Sexy Economics – Page 2 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

The Economic End Of Europe

“I don’t get history. If I wanted to know what happened in Europe a long time ago, I’d watch Game of Thrones.” – Community

Why do communist governments always fail? They cease the means of production.

(Memes today are mostly as-found.)

The handling of the war in Ukraine will go down as a historic blunder, rivaled by only a few events in history:

Archduke Franz Ferdinand deciding to go cruising down the road in his ragtop,
Socrates, who in his last words said, “I drank what??” (thanks, Real Genius), and
The forming of the band U2®.

The Western World had already been rocked by the response to COVID-19. The economic shenanigans required to keep the economy on life support had been bad enough. The entire debt-based currency system had been lurching back and forth more than Hillary Clinton after quality time with a bottle of gin and her “Madame President” scrapbook.

And bad things are going around in Switzerland, as we’ll see below. And big trouble may lie ahead for Great Britain:

In truth, the recovery from the Great Recession hadn’t created any real structural changes. The primary mechanism for preventing utter economic collapse was printing bucketloads of cash and shoving it into the faces of the banks so that they didn’t fail in a catastrophic and sequential fashion. It isn’t the only time that irresponsible decision-making was rewarded with buckets of greenbacks, but let’s not dwell on Hunter Biden.

Where are we now?

Europe is facing an energy drought – one that (unless Russian gas shipments are resumed fairly quickly) will result in lowered economic output. How bad? Some have said, “Great Depression bad.” The precursors of this can be seen in the cracks we see developing economically:

If the Pope commanded the cash be transferred electronically, would that have been a PayPal® order?

Now, one thing I do know: religions are really, really good about keeping their eye on their cash. I wonder if there was some reason that the Pope was wanting this financial move? Was it because he like making Papal airplanes? Or, was it because someone had tipped him off?

Why can’t the Pope be cremated? He’s still alive.

People are betting that Credit Suisse® to fail. They’re also betting that Deutsche Bank™ will fail. Why? When banks lend money to people that can’t pay it back, well, unless the Federal Reserve© comes around to stuff the banks full of cash, they fail.

So, COVID-19 hits, governments around the world print cash, but nothing is physically broken. We can (sort of) pretend that the world is fine, and whistle through the graveyard and hope that we can squeak out another year of wild naked greased PEZ® parties, elephant rides, and pantyhose for everyone.

Then, Ukraine. As I’ve said before, with a sane president capable of making good decisions, this would have been solved with a few phone calls, some Krispy Kreme doughnuts, and maybe a few coupons for 50%-off shrimp at Red Lobster™. Nope. Biden escalated all of it.

And, again, maybe (probably not, but maybe) in a world with an economy that had underlying actual strength, Biden could have pushed it just like he did and not cratered the entire economy of the West.

But he did. And now the consequences cannot be avoided. Interest rates are shooting up.

How high?

Oh, surely we aren’t in a real estate bubble.

Oops. But at least the international community isn’t panicking.

Oh, they are? Well, at least Biden hasn’t sold off our energy reserves in a naked bid to influence the 2022 election.

Oh, he did? Well, at least Biden has a good understanding of how energy markets work, and how supply and demand sets prices.

Oh. Well, I guess that’s really scary. Thankfully, no one is messing around with the fundamentals of reality.

Huh. I guess my dog just quit.

Well, at least The Mrs. and I had a serious talk about the bedroom.

All foolishness aside, if Europe has an energy drought that lasts three years or more (one of the latest estimates I’ve seen) the results will be as devastating as a war. Economies need jobs to produce wealth so people can have wild naked greased PEZ® parties, elephant rides, and pantyhose for everyone.

And, despite the magical thinking of some people on the Left, free anything (not just healthcare) isn’t free. Someone, somewhere, has to work for it to pay for it, otherwise it’s slavery. Which, I think, is fine for Leftists, because they never imagine themselves the slaves.

But I have faith, faith that the Swiss will save us.

The Swiss have a long and proud history. This history goes back to at least 1307, or so the legend goes, to William Tell (the guy who shot the apple resting on his kid’s head). In fact, William Tell and his son were in a bowling league, but the records of what team they were on are now lost to us. We will never know for whom the Tells bowled.

Our Financial System: It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way

“So, I am to receive thirty percent for finance, for legal protection and political influence. Is that what you’re telling me?” – The Godfather

Hunter was so stoned he ate a kid’s meal at McDonald’s® yesterday. The kid’s mom was not happy.

I am a fan of capitalism, mostly. Over time it has proven to be the single best way to have people contribute. It gives them a reason – if they do well, they gain more. By combining lots of people competing fairly, the entire world gets wealthy enough to afford a full tank of gas. How we split it 8 billion ways is up to us, I guess.

It’s simple – with capitalism, people don’t try to get more of the cake, they make the cake bigger. Or they make more cakes. And it’s all voluntary, unless it’s for a gay person. I’ve been told that baking cakes for gay people is the one thing in capitalism that’s not optional.

Capitalism is so excellent that it (along with several thousand nuclear weapons) was the primary weapon that allowed the United States to not become fragmented into places like Collective Farm #1701 in the Nebraska Oblast of the Greater Soviet Union.

I saw a the Davis twins at my high school reunion. Those two sure looked the same!

However, there is a problem with pure capitalism.

Morality, or more specifically, the lack thereof.

I used to be a complete libertarian, and I thought that, generally markets would take care of any imbalances over time. They don’t. What has happened is that the economy has been warped.

When I graduated from college, I didn’t really have the vocabulary to describe the way that I felt about it, so I said, “I really don’t want to work for a financial company, I want to work for a company that makes something.” At 21, that was about all I could come up with to describe it.

Thankfully, I’ve spent more time out in the world and have come to understand what I was trying to say so inelegantly back when I was young. Here’s what I’d say today: “I don’t want to work for a company that’s a vampire leaching off the economy by providing nothing.”

Still better than Goldman Sachs®.

And that’s what a lot of the economy of the country has become. It’s led by companies that don’t fundamentally produce anything. Black Rock® financing private investors who bought hundreds of thousands of houses across the country is a great example of this. Why? To turn renters into profit centers.

They were creating no value for society, instead their entire idea was to turn a necessity – a place to live – into a profit center and create no value in doing so. And that’s the segment of society that’s increased – finance, real estate, and insurance. We make less stuff, but spend more time and effort on the segments of society that only leach off the cake, not make it bigger.

I hear the Vatican started an online bank. They call it Pa-Pal®.

I won’t argue that banking isn’t important as a way to store and fund money, but banking isn’t the purpose of the system. Banking, insurance and real estate are services to make food, to make cars, to make radios, to make planes, to make movies, and to make plants that make PEZ® dispensers.

Why is it like this?

The short answer is: because we let it be like this.

The long answer is that, since they had lots of money, they bought enough bureaucrats and legislators and judges that they changed all the rules of the game in their favor. And we let them do it.

The good news is that it wasn’t always like this. And there’s no reason that it has to be like this.

Now, I’ve seen plenty of blogs go off the rails when the writer comes up with a complex system that will be the one and only true system that will get the world out of difficulty. Uh-uh. Not this guy.

But throwing light on the problem is important, because after the system collapses (and it is collapsing) we should recognize the reason that it is collapsing and not let it get back like this again. Ever.

The signs are clear. Look at Boeing® – offshoring an entire industry to teach China how to make planes so China could learn to make planes so they could . . . make planes. I’m not sure exactly what Boeing™ makes anymore, but when they decided that having everyone else make all the parts instead of them was a good idea, they ceased to be a plane maker and began to be . . . a vampire.

Looks like Boeing® hired the Wrong Brothers?

Boeing© isn’t all the way there, but you can see it headed that way. They want the profits without making the plane. They have ceased to be a plane maker, and will take any profit that they can at any time. In a search for profits, they have lost their sense of self.

I believe there’s an old statement that covers this situation very well – “For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” And I think that particular quote covers a lot of the issues that we have as a country right now.

So, I guess if we have a vampire problem, we have a lot at stake.

Copper, Bikini Economics, And An Early Warning

“My hemoglobin is based on copper, not iron.” – Star Trek, TOS

Why didn’t they let the clown make iron? He smelt funny.

The current economic mess we’re in has often been discussed by economists. Let’s look at the word economist so we can understand what that word really means. Eco comes from the Greek “echo” meaning repeating sound and the Serbo-Croatian word “myst” meaning where gorillas hang out, therefore it means a bunch of gorillas repeating the same thing back and forth to each other on PBS® until it’s time for bacon-wrapped shrimp and cocktails at the faculty lounge.

Likewise, the economy has been hit by what the “economists” call an exogenous shock.

Okay, what’s exogenous? I could give another silly definition involving the X-Men® and confused gender identity, but exogenous really means coming from outside. In this case, it’s the current mess in Ukraine, and, most particularly, the sanctions that were put in place.

Typically, I’ve noticed that when people want to punish someone, the idea would be to pick something that would be negative for that person. But, once again, Biden has managed to play Brer Fox to and thrown Brer Rabbit straight into the briar patch – Russian income is up compared to previously. Normally when you punish someone, bad things happen to them.

Oops.

I could probably round up a group of drunken fraternity juniors at any college that still taught stuff (sorry Harvard®, sit down) what could over a round of beer pong come up with better sanctions than Biden and his staff threw together. And at the worst case, they’d come up with sanctions that were silly yet didn’t hurt the United States. I mean, Putin doesn’t really have hair, so we’ll have to table Chet’s idea to give him a swirlie. Besides, Chet is passed out now and Brad has a Sharpie® out.

What do you call someone kicked out of a frat? A has-bro.

It started predictably enough – the energy sanctions have already caused a fill-up event to cost so much that it gives the Lefties goosebumps. This is wonderful in their eyes. Why? It causes less use of pesky gasoline and electricity. Their ultimate goal is to create an economy that produces no carbon dioxide at all, being run entirely by $80,000 electric vehicles to take Leftists from the Starbucks® to their Pilates lessons.

How far are they willing to go? The Dutch have implemented a plan that requires their farmers to reduce their number of cattle by 30% by 2030. So, less of whatever the Dutch make out of milk. I wonder if they’ll take the same stance with gasoline? If so, how will Vincent’s Van Gogh?

Vincent’s Van won’t Gogh. And since the economy can’t work on good climate intentions something will have to break.

Vincent did some karaoke – he liked to sing blues. One Bourbon, One Scotch, and One Ear.

Something to break? Let’s talk about the price of copper.

Copper is a very good conductor of electricity. It’s also a metal that is in demand when an economy is growing. Why? Copper goes in wire for houses – 43% of copper is used in building and construction. Copper goes in computers – 20% is used in electronics. Add in another 20% for cars and such – and that takes us over 80%. I’d bore you with more facts about copper, but it makes me break out in hives – I guess I have a metallurgy.

I went to Steve Jobs’ funeral, just to ask this: “Who is thinking outside the box now, Steve?”

Regardless, let’s look at what happens to the price of copper when the economy is overheating – in 2006, you can see the price of copper (from Macrotrends, LINK) shot up. Interest rates were low, and houses were being built on every flat piece of ground from San Diego to Orlando.

That was the result of an economy that was overheated. Copper popped up in price, and then collapsed.

Copper does that – and it leads. When interest rates were low and anyone who could fog a mirror could get a loan, then copper prices shot up back in 2006. As long as the boom held out, copper held out. When the market for houses finally collapsed, so did the price of copper.

So, that’s the history.

What about 2022?

It started with a spike. Why? Low interest rates and easy money made it so the housing market, even in sleepy little Modern Mayberry was hot. When I bought my house, there were houses that had been on the market for over 300 days. Three months ago, a house hit the market on Friday and was gone by Monday.

Now, I’m thinking it won’t be nearly so easy to sell in a small market. And copper indicates that it’s likely that construction demand is dropping. Not only that, but China, typically a big market for copper, cut its demand for scrap copper in the past week by 47% (according to the one source in broken English I could find). So, it’s no big surprise that copper prices are down over 20% since March.

So, I’m not sure Biden can sanction Russia any harder unless he comes to our houses individually, breaks our windows, impregnates our dogs, and sticks his thumb in the butter in the fridge.

Oh, crap. You don’t think I gave him ideas, do you?

The Funniest Post About Jevons’ Paradox You’ll Ever Read.

“But seen from out here everything seems different. Time bends. Space is boundless: it squashes a man’s ego. I feel lonely, that’s about it. Tell me, though, does man, that marvel of the universe, that glorious paradox who sent me to the stars, still make war against his brother?” – Planet of the Apes

I heard she prefers to be called “aoc” because she doesn’t like capitalism.

In 1865, when Joe Biden was barely sniffing at his first hair, English economist William Jevons noticed something: that Biden’s behavior was really inappropriate. Besides that, Jevons also noticed that innovations that made coal more efficient to use led not to lower uses of coal, but to the use of more coal. This became known as Jevons’ Paradox.

When you think about it, this makes a huge amount of sense. If electricity cost 10 times as much as it does today, we’d use less of it, and The Mrs. would probably (reluctantly) turn the air conditioning up from 62°F to 64°F (23 to 52 megaparsecs/joule-furlong) in summer. To make it clear: The Mrs. likes it colder in the house than a college faculty lounge when someone mentions personal responsibility.

The more expensive or more inefficient something is, the less it is used, which probably explains why they keep Kamala Harris in a Tupperware® container when they’re not trotting her out to somehow make even less sense than Hunter Biden after a three-week coke, hooker, and greasy cheeseburger binge.

That’s weird, because I was always under the impression Kamala was the cheap resource. Who knew?

Hunter Biden on drugs: “Cocaine use? I have to draw a line somewhere.”

I was conversing back and forth about various and sundry things with Eaton Rapids Joe (you can find him HERE) on email since he decided to experiment on the tensile strength of his bones (they rarely break in compression) in a kinetic environment and is as mobile as a Ford Pinto™. That made him bored enough to drop yours truly a line. As the conversation progressed, I thought of good old Jevons.

The truth is that we swim in a pool of Jevons. You might want to soap up when you get out. Seriously, though, we normally adapt our work to use cheap (the non-Kamala kind of cheap) resources.

Here’s an example: back when I went to college, computing processor and memory time was expensive. The CPU was the pivot point. In my programming class, students were actually given an account that charged them per Pelosi-second of processing time.

Last night Pelosi was so drunk she took the train home, which was weird, because it was the first time she ever drove a train.

A Pelosi-second is the amount of time required for Nancy’s liver to absorb a bottle of vodka given to her by a Ukrainian lobbyist, so it’s pretty fast. Just like in Joe Biden’s brain, memory was rare and expensive, too. But when the cost of memory went down, we ended up using more of it.

Nowadays, because of Jevons’ Paradox, we find that computing processor power and memory are cheap. There are two pictures, three Polaroids® and six daguerreotypes of me growing up. I have more pictures of Pugsley’s first birthday cake.

One result of this is that computer code is no longer (really) optimized. Because CPU and memory is cheap, industry has decided that they can be sloppy programmers. If we have overflow in the 32GB of RAM, well, we can reboot once a month. Unless you’re in a Boeing®. Oops.

Sorry if those jokes were boeing.

That’s computer stuff. What other things have Jevons’ Paradox impacted?

Energy.

Food.

Money.

“Holy cow, John Wilder,” you’re saying, “that’s nearly as important as the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial!” Let’s start with . . .

Energy.

Yup. And in energy, especially, the Paradox has been our friend. What energy does is, essentially, provide us with amazing amounts of prosperity. It moves important stuff like fidget spinners from China to Stately Wilder Mansion for pennies. It moves less important stuff like life-saving medicine and PEZ® for unimaginably small amounts of cash.

Ubiquitous energy has made the world small. It has made huge efforts, like moving Bill Gates’ ego from place to place, inexpensive. But as we see Russian energy cut off, and Biden doing his best to make the United States energy inefficient, perhaps so the only source of energy would be AOC’s thighs rubbing together.

Is the Hooters® home delivery service called Knockers™?

Regardless, we face a future where all the inefficiency that we’ve allowed into the system due to cheap energy will have to unwind.

Next on the tour is . . .

Food.

In my early life, food has always been worth a commercial or two showing starving kids covered in flies from some hellhole where they use sharp sticks for money as well as kitchen appliances. I think it was Baltimore. Regardless, in the last decade, world hunger was solved. We had enough food so we could pave roads with Pizza Rolls® and stripe them with Hidden Valley Ranch™ dressing.

Yup. Totally solved. More than enough calories for everyone on the planet to use Oreos™ for deodorant and bathe in Coca-Cola©. Sure, sometimes people starved, but not very many, and mainly in communist hellholes where the local warlord still hasn’t gotten over his devotion to U2® and Bono comes by to make public appearances to show how much he cares. Or Baltimore.

Were people hungry?

Certainly, but they were generally fat while they were hungry. But the problem was solved.

Broccoli is a great thing to eat when you’re hungry and want to stay hungry.

In a world where Ukraine and Russia aren’t exporting grain and fertilizer, however, this changes. Sure, in the United States we can probably count on food for everyone, just expensive food. But that world hunger thing? Yeah, it’s back in play.

What’s left?

Money.

Huh? I thought we were awash in money, so much so that gasoline was more expensive than supporting the Ukraine for an afternoon? Well, no. Money is the one thing that is getting more expensive.

The reason is simple – we’ve had nearly zero percent interest since 2008. The Fed® has been shoving it down the throat of banks. Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden have been printing it as fast as they can, since it didn’t seem to matter.

They also make cameras, the Go-Provolone®.

Until it did. And now interest rates are higher. But who needs money? The same people paying record-high prices to try to extract Energy. The same people who need to borrow cash to fertilize fields and plant seeds and harvest them.

Yup. Expensive money means less energy and less food.

Oops.

Well, there must be a bright side?

Yes, thankfully there is.

Faculty lounges all over the continent will heat on up. And maybe personal responsibility will make a reappearance. Or maybe AOC will see her shadow, but that’s scary.

That means six more weeks of communism.

5 Things Biden Has Done For Us???

“Here’s to failure!” – The Producers

When a cow runs out of milk? Udder silence.

I was flipping through my phone and an article caught my eye. In this case, it wasn’t about the story, “Woman Mistakes Menu Prices For Calories” (an Actual Story) but instead it was “5 Good Things Biden Has Done For All Of Us”.

I was a bit surprised by the title, but, hey, I could go with that. What did the author (a long-time water-carrier for the Left) have to say? It’s no surprise that nearly every adult who hasn’t had a prefrontal lobotomy or isn’t a committed Leftist (but I repeat myself) has been disappointed by Biden. And that was from a really low bar of expectation so that “speaking coherent and complete sentences and not doing anything” would have been considered a win. However, this article title was the equivalent of, “Smallpox And Native Americans, The Bright Side For The Sioux”.

I’m worried that my smallpox joke is old, and that people just won’t get it anymore.

What did they credit droolin’ Joe with? First, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill. This will add over a trillion dollars to the debt. Why should that matter? Well, the last time I checked, inflation was over 8% by the “official” numbers that likely understate it by half or more. Spending another trillion probably won’t destroy the economy that much faster than the other crap Joe’s messing up, or will it?

Sure, the roads could always use more funding, but most of what I’ve seen would benefit the large urban centers with the types of large government plans that Leftists love. I, for one, am thrilled that the government is going to fund electric charging stations and freight rail, you know, things that private companies could and should do instead of having Washington fund it.

Don’t worry, if the government makes electricity stations for cars, they’ll be free of charge.

Second, the Leftist hack had the guts to credit Biden for the economy. Yeah, I know, it was tough to type that without laughing. I won’t try to explain the tortured pretzel logic. It was similar to everything that a Leftist ever creates: a huge explanation of why something isn’t what it really is, like why babies are dangerous or murderers are really the victims.

The economy is a wreck. Even without inflation, the stock market is crashing, the jobs that are being created are awful, and we’re importing record amounts of stuff. Oh, sure, we’re exporting, but it’s mainly free stuff to the Ukraine and marketing of Hunter Biden’s valuable “services”.

I’m betting it’s like sauerkraut, smoke, and six-day old sweat.

Okay, what’s third on her list?

NATO. I’m laughing at that one. Leftists spent decades wanting to tear down NATO because it was in opposition to the place they really loved, the Soviet Union. Now that the Soviet Union is gone and Russia is the current bad guy, the Left loves NATO like Nancy Pelosi loves vodka.

I used to like NATO, but that was when we had an existential crisis brewing with the Soviet Union – it was them or us. It served its purpose and the Soviet worldview based on world domination lost. So, why do we need NATO? Oh, sure, Russia. The same Russia that’s currently spent 82 days gaining approximately six acres in the Ukraine?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m in favor of a strong defense, but I’m just not sure what NATO defends against right now. But, hey, they have 62 acres of office space in Brussels right next to some pretty cool chocolate shops and a cool gay NATO flag.

If the war keeps going like this, Russia might want to join NATO for protection against Ukraine.

Fourth on the list is child poverty. I can understand Biden’s desire to avoid child poverty, since it makes their hair brittle and not smell so appealing. On a serious note, the way he’s doing this? The way the Left does everything: pouring more money that they printed into it. The irony is that the short-term, minor reduction in poverty will be utterly dwarfed by the size of the economic destruction that the unending streams of free money cause.

The last thing on the writer’s list?

Diversity.

I could go on and on about this one, but Diversity as used by the Left means, “not a white guy who likes girls” – anything else is Diverse. I have no idea why diversity is listed as a strength, but everyone keeps saying that, which is like asking “do you walk to school or carry your lunch?” It’s nonsense packaged as being self-evident. Is there any possible way that having sex with men helps the comically named Pete Buttigieg a better Secretary of Transportation? Is there any reason that having more women in the White House is a benefit, I mean, outside of paying them 30% less?

No.

What does Diversity mean to me? A lot of different things.

The end result is this: the Left is grasping at straws – any straws. Anything and everything that Joe Biden has done has turned into failure. Not small failure, but the worst type of humiliating, debilitating failure. It’s funny when it’s just him and Hunter, but in this case we’re paying the price. On the bright side? At least Hunter has something to do . . . .

Inflation, Velocity, and Bikini Economics

“Well, you already know my name. I come here to, uh, unwind, because my job can be intense. I often dream I’m Clint Eastwood.” – Psyche

A picture from the last Federal Reserve® meeting.

There are several things that are wrecking the economy. One of them that isn’t Joe Biden (or his sidekick, the Amazing Giggle Girl) is the sheer amount of cash in the system. M2 is one of the broader definitions of currency – it includes ready cash, savings accounts, quarters under seat cushions, winning lottery tickets, tears from Leftists over Elon buying Twitter™ and, really, anything that can be spent fairly rapidly.

I want to send a shout-out to the guy who plays the triangle in the orchestra. Thanks for every ting!

I’ve brought up before that this measure, M2, has shot up. It sort of has to – the national debt doubles every eight years so they have to get more and more into the system to build that sort of debt. Half of M2 has been created since September 2013. In the United States, we have so much debt you could rename the country “Owen”.

Although (in theory) cash is supposed to grow in tandem with the economy, inflation has been the inevitable result, especially since the dollar is no longer backed by anything other than kind wishes and Nancy Pelosi’s belly button lint.

So why aren’t things worse?

Velocity.

What’s velocity? A simple definition is how fast cash moves in the economy. I’ve had a collection of pennies in a piggy bank since I was in junior high. Why pennies? I spent all of the dimes, nickels, and quarters on beer when I was underage stuff, so over time, it became a penny fest. But those 1,000 or so pennies are definitely part of M2, but have had zero velocity since I could drive.

So, inflation happens when you line up bikini girls in order of height?

The $20 in cash I spent at Walmart® moved to the bank, where it was deposited. Walmart™ then got a deposit and spent it on wages to a clerk. The clerk then spent it on PEZ®, and then it was recycled again. That currency had a pretty high velocity, just like that one girlfriend that told me she needed time and distance. That’s velocity, right?

Some cash moves around. Some doesn’t.

Here’s the dirty secret of the economy since 2008: the velocity of M2 has dropped from a “healthy” economy velocity of 1.7 or so to a “piles of cash under the mattress” level of 1.1.

People hang on to both cash and ratty underwear (this is true – one sign of a depression is lowered sales of men’s underwear) during times of uncertainty, and a quick view of the chart shows that despite all of the “quantitative easing” that the Federal Reserve™ has done since 2008, things are still broken. Cash is sitting in piggy banks, in accounts, and at least some is sitting in dark pools in accounts to prop up the reserves of the banks.

Things get tough right around the elbow.

We’re seeing the stock market dip now, in a system awash in cash. Why is the stock market dipping when prices of everything are skyrocketing? What is the dipping sauce, is it ranch? Why aren’t stock prices going up, too?

Certainly, some companies are having record profits – oil companies, timber companies, fertilizer companies. But how many people are going to buy luxuries when the price of eggs is $5.00 a dozen and a hamburger costs a kidney “donation” at McTransplants®?

So, is this a kidney Bean?

Inflation causes failure. At first, it looks good. It increases some profits, like that fertilizer company’s profits. Housing prices take off. Most people enjoy this, at first.

But after it gives, then inflation takes away. Prices have to go up at the restaurants because beef and broccoli and potatoes go up in price. Then, people look and decide that they can cook at home for cheaper. And those higher house prices? The result is higher taxes on the property.

Now prices at the restaurant have to stay up, because the restaurant can’t make up for higher prices by charging less than it costs to keep the lights on. But there are fewer customers.

So businesses, especially businesses built on disposable income, fail harder than Joe Biden on a crossword puzzle. But that’s just the start, at least as long as we keep Joe away from actual decisions.

The scary part (besides Joe hanging with his invisible friend, JoJo) is that no one really knows what happens when all of it unwinds.

Well, it’s sort of like a bikini picture.

What will make the velocity of currency go up? When people are afraid to hold on to their money because they’re worried that it’s losing value.

But that is (my guess) not quite yet.

I do expect, especially when the stock market unwinds to see a deflation first, across multiple asset classes. It will be “catch a falling knife” time because in many cases it won’t be clear what is a good bargain, and what’s junk. In 2008, gold dropped from nearly $1,000 to $710 as the market melted down.

Gold was obviously safer at that time than the stock market, but even it was driven downward – because cash was vanishing from existence as home loans defaulted. How does that happen? Remember, if I have $100 in the bank, it’s not really there. The bank loaned it out.

So, I think I have $100, but so does the person who borrowed it from the bank, so M2 shows that there is $200. When the loan defaults, there’s only $100. And it’s $100 the bank is on the hook to pay back to me, so they have to borrow it from someone else.

Yup. Defaulting loans and business failures cause the economy to contract, even during inflation. And if that causes the Fed® to print more money?

We’ll be in even bigger trouble.

Update: our appeal at Google® was approved. The podcast was restored (LINK). Our livestream is on tonight (Wednesday at 9 Eastern), at our channel.

Negotiation: Not Just For Breakfast Anymore

“We have been negotiating with men in UFOs for seven years. If we don’t get to Washington by Friday, the whole deal will be off.” – Real Men

Johnny Depp is sorry he doesn’t have Amber Heard immunity.

Elon has been negotiating for Twitter®, recently. I thought I’d dust off some old comments about negotiation that I had laying around. He is looking for a deal. In most of his career, his deals have been very much of the “there’s no way that will ever work” type of deal. He made $3billion off of PayPal™ and then risked it all on SpaceX®. That deal and his hair plugs have worked out very, very well for him, so I bet he’ll be able to close the Twitter™ deal.

So, I thought a post about negotiation was in order.

Why talk about negotiation now? As society changes, there are going to be many, many points where deals will be made. I can’t predict what deals will be available, but you’ll never know when you might need to swap some pickled yak funk for a tub of dingo chum. Mmm, fresh dingo chum.

I have observed that the people who get wealthy off of deals look at many more deals than they ever make. The last time I played poker (years ago), I played 30 hands for the evening. I won two. I walked out of the place with thirty bucks – I had started with twenty. I would have made more, but I kept trying to lose after a certain point so I didn’t walk out of my neighbor’s house $80 up. I would have considered that rude because it was the first time I played poker there.

Lots of bad deals, two winning deals.

That lesson leads to the zeroth rule, mainly because I realized I was done with the rest of them and am too lazy to renumber everything.

Rule 0: The Stakes

It’s easier to win or create great deals when the stakes are so small that you can think calmly and rationally. Hence: rich dudes (say, Warren Buffet or Jeff Bezos) can make lots of small bets that were white-knuckle negotiations on the other side of the table. Jeff Bezos probably uses living human kidneys (still in the human) as table stakes at his poker games.

The Mrs. wanted to play strip poker, but I figured she just wanted to do laundry. So I folded.

Rule 1: BATNA

The first rule of negotiation is that you don’t have to end up with an agreement – you need to know your BATNA – Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement. In the poker example, I folded and was out a buck or two on each hand I walked away from. Several times in my life I’ve walked away from job offers because they weren’t right, and no amount of negotiation could have made them right.

Sometimes, (really most times) the best deal is no deal. Take my ex-wife. Please.

Rich people generally walk away from most deals. People like Warren Buffet could literally do almost any deal he wanted to do, since most companies are smaller than the available cash that Warren keeps in the sweaty folds of his skin. Buffet reminds me of the story about the guy on the golf course who kept talking about how much money he was worth. Another golfer, an old Texan, couldn’t stand it.

“How much are you worth, son?” asked the Texan.

“Fifteen million dollars,” the other golfer said, proudly.

The Texan responded . . . “Flip you for it.”

The question you have to ask is . . . what happens if you don’t come to an agreement?

If you’re Buffett, there’s no deal you have to make. But me? That’s a different story. Sometimes there are consequences from missing deals – sometimes significant.

One particular negotiation that I had to make involved negotiation over some land with a guy worth about $80 million bucks. That leads to rule 1A (yup, being lazy again).

A lion would never play golf, but a Tiger Wood.

Rule 1A: If you can help it, NEVER negotiate with someone worth $80 million because they don’t care, so there is no BATNA-level leverage. Unless the deal is ludicrously good for them, they have NO reason to even speak with you. Unless, your kid is in the same calculus class and football team as their kid, which my kid was. So, the rich guy talked with me.

He offered my company his land at ten times the going rate.

Our alternative as a company? It was spending several million more than his offer on another patch of land. We almost bought the other land, on principle, but my boss decided that he didn’t want to explain why he spent several million dollars because he had no leverage in a deal.

The rich guy? He literally wouldn’t have cared. Our deal, as awful as it was, was worth more than the average family makes in years, and was literally a favor because his kid went to school with my kid.

Sometimes your alternative sucks. But we had one.

Another big mistake is buying into the frame of reference of the other party. If his opening position is that he’ll trade you a handful of magic beans for your two children, negotiating him down to just one child isn’t awesome negotiation (unless you really want him to take both). No, the deal is bad and probably isn’t worth negotiation.

Rule 2: Don’t negotiate against yourself.

I worked with a guy who I’ll call Moe (because that was his name) who was a genius at negotiation. We would drive around on company time and he would take me, the new kid at work, out to look at “jobsites”. This may or may not have involved beer on several occasions.

Sometimes, these trips would involve Moe’s personal shopping, as well. He was a golfer, and one time we walked into a golf shop and he asked about a specific club. He then proceeded just to walk around the store, and the clerk would follow him around, constantly lowering the price. The clerk was negotiating against himself, while Moe looked disinterested, and cut the price of the club in half without Moe saying a word. I tried the same tactic later that week at a furniture store – same result.

Rule 3: When you get to yes, shut up.

This one is pretty simple. I constantly tell that to Pugsley after I’ve agreed with his latest crazy scheme. “You got to yes, shut up. Keep talking and it might turn to no.”

I’ll just shut up now.

How do we know that aliens aren’t vegan and don’t do Cross-Fit®? Because they would have told us.

Rule 4: The deal isn’t done until the deal is done.

When I bought my first car from a dealer (which was a huge mistake in itself), I was surprised that negotiation wasn’t done. We had just negotiated price. Then there was financing. And undercoating. And floor mats. And add on maintenance contracts. And a timeshare in Bermuda. And about half a dozen other things. The deal wasn’t done until after another dozen “deals” were done where I had to say, “No” again and again and again. They tend to push these deals on me after hours of negotiation, when I was tired.

Rule 5: The more information you have the better you can understand what a good offer is, and whether to accept it.

Whenever you negotiate for a job, the employer has more information – how much they can offer for the job, and what other things they can do to sweeten the deal. One colleague I know started a job in management at a company after accepting their offer. Three months later, a new employee of his started, a new employee he had hired. The new employee had gotten a signing bonus: my colleague hadn’t. Heck, one time my boss offered to give me a bonus if I acted like a frog. I jumped at that opportunity.

Oops. He was forever upset about it, and it later cost him his job because he was always griping. Goes to show the moral of that old joke is right: Why did my chicken cross the road? The road betrayed him first.

Rule 6: Know what is important to the other party.

It might be money. It’s probably money. But it also might be looking good to their boss. Understand what they want, and then see how to best give it to them. It might be something simple like being able to leave early every other Thursday at 3pm. It might be that they won’t stop until you give them a coat made from bigfoot hair stained from a pigment derived from the colors Rudy Giuliani leaves on his towels.. Or maybe it might even be something unreasonable.

Rudy was my attorney on a speeding ticket once. He successfully got it pled down to second-degree murder.

Rule 7: If you live longer than age five . . . you will run into unethical negotiators.

They might lie. Which looks and sounds a LOT like bluffing. But it’s not, and you know the difference.

They might threaten. One salesman always talked about all the people that got fired for buying the competing product from his competitor. How did that affect me? It made me want to never buy his product (I’m contrarian that way – push me on fear and I never trust you).

They might try to impact the negotiation by “accidentally” letting information slip. Information carefully prepared to skew your decision or offer.

My best advice? Be honest. No one can cheat an honest man.

Always be ready to walk. Most of the time there are other deals.

Except for Elon. I think he’ll negotiate so hard against the Twitter® board that they’ll need tweetment.

Real Life isn’t exactly like Twitter™. Women seem to get upset if you follow them.

The Modern World, Part I: Health And Strippers

“Learning about Cuba, and having some food.” – Fast Times at Ridgemont High

“Sir, I found the IED – Ice Cream, Eggos® and Diet Coke™.”

I had (before Vlad decided to put on the Imperial March and send the tanks down south) promised a three-post series based around a single theme. As the name of the blog implies, this first one covers the “health” theme of the blog . . . . Unless events in Ukraine dictate, expect parts two and three on Monday and Wednesday.

What happens when society conspires to make people . . . unhealthy? We’ve experienced an upheaval in the traditions and previously self-imposed and society-imposed limits to behavior (behaviour is the metric spelling for you in Chairman Trudeau’s People’s Republic of Canada).

By (nearly) any measure the United States is far less healthy as a nation than it was five or six decades ago. About only good thing we’ve seen is a lowering in heart disease and other diseases related to smoking. That’s a bright spot. Many of the metrics are fairly grim, though on other health statistics. Even life expectancy, which had been increasing, is now trending downward faster than Kamala Harris at the county fair zipper pull.

So, Joe Biden sent her over to manage the Ukraine situation. I’ll bet she’ll suck at that, too.

I’ll throw out this idea: many of the health issues that we are facing are the product of modernity – changes in society that break with time tested traditions:

I can pull up numerous articles that point to how America is the fattest that it has ever been. Homer Simpson was portrayed as comically obese in the 1990s when he reached the weight of 239. Now that qualifies him to wear medium clothes. From the child’s section.
We’re also at a high point of kids being raised in broken homes, which causes health issues as well. I mean, if being in jail is a health issue.
Finally, we’re in many ways unhappier than ever before – opioid deaths aren’t happening because life is peachy. Kids in high school today don’t think they’ll do as well financially as their parents. And people are looking for increasing escapes from reality.

Let’s start with weight – I’ll spend more time here since I think it’s a topic where we tend to blame people because they’re fat. However, I am not particularly a proponent of the idea that self-control just disappeared and that’s why America decided to pack on the pounds. Nope. Things changed which made it much easier to pack on the Dorito® muscle.

This is exactly what AOC weighs when she has both her saddle and feedbag on.

Join me for a minute in a time machine back to the 1960s. What did people eat?

Food. Duh.

But what kind of food? Food with much lower levels of processing. For example, frozen pizzas and microwave Pizza Rolls® and Bagel Bites™ didn’t exist. If you wanted a TV dinner, they were required to be placed in an oven for approximately sixty years and then pulled out. I never had a 1960’s version of a TV dinner, but the photos I’ve seen made them look as attractive as Nancy Pelosi.

They were a novelty.

When I was growing up, Ma Wilder made dinner. Sure, she bought noodles sometimes, but she also made her own, from scratch. I can’t remember my mother ever making something from a kit. She bought me some pizza kits about twice a year where you made your own dough because I think it amused her to watch me try to cook.

No, when Ma Wilder made mashed potatoes, she started with . . . potatoes. Then she added milk and butter and salt. Four ingredients. She even made gravy from scratch. Much of the food Ma bought didn’t have labels. Why would you need to label a steak? I mean, the only ingredient is: steak. Same with lettuce. Same with tomatoes. It’s . . . food.

I think I channeled Aesop for a minute there.

How many moms in 2020 have the time to cook like Ma Wilder did? How many are, instead, thrown to work and then due to time pressures toss the kids Pop Tarts® and Tropicana™ and Kid Cuisine©? When I was a single dad (and much stupider than today) I’ll raise my hand – I did.

So did/do a lot of people. The food that is convenient is categorically different. And, at least until inflation makes it nigh unaffordable, it’s now ubiquitous. Soda pop costs less now (adjusted for inflation) than ever. Buy it in the 2 liter (2 milligrams in metric litres) bottles and it’s amazingly cheap. Buy the off-brand stuff and you can get it inexpensively enough that you could bathe in it.

Food is also available all the time, everywhere. When I was a kid, there was breakfast (I always skipped it due to the high quality of my genetics) lunch at school (I nearly always skipped that because I could buy a comic instead of lunch if I saved my lunch money) and then dinner at home. Mom may or may not have made dessert – it was generally a once a week thing. And convenience stores are selling Snacky Cakes© at 3am. When I was a kid, everyone was asleep at 3am.

They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day. But what if there’s no fast to break?

Compare that to today? All school food is free for all students this year. Pugsley could have free breakfast, a free snack, a free lunch, and then a free afternoon snack if he wanted. Every day. And then dinner, and then a fridge filled with snacks.

The cooks at school aren’t (mostly) getting actual food ingredients to cook, either. They’re getting highly processed foods that contain (in some cases) ingredients other than salt that were mined instead of grown. They contain oils and chemicals that were made in facilities that would make an oil refinery blush. Oh, wait, the “vegetable” oil is made in a refinery that uses solvent extraction and then bombards the oil with hydrogen to create a chemical reaction to make it shelf stable.

Do we wonder why we’re fat? We’re not eating food. And what we are eating is so available that we’re stuffing ourselves with it constantly.

Why?

Moms have to work because society says that making PowerPoints® is more important than raising kids. Besides, it takes a village, right? Oh, and since all the moms are working, a family can’t afford a house on just one income. That’s, of course, if the family is intact. Single moms and dads have even less time.

Yup. This modern world is a winner, am I right?

I tried pole dancing once, but Kowalski didn’t like it.

That brings us to issue two: single parents and blended families. Do I understand that it’s sometimes required? Yes. I was married to someone before The Mrs., and it didn’t work because it was a mixed marriage – I was human and she . . . wasn’t. I kid. She might be human, but the test kept turning to smoke when her DNA was exposed to light.

Society has made divorce a go-to option. Again, I’ve been there as a parent.

But not as a kid.

I had two parents for most of my childhood, which was awesome. (I was adopted after the mother wolf left me on the Wilder doorstep, which was seen as a fulfillment of the Great Prophecy that I would be the one to unite the mayonnaise and mustard – the condisatz haderwich – I even survived the Everlasting Gomstopper© jabbar.) Sure, they argued. Sure, there were problems from time to time.

I never had to worry, though, who Ma or Pa was going to bring home.

I never had to help them emotionally through a divorce. I got to be a kid. And when Ma said, “Wait until your father gets home,” I was damn scared. They were united in punishment, and they would absolutely not undercut each other.

But Pa saved his blue shield for special occasions.

If I was in trouble, I couldn’t escape the consequences.

Now? The pathology of single parenthood is clear:

43% of prison inmates grew up in a single-parent household
90% of repeat juvenile arsonists live only with their mother
75% of patients in drug abuse facilities came from a single-parent household
63% of youth suicides are from homes without a father

I could go on and on. Society has made divorce by women for “fun and prizes” cheap and easy. It’s even celebrated by the “I don’t need no man” crowd. Who suffers? Society. And the kids.

So, the tradition of divorce being very, very hard to get and socially undesirable seems so outdated now. Right?

Let’s add on our final contestant for this post: the financial pressures and collapsing economy brought out by a relentless globalization and continual change. Careers are gone. Gigs are in when an economy has all turned to “services” driven by cheaper labor.

In many cases, businesses are built with just the idea to use cheap labor to financialize the industry. What’s the forty-year-old guy who used to carve gravestones going to do when the boss buys a laser engraver that does twice his work in half the time? There’s not exactly a market for monument carvers.

At Mozart’s grave, you can watch him decompose.

Let’s also add this into the mix: The constant streams of gratification available from infinite Internet porn to infinite Internet social apps (I hear the kids have found something called MySpace®) haven’t created the sort of real-life experiences that were common in the past. Now, the negatives are accentuated, amplified, and immediate. Is it a surprise that kids today are nihilistic and escapist and jaded on male-female relations?

Still, in all of this, there is room for personal responsibility. We are each responsible for our individual outcomes. I can’t pass the buck for my failures back to society, but I can look at the trend. Have the people who got fat changed? Not really. It’s just far easier to get fat today, but still the responsibility of the individual.

Have plenty of kids from broken homes turned into champs? Sure! But the statistics show that parents, shockingly, matter to the outcomes.

If I pick a career that gets replaced, is that on me? Yes, yes it is. But how many people have picked careers where they have been replaced? Twitter® even banned people for telling journalists (who had told coal miners, “learn to code”) to “learn to code.” We live in a society where careers are ephemeral, coming and going faster than Nancy Pelosi’s bouts of sobriety. And what do we do about a generation raised by computers that are programmed to be as addictive as possible without creating actual achievement?

I heard an actual journalist was recently at CNN®. They had Security escort him out.

If I leave a kid in a candy shop politician unsupervised, it’s my fault, as well as the kid’s politician’s fault. You just don’t leave irresponsible people where they can cause damage, even though the moral choices were made by the kid politician.

Perhaps, moving away from traditions means moving away from problems that have been solved before?

Choosing A Path In Life, 2022 Edition

“What’s all this talk I hear about you fooling around with the college widow? No wonder you can’t get out of college. Twelve years in one college! I went to three colleges in twelve years and fooled around with three college widows.” – Horse Feathers

In this episode, Gilligan eats the last cookies on the island. Ginger snaps.

The “traditional” path for students with good grades was to “go to college.” Honestly, this was pretty good advice for a long time. The number of high school graduates that went to college bounced between 40% and 60%, of course being higher during the Vietnam draft. When my uncle was in Vietnam, he killed a dozen soldiers. Next year we’re going on vacation to a different country.

Around 1974, however, the percentage boomed, with over 80% of high school graduates at least attending some college by 1978 or so. The rationale was that a college education was a ticket to a better life. Again, for the most part, the common wisdom was right.

But why? In 1971 after a Supreme Court decision, companies could no longer use I.Q. tests for employee selection, they had to use something because, despite what the Simpsons™ might suggest, you really want smart people operating nuclear power plants. Certificates and credentialism had always been nice, but now businesses desperately needed some way to select employees that were smart enough to do the job.

What did Three Mile Island say to Fukushima? “Nuke, I am your father.”

Thus: college degrees. The more selective the college, the greater the ACT® or SAT™ score required to get in. ACT© and SAT™ scores are actually a very good proxy for intelligence, so, graduate from a good school? That shows a (likely) innate intelligence along with enough foresight and planning to defer satisfaction until the degree was granted.

In 1970, going to college at Harvard™ could be paid for with the (current 2021) equivalent cost of $22,000 or so a year. Now it’s over $75,000 for the sticker price. College prices went up because demand went up. Harvard’s© prices went up more because they were more selective – it was harder to get in so they were a better sifter for I.Q., I mean, who would have guessed that Hawking had the same I.Q. as Evel Knievel? I mean, they both loved ramps . . . .

But another factor was the increase in money available. Politicians looked for ways to encourage people to go to college. So, colleges increased prices to better soak up all of the student loan dollars available. Getting students morphed from “here’s where our graduates work” to “here’s what our climbing wall looks like.” Millions were invested to make a college more of a theme park than a serious place of learning. They raised prices so high that during COVID, college even became the most expensive video streaming service.

Along the way, though, standards decreased to get more students in the door. Not only was it easier to get in, inflation hit grades as well. Right now, the average grade at Harvard© is an A-. The average.

Harvard®, the vegan Crossfit™ of colleges.

Even now, though, Harvard™ is still a great rate of return for students. It’s not the education, it’s who a student meets. Harvard® is useful for the connections with wealth and power a student can make. Get in good with the right family? A student can become engaged with that class, though often there’s a cost.

Harvard® is still a good investment, even though it’s supposedly hard to get in. Heck, I got in. They don’t even lock most of their windows.

Some colleges are horrible investments. Going to Podunk U in North Central BFE and majoring in Anthropology of French Basket-Weaving Poets? Yeah, that’s also known as majoring in pre-barista. But that student could have been a barista without rolling up $50,000-$75,000 in student loan debt. And, if the student majored in philosophy, they can ask, “Why do people want fries with that?”

The Mrs. told me I needed to grow up. I was speechless. It’s hard to talk with 45 gummy bears in your mouth.

So, if I were giving general advice to a kid who was determined to go to college, I’d suggest that they avoid anything that someone can do over the Internet from Bangladesh. I can hire 45 Bangladeshis for approximately half of a Slim Jim© an hour, so why compete against tens of millions? Engineering is good, if you have the knack. Medical fields are constantly in demand – I saw an ad here in Modern Mayberry for nurses. Five-figure signing bonus – and that wasn’t $199.99, it was over $10,000. That’s probably a good idea. The short answer is that it’s not 1970 anymore. A student can’t just do any degree – they have to major in something that will pay the cost of the college degree.

Is college a good idea? Not for all of the 80%. Probably, college is still a good idea for 40%, at most.

So, what about trades?

Just like college, the economics has been twisted there, too. Just like supply and demand has tossed prices for college into the stratosphere, an oversupply of laborers has cratered the cost of many trades. Except for carpenters who build stairs – they’re always thinking a step ahead.

Where did the labor come from? Immigrants, illegal or not. Entire construction trades in many parts of the United States are completely staffed by people who speak less English than Pepé Le Pew. Whereas they often do great work, they are part of the reason that wages are stagnant in many trades. Sure, in 2022 there are shortages everywhere putting an upward pressure on wages, but that’s a short-term event.

I had one plumber who was very polite. When he looked at my sink he said, “I am at your disposal.”

Certainly, some trades are doing well. Which ones? Once again, those that require credentials and those that require citizenship. Anything that lowers the competition.

Regardless, the time when most trade jobs had pensions has passed – many have the promise of . . . Social Security. And in 1970, getting a job that supported a family just out of high school without a college degree? It was possible. Tough? Certainly. But possible.

It’s still possible today. A small-town plumber in Modern Mayberry does pretty well, so well that he became a Christian missionary overseas – I guess he’ll bless the drain down in Africa. The local HVAC guy makes a killing, too. And power linemen? They live in some of the nicest houses in town.

Are there still paths for a young person in 2022? Yes. It’s far tougher than it was in 1970 for a kid today, though. The traditional paths are difficult.

Now thank me I didn’t find a picture of Rosie in a bikini – I bet she has a hairy back. Oops. Sorry about putting that thought in your head.

The path, like the path between Scylla and Charybdis, is narrow. On either side are monsters. It’s sort of like being caught between Rosie O’Donnell and Whoopi Goldberg – you’re always safer if you have a pocket full of hot pizza rolls to distract them.

Pirates, Rail Looters, Fed Looters, And Bikini Economics

“Pirate Ghost would suggest that a pirate died and became a ghost, but a Ghost Pirate is a ghost that later made a conscious decision to be a pirate.” – South Park

Most of the time when a train story hits the news, it involves the comically overloaded trains in India. The typical headline in a newspaper (back when those existed) was on page 7, and went something like this: Train Derails In India, 471,320 Dead. The news story was typically right near, “Local Cat Makes Good!”

It’s been a while since I saw much about trains in the news. Imagine my interest when I found out that people were hopping on trains in Los Angeles (Translation From Spanish: Tarp City) and looting them. What the Corsairs from Compton Boulevard are looking for is . . . merch. Amazon® packages. Best Buy™. Nike©.

If Amazon® delivered by drone, for these folks that would just be skeet shooting, with prizes.

It’s really piracy on the rails. Mobs attack the slow-moving trains and proceed to loot them. They’ll load up on televisions and laptops and video game systems and almost everything that you can order online. Except for books. And, probably, work boots.

The fact that this is tolerated is a symptom that Los Angeles is now, officially, the Somalia of the West Coast. There appears to be no effort to stop the mob, and no effort to arrest any participant. Recent news reports would indicate that an ax-murderer, after arrest, would be given his (oops, California!) xir ax back after getting booked and not even have to post bail.

But try to smuggle a plastic straw in? It’s off to Workers Leisure and Re-Education Camp #495 for you.

When you think about it, using a straw is just like snorkeling in reverse.

The fact that land pirates are actually a thing in 2022 means that, in Los Angeles at least, the rule of law has broken down completely in areas. Thankfully, that hasn’t translated to other parts of the country, right?

Well, about the Federal Reserve® . . .

It’s not as if the Fed™ governors have been caught in a scandal where they unethically traded stocks. Oh, they have? Dallas Fed© President Robert Kaplan and Boston Fed™ President Eric Rosengren and Fed® Vice-Chairman Richard Clarida all resigned in disgrace after trading based on future Fed© decisions that hadn’t been made public?

Say it isn’t so! Oh, wait, it’s completely so. Apparently, the Fed© treats their “management” of fiscal policy just as seriously as the Watts Porch Pirates treat their “management” of Amazon® freight logistics.

Well, at least they’ve done well with the economy, preserving the purchasing power of money over time, right?

Of course . . . not.

I’d point out how bad this graph is, but somehow I don’t feel as sad with this one.

In reality, monetary policy since the Fed™ started has been to make your cash worthless, over time. You can see what a great job they’ve done since 2000. In effect, the Fed© has been in your bank account, robbing it bit by bit, just like the Hollywood Buccaneers have been boosting freight out of the train yard. They just leave a bit less trash.

But certainly, they’ve been operating now as a sober bunch.

Ha!

No! They’ve taken every Fed® interest rate record since 1955 and smashed it! They are, absolutely provably, so drunk on Jack Daniels® that they can’t feel their collective jaws. They are knee-walking, porcelain-grabbing drunk.

Wolfstreet.com called them . . . The Most Reckless Fed® Ever. (LINK)

They put together a nice graph (below) that shows that if you take the Fed™ funds rate (what they charge to borrow money) and subtract inflation, we’re at a LIFETIME level of irresponsibility. The Quantitative Easing (ahem, helicopter cash) and Stimulus Bills (ahem, more helicopter cash) have pushed inflation up.

The reckless bit is on the right. No, farther right. Yes, farther.

So, all of the “Fight for $15” folks are quiet now, because whatever the minimum wage is, $15 is attainable doing temp work. Everyone not making big bucks? Inflation is eating the raises of most people. So who’s winning? I mean, besides the insider traders at the Fed™?

People who own stuff. Inflation makes cash worth less, and eventually worthless. Owning things makes sense in a world where cash is becoming worthless. Who owns things? Rich people. They’ve done very, very well. Why is Tesla®, which made 936,000 cars last year, has a market cap of $1.1 trillion dollars. Doing the math . . . that has Tesla© worth $1,175,214 . . . per car they made.

Huh? Honestly, it’s not a stock: it’s a meme.

I guess people have to buy something. Notice that Elon himself was selling his stock to convert it to (temporarily) cash to convert it to . . . stuff. Even the tax hit wasn’t enough to deter him – he might well have the biggest tax bill of any individual in history this year.

Why? Do you sell a stock that you think is going to go up? No. You sell a meme. And let’s not talk about how the Fed© has force-fed banks billions of dollars to prop them up and increase their profitability.

I hear he wears Space-Axe® body spray.

So, we have pirates looting railcars to take home blenders and game controllers. We’re not stopping them.

We also have much, much bigger thieves – the Freebooters of the Fed™ who have done their very best to, first by inflation, then by recession, to drain trillions of dollars of savings of average Americans, and it doesn’t even get higher up in the newspaper than an Indian train accident.

Looks like the D.A. isn’t prosecuting these guys, either. Guess they haven’t tried to smuggle any plastic straws . . . at least then they’d get sent to Workers Leisure and Re-Education Camp #495.