Sexy Economics – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Kardashians And The Cult Of Growth

“A future of economic growth, freedom, and happiness.” – Robocop

I had a hen who wanted to study economics. She was something of a mathemachicken.

“The economy grew at an annualized rate of 4.9% in the third quarter of 2023.”

And my response: so what?

There is a Cult of Growth in the world. In the United States, at least, that growth was literally in the DNA of the young country – there was lots of space and it was only filled with some pesky Indians who didn’t have a lot of resistance to smallpox or lead, some buffalo, no zoning, and lots of empty land to build Blockbuster Video® stores.

So, off my ancestors went. The idea was simple – fill the country from sea to sea with farms and businesses, eventually mines and mills and railroads and factories and highways. No one really planned it, and there weren’t economists reporting on unemployment figures to Rutherford B. Hayes.

What does the “B” stand for? Babebandit.

The growth that the United States experienced was amazing, and it was real. People built those farms and businesses and mines and railroads and factories and highways. That sort of growth allowed the creation of amazing wealth and prosperity because it was enduring and built upon itself. In those decades of growth, the United States experienced not diminishing returns but increasing returns as the steel mills fed the oil boom which fed the creation of the automotive industry and interstates.

Add in a few thousand nuclear weapons, and this growth of actual productivity and wealth production allowed the country to achieve tremendous national prosperity during a time of relative safety. Some would maintain that this prosperity peaked in 1973, but when you look at the relative availability of exceedingly cheap “stuff” – it was probably later than that. Perhaps a good case could be made for the 1980s when Blockbuster Videos™ roamed the land like a great majestic beast, spewing properly rewound videotapes and Raisinets® to all.

Regardless of when that exact date is, it is likely past.

Your momma is so old she rewinds Netflix® videos before logging off.

What was once achievable on a single income now requires (in many cases) two incomes. People of the past always thought that new labor-saving devices would accrue benefits to the worker, and we’d see a two- or three-day work week. Instead, we see people working more hours for less (relative) pay.

Why is that? I mean, the economy grew, right?

Yes, it did. But the way the economy grew, fueled by illegal aliens contributed to lower wages. The argument could be made that that the economic activity, the growth from these added workers helped everyone. Well, no. Illegals are certainly a net negative when everything is accounted for – welfare, roads, schools, medical care, voting GloboLeft, and Kardashian body hair.

I think she’s got so much plastic in her that if she swims it’s technically littering.

And the “growth” that we saw in many cases was the productive bit of the economy being hollowed out and shipped off overseas. Why? Because regulation increased in the United States (it never goes down) and it was easier to start and run a factory in Malasia than it is in Maine. And if iMegaCorp® can ship the factory over and increase corporate profits by 2%, they’ll do it.

Why? They’re owned by the people who make bad growth.

What’s bad growth? Well, the financial sector. It should be set up not as a casino or a place where the businesses make money selling money.

Growth is not always good. And it’s not always desirable. Let’s take an example: if I decided I wanted to gain a pound of weight next week, the healthy way to do it would be to put on a pound of muscle through exercise. But the easy way to put on a pound would be to pound some beers and milk shakes.

I believe her pronouns are HerShey.

The United States could do the same – we could increase the size of the economy by producing more and better cars or computers or flat panel displays, or bulldozers. Or, we could increase the size of the economy by ChaseCitiFargo™ charging extra fees on overdrafts and GoldmanBlackRock© buying a company, loading it up with debt that it can’t pay, and then selling it piecemeal for a 15% profit.

One of these makes a more productive society. The other is the equivalent of two people selling a house back and forth for 10% more each time and talking about all the wealth that they created.

So, not all growth is good, and not all increased profit is increased wealth. One economy can make stuff, the other just makes magical made-up profits. I’ve made the argument for some time that China’s economy is fine. It is. They know how to make stuff, so they are fundamentally more stable than the United States because the growth in China wasn’t in financial shenanigans, it was in productive stuff.

Did you know it’s illegal to water your plants in China? It causes the microphones to rust.

Does China have all sorts of debt? Yes, yes they do. Have they produced a lot of suspect crap in the past, especially for internal consumption? Yes, yes they have, and probably still do. Doesn’t matter.

Their economy isn’t based on “growth” that occurs only on paper, and only due to paper even though people smoke in China to get fresh air.

They don’t worship the Cult of Growth.

Do I want to live there? Nope.

Again, there’s good news – this system can’t last, so it won’t.

The ride, however may be bumpy . . . as we get to rebuild it – on healthy growth this time.

The Funniest Post You’ll Ever Read About Bank Failures And Yachts

“A major one.” – Fight Club

What did Kim call his yacht? His dictator ship.

Last March, Silicon Valley Bank® failed. In a big way. Because the people who deposited money in the bank own things like yachts and senators, well, they escaped with hardly a haircut. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation® (FDIC™) normally ensures deposits for $250,000 per account holder. In this case, they decided, nah, what the heck, we’ll make sure that Roku® and Oprah Winfrey and Prince Harry don’t lose a dime.

Ironically, today the Internal Revenue Service sued the FDIC© for $1.45 billion in back taxes they say that Silicon Valley Bank™ owed when the FDIC© took it over. Sure, it sounds like on part of the government is suing another part of the government for play money made up by the (non-federal) Fed™ but the FDIC™ is supposedly independent and gets its money from the member banks.

Which are members of the Fed™. Which prints the cash.

If this sounds as incestuous as a Hapsburg family stump, well, it is. And of course I’m going to go with a fresh meme about the Hapsburgs, because that’s what all of the cool kids are doing today.

A Hapsburg walks into a bar, the bartender says, “Why the long face?” The prince says, “Generations of inbreeding.”

The root cause of the Silicon Valley Bank™ failure is that they lent money for long periods at low interest rates. When interest rates go up, those loans aren’t worth a lot, at least to the bank. Right now, my mortgage has a lower interest rate than I’m getting in checking.

Silicon Valley Bank™ looked at all the crappy loans they had, and did the math, and found out that they were worth less than zero. Even worse, their bigger depositors heard (because depositors who own senators seem to get advance notice) and started to pull their money out.

Since those folks had friends, they told them. Soon enough, everyone wanted one thing – they wanted their money out of Silicon Valley Bank™. Rational people realized that if this was a problem at Silicon Valley Bank©, it was a problem everywhere.

Silicone and silicon – electrical engineers know the difference – no one trusts them around silicone.

In a thought that gives central bankers and senators cold sweats (after the previous night’s booze wears off) is the idea that people lose faith in the banking system. Oddly, this wouldn’t be a problem if we used money made out of gold and silver, but since ours is just as much a fantasy as thinking that diversity enriches us all.

So, there’s a problem that’s impacting literally every bank. Some big ones have failed, but thankfully Duchess Markle still has her cash so she can get enough publicity to hide from commoners like me. What’s the solution?

First, pay off everyone so no one is scared and Oprah doesn’t have to fly commercial with mere mortals. Second, flood the system with money. If a bank needs cash? Wheelbarrows of it?

Give it to them.

Thankfully Congress took a break from sending your tax dollars to Ukraine to bail out Oprah.

Last year, banks were paying 0.10% or so for crappy checking accounts. This summer, rates started shooting up, so I snuggled into some CDs that paid a lot more than my mortgage cost. Then, last month, I got a call from my bank where I set up the CDs.

“Mr. Wilder? You have money in other banks, right? If you deposit (a few thousand) dollars from accounts outside of your accounts with us into savings, I can give you a 4.5% rate on checking and savings.”

What????

If there’s one thing I know about banking, is that bankers are not generous except to themselves, senators, and Oprah.

I check with him, drove to the nearest branch of Major Bank™ in Mt. Pilot, and tossed a few thousand in. Could I take it out later?

Sure!

I am informed this is funny because horses often live in stables, so this would be a violation of California’s work safety laws.

I started wondering about this, but soon enough came up with the answer: when I make a deposit in the bank, I’m making a loan to the bank. And if they’re offering me nearly 5% for just parking cash at their place, that means . . .

I’m their best alternative for a loan. Me. John Wilder. Enough so they paid a dude to call me and ask.

Yup, it’s just that simple. And they called me to ask me to make a loan, and offered to pay me over four times what I was making on my cash to make that loan. Reading a bit further, it turns out the way that the Fed™ shoved money down the collective throats of the banks was through the Bank Term Funding Program (BTFP).

BTFP loaned money to the banks, and the banks deposited the money at the Fed© to make a profit on the difference.

Yes, the Fed© created the BTFP, loaned the money to the banks who then deposited the money . . . at the Fed™. I’m not making this up. As of March 11, 2024, the Fed© will no longer be making more BTFP loans at those sweetheart rates. All new loans would be made at the same rate the bank gets paid by the Fed©. The gravy train, or at least this gravy train, is over.

That’s what the Fed© said in January, 2024.

When did I get the phone call wanting to borrow a few bucks from Major Bank?

January, 2024.

Since when do I believe in coincidences? And it was weird, it wasn’t a lot of money that I needed to deposit, but I think they were looking to get bigger players than tiny John Wilder.

But at least they’re not insufferable idiots . . . oh, too soon.

And that’s the rub. If banks are looking to borrow cash from me, how bad are their balance sheets?

Dang, I’m worried! Will Prince Harry have enough money to travel the world for 45-minute meetings with his father? Will Oprah be able to afford more caviar?

And, maybe I should take up loan sharking. Maybe I can buy my own yacht, bigger than Prince Harry’s and I’ll sail past him, and look down on him, and try to give Harry that condescending look that appears to be his Resting Prince Face.

And I’ll write a rock song about it.

I’ll call it Smirk on the Water.

Bikinis, Garbage Loans, And Fishy Finance

“A 30-year mortgage at Michael’s age essentially means that he’s buying a coffin. Now, if I were buying my coffin, I would get one with thicker walls.” – The Office

Most garbage workers don’t get official training. They pick it up as they go along.

The Big Solution to the Great Recession was printing lots of money. I would have (back then) thought that it would have hit the economy all at once. In reality, what the Federal Reserve® and the Treasury did was send all that money they printed off to the banks.

The banks didn’t lend it. They kept it on the books, and in fact many of them redeposited their free money with the Fed™. In reality, the Fed© was scared about was the entire system locking up. It was pretty bad in 2009 – basic chemicals that were necessary (say, sulfuric acid) for a basic, functioning economy just stopped production.

No one knew who had money, or who would have money. As one friend of mine noted at the time, “When the tide goes out, you finally see who isn’t wearing swimming trunks.”

My office above a bank, my assets over tens of millions of dollars.

The inflation stayed “within target” for the Fed™, flipping up and down around 2% during the decade following. Again, with all of the money printed, I expected it to be more, and I still don’t trust the official government figures on inflation since that would be like trusting a used-car salesman on that gently used 1995 Ford Taurus© with only 350,000 miles on it.

COVID was the final straw, though. People produced less stuff, so there was a lower supply. The government printed a lot more money and then gave it to everyone, who most definitely didn’t save it, and in fact bid prices up on everything. Making nothing and buying everything?

Inflation. Or my ex-wife.

Inflation finally triggered interest rates to go up. That posed a problem for the banks. Let’s take me: I have a small mortgage left on Stately Wilder Manor. I’m in no hurry to pay it off because I can get a CD for 5.5%, but my mortgage is only 4%.

How did Metallica stop people from pirating their music? They started releasing garbage.

My mortgage is worth less to the banks now than I owe on it – if I were another bank, they’d sell it to me for less than I owe. That’s a problem for banks that have exposure to mortgages and didn’t sell them off or hedge them.

It’s not just mortgages – Silicon Valley Bank® decided to invest in lots of long-term bonds and such because inflation had been so low. Buy a corporate bond yielding 4%, pay depositors 1%, and profit!

But when interest rates started heading upward, the same sort of math as with the bank that owns my mortgage applies – what used to be worth $100 is now only worth, say, $80. Oops. When the people who put hundreds of millions of dollars into the bank, money that wasn’t insured, find out?

Bank funs. Er, bank runs.

And it’s gone . . .

How bad was it? Of the $172 billion deposited at the bank, only 11% was covered by deposit insurance. I imagine that there were quite a few tense billionaires like Oprah worried that she’d have to get a job at the McDonald’s® drive through, and how could she resist those perfectly salty fries?

Since billionaires were in danger, the FDIC immediately said, “Rules? Who needs those. All money is safe in Bartertown!”

My initial expectation is that we’d see more bank failures right around now as interest rates increased and the piles of garbage on the balance sheets of the banks started to rot. Instead? Banks are still (I believe) happily lending money borrowed by the Fed™.

How do they do it? They manage to do it by having the Fed© allow them to mark their assets to what they paid for them, not what they’re worth. So, they’re lying. I’m fairly certain the Fed™ is buying this stuff to get it off the balance sheets of the banks and lending them more money whenever they don’t have enough caviar.

Does the Sturgeon General recommend caviar?

The rot, though, is still there – it’s only a matter of who pays for the rot. Debt always gets paid, the old saying goes, either by the borrower or by the lender. I do know of two local businesses that are going bankrupt. Their debt is what drove the bankruptcy. My guess is that, combined, they have a debt of a million and a half dollars (or so). Who will pay it? In the end, the lender will.

I think that might be at least part of the big jump in debt that the United States owes. As interest rates go up, Uncle Sam is acting like a raccoon and jumping straight into the trash can to eat the garbage loans and bonds that the banks had to throw out because they were stinking up the fridge. Here’s proof:

England doesn’t have a kidney bank, but it does have a Liverpool.

Eventually, printing lots and lots of money is like a magic trick the magician does one too many times and everyone sees how it works. Will it work this time?

Unrelated, frequent commenter Ray notes this Give Send Go. I’ll let him explain more. GiveSendGo – Loco Needs Divorce from Prostate: The Leader in Freedom Fundraising.

The Big Short – The Next Step Down

“Our investment-strategy was simple. People hate to think about bad things happening so they always underestimate their likelihood.” – The Big Short

If you live in a haunted house, you’re not alone.

I watched The Big Short the other night. It’s about the financial system and the shenanigans that led to the near collapse of the Western financial world, but presented with elements of light-hearted comedy, so, of course I enjoyed it. And having Margot Robbie sitting in a bubble bath describing mortgage-backed securities, subprime loans, and credit default swaps while drinking champagne was genius.

The premise of the movie is that several groups of people figured out that the housing market was fraudulent, and that any human with a heartbeat (and, as described in the movie, at least one dog) could borrow enough money to buy a house.

Why not? House prices only go up.

I’m no Margot Robbie, but when I’m naked in the bathroom, at least the shower gets turned on.

There have been many people who have done excellent pieces describing the sheer insanity of the housing market and the incestuous relationships between the lenders and rating agencies that kept the party going with cheap money far too long. You can read them, but they don’t feature a picture of Margot Robbie in a bathtub.

In my personal experience, a bank that rhymes with Hells Rarmo offered me a loan for over six times my annual income with only my stated salary as the basis. My response, “You know, I could never afford to pay that back. Why would you offer a loan that big to me?”

“I know, but I’m required to tell you about it,” was the answer from the uncomfortable voice on the other end. Even I could see the con from there, especially since they offered to lend me my downpayment.

The next home loan I got (after the collapse, in 2009) required enough personal information from me that I had to hire a proctologist to help me fill out the paperwork.

What’s a three-letter word that starts with gas? Car.

The result of the Great Recession that followed was a retooling of the industry, bankers and people from the ratings agencies went to prison for fraud, and the government decided to create a system of sound money so these sorts of manias were tamed. Okay, you can laugh now, because none of that really happened.

The government just shoved so much money down the throats of the banks that they got even richer for manipulating the system in ways that would make Al Capone’s scar twitch.

What I saw during the run up to the disaster is that the economic taint (heh heh, I said taint) from the housing bubble spilled everywhere. The place I noticed it first was that waitresses became worse. Why? During the bubble, everyone upgraded their job, and good, smart waitresses became, (spins wheel) mortgage brokers and realtors. The mark of a really good economy is crappy customer service.

She don’t lie, she don’t lie . . . romaine.

I wrote a couple of weeks back about how I can see this happening in restaurants locally here:

The Invisible Recession

People are hurting, and the first thing to cut are the luxuries. Some people take eating out at McDonald’s© as a luxury versus heating up leftover lasagna, and now they’re bringing the lasagna. Garfield® would be proud, but McDonald’s® rarely makes money from cartoon cats.

Add in gasoline prices that are so high they make prescription drugs look cheap, and the squeeze is here. CarMax© just recently announced that they’ve taken a 10% hit last quarter in number of cars sold. People don’t buy cars when they’re worried about choosing between day-old lasagna and a McChicken™ sandwich.

At least one of you will enjoy this one.

The biggest tension in The Big Short came from the fact that the guys who saw the fraud went all-in. In one case, Micheal Burry put $1.3 billion into “insurance policies” that would pay multiples of the invested amount if the mortgages bonds started collapsing the way that Burry was sure that they would.

Burry made a $1.3 billion bet, and on top of that, he had to pay monthly premiums in the millions to keep the policy in force. Yet, even as the housing market started to fail, the housing bonds weren’t failing. If those bonds didn’t start falling Burry and his fund would be buried. John Maynard Keynes famously said that “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent,” proving that he was at least occasionally right.

Economics jokes are like bank bailouts. Most people don’t get them.

They did fail, and Burry made his investors rich, just in the nick of time before his fund became insolvent. Burry (according to rumors) ended up making over $800 million during the financial crisis.

All this brings us to where we are today. I might be wrong, but what I’m seeing everywhere I look are people that are at the end of their rope. The reason? Because we never took the pain and we didn’t clean up the financial system and make it a servant rather than a master.

But I have a plan. Maybe Margot Robbie could explain our way out of this one?

The Kids Aren’t Alright: Sex

“I don’t know much about geopolitics, but that is one cool name for a country: Chad.” – Norm Macdonald Live

Ever notice you never see Chad with Chad in Chad? Hmmm.

Technological change has been very difficult for the kids of today – it has changed entirely the way that they relate to each other, how they spend their time, how they are rewarded, and the very nature of the male-female relationship. Since I’m writing this post, it’s about as positive as Biden’s impact on the economy.

Of course, technology had changed the way that previous generations lived. When I was a kid, our entertainment on a Friday night was cruising main. We’d get in cars, and ride up and down the street, listening to loud music, revving engines.

Why?

To see each other. To find out what was going on. To meet girls. The girls would go to meet guys and chatter and drink some occasional peppermint schnapps snuck into a Big Gulp® cup. Often the girls and boys would do no more than flirt. Sometimes, though, well, more would happen.

This was an in-person interaction that was natural. The technology of the car and cruising Main were just minor adaptations of behavior that was certainly as old as the concept of the very first city – boys wanting to watch girls, and girls wanting to be watched.

Does mentioning cruising Main make you feel old yet?

This in-person interaction gave us the dopamine hits of the day. And, even at the breakneck speed of 25 miles an hour, there was an absolute limit to the number of boys a girl could see in a night of cruising Main of, maybe, a few dozen.

The reality is, of course, that we all have a finite number of choices of people to date (and mate) with. Cruising Main was a dance that was as old as time. In this dance, the woman offered her youth and beauty in return for the commitment of a good man. The man offered his commitment for the youth and beauty of a woman. And, when I was much younger, if I stayed up late enough I could watch it all on Cinemax® after my parents were asleep.

Those trades are, generally, good trades. They create a stable society, and provide a woman the chance to find, marry, have children with a man and raise them. Women tend to try to date and mate upwards in socio-economic status. Men? Well, you know.

Hey, derpy girls need love, too.

Now, for many, the meeting place is Tinder©. In Tinder™, women have infinite choices – they are the commodity to be possessed, and they swipe left or right, alternately accepting or rejecting hundreds of men in a minute. In this new bargain, the woman now trades her youth and beauty for endless one-night stands with Chad Tinderchuck. Example:

Chad always has a date, since girls always swipe to talk to him. In this, Chad ruins women. Chad’s a 10, but when it’s 2am at the bar, Chad’s fine with the average 4 or 5 or 6. In this way, that 4 (Flora Foura) thinks that, for the rest of her life, she deserves a Chad Tinderchuck in the prime of his life. She is a widow, forever pining for that man that she thinks she deserves. Don’t believe me?

Wait, is that a lunch lady from 1983? And she’s calling anyone mediocre???

The actual 5 or 6 guy Flora should be with? Well, after Chads marry and disappear, and younger Chads start ignoring her, she’s ready to “settle” for that 5 or 6 Andy Average. And, she’s angry about it every day that she sees Andy, since, deep down, Flora knows that she’s good enough for Chad.

But we’re seeing now that Andy Average isn’t quite so interested in Flora Foura after she’s spent her twenties on a revolving carousel of men, maybe picking up a child or two.

Let’s be fair – most of the things that most men do (especially young men) is to get quality females. If those aren’t available, Andy Average shuts down. Why work overtime when Xbox® is cheap? Why pump iron when Flora puts him on ignora?

¡Jeb! is always on ignora.

Men then go NEET – Not in Employment Education or Training. Why work hard? Why try to get great education? Why work at all? One segment of men has gone beyond MGTOW – they’ve gone full NPNW. I’ll let you sort out what NPNW means.

And who can blame men? When I was in high school, women liked men taking charge. Men were supposed to try, and women were supposed to put up a struggle so they didn’t feel like tramps. To be clear, I never engaged in any behavior that the young fräulein didn’t enthusiastically support, and when she said “stop” and meant it, I did.

It was well ingrained in women that they didn’t want to look like tramps, so they had to pretend they didn’t like or want to make out. Meat Loaf’s song trilogy Paradise by the Dashboard Light is a perfect description of a healthy sexual dynamic of the type that produced . . . me, and probably you, too.

We now live in a world of #MeToo. Russell Brand (who I don’t know because he doesn’t return either my emails or my calls) is being accused of, hear me out, having sex with (really!) a girl who wanted to have sex with him, who was (drumroll) of legal age. The cad! If a multimillionaire celebrity can be accused and lose a couple of million dollar a year of income for doing legal things, well, what chance does Andy Average have, especially since the average woman don’t need no man?

This is, perhaps the biggest lie. Women who don’t have children or a husband in their 40s are, perhaps, the unhappiest demographic on the planet. And, as I noted earlier, women want to marry up. The big paradox is women want to get a college degree (skip having children) and earn a lot of cash.

Women won’t marry men who make less than them, so they die childless and alone.

But, hey! At least they got to make cool PowerPoints™ between boxes of chardonnay and the trip to the vet for Sir Buggles Von Fancypants. I’m not exaggerating. Check this out:

When you sold your family, soul, and children for Internet likes.

Did I mention this is ruining the economy, the family structure, and the future?

The good news (for me) is that I wrote my notes on this post, and I’ve only touched a third of them. That means probably the next two Wednesday posts will be around this theme.

The bad news is that there are two more posts. As much as I’d like to say the kids are alright, they’re most definitely not. This has tremendous impacts on the near-term economy, as well as the future of the West.

But, hey, at least Biden’s still Building Back Better!

Oh. That didn’t age as well as a cat lady.

How Occupy Wall Street Led To The Current Woke Crisis

“Being a villain is such a waste of time!” – The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show

The way she set up the pieces, I think she might be planning on eating them, rather than playing a game.

Once in a while, it’s good to take a step back. Where are we?

First, it’s important to review that the economy is not the financial system. The economy consists of the stuff we make, and the people who make it, and their productivity. It’s matched with people who want that stuff.

Stuff can be anything people want to pay money for: PEZ®. Cars. Machetes. Beer. Zirconium nose hair trimmers. Video game software. Pictures of PEZ©. Gasoline. Streaming movies about PEZ™. Velvet Elvis™ paintings (I still need one, I prefer the “mid-carbohydrate, wearing sunglasses and a sequined jumpsuit” King). Houses. People to polish the PEZ® statues I keep in my yard. Did I mention beer?

Notice that the stuff is physical stuff as well as information and services.

What’s not required?

I have the heart of a lion! I have the eye of an eagle! I have the legs of a gazelle! I also have a lifetime ban from the zoo.

Money. Debt. Interest rates. These are fundamentally constructions of humanity, and are meant only to make transactions easier. They are not required. When Pepsi® wanted to do trades with the Russians, they traded cases of Pepsi™ concentrate for seventeen submarines, a frigate, a cruiser, and a destroyer. Think about how cool that was: for a time, Pepsi© had a navy that could have probably made France surrender in a fury of carbonated corn syrup. Again.

And how cool would it be for a soft drink company to stage a march down the Champs-Élysées while Parisians cried? Honestly, it probably would have led to a better outcome than they currently have.

But what happens when the tail (finance) wags the dog (the economy)?

I guess the best answer goes right back to France, but this time not to around 1990, but to around 1790. What did the masses see? They saw the upper class scamming and cratering the economy while eating piles of bacon-wrapped shrimp, or whatever passed for a delicacy in 1790s France. The system really was rigged, but it was so rigged that poor Marie Antoinette couldn’t imagine actual hunger.

I will admit, they had cutting edge technology.

Here, though, I think that the Powers That Be see the end coming. Remember Occupy Wall Street?

Yeah, it was a bunch of smelly hippies that mainly spent time arguing about who was in control of the collective, and it featured all of the woke crap that is currently being paraded, but back in 2011 only the smelly hippies took it seriously. Oh, my, to be back in 2011.

Anyway, what happened after 2011?

The media and the Powers That Be were scared. How scared?

A neutron walks into a bar. The bartender says, “For you, no charge.” The electron next to him yells “That’s discrimination!”

They upped the ante. If people were unhappy about the manipulation of the banks and the mortgage-led meltdown of the Great Recession, the answer was simple from the Powers That Be: “Look, a squirrel!”

They doubled down on every single thing that is Woke. And, why not? The seeds were simmering as the Leftists took control of the education system and threw children into sex education that was really indoctrination, often without the knowledge of the parents or their consent, was yet another thing that finance could get behind.

And when finance gets behind it? All the companies that require finance get behind it, too. The attempt is gone a bit farther – an attempt to regame the system so that the financial imbalances built on decades of mismanagement could be controlled. Every aspect of finance and money, if it were only in the control of the Powers That Be, well, then the tail (finance) could really control the dog (the economy).

Looks like the Woke want to refund the police?

But here is the salvation. The Powers That Be only understand the financial side of what’s going on – the shadows on the wall. They do not understand the systems that they need to survive. Remember Mike Bloomberg in 2016 saying, “I could teach anybody, even people in this room, to be a farmer. It’s a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn.” This is the shallow understanding of a person whose feet have never left asphalt and concrete, and learned all he needed to know about farming by watching Green Acres.

Mike Bloomberg doesn’t understand where the food he eats comes from. He does not understand it, and cannot recreate it. No matter what Mike Bloomberg does, he cannot use his financial magic to create one kernel of corn, not one molecule of water. Financial magic encourages production of corn, but cannot make it.

Woke culture cannot produce prosperity, or a single PEZ®.
Printing money cannot produce a single steak.
Financial manipulation cannot produce a single velvet Elvis©.
The tyranny of the Left cannot produce a human civilization.

The regular person has spoken this week – Bud Light® is now off the menu for millions and I’ve heard that it lost up to 70% or 80% sales last week. Will it kill Bud Light™? I doubt it. Drunk people often don’t make the best decisions, but, then again, I’m here.

How to remove 80% of beer drinkers with this one simple trick.

I think bud light will manage to survive, but we are seeing the cracks in the woke agenda that showed up after Occupy Wall Street – at some point, regardless of all of the financial shenanigans, at some point someone has to want the crap that’s being produced.

To those that look at the mess that we’re in, I can assure you of this – it’s all going away. It’s merely a matter of time. The economy is not the financial system, and a bank cratering doesn’t destroy all the corn that Mike Bloomberg has no idea how to grow.

Or maybe he could teach me otherwise?

Rigging The Game

“Coupons. Well, what a wonderful way to economize. Well, I could clip them and give them to my personal shopper.” – Frasier

The first symptom of COVID-19? Believing what the government says. (all memes this post “as-found”)

It’s a strange, new world. During my childhood, there was an active focus on one concept: we’re all humans, regardless of race. We should all be treated the same, and have the same rules. Sure, there were programs like affirmative action, but the primary impact of those was (for the most part) in making sure that minority candidates were considered for jobs. The rule (generally) remained that the most qualified person got the job. Meritocracy reigned.

I won’t pick the date this changed, because it’s been a continuum, a bit here, a bit there. But if you had seen the following headline in 1980 or 1990, I think the first thought of people would have been, “How can that even be legal?”

I was trying to think of a Bank of America® joke, but I lost interest.

The idea isn’t just at Bank of America®, it’s also at Wells Fargo™, too, you can look it up. The concept is that companies attempting to get their ESG (link to my previous post on this monstrosity here) score up are setting up programs like that. To be clear, any loan by any bank that’s not rooted in the ability of the borrower to repay is awful, and immoral. It’s also shenanigans like this that led directly to the 2008 housing bubble and Great Recession.

In a related story, I wonder if Pelosi shorted them yet?

If a country is searching for a solid economy, this isn’t it. If a country is looking to make actual equality the measure, this also isn’t it. If it were just this, it would just be (outside of being illegal) just a limited number of bad business decisions, but it’s not limited to just this.

How about electric cars? I mean, I’m as much into having children dig for toxic cobalt in the Congo so rich people in California can have electric cars and feel smug about it as the next person, but to create a tax incentive?

Seems a bit like we’re rubbing it in.

If Apple® makes an electric car, will it have Windows™?

Not to mention reparations. It’s odd that the people who want to abolish debt for people that borrowed money are also the ones that want to pay people for things that never happened to them. I guarantee that, no matter how much is offered it won’t be accepted.

Why? It will never be enough. Ever.

Another symptom of the Kleptocracy.

What about the Biden family themselves? Is their economy wrecked like they’ve wrecked the nation?

No. Joe went from $0 net worth in 2015 to $9,000,000 (latest info I could find) today. How’d he do that? I’m sure he cut back on Starbucks®. According to reports, Hunter asked a donor to set up a job for his “pled guilty to a felony for $100,000 credit card fraud for makeup” niece.

They agreed to hire this felon for $85,000 a year. She refused. She wanted no less than $180,000. To be fair, from the pictures it does look like she needs that much makeup.

Again, that’s small potatoes, when looking at the billions that have already been looted from the open checkbook that is the Ukraine.

The IRS called Hunter and told him he was being indicted for tax fraud. He hung up, and told his dad, “Ha! I don’t even pay taxes!”

And yet, there’s more! I’ll skip over the massive payments for illegal aliens to play computer games and stay in hotels at taxpayer expense while actual Americans are homeless and face bankruptcy to medical bills inflated by donor companies like Pfizer®. I’m sure that doesn’t make anyone mad.

What’s the difference between E.T.® and an illegal alien? E.T. learned English and wanted to go home.

In point of fact, what we are seeing is the looting of an economy. Our economy. I think it’s been going on for years, but the looting wasn’t so visible because it was papered over, literally. After the 2008 Great Recession, there wasn’t really any attempt to make the economy better, rather, the idea was to just keep printing money – Qualitative Easing is what they called, it, which was a fancy way to say that the money would be printed and buy up the weakest assets of the companies that the Fed® had desired to support.

Bank of America™ and Wells Fargo© were among them.

COVID-19 was the lynchpin, though. As the tide receded and undulated, we could finally see who didn’t have a swimsuit on. It turned out, it was most of the economy. Now, inflation. And, to top it off, eggs appear to be the 2023 version of toilet paper, so I guess this year that Halloween pranks will actually add value to the house.

It also looks like the plan that The Mrs. was brooding on, “let’s get some chickens that lay eggs” will finally hatch.

Maybe.

What do Green Eggs and Ham, Fifty Shades of Gray, and our economy have in common? They all make people who can barely read want to try new things.

Oddly, it gets even worse. Since 1988, the United States has paid $13 trillion in interest to . . . use its own currency – the government needs currency, the Treasury prints bonds, the Fed® creates cash, the United States owes interest and pays fees to the Fed™ member banks.

That’s weird, because the United States used to just issue its own cash. Without debt. Sure, if you print too much, that causes inflation.

Oh. I see we’re soaking in inflation. And the Fed® actively plans for inflation as a part of the business plan. I think there’s a pictograph that might explain things . . .

Chuck Norris mines cryptocurrency. By hand.

The looting can’t continue forever. And that’s a good thing. This made-up economy filled with economic nonsense that, at times, makes Lenin look like an economic genius, has a time limit. Merit will return, just as the Gods of the Copybook Headings have always predicted.

There can be no other outcome.

The Most Dangerous Thought Of The Day

“On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” – Fight Club

Amber lost the lawsuit to Johnny Depp to the tune of $15 million. I guess she’s now deep in Depp.

One thing that I like to do is test ideas. Sometimes, like PEZ® and velvet Elvis posters, the idea is a classic of Western Civilization. Other times, like communism, communism, and communism, the idea is horrible. Others? Others are a kludge that we’ve made work. Or the idea is just the system that we have.

This post will test an idea that just might be the most dangerous one I’ve ever shared.

An idea that has been with us for most of recorded history is the concept of interest rates. The idea is simple – I borrow $10 today, and next year I give back $11. The extra dollar is the fee I pay for borrowing the money. There are records that compound interest was charged by the Sumerians back even before your momma was born, back in 2,400 B.C. They even had the math to accurately calculate it. Area of a circle?

Nah.

How much you owe me? That’s easy as pie. But not as easy as a nearly 22/7 pies, I guess.

Sorry, that joke was irrational.

Regardless, interest rates have been with us a very, very long time. And they have been vexing us for just as long. The good properties of interest are that it allows for people who don’t have money to get it, which they like. It allows people with “excess” money to get something for having the money, which they like.

There are some pretty significant downsides. Let’s take a simple example: There are several people on an island after a three-hour tour. A three-hour tour.

There are 10 ounces of gold on the island. I need to borrow them because, well, I have no idea. Assume it involves me trying to get to Mary Ann’s coconuts. Whatever.

A year later, the person who lent me the 10 ounces of gold wants 11 back. But there aren’t 11. I default. I default because there is a limit on the currency. This simple example shows that, in a society where interest exists, eventually there must be either a default, or there must be an inflation of the money supply.

I guess there’s a reason The Mrs. buys coconut shampoo?

This leads, inevitably, to a series of booms and busts. It also leads to, over time, a greater and greater concentration of money (or cash) in the hands of those who actually do nothing more than have the cash. In our society, these people often just print the cash, unbacked by anything, like it’s some amazing Sumerian money magic.

I hear the ladies love a man in cuneiform.

Thus, the financial sector, through the use of interest, both (over time) gains control over society through the concentration of capital. The golden rule? He who has the gold, makes the rules. In this case, the Federal Reserve® (which is not federal, and doesn’t have reserves) is actually owned by the member banks. So, the banks own the Fed™. Which makes the rules.

As I said in a previous post, there has been a concentrated effort to remove the political from the economic, and the economic from the political. Sure, Congress passes $1.7 trillion spending bills so we can send lots more money to the Ukraine, but who finances all of these shenanigans?

The Fed®. Look in your wallet, and pull out some cash – it says “Federal Reserve Note®” – not United States Dollar. A difference. Congress doesn’t print the cash – the Fed™ does. And the Fed© has to print more of it each year, because people keep getting charged interest.

This leads to cyclic bouts of inflation and/or currency default due to the accumulated debt. The Great Recession of 2008 was brought about because of a debt-fueled housing spending spree that collapsed.

What car does the Chairman of the Fed® drive? A Fiat™.

So, what happens if . . . we don’t allow interest to be charged?

It’s a big thought. And the world has had interest rates for a long time. In Imperial Rome, they varied from 5% to 25% depending on the time and on what was being invested in, and there are records of just the same sorts of credit crunches as we see today. And also the need for the Romans to take their silver coin, the denarius, and turn it into a mainly base-metal coin by the end of the Empire.

But I’m not alone in speculating about what would happen if we stopped charging interest. Aristotle himself (and not the Aristotle who makes the gyros at the fair during the local harvest festival in Modern Mayberry) had the idea that it shouldn’t exist because, heck, I’ll let him tell you:

“The most hated sort, and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural.”

I’m not sure if Aristotle was upside down on a used goat that he bought, but what I think he’s trying to say is this: the act of lending money creates no value. If I buy a building and build a PEZ® factory, the PEZ™ factory either makes a profit or makes a loss. If it makes a profit, that’s one signal that it has created value for society. It has employed people to make a wholesome product that, when consumed in moderation, is harmless. If I can make a profit doing that, I’ve created value in society.

If I lend money? Not so much. My singular objective is only the profit from making money.

It takes an infinite amount of Zenos to screw in a light bulb.

How would such a world work? Perhaps people combine to lend money to businesses based on the idea that they might create value (and thus a profit) and take the gain in their money from that value created through the business? People combine to finance a business for a purpose, and thus gain.

No interest required.

How about a house? Why would I loan money, absent interest, on a house? Perhaps the payment could be based on the assessed value (thus making the loan an investment, rather than a loan). If the value goes up, the payment goes up. Down? Payment goes down.

This would put skin in the game for the banks, and they would have a vested interest (pardon) in making sure that the investment was good. No incentive for the housing crisis. Payments linked to . . . value created.

Car lending? Yeah, that’s harder, since that is a declining-value asset. I’m sure that it could be figured out, since I’ve already solved tons of loan issues with the two solutions above. I’ll leave solving the car loan problem to the class. Oh, and the student loan problem, too.

I hear that $221 million in student loans were canceled. Those lucky seven people!

It can be done. It has been done. Oddly, I think it would result in a freer world where, rather than focusing on ways to, uhm, view people as assets to extract value from, people would be forced to seek to provide value for their fellow man. Making happy customers.

Think of it as a thought experiment. A dangerous one that would change who has power in this world.

See, I told you this was my most dangerous post.

The Funniest Post You’ll Ever Read About: Money. Sex. Football. Corruption. Oh, And War.

“No respected psychic will come on this show. They all think you’re a fraud.” – Ghostbusters II

On one side, we have a liar that preys on unsuspecting youth, and on the other, his son Hunter.

It starts with an election.

I know that I was a bit surprised by Pennsylvania. The candidates weren’t great. The Republicans tossed a greasy TV fraud who, until he started running, believed in everything Woke. Ugh.

His opponent? Sling Blade™, an actually mentally impaired man who had a stroke. Before Sling Blade© had a stroke, though, he was as socialist as Trotsky on the day rent was due.

So, who gets the win? Uhhh-humn.

Can’t you see him on a ticket with Biden?

One little win like that, and sure, it makes sense. People like idiots better than frauds. But it wasn’t one little win. It was everywhere that mail-in or bulk ballot boxes exist and where the Left needed to win elections in order to keep control.

I had done the math after a discussion with a friend. In 2020, mail-in votes were tracked in most places by the party affiliation of who had requested them. Leftists had certainly requested them more frequently, so often made up more than 50% of the total.

Fine. More people on the Right vote on the day of the election, so that makes sense. But when you looked how those mail-in ballots voted in Pennsylvania, Biden got all of the Democrat ballots, plus almost all of the independent vote, plus a chunk of those registered as Republican.

I did these numbers based on NBC© and Newsweek™ data and if the mail-in ballots behaved like other places, Trump was cheated out of around 120,000 votes, more than twice what was required for him to win Pennsylvania.

I was thinking that the Democrats might have been interested in having the Republicans have control of the House in 2023, because then the Left could blame them in 2024 for not having all the answers. Nope. They apparently drank their own Kool-Aid® that this was the biggest and most important election, ever. They cheated. How can we tell?

Everywhere the vote didn’t matter, the Left didn’t spend the time and money to shift the election. Look at New York . . . the last time a Republican won as Governor his name was Pataki, and he was last elected 20 years ago. Before him? Nelson Rockefeller. Yup. New York could be called Blue York. So, letting it shift to the Right was fine. But Michigan? They had to get their governor, Waddles Whitmer re-elected.

Why did they have to get Waddles back in the chair? So that they could keep the voting laws favorable to the Left. That’s it. From the standpoint of the Left, it is literally her only job. In Illinois? The Left didn’t need it, so people could vote however. Besides, Chicago is so corrupt that they could generate however many votes they needed in an afternoon with a bored school secretary and a mimeograph machine.

Even in races that were virtual locks for the Right (which historically underpolls) you ended up with blatant theft. What does Washington have? Mail-in voting.

And they don’t even bother to hide it at times, or, rather, hide it in full view:

So, we have the “What” and the When” – a stolen election in 2022. Again. We have the “How” and the “Where” – mainly mail-in and drop-off ballots. We have the “Why” – to change voting laws so that the Left can maintain power, forever. What about the “Who”?

That’s simple. And you may not like it.

Bert knows. Consider this a warning.

Upfront, this is a developing story, and the following is the best version that I can source right now. Take everything here with a big helping of allegedly, because I can’t independently verify lots of bits.

Let’s go back in time. On April 25, 2019, Biden announces he’s running for President. Thirteen days later, on May 8, 2019 Sam Bankman-Fried launches the FTX crypto exchange. Oh, and his mother? She’s a Leftist political fundraiser and organizer when not teaching law. Sam Bankman-Fried is 27 at this time. FTX makes Sam a multi-billionaire a few months later.

What a coincidence! Leftist needs money to fund Democrats, and immediately becomes a billionaire.

Sam becomes the number two Democrat donor to aid Biden in becoming elected. And Bankman-Fried has donated (according to some sources) over $100 million dollars to the Democrats during the last two election cycles.

How did he make his money? Well, in a lot of cases, he just printed it. In others, he used the deposits of people in (what appears to be) a Ponzi scheme. He got high-profile people to invest big bucks in to his firm, and even pressured employees to invest in his company. This is Sam Bankman-Fried:

I hear his favorite sport is phishing. Also, that’s my grandma’s hairstyle.

So, Bankman-Fried did the usual, by begging for money from famous people. And, he was amazingly good at that. He convinced Tom and Gisele (by some accounts) to give him hundreds of millions of dollars to invest. Want proof?

Is it just me, or does he give off a creepy vibe?

And the rich and powerful are now paying the price. Tom Brady and his ex-squeeze Gisele? They were worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I wonder how much they trusted Bankman?

That’s a pretty good hairline for 65.

But Sam Bankman-Fried didn’t date supermodels. Nope. He dated his CTO(?), a 28 year-old Harry Potter® fan. Here’s her picture:

Her name is Caroline Ellison and she’s the reason for Bert’s earlier warning. She manages to simultaneously look like a 12-year-old and also an 80-year-old grandmother which is an odd choice for the girlfriend of a billionaire. Or anyone.

Not gonna lie, I’m hoping both of these kids hit prison so neither of them can take a dip in the gene pool. Me? If I ever get to the tres comma club, I’m gonna follow this man’s example:

But why settle for that, when you can go international? Reports coming in today indicate that tens of billions of dollars were laundered from US government funds sent to the Ukraine. Yup. Money sent to Ukraine was sent, by Ukraine, to FTX, where Sam Bankman-Fried, son of hardcore Leftist operatives, funneled the cash back into the Democratic coffers.

Or, graphically:

If you’re not mad by this point, your name isn’t Tom Brady (hi, Tom!) or you’re not dedicated to the actual rule of law in this country. This is a scandal of global proportions. Again, rumor has it that Sam Bankman-Fried is trying to figure out how to escape the Bahamas to join up with his creepy girlfriend in Hong Kong so they can move to someplace that doesn’t have extradition back to the United States so he can avoid ending up like Bernie Madoff, or, more likely, Jeffery Epstein.

So, if you wanted additional proof of Wilder’s Principle of Greatest Amusement (given the equal likelihood of two events occurring, the most amusing event will happen) here it is. This event has everything.

Mathematically provable corruption and stolen elections. Senile, likely incontinent usurper presidents, Tom Brady, the theft of billions, a brewing world war, the ugliest girl to ever date a “billionaire”, and an actual supermodel. If this was a movie plot, there are exactly zero people that would believe it.

What could make it more amusing?

Okay, that’s close. But, hear me out. What if Sam Bankman-Fried escapes to Venezuela, and Tom Brady joins with a group of Navy Seals to sneak in and take revenge? And Fetterman was really Tom Brady’s brother, who had a pet mouse named George? And then Tom was elected President?

I’d buy that for a dollar.

Groundhog Day, But It’s The Economy

“You like Japanese sake, Mr. Bond, or would you prefer a vodka martini?” – You Only Live Twice

The economy also depresses me. That’s why I drink a gallon of water before bed each night – so I have a reason to get up.

First, I want to pop a signal flare on behalf of Big Country Expat. He was bananated off of blogspot®, and now has a new home here (LINK). So, if you were looking for BCE, he’s surfaced. Expect more of these flares in the future, because more folks will be kicked off of platforms as time goes on.

Okay, back to the blogging.

Back in 2018, 2019, there were few reasons to post contemporary economic posts. I could do what I like to do best, sit back, research, think, and give a few strategic thoughts on what I thought the future would bring. There weren’t a lot of stories of an immediate nature. That had been true (more or less) going back to 2010. The motions in the markets were longer, and we could take the time to post the waves, print bikini-girl graphs, and talk about the problems that were coming.

Why is our economy like a strapless bikini? It looks like there’s nothing holding it up.

Now?

It’s that damn movie Groundhog Day. I have folders of graphs on economic doom that, in a normal year, where each would be the biggest story in months. In 2022, those stories are coming out every week. Germany collapsing and all of their people are going to be cold in the 2022-2023 winter? Check. Britain collapsing and the latest prime minister wants to (spins wheel) import 50 million illiterate immigrants that marry their first cousins because that’s what will fix Britain’s problem? People literally saying, “Global thermonuclear war? Bah, that’s not as bad as COVID®.

I’m not even making the above three stories up or exaggerating it in any way. The Babylon Bee in 2022 has become non-fiction. I’m expecting Joe Biden to pull a rubbery mask off his face and reveal himself as the old man who ran the carnival. He would have gotten away with it, if not for those pesky kids.

So, this week I’m just going to rant. On (spins wheel) vodka. “Vodka, it’s not just for breakfast anymore®.”

Our economic system before the Federal Reserve™ was a mess. Why, people had to have actual gold to back money. And if a bank got sideways? It failed. Talk about incentives.

Gold wasn’t the biggest of the pre-Fed© sins, though. Regional banking centers outside of New York were taking a larger and larger percentage of the banking market. That, my friends was a sin. If there’s money to be made off of charging people interest, and a New Yorker isn’t involved, that’s treason.

The Federal Reserve™ Act essentially stopped the growth of banking outside of New York like Kanye West would be stopped from attending a Soros-family bar mitzvah. But that pesky gold remained. So, FDR confiscated it. All of it.

What did Obama use for birth control? His personality.

Why? So he could immediately make the dollar worth less. It was a con. But one he sold because (smoke and mirrors) I have no idea. Seriously. Maybe it was the equivalent of the COVID® panic back then. If the American public had stormed the White House when FDR stole their money, lynched him, and then placed statues of Eleanor Roosevelt’s face on each coast to ward off evil spirits I think we’d be a better country.

But we didn’t.

I’ll skip ahead to 1971. There are plenty of things I could complain about in the decades between the 1930s and 1971, but I don’t think there’s enough vodka in the house (only a few gallons) and my liver has indicated that it can only take these utter financial rants about once a year unless I switch to wine or beer.

But, I tell my liver, we already drank the wine and we’re saving the beer for . . . hmmm. Why are we saving the beer? Shut up, liver.

Regardless of my weak organs, in 1971 Nixon booted the dollar off of any convertibility to gold. That was because the French had figured out the game: they saw how many dollars that we were printing and wanted us to give them gold instead of dollars. Nixon saw right through that (thank you, vodka!) and just said, “We’ll print all the damn money we want to, or I’ll send G. Gordon Liddy to eat France.”

If you ever feel useless, remember this: France has an army.

Of course, inflation followed. Jimmy Carter was an awful president, mainly because he wasn’t aware of what happened, why it was happening, what he could do about it, or . . . wait, this is sounding like Biden, but Carter was actually smart and relatively virtuous.

Then we sailed. Interest rates were raised, stopped inflation, and after two decades of high interest rates the currency stabilized to the point gold prices dropped and the biggest problems the country had were Hillary killing people and Bill Clinton having sex with anyone else besides Hillary.

Ahhh, brings back memories of a sillier time.

Pressure though, was there to inflate the currency. That was built in. Social Security and Medicare

Hang on. Need more vodka for this. Be right back.

Social Security and Medicare require a growing economy. They require more people working than those that are receiving benefits. But tax policy and birth control and Hillary Clinton’s Abortion Clinic® (Motto: No human is too old to abort©!) made it important to import people to pay for this stuff, especially if they’d vote (D) in elections.

That made the economy less stable, rather than more. But the Federal Reserve© retained two controls: printing money, and interest rates. Heck, the Fed© should call it, “This One Weird Trick Allows Us To Print Money Without Printing Money.”

That one weird trick is low interest rates. When people borrow money, it actually is inflationary. I could go into detail, but each $100 you have in a bank can be loaned out. So, if you put $100 in a bank, you think it’s there. In reality, it has been loaned out, so you think you have your $100 at the same time someone else is spending it. There’s more to it than that, but I’m running low on vodka and, last time I checked, you have the whole Internet. I mean, none of it is as funny as this place, but, you know, I have to leave room for other folks.

If you ever try to do yoga drunk, that can put you in an awkward position.

But that brings us to the Great Recession. The Fed™ and Congress wanted everyone to own a home, so they created massive amounts of money through the magic of low interest rates. Poof. Then everyone wanted to buy six or a dozen houses because they never go down in value.

Then it collapsed.

The problem with a debt deflation as the loans collapse is that the cash supply collapses even faster than the Fed© can print it. That’s the Great Recession. So, the Fed™ tried to smooth things out by “dropping money from a helicopter” – which is a direct quote from the Fed© chairman.

It worked. Sort of. When you do things like that, it distorts the economy in a big way. You bail out banks, but cause other people to fail. But those people aren’t congressmen, so, who cares, right?

Again, it worked. Sort of. The problems with Social Security and Medicare remain, and are getting bigger. We’re pretending that those things aren’t happening, just like I’m pretending that having Kamala within a heartbeat of the presidency is something that Jefferson, Adams, or Washington would be cool with.

Then, COVID. Solution? Print money. Now, we’re back to inflation. The solution is simple: raise interest rates to the point where they’re larger than Barron Trump. But we can’t! Back in the 1970s when we played this game the first time, we had functional manufacturing and the undisputed strongest economy in the world. It still almost wrecked the place.

At least Barron will never have microaggressions.

We’ve run out of places to hide. Admittedly, this nonsense has gone on far longer than I expected it could already. We are living in a time and place where we’ll see more changes in a year than we normally see in a decade. Heck, we might see weeks in the near future where we see more economic changes in a week than in a decade.

I’ll admit, I do miss boring at this point. But, I still have you, vodka.