that has already happened.
The moneyprinters distort housing prices as they do all other prices.
Correction:
*they voted from home out of FEAR ...:)
Wow!
Yeah, it’s either that, large-scale debt defaults or a debt jubilee. Historically, those are the only ways out of the inflationary trap once it’s gone this far. If Obama and Bernanke had had the stones to not bail out banks and bondholders during the financial crisis the defaults would have been painful (particularly for Wall Street and private equity, but also for retirees depending on pension funds) but left us in a much more sustainable position once all the bad debt was cleared off the books. But of course they couldn’t do that, it would have benefited Main Street at the expense of Wall Street.
So true. Great post...and insight
Get a wheelbarrow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZI_j6_Npnfw
Or get saved by Jesus Christ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RTz4cU2GLI
Not subsidy for borrowers, subsidy for holders of debt.
Ditto! It's the only proven way to pay back the mess they created. We will have to dig in, after years of putting money away, into our savings. The ominous "rainy day" has arrived and it's a monsoon of biblical proportions for many.
...except that rising interest rates are going to inflate the National Debt, creating a restriction on Government spending/investing further complicating matters....just sayin..
Interest rates need to be closer to 10% than 1%. 1% isn't going to slow the train down.
That's true but not all interest rates are equal, and state intervention and central bank intervention distort all prices -- including the time-price of money.
Does the US federal government really need to 'go to market' to borrow money? OFC not. The fed can buy as much treasury debt it wants, with keypresses on a computer -- and that, at any interest rate it wants to set. It's a completely farcical, political system that's pretending to be a market.
Probably the two best books on the subject of how badly distorted the world gets when you allow the moneyprinters to take control are :
1) The Fiat Standard by Saifedean Ammous https://saifedean.com/the-fiat-standard/
2) The Ethics of Money Production by Dr. Jörg Guido Hülsmann https://mises.org/library/ethics-money-production (free ebook)
Really awesome books - not sure if there's audiobooks yet.
YES!
That debt ain't goin' nowhere.
You're right it's not going anywhere, it's just that $30 trillion won't be a lot of money when they're done. ;)
Edit: Just like you will get 'full benefits' from SS that won't actually buy you anything. Government doesn't care. They promised you $x/month, not the ability for those dollars to buy anything.
What a realty check.
Reality and realty check...not in the mail..;)
They promised nominal dollars not real money.
Property valuations are only good, if you property is mortgaged and/or you are looking to sell. My proposed tax valuation for the next year is an increase of almost 30%.
Thank goodness for proposition 13 here in California (passed in 1978 by voter initiative), yearly property tax increases are capped by law at 2%.
I remember very clearly in the mid-70's my parents worrying about having to sell the house as they could not afford the property taxes. Those in charge literally viewed property value increases as a windfall for for them to go on a spending binge. Prop 13 stopped that (thank you Howard Jarvis RIP).
There's a lot wrong with California but this was one thing we got right.
Yeh but property tax should be zero. If the community needs to provide water, sewage, pay fees for those or don't. If you want to send a kid to a school, pay for that. Dont tax owning a home.
I don't pay 'property tax' i my country. I pay for services I use.
We have personal property taxes in Missouri. Our vehicles are taxed very year. We received a letter from the state telling us that out car taxes are going up because the market value (sorry if I used the wrong economic term; I am new to this) of used cars has gone up. WTF?!!
The State of Misery? What happened to the Show-me-State?
I wish I knew
I lived in KC when I was young and then again from 2008 to 2020. I don't know what happened to that town. One of my offices is there and I still see twenty-somethings running outside with their mask on.
I honestly would've never thought. I'm serious. What a disappointment
1) For a century, the word INFLATION meant THE INCREASE IN FIAT (artificial) MONEY SUPPLY.
2) The SYMPTOM of the artificial increase of money supply, is PRICE INCREASES.
3) The central bank regime managed to redefine 'inflation' to mean "consumer price increases", thus hiding the cause of price increases (their moneyprinting).
It's a real conspiracy, the history and theory of which is described by Austrian Economics. It is worth taking time to study seriously: Free resources at https://mises.org
Exactly the case.
https://simulationcommander.substack.com/p/inflation-and-you
When speaking of inflation, I think it’s best to do it in two different terms: Monetary inflation, which is a rise in the money supply (the DuckTales scenario), and price inflation, which is a rise in prices. Though intertwined, these things are quite different.
First, monetary inflation. This is a pretty basic measurement. How many dollars are floating around out there?
As you can see, monetary inflation has been increasing and accelerating since Nixon went ‘full fiat’ in the 1970s. Since then, the number of dollars in the system has been doubling about every 11 years, with covid rapidly accelerating that trend.
Price inflation is often related to and affected by monetary inflation, though MANY additional factors impact price inflation. A shortage of goods, additional cost of links in the supply chain, rising labor costs, and additional regulations all negatively affect price inflation. On the other side of the equation, improved efficiency, cheaper materials, reduced regulations, or increased automation tend to drive prices down (though rarely enough to actually see price decreases).
In a way, monetary inflation provides a sort of ‘baseline’ price inflation rate to the economy. Think of it as a wave pool with variable settings. At a low rate of monetary inflation, it’s easy to move. The higher the rate, the more you have to ‘fight’ to move forward. Set the machine too high and you’ll be overcome. Monetary inflation is the ‘rising tide’ that lifts all prices.
Smart, very smart.
Everyone should read his comments
Thanks!
In modern times it's best to differentiate exactly as you do: Monetary Inflation vs Price Inflation.
The Monetary Inflation side is unfortunately more complicated than just 'how many dollars floating around' since different debt instruments have varying degrees of 'moneyness'. Economists debate which monetary aggregate is most meaningful (M2, M3, MZM etc). It's way out of scope to elucidate in the brief comments here.
True, but I don't think anybody can deny that when you double the money supply every 11 or so years, it's not too long before the fake economy of being close to the literal money-makers overtakes the real economy of voluntary trade of goods and services.
And when that happens, buckle up.
Since you're into this, I have a theory that ought to be investigated by a more sober and serious economist.
Since there are a lot of different types of 'dollars' floating around, and the amounts of different types of money can be increased or decreased differently, the classes of people holding those different types of money will result in varying degrees of price increases in different types of assets.
For example in the 'meltdown' of 2008 and 2009, many economists were predicting price inflation, but the didn't consider what different classes of people would be getting the new dollars. The new money went to the 0.1%, leading to increased real estate and stock and art prices, but the price of hamburger didn't shoot up -- because the bulk of the working-class people didn't get much of that new money.
Now consumer-grade price inflation is launching due to the double whammy of policy-driven economic breakage (lockdowns, supply-chain disruptions), combined with mountains of loans and cash to the erstwhile-working classes.
As others have said - losers are those who work and save.
The enemy's tactic is to differentially privilege those who leech, rob, borrow and steal. It's quite conscious, and diabolical.
"The enemy's tactic is to differentially privilege those who leech, rob, borrow and steal. It's quite conscious, and diabolical."
That's the fake economy overtaking the real economy. It's much more profitable to just bribe the money- or rule-makers.
Yeah it first hit me when i worked in finance in the 90s. I saw how it was more profitable for our company to borrow from a bank than to save-up profits. That's degeneracy fueled by fiat money - a ... scheme... by... the... enemy...
Boom.
Yes, quite correct. Misapplying the label to the symptom and not the cause.
I’m probably at the extremist end of prognosticators. I don’t expect the dreadful economic (& most other aspects of life) storm we’re entering to get better.
That’s because it’s my belief that the entire situation has been manufactured, deliberately, with the intent of destroying economies & sovereign currencies.
By destroying the old, introducing the new financial system becomes not only more acceptable but essential. Cashless digital money/ CBDCs = slave system.
Each to their own, but please give some weighting to this scenario.
I agree. I’m planting a lot of potatoes, but I feel fatalistic. The last couple of weeks I put up a chicken house. I wonder how I will get chicken feed six months from now. They are choking off the supplies of food, gasoline, electricity. Right now mostly just with precipitous price increases, but I soon expect serious flat-out shortages. Actually they are already here. I shop at an upscale organic food store that I noticed kept not having any tortillas lately. After coming up empty every visit for a couple of months I finally complained to a manager. WTF is going on here? Why can’t you keep a basic staple (This is California) in stock? He said, we are ordering but only are receiving 50% of what we ask for…throws up his hands. I said you better start rattling some cages man because we are being culled by Klaus Schwab and other minions. Welding supplies—the supplier suddenly starts not having welding gas. When “COVID” hit, all the serious dust protection masks (that can seal well to your face) disappeared for more than a year. This is a great way to undermine anyone who works with physical material for a living. I could see a temporary jog in demand needing to rebalance, OK. But it went on and on. I don’t believe there is an innocent explanation. I think the choke is on for the “excess people.”
So it looks like planned collapse. Just drain the water out of the aquarium so the fish can’t function, then roll up all the defaulted loan property.
Everywhere I ask, similar stories, adjacent to their field of work.
Even early in mid 2020, my regular woodman, who’s replaced every door & window in my rural home in Kent over a decade, said he couldn’t schedule my last commissions, because he couldn’t get quality timber.
Later, a tiling guy couldn’t get specialist cutter bits (German or Japanese).
Auto parts ditto. Racing clutches not available which are commonly used in AudiSport.
Ironically, my hobby, vintage 1970s Suzuki Motorcycles, no shortages! So a fair bit of 2020, I sorted jobs I’d allowed to pile up. It wasn’t the usual enjoyment, because I was pretty sure the old world had gone & would never return. Sadly, I was correct.
So I fixed & sold a project bike I’d had since 2012, because it was the least emotional for me to see go. Then I sold my only “new bike” (I’d bought it new in 2007).
The last two I’ve owned forever, the GT380 since 1978. I’ve not sold it, but lodged it long term in the secure garages of a mate who has vintage Kawasakis.
This is why I was filmed in my shed in 2020!
But it’s unequivocal that what we’re experiencing is entirely deliberate & there’s no plausible explanation that’s benign. What has happened under the pretence of public health has been to kill a lot of people. Just the NPIs from lockdown onwards was medical murder. The “vaccines” are far worse. The complicity of the medical establishment has been the equal of doctors in Nazi Germany. I have no doubt that this crime is far bigger & will be seen as such in due course.
I’m trying to wake up a critical mass of people. Too few on our side will even hint that what’s happening is deliberate. I don’t understand why they won’t call it out.
Perhaps you will want to consider a Kawasaki KLR. Some call it “the Apocalypse Bike”. Dual sport. Good on highways, good on dirt. Only one design change in 44 years of production and many of them out there, so you can buy two or three of the same generation and cannibalize them for parts. The US Marine Corps used them for many years.
Just a suggestion from an old biker in the woods.
Thank you, good tip, I will look into it 🤗
I am not a scientist. I do watch events though, with an interest in how they will impact the course of things. It’s sort of a family thing—expecting a return to hard times.
I told the people I cared for at the beginning of all this that normal is dead—granted, it was for the wrong reason. The hype that a novel virus was killing people in the streets did what it was intended to do.
But bogus info or not, it became clear that the world we knew had been shot in the head—nothing for it now but to watch the lumbering giant collapse, making whatever preps we can.
How others see it differently is beyond me.
A Titanic moment it seems. The starboard bow is mortally holed but the deck seems level enough and the lights are still on.
I agree. For the first few months, I held the natural hope that this could yet be turned back.
We’re way too far along the path for that. I no longer think collapse could be avoided now.
To your point that this is all planned and deliberate, it seems scarcely deniable except for the credulous and incurious.
It’s been too systematic, too many glaring indicators of evil intent. Too many actual planning sessions, too much video of the planners think-tanking.
It certainly is deliberate, and the entities possessing the wherewithal to pull off this global catastrophe are not going to be easily stopped—maybe somewhat hindered.
I think the US will somehow manage to retain national sovereignty as a constitutional republic, but I can only guess as to how. And the global storm will certainly impact us heavily.
All of my reason for such hope is based on two cryptic verses in Daniel and The Apocalypse. Nothing that I’m seeing in events in the world and the nation gives me any cause to anticipate a good outcome.
It seems such an unbalanced struggle, and our institutions are patently compromised.
I do admire your courage for speaking up.
I do feel the limits of potential upsides from speaking out are being reached. Arguably that happened some time ago.
I had expected that a small but obvious proportion of the population would actively seek to organise to oppose the malign forces around us.
However, it seems that the proportion that both recognises the threat and is willing to work with objectives beyond their own immediate survival is so small as to constitute no real resistance in prospect.
Censorship & keeping us all divided has doubtless assisted that impression.
I had thought in any case that time would come when it would only make sense to focus on “acting locally”. Incremental benefits from doing another dozen interviews are surely very small. But the cost in terms of distracting from local organising is now acute.
Accordingly, while I won’t entirely abandon the attempted broadcast aspect, my first considerations now are organising with the aim of buying time to choose, when the SHTF arrives (assuming there’s ever a moment when that becomes apparent!).
We’re in Florida & that’s probably the best start we could have had in this effort.
Where are you & what do you plan, broadly?
I regret to say that as soon as one delves below the superficial, albeit non trivial, actions one could take, a deep question arises: do you actually want to survive what’s coming, given the majority are going to do exactly what the perpetrators plan?
If you need a tile with a hole in it you might get a local potter to make a tile with the hole where you need it and hopefully they can also copy your glaze close enough to work. I make tiles for my projects pretty often to get exactly what I want.
You may have to grow food for your poultry if you have the room and the physical energy. They eat practically anything. I worry about my birds’ food. I can do only so much. Anatolian shepherds protect them from the many predators in my area, so they range and forage all day. But I have to feed the dogs.
If my flock of sheep increases they can provide for a lot of those needs.
Fatalistic moods assail me from time to time too. All I can do is keep plodding on in the homestead endeavor.
“The prudent man sees the evil and hides himself; the simple keep going and suffer for it” Proverbs 22:3.
Cold Mountain Poem Sixteen by Han-Shan
Translated by Gary Snyder
Cold Mountain is a house
Without beams or walls
The six doors left and right are open
The hall is blue sky.
The rooms all vacant and vague
The East wall beats on the West wall
At the center nothing.
Borrowers don’t bother me
In the cold I build a little fire
When I’m hungry I boil up some greens.
I’ve got no use for the Kulak
With his big barn and pasture-
He just sets up a prison for himself.
Once in he can’t get out.
Think it over-
You know it might happen to you.
—————————————
Maybe the unintended consequences of the Reset will be 500 Million uncontrollable enlightened “slaves” lol.
Beautiful poetry. And very apropos, I fear. Thanks for sharing it. I do wish I were 20 years younger going into this dread time. The national forest all around me would seem more welcoming, less challenging.
Existential crises don’t threaten our species just every day, though, so the fateful time falling in one’s prime years is something one can not count on.
Dr. Yeadon,
You're not alone with that assessment. The Global Predators know that the system is already comatose and something drastic has to be done - whether it makes sense or not. As of today, if you liquidate everything the US has, including the land and all other assets, each American will be worth ~ (-$200,000).
Let me detail the statistics that prove your point. I bet you may not have seen these stats before. The date of my estimates is at the bottom.
US Total Unfunded Liabilities : $169, 586, 872, 950, 543.0 (fed+states). 15 digits!
US Total Debt : $90, 905, 683, 245, 654.0 (fed+states). 14 digits!
US Total National Assets: $194, 767, 783, 583, 435.0 (everything between Mexico and Canadastan + US worldwide assets). 15 digits!
Global US Account Balance: -65,724,772,612,762.0 (-$66 Trillion!!!). 14 digits!
Absolute Value of each American: (-199,166)
Time of estimate: 2022-06-01 9:34:56 PST.
Source: https://usdebtclock.org/
Dr. Yeadon. You are truth teller.
It's a rare gift, I think, to be able to explain complex things with real clarity yet not talk down to your audience. I always try to avoid leaving even the slightest slugtrail of slimy sycophancy but--excellent as always.
Would I be a sycophant, if I said I laughed my ass off at this? :
"the slightest slugtrail of slimy sycophancy"
Go ahead chastise me...hilarious
He wrote a whole post about inflation without mentioning the cause of inflation. That's not excellent.
RE Boomers have it easy. I'm a late boomer and so graduated from college and law school in very much down-times; the late seventies and the early eighties, the era of stagflation. Few jobs to be found. Auto loan rates were high. When we bought our first home in 1989, the price of housing was rising every month, interest rate on our mortgage was almost 9% and you HAD to have a ten percent down-payment in order to get a mortgage. It was very difficult for us to get our first modest house and we were only able to afford it because it needed a lot of work.
Our oldest bought a house in late 2020 in the Dallas area and they did get into the market just in time---the same house plan is now selling in their development for $150,000 more than they paid.
Our youngest doesn't have a prayer of buying a house in THIS market but I think it's safe to say that they will be able to eventually.
I graduated law school in 91 at the height of the first Bush recession, spent a year looking for a job and supported myself with my typing skills as a temporary secretary. It was pretty brutal for a number of years.
I saw the coming inflation last year and wanted to move but was unwilling to pull my 11th graders out of their current school before graduation. Dec 31, 2021 I signed a contract on a house under construction in SC (getting out of NJ!!!) and got approved for a mortgage at 3.5%. Unfortunately due to the awesome supply chain problems the builder couldn't/wouldn't give a closing date until mid April and I couldn't lock in the mortgage. When I finally could, I'm now at a 5.1% rate :(. On the upside, I've already got 2K of gains in the house as the appraiser valued it at 2K over the contract price. Granted my 5.1 is still better than your 9%, but is still ouch compared to where it had been.
Sorry about your inability to lock-in at 3.5%! Our daughter who bought the house in Texas is now having other family interested in moving there. Her husband's sister had the exact same thing happen to her mortgage as you---they decided to move to Texas to be near our daughter and contracted for a new house being built. But construction was delayed for a few months and as a result they lost their ability to get a mortgage in the 3's; instead they ended up with 4.85% and they feel fortunate to have locked that in.
What's cool is that more extended family, including us, are seriously considering moving to Texas to be near each other and be in a freer state. I don't want to leave my beloved Pennsylvania but "I ain't blind and I don't like what I think I see" in the Northeast.
Thanks. There's definitely a flood of people moving out the Northeast. I never imagined that I'd move out of NJ. I've never in my 55 years lived anywhere else, including college and law school (commuted to that in NYC). It was the reaction of King Phil to the pandemic that left me convinced that I need to get the hell out of this state. I really really really wanted to go to DeSantis' Florida, but couldn't convince my 18 year olds to go there. We compromised on SC which I found respectably red and free. The insanely low property taxes were a bonus.
The extended family all have plans to move out of the northeast now. My parents are going to sell their NJ house next year and move to SC as well (unfortunately they are dyed in the wool democrats and will continue to vote blue no matter how often I point out to them how far left their party has moved). Since two of their three daughters will be in that state. The third is in Lancaster County PA and is planning to move too, just needs to figure it out timing wise as she has kids a bit younger than mine who just started high school.
Wondering why your sister wants to move from Lancaster? That's an area that husband and I would consider moving to (from Philadelphia) to get away from the worst of the woke if we stay in Pennsylvania. Is the area bad, or she would just like to join everyone in S.Carolina?
Partially to join the rest of the fam in SC. She definitely doesn't have the worst of the woke like you do in Philly or me here in Bergen County NJ. She loves her area though her poor kids were stuck wearing masks in school as long as my kids were. Spring 2022 was when my governor finally lifted the in school mask mandate and iirc her kids were finally unmuzzled around the same time. She's currently in a townhouse development with a rather brutal HOA. She really would like to get a bigger piece of land where she can grow and raise things.
Didn't realize they were masked so late out there in Lancaster, it's disgusting and criminal to do that to children.
It's almost as if they saw this coming for the last 10-20 years. Obama raised the fed. minimum wage significantly and locked in increases over many years to help disguise the reality. And so many other laws that tried to ease us into this mess, the full consequences we have yet to see. It's like Madoff plugging holes in the Ponzi scheme for as long as he could until the dam broke. Meanwhile, Gates buying all the farm land and Blackstone and Vanguard buying residential homes over market price. You will own nothing and be super happy!
They really don't want to get me to the point where I am on the verge of owning nothing. When you have nothing more to lose, you might become quite unpredictable.
They are counting on that... they do game everything out... everything
Of course they do. They are invincible and infailible. There's nothing we can do. Just bend over and take the brain chip, as this is the final step.
Well said. And this increases the unpredictability of the unstable exponentially. Hence high rise in aggressive crime.
You mean like the Second Horseman having the power to “take away peace from the earth, that men should slaughter each other”? That kind of rise in aggressive crime?
Everything strategized. If we all kill each other, all the better.
I have been saying since the start: Unless you fix the money, you're going to win the 'fight for $15' and immediately have to start 'fighting for $25'.
Fix the money = take away the bankster privelege of printing money.
Yes, definitely. Ron Paul tried to raise that fundamental sound money issue. It was sickening to see how the media ignored him during the debates for the nomination. Unfortunately he did not have the kind of vital force needed to bull his way into being heard. Trump later demonstrated how to do that. He performed a great service exposing the fake news problem, at least. Just that was a great accomplishment, imho. After that he went down under a pack of hyenas, and finally, I think, took a dive “voluntarily.” His stance on “vaccines” made no sense at all.
RON PAUL 2024!!!!!!!!!
RobotRON 2048! :D :D
Ron Paul was a real challenge to the system because he served up ideas and ideals. Drump was a showman. Decent guy though, tried to reduce wars and conflicts. Just not a Ron Paul.
Trump just might be a reincarnation of P.T. Barnum.
You'd have that fight no matter what the economy was. Soon as you hit $15 mandated, those earning it (well, those who can anyway) adjusts their cost of living to $17 so to speak.
And then feel cheated.
Rigged "reality."
Wage pressure explanations of price inflation are theoretically weak. There's probably a bit of an effect, but if there's no consumers to pay the increased product prices, those jobs mostly fall away and shortages result.
Oh, we've got shortages too, now. But very few politricksans understand economics. Remember most of them are pretty ignorant or stupid - just the kids from high school who won popularity contests.
I'm part of the weird generational slice that people with too much time on their hands named "Xennials."
My husband and I bought our first home in the normally-overpriced NYC during the '08 crisis, refinanced in around '11 when rates were even lower, and when we had dual incomes, we poured extra cash into paying off our principal, and threw every gift from parents or bonuses from work at it. We paid off about 3 years ago, and last year sold it at a roughly 45% profit to get out of the progressive dumpster fire that NYC will be for the foreseeable future. We bought a lot more house in a cheaper rural market that was still, compared to usual, moving lightning fast (houses were going off the market within hours).
Despite not having a mortgage- a fact we're extremely grateful for, in our early 40s- we are keenly feeling the increase costs in fuel, energy, and food as much as anyone. If my husband hadn't found a new job this year, our energy and gas bills alone would probably wipe out our savings within a year.
And now we're being told this is A) a figment of our imagination, B) for our own good, and C) a sacrifice we're called on to make to benefit... someone.
I'm not going to say we're poor. But pretty much my entire life as an independent adult, I've been pretty sure I could be financially destroyed in the blink of an eye by politicians deciding to annihilate the economy that year.
If we lived in a mansion, I'd probably still be stocking a shelter with dented soup cans for $0.20 like I am now.
It must be said: you and your husband did and does what everyone /should/ be doing, as opposed to what the vast majority for whatever reason is actually doing.
The "Escape from New York" is becoming more and more common in western nations overall, I believe. The ones who like you knows smoke means fire gets out soon as, and now the moderately effluent middle-class has started to follow. When enough of them has left, one of two things may happen:
a) The cities get leadership which tries to actually fix the problems using harsh zero-tolerance measures, which might as in maybe turn the flow.
b) The cities get leadership which blames everyone who's left /and/ who's moved away for all the problems, asking for support from the federal level and lobbying at federal level for nationwide taxes to be diverted to "fix problems of income inequality and standards of living" between different states and counties" - which is a nationwide welfare-trap and nothing but.
We have such a system. Well-run communes (what we call our counties) are forced to pay part of their taxes to poorly run communes, which can then squander said taxes on stuff like potty-mouthed trashcans, gender-neutral playgrounds or gays only nursing homes like my old hometown of Malmö. Malmö has gone from needing 2 000 000 000:-/yearly in communal welfrae in 2010, to 6 000 000 000:- last year (remove a zero to get a rough estimate in dollars). That's a city of some 330 000 inhabitants, all ages.
You can expect New York's current mayor to start blaming surrounding outlying prosperous areas any day.
Oh, no need to blame the "outlying prosperous areas." It's been a NYC tradition since before I was born to blame the failure of progressive policies on "Wall Street not paying its fair share."
During the worst stages of the NYC COVID lockdowns- around the time we put our house on the market- our then-mayor (Di Blasio) was actually publicly begging departed millionaires to return, promising them lavish dinner and cocktail parties to thank them for bringing back their tax dollars.
By Heimdal's nine mothers, that man had no shame obviously! He is elected to lead and cries and begs, offering paltry trifles and enetertainment a slivver of what these people sees as regular and commonplace?
That he did not died of shame outright!
We have quite a lot of that kind of stupid politicians. One became infamous by stating that "we" needed to tax "the rich" harder. When pressed on what she meant by "the rich", she infamously stated "retired workers buying mobile homes and having them as legal residences to dodge residential real estate taxes". These retirees are virtually always old contruction workers, plumbers, lower tier civil servants and such, lower end of middle income bracket, having saved up to a mobile home instead of a cottage somewhere.
That she did not consider her paycheck as PM, more in one month than ten returees together, as "rich" just added to the feeling of "I loathe you but please shut up hearing you speak is so embarassing I might die from secondary shame".
It’s not so bad, I can’t wait to be a trillionaire!!!
Get your Zimbabwe notes on eBay. Suitable for framing.
I have one and periodically bring it out to show as a warning to my few remaining left-leaning friends. One hundred trillion dollar note, technically worth about 48 cents USD.
https://vimeo.com/695767702
Regarding your house as an asset: One of the things I learned from reading books like Rich Dad, Poor Dad, is that if it is NOT bringing in income, it is not an asset. If it is costing you money it is a liability. So your house is actually a liability, not an asset. It only becomes an asset when it is sold. A lot of people don't understand this concept. So they overbuy in the hopes of making a profit down the road, only to run into trouble should the market tank at the time they need to sell.
Another, related, concept is that of "phantom wealth". This is what most retirement vehicles are based on. What I learned in economics class in college and what I have learned studying personal finance on my own, is that the value of something is driven by what the buyer is willing to pay, not the price the seller puts on it. Now when it comes to necessities like food and energy you are pretty much at the whim of the seller because there really aren't any alternatives for these things. Investing in the market, on the other hand, is optional. So if there are no or few buyers, the price has to go down. What this means is that you may have X amount of dollars in your 401k on paper, but when it comes time to start withdrawing, if the market is not good, you aren't going to get as much as what you thought you had. Back in the mid-90's I "lost" $17,000 in pension funds due to some shenanigans by a dishonest CEO who ran a thriving company into the ground six months after he took over the reins. In January my statement said that the paper I held in company stock was worth $17,000; by July those same pieces of paper were worth less than toilet paper and not nearly so useful! That's phantom wealth.
I am afraid that there is going to be a reckoning down the road, because the only way we can keep things like 401k's and even Social Security going is if there are more people paying in (buying) than there are people taking out. When places are hurting for workers, that means less people paying in to the system. Younger workers also frequently don't have the money to put aside in 401k's either. I've had quite a few discussions with coworkers lately about retirement. I think my generation (Boomers) will be the last to really retire. I also see some of my younger and not-so-younger colleagues make some really scary financial decisions, I mean some really, really bad stuff; they're living paycheck to paycheck, in debt, poor credit rating, bankruptcies, missed payments. This stuff has a nasty habit of catching up to you when you can least deal with it. "Oh, but I've got time to turn things around." Not really.
I could write a whole lot more on this subject, such as the industries and institutions that prey on poor people (and there are a LOT of them). I am going into retirement in a lot better shape than most of my peers and that is because I made a deliberate choice to avoid some of the bad choices they made. There are people I don't look upon with envy; these are the people who have gotten involved with drugs/alcohol, had run-ins with the law, or are struggling to raise children on their own while drifting in and out of a series of bad relationships. No, I don't say "But for the grace of God there go I" when I hear these stories. I don't find anything attractive about that kind of life at all.
Just read an article about how they are trying to make "green steel" now, because the production of steel is one of the major emitters of carbon. One small problem with that, it will make steel much more expensive. And as you can imagine there's steel in almost everything, from construction to cars to appliances to kitchenware.
Just another upcoming contribution to inflation, along with still rising energy and food prices etc.
We will own nothing and will be told to be happy.
Bitcoin fixes all this shit! 😉
It's worked out alright so far.