Wealth – Page 12 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

E, S, G: The Leftist War Against The Economy

“You dirty double-crossing limey fink! Those damn diamonds are phonies!” – Diamonds are Forever

Copernicus wondered where the Sun went at night. Then it dawned on him.

Let’s go on a thought experiment:

Pretend that, having conquered the colleges, having infiltrated the leadership of the military and being 95% of the members of most government agencies, and jetting from place to place on private planes, the Left wasn’t done. No, there was still one goal remaining, and it wasn’t finally getting a date or being able to benchpress more than the bar. Nope. The remaining group which they hadn’t managed to completely own was all of corporate America.

But how would they do that? I mean, the Left has a lot of money for taking over Portland, Oregon again and again, but that’s hardly a challenge nowadays. What if the Left decided that they wanted to only invest in companies that shared their political leanings, and create some sort of bogus reason to make other people do it, too.

Enter ESG.

What does ESG stand for, Entitled, Stupid, and Gutless? No, that’s Antifa®, silly. ESG stands for the three criteria that the Left wants to use to decide if a country or business is sufficiently Leftist: Environmental, Social, and Governance. That seems, at first blush, to be relatively safe. I mean, who wants a bad work environment? And social, well, maybe that means good customer service. And governance? Maybe that’s how efficiently the company is run?

Nah.

I got into Harvard®. You’d think they would have better security.

Not even close. So, ESG, does it really mean? I’ll quote from the fine folks at Harvard®:

The “E” captures energy efficiencies, carbon footprints, greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, biodiversity, climate change and pollution mitigation, waste management and water usage.
The “S” covers labor standards, wages and benefits, workplace and board diversity, racial justice, pay equity, human rights, talent management, community relations, privacy and data protection, health and safety, supply-chain management and other human capital and social justice issues.
The “G” covers the governing of the “E” and the “S” categories—corporate board composition and structure, strategic sustainability, oversight and compliance, executive compensation, political contributions and lobbying, and bribery and corruption.

Certainly, there is some Mom and Apple Pie-level stuff in there. There has to be otherwise they couldn’t sell it. It’s not like people look at a company and say, “Gosh, I wish Google® was even more corrupt with their search results” or “I wish Facebook™ had done more to dishonestly influence the election by censoring even more news unfavorable to the Left”.

In his spare time, Mark Zuckerberg likes to do normal human things, like drink water, consume calories, update circuitry.

Most of the ESG metric, however, is right out of the Left’s playbook. The parts in bold above are things that, mostly, don’t have anything at all to do with actual profitability or performance of a company. How can I tell this isn’t serious? The Left isn’t going after the NFL®. Even though I haven’t watched a game in years, they keep playing the games. So let’s pretend the NFL© wanted to maximize its ESG score:

For instance, to improve its ESG, the NFL could focus on climate change by eliminating stadiums and all the wasteful use of gasoline to get to the games. There’s more:

They could reduce their carbon footprint by using all natural, sustainable cotton fibers instead of wasteful nylon in their uniforms.
They could have opposing teams take electric cars to the games.
They could replace the plastic in their helmets with sustainably harvested weaved plant fiber.
They could replace the uniform types of grass on the field by using native plant species. Think of it – in Arizona you could have cactus and sand instead of lush lawns (that use far too much water!).

That takes care of the E! What about the S?

Workforce diversity? The players on the team could easily be selected so that they strictly follow the demographics of the United States, including half of them being women, and some being senior citizens. The handicapped would need to be represented as well, and not just as placekickers like they usually do.
Pay equity could be easily taken care of by having no member of the team or of the management staff make a time more than 20 times what the guy selling sodas in the stands makes each season, which would mean the CEO pay would be capped around $80,000. And if the starting QB got money from promotions, he’d have to split it equally with everyone in the organization. Equity, after all.

Maybe he can put that on a slogan for the endzone?

That takes part of most of the S, especially after the owner is forced to give up 90% of his team ownership to random citizens of the world, so a Sri Lankan goat farmer can understand the joy of owning an NFL™ franchise.

What about governance? Well, we could appoint people from every country in the world to the board of each NFL® team. And no more cozying up to local, state, and federal officials for more tax bux.

So why don’t people talk about applying the ESG metric to the NFL™? It’s simple.

People take football seriously.

All of the nonsense the Left loves to spout falls apart when it comes to one, simple business that everyone can understand and easily see the idiocy of the ESG metric.

Sri Lanka couldn’t believe it was riot season already! They still had their “I support Ukraine” banners up.

In real life, Sri Lanka was ranked by ESG score. They scored a 99 in Environmental, an 88 in Social, and a 47 in governance. Sri Lanka is facing its “worst economic collapse in its modern history” according to some economist somewhere that you can Google® search for if you’re bored. But its ESG was so good, right? They only used natural fertilizer, and lowered their carbon footprint! They also were starving and had to import lots of extra food.

It’s that same environmental rating that countries like the Netherlands and Canada are chasing when they are preparing to mandate that their farmers have fewer cows and use less fertilizer. Both of those things, you see, hurt the carbon footprint and thus make the environmental score of the country go down. If it causes people to go bankrupt to buy Cheetos® or starve, I guess ESG is a way to make sure that everyone in the world has the same chance to be hungry, poor, or exposed to social unrest as the least developed nation. It could happen here. Oops. Forgot about Chicago.

It is happening here, at least with the ‘S’ part of ESG. Looks like we’ll have Equity soon with countries that riot over it being (rolls dice) Tuesday soon enough.

When he fires an employee, he fires an employee.

Because of this fantastic success at the national level, Wall Street™ is pushing ESG at the corporate level. The aptly-named Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock™ which currently controls over eight trillion dollars in investments is a big fan. Eight trillion dollars? That’s almost enough to buy two full tanks of gas in Biden’s America. Think a man who controls eight trillion worth of cash has some pull?

The aptly-named Larry Fink certainly does. Individual shareholders don’t vote, so the aptly-named Larry Fink’s eight trillion in stock probably controls two or three times that level of shareholder votes. Alone. The actual ESG rating process is so murky and subject to manipulation that the ESG for a company can be as fraudulent as Joe Biden’s hair plugs.

So, yeah, the Left has constantly used corporate America for funding, and now they’ve figured out a way to make business support whatever crazy policy that the Left wants to use to turn the United States into the next version of Sri Lanka.

Thankfully, he planted a tree to offset his carbon emissions.

The aptly-named Larry Fink has a private jet, and houses everywhere, and burns more carbon in a week than most people will burn in a lifetime. Won’t you please reduce your carbon footprint so he can continue to do this? I mean, it would up your personal ESG score . . . .

Student Loans, Death, And Taxes

“I’ve got Doctor Euthanasia’s home number for that eventuality.” – Absolutely Fabulous

They should thank their student loans – I don’t think they could ever repay them.

I had another theme picked for today, but that’s okay – it can wait for a few posts. It’ll keep. But when I heard that Joe Biden was planning on relieving up to $10,000 in student debt for all borrowers that make less than $125,000, I was astonished.

The late genius P.J. O’Rourke described exactly this situation:

“I have only one firm belief about the American political system, and that is this: God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat. God is an elderly or, at any rate, middle-aged male, a stern fellow, patriarchal rather than paternal and a great believer in rules and regulations. He holds men strictly accountable for their actions. He has little apparent concern for the material well-being of the disadvantaged. He is politically connected, socially powerful and holds the mortgage on virtually everything in the world. God is difficult. God is unsentimental. It is very hard to get into God’s heavenly country club.

“Santa Claus is another matter. He’s cute. He’s nonthreatening. He’s always cheerful. And he loves animals. He may know who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, but he never does anything about it. He gives everyone everything they want without thought of a quid pro quo. He works hard for charities, and he’s famously generous to the poor. Santa Claus is preferable to God in every way but one: There is no such thing as Santa Claus.”

First, $10,000 doesn’t sound like all that much, right? Further, that would wipe out entirely all the debt from about a third of the borrowers. So, I pulled out my calculator. A third of 45,000,000 is 15,000,000 people, who presumably vote. Assuming that their average debt . . .

That’s $90 billion. Ugh! Some people work a whole year and don’t make that much money. I checked the numbers again, and was, like, um, that’s right. So what about the other two-thirds?

I assumed that some of them made more than $125,000 a year – Biden’s cut-off for his “gift”. I decided to play it conservatively – assume that only 25,000,000 people would get the full $10,000 airdropped into their lives. That’s another $250 billion.

Altogether, that’s $340 billion. $340,000,000,000.

This is an astonishing sum for someone to just give away as free money. And forget the moral hazard associated with doing this – paying debts is honorable, especially when everyone else is required to. You’re not a loan.

I guess someone didn’t get the Barbie® they were looking for from Santa Biden.

But since (spins wheel) at least Bush II (and you could argue Nixon was on the bandwagon, too), the competition by presidents of either party has been to shovel the most money out the door to people as fast as they could in year two of their presidency to juice the economy so all the cylinders would be pumping when their next election hit. And since they only have two terms, who cares what happens then?

People vote in favor of good economies, so a good economy going into the 2024 election will help get votes.

Originally, that $340,000,000,000 bought a lot of nonfat vanilla lattes on the way to Introduction to Feminist Non-Binary Ancient Indigenous Australian Literature 201 at good old We Have A Climbing Wall University. I’m betting that $340,000,000,000 will buy a lot of votes from the graduate-level baristas that took that class.

What will be the result of all of that extra cash floating around the economy?

It does look like it will be tax free . . . but I’m betting lots of those folks wouldn’t cheat on their taxes, I mean, what kind of example would that be for their 23 dependents?

It’s hard to tell. Normally, I’d say almost certain inflation. I think that even Biden is dimly aware that all of the previous inflation has destroyed the housing market – sales are down over 20% from last year. That destroys a lot of value. And if the market drops?

The bigger question is this: giving a single politician the unilateral authority to make multibillion-dollar decisions on a whim is madness. It turns the executive into a king, handing out largess to whoever he feels like. I mean, if Biden remembers.

But what other powers does a king have?

The power of death. And that’s in play up in Canada.

3.3% of deaths? Those are rookie numbers, Canada!

They are rookie numbers, and Canada is doing its best to pump them up. Remember, coffee is only for closers. And Canada wants to be a closer. Read a headline the other day – a Canadian veteran has PTSD. Doctor’s suggestion?

In Canada, if you’re feeling suicidal, apparently the authorities want you to get help. As in someone to help you kill yourself.

Yup, Canada suggested he run away to go live on a farm where he can run and play, like all those goldfish I had as a kid. Except in this case, if you go to a doctor because you have a cold, they’ll suggest, without you asking, if you want to have a dirt nap instead. Okay, not a cold. But PTSD.

I can’t imagine why they’re suggesting that. Perhaps it’s because it’s cheaper to bury someone than to give them “free” healthcare?

Suicide? That’s the last thing I’d ever do.

Oddly, it turns out that when people have goals, values, and the prospect of a decent life ahead of them, euthanasia is an idea that doesn’t sound so good.

Except to them. And if it’s you dying.

Huh, somehow they no longer sound like Santa. Because? He isn’t real. If you want to know how they really feel, re-read the Tweet® above.

Total Recall: Looking Back On The COVID Crisis

“You had a dishwasher box to sleep in? I didn’t even know sleep. It was pretty much twenty-four seven ball gags, brownie mix and clown porn” – Deadpool

One girl I dated in High School asked if she used too much makeup. I replied, “Dunno, depends on if you are trying to kill Batman.”

[Wilder Note: I’ve been meaning to dig this post out for a while, especially since something that WordPress did mangled a bit of the original with weird characters. I wrote it originally on March 25, 2020. This was meant as a prediction of what we’d see going through the ‘Rona. It has been wilder than even I would expect, and in many ways I think I undersold what we’d see. That being said, I’m not sure we’re done going through The Cliff phase and into Disillusionment. I’d love your feedback.]

“Great, now it’s the end of the world and we can’t get a new dishwasher,” The Mrs. actually said, after I finally relented that it would probably cost more to fix the dodgy old dishwasher than a new one would cost. Plus, the old dishwasher is stainless steel, so if it were a hundred yards away, it would make quite a nice practice target. I call that a win-win. Besides, Amazon® actually has them in stock, so I could theoretically have one by next week.

See? You can get quality appliances during the end of the world.

I started working from home yesterday, which was nice. When it was lunchtime, I wasn’t hungry, but I was nice and warm so I took a nap right in my home office which is also known as the couch. Good times. I do have a concern: The Mrs. slapped my heinie as I walked by and said, “nice butt” so I’m thinking of bringing this up with HR. I want to be treated as more than a sexual object. I mean, not much more, but more.

As much as you might be interested in my derriere, I really do want to talk about COVID-19 and get to the bottom of how the issue will progress in the coming months. While each crisis is different, they are all sort-of-predictable because in the end, people don’t change all that much, even though circumstances do. Certainly, we want to get this all behind us, in the rearview, so to speak.

Okay, I’ll stop. Seven synonyms for the posterior in two paragraphs are quite enough. I don’t want you to think I’m a bum.

But what is this pattern I mentioned? Here are, as near as I can determine, Eight Stages of a Crisis. This provides way in which each crisis can be evaluated compared to the others this is my modification of work originally done by Zunin and Myers.

This is like the Kubler-Ross five stages of grief, but with the apocalypse in mind. Why settle for one death, when you can have millions or billions on your mind? It’s so nice and cheery. The nice part of using this model is that you can gauge where we are in the current COVID-19 mess.

Who would he assassinate for a Klondike® bar? Apparently Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

The Warning

This is the opening stage of a crisis. It may be short, as in 9/11, or it may be a slow-motion collapse like the gradually increasing troop buildups and mobilizations that led to World War I. Everyone wanted to stop it, but no one was sane enough to say no. The Warning before the first Civil War was literally decades in length.

In the current COVID crisis, The Warning came during and just after the December impeachment. With the focus of the country elsewhere, who cared about the flu? We don’t trust the media very much. Why? They don’t seem trustworthy. Example: when Trump shuts down air transport to China, CNN® says it’s racist. When China shuts down air transport from the United States, CNN™ says it’s a wise and prudent move by China’s benevolent leadership.

In a world where CNN© and the Chinese government have similar levels of credibility we tend to forget the ending to the story of the boy who cried wolf: in the end, the wolves really attacked.

How did they not see this coming?

The Event

The Event is generally not long, but it can be. It’s the Shot Heard Round the World at Lexington and Concord in the Revolutionary War. The Event is when the rules change forever, and nothing can ever make the world go back to the way it was. It’s the spark that lights the fire. When people look back, everyone can see The Event.

Nothing is ever the same afterwards. The Event changes everyone that it touches, and often ends up changing systems permanently. It is disruptive. It may not be the reason that everything fails, it might just be a small event toppling an already unstable system. In a crisis like 9/11, the event is obvious and instant. COVID-19 has led to a slow-rolling avalanche across the economy. Was it poised for a fall anyway? Possibly.

As a longer cascade, what will be The Event that history will use to remember COVID-19?

In one of my more frightening thoughts: what if we haven’t seen The Event yet?

I’m not sure he’s koalafied to make that decision.

Disbelief

When things have changed, and changed drastically, people refuse to believe it. When the power is out because a tree fell on the power lines, I will walk into a room an automatically flip the light switch. Why? Habit, partially. But there’s a part of my mind that is existing in Disbelief, perhaps, that doesn’t believe that the power could ever be gone.

Disbelief isn’t a coping strategy, and it’s not an attempt of the mind to protect itself, at least in a healthy person. It’s more inertia. You’re used to the world being a certain way, and when it isn’t, part of your mind isn’t quite ready to process it.

This might be an overreaction. COVID-19 might be no worse than the flu. But that isn’t explained by the reactions we’ve seen so far from places that got it earlier than the United States. Italy is locked down. In two weeks, we will know more. In a month, I think, we will have certainty.

In order to calm panicked customers, Wal-Mart opened up a second register.

Panic

At some point, the mind is confronted with the new reality and forced to accept it. But the rules are new, and unknown. What to do? One could take a deep breath, and review the situation and think logically or? One could Panic. Panic is easier, and doesn’t require a lot of thought.

Panic is the natural reaction when your brain realizes that it has done zero to prepare for the new reality. So, what to do? Buy staples as required to build up the stockpile you’ve accumulated over time? Or buy 550 cans of Diet Mountain Dew®? Or just buy toilet paper, because everyone else is and you don’t know what to do or have any independent thought? Toilet paper purchasing is Panic.

Not all heroes are able to walk. I mean, some gained 400 lbs on the couch.

Heroism

While the Panic is ongoing, the first glimmer of Heroism starts to show. Brave men and women working in the medical field are the first signs of Heroism. Donald Trump talking with Al Sharpton to address the problems he sees is Heroism is realizing that there is a greater good, and that sacrifice is required. Heroism is embodied throughout the response to the crises where a few have an opportunity to save many, and where enemies put aside squabbles for a time because it’s the right thing to do.

There was a family story: Grandma Wilder went during World War II to weld Liberty ships at the Alameda Ship Yard. She would regularly get things sent to her from her mother who lived in the country in the middle of Flyover. Needles were rationed in San Francisco, but not in Flyover. Sugar was rationed in San Francisco, but not in Flyover. Why ration needles and sugar? To build common purpose, so even people not piloting P-51s or jumping out of landing craft at Iwo Jima could feel like they were doing their part. To be fair, rationing was necessary in wide segments of the economy, it wasn’t a fake, but it did help bring everyone together.

Right now Heroism is going on, and we aren’t even asked to do anything more than to sit down and watch Netflix® unless we’re keeping vital industries going. Here’s a link to Aesop’s place that shows the quiet heroism going on out there (LINK). Read it all.

I read the other day that coyotes are about 10 miles an hour faster than road runners. My entire childhood was a lie.

The Cliff

Keeping order requires energy. Some part of the energy of the system is put into keeping order. In a time of significant social cohesion, like World War II, the United States didn’t face The Cliff, even though virtually every other developed nation did. Instead, the energy that the crisis took was replaced by people working together.

Most of the time in a real crisis, however, there’s The Cliff. I wrote about it here: Seneca’s Cliff and You.

We have not fallen off The Cliff. Is it certain that there is one? No. But every single leader, elected or appointed, is acting like it’s there. I believe we will see it. The new normal will grow from events moving quickly. Already at Wilder Redoubt, we’ve had nothing but home-cooked meals for the last week, with a couple of store-bought sandwiches being the exception.

Will home-cooked food, family dinners, and homeschooling be the legacy of COVID-19?

I expect that we’ll see The Cliff soon enough. How deep will it go? As I’ve mentioned before, no one knows. The worst case is that the economy crashes through levels to Great Depression era lockup in two weeks or so. Only 40% of Americans are able to absorb an unexpected $1,000 expense. 80% are living paycheck to paycheck, and those paychecks just stopped.

Dead.

Going first will be car payments. The average monthly car payment is $800. Me? I’d sell you my daily driver for just two months of that, so expect car finance companies to seize up like an ungreased stripper pole. But the businesses that employ those people aren’t much better off. The best restaurant in Modern Mayberry came pretty close to closing down shop six years ago, but pulled through. The second best restaurant didn’t survive. There will be cascading failures as the debts owed from one business to the next go unpaid, and this won’t just be for small businesses. I feel confident saying that several businesses with 10,000 or more employees will go bankrupt. Overall loss to the economy? 40% of the GDP this year?

Is there a better case? Sure. We contain COVID-19 in a month or so, and then call it good. We only lose 10% to 20% of our GDP this year, and government pumps five or six trillion dollars into the economy to juice it back up. That’s the best case. And that’s just in the United States.

I’m not kidding, that’s how deep The Cliff is. If we’re lucky.

Something, something, Dark Side®.

Disillusionment

After the fall, things suck. We had heroes, but the time for Heroism is over. Disillusionment sets in when things don’t snap back to normal. Things will seem rosy, only for failure to crush hope. The more government “helps” during this phase, the worse recovery will be. Roosevelt “helped” so much during the Great Depression that he extended it for years.

But politicians will take drastic steps, because they can’t help themselves. The length of time Disillusionment lasts? Months to years.

Some re-assembly required.

Rebuilding

This is the other side of The Cliff. Whereas, as Seneca said you go down a cliff pretty quickly, you only build up slowly. Rebuilding the economy will take years. If we do it right, we’ll build a stronger economy, less dependent upon foreign supply lines, that guarantees freedom while preserving the traditional values that built the wealth in the first place.

If done poorly? The system is controlled, oppressive, and coercive. Leaders matter, but the quality of the citizenry to fight back against the system is even more important. Rebuilding takes years, and by my best case scenario, four to eight years.

So, I guess I’ll get a jump start on rebuilding. Dishwashers on the Internet. Amazing. My only problem is that there’s this lady at work who keeps making suggestive comments and touching me all the time. Just a few minutes ago, she told me that she expects me to share a bed with her! They always told me not to get my honey where I got my money, but what happens when you work at home?

White House Insider Scoop: The Economic Plan

“Television? My God! If they could market that in pill form, Switzerland would be plunged into a recession.” – Absolutely Fabulous

“Old McDonald had a farm . . .” sang the cheerful repo man.

Note: there’s some meta content at the end on recent site issues at the end of all this. Apologies for any issues. I know that the subscriber stuff didn’t work on Monday, but I have faith it will today. If you’re not a subscriber, I suggest you tempt fate and subscribe in the box over there to the right . . . .

This past week in the economics side of the world there has been a recent dust-up. The generally accepted definition of a recession is that there are two consecutive quarters of economic contraction. I’m not sure exactly how they measure that, but I assume it’s by throwing a bunch of chicken wing bones from the Buffalo Burnin’ Hot® Pizza Hut™ wings into the air and seeing if they fall in a pattern that is pleasing to Gorto, god of the Great Charts of Giza.

Or maybe not. That sounds pretty high-tech for an economist, since it might involve higher economics like counting.

But at least it’s more scientific than how economists judge if there is a recession or not.

Regardless, the White House has suggested that the same definition that’s been used since, oh, I was knee high to Farrah Fawcett-Majors (which wasn’t bad, I’m thinking) is no longer operative. Nope. Now (according to Wikipedia®) recessions only occur when the National Bureau of Economic Research©, a privately held group, says so.

When will they say it’s so?

Probably years after the recession has occurred, and probably then only if it’s something the Left want’s to see.

Winston Smith would be proud.

I can’t help, though, wondering what the conversation was like in the White House when they discussed the horrible economic data that showed there was a recession, or at least what would have been called a recession in every year every except for 2022.

I hear homeless horses never get married. It just isn’t a stable relationship.

Joe Biden (BIDEN): “I’m really glad you all could join me this wharngm *cough* smaglerpump. Anyone have a steak? Oh, wait, can’t eat ‘em. Gets stuck the dentures, you see *wet phlegmy cough*.”

Biden takes dentures out to show group.

Kamala Harris (HARRIS): “Wow! I could have used that trick!”

Secretary of Treasury, Janet Yellen (YELLEN): “Mr. President . . . .”

BIDEN: “Oh, is Barry back? I think I’m sitting in his chair.” Jill Biden (DR. JILL) kicks BIDEN.

BIDEN: “Ow! What??”

YELLEN: “Pardon me, uh, Joe. The recent economic data had come back, and it’s not good. From a technical standpoint, and primarily due to our plan, er, bad luck, er, Putin, we’re showing that the economy of the United States is contracting.”

It could be worse. Gas could be really expensive. Oh, wait.

BIDEN: “Does that mean the baby is close? I think I’m hoping for another boy. I’d like to name one Hunter. What a pure and noble name. No way a man with such a strong name would become a degenerate dissolute drug addict who hires ladies-of-the-night.”

YELLEN: “What?”

BIDEN: “Whores, we used to call ‘em. Street-walkers. Strumpets. *Long series of coughs.* You know, loose women?” Pause. “I mean that. Do you know any loose women?”

YELLEN: “Pardon me, Mr., um, Joe. What I’m trying to tell you is that the economy is a mess. Prices are shooting through the roof, and where we once saw labor shortages due to paying people to not work, now we’re seeing companies starting to lay off people, and demand dropping. Not at all good. It’s what we economists technically call a recession.”

BIDEN: “Recession? What will President Carter say about that when he gets back from Camp David? That’s no good at all. We simply can’t have a recession. We need ideas, people!”

Secretary of State, Antony Blinken (BLINKEN): “Heh heh, we could send that crazy witch Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan. That would distract people. Heck, maybe no one would notice that the price of gasoline requires them to ‘donate’ a kidney to get a fill-up.”

Joe wanted Hunter to slow down on his cocaine habit – he said, that Hunter had to draw a line somewhere.

Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin (AUSTIN): “Great idea! We could send over some aircraft carriers. We’ve got dozens of those. Really pump up the tension.”

Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas (MAYORKAS): “And import Nicaraguans. Perhaps sixty million of them. They don’t vote.”

Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg (BUTTIGIEG): “Dr. Jill, what are the first symptoms of monkeypox again?”

DR. JILL: “Pete, I’m not that kind of doctor. I’m the kind of doctor that people have to call “doctor” because I insist they do.”

BUTTIGIEG: “Oh, what was your thesis title?”

DR. JILL: “Student Retention at the Community College: Meeting Students’ Needs.” (J.W. note: this is really the title.)

Vanilla Ice is both more vanilla and more ice than Jill Biden is a doctor.

ALL, except BIDEN, who looks confused: Laughter.

BIDEN, looking at DR. JILL: “Missy, are you new here? I could use a sandwich. But nothing too tough. Dentures. See?” Pulls them out to show her.

ALL, except BIDEN, who looks confused: Laughter.

DR. JILL exits.

BIDEN: “Well, now it’s just us guys. Anyone want to watch a porno? My son Hunter,” long pause “sent me this one. Shared it to me on FacePlant®.”

YELLEN and HARRIS glance at each other.

BIDEN: “So, what’s the plan? I mean we have this regression, I mean digression, er, um, digestion.”

YELLEN: “Mr. Pr . . . er, Joe, it’s a recession.”

BIDEN: Agitated. “No, it’s not! It’s not a recession until Obama says it’s a recession!”

All look at each other in stunned silence.

YELLEN: “That’s perfect. We pretend we’re not in a recession. Just say it isn’t one.”

All nod, except Biden, who is staring vacantly toward the ceiling at a point near the opposite corner.

Chief of Staff Ron Klain (KLAIN): “It’s decided. I’ll mobilize the usual folks. CNN®, the New York Times™, the Washington Post©, and oh, yeah, I’ll mobilize our trolls. Let’s put the old definitions down the memory hole. Start with Reddit® and Wikipedia™. In a couple of weeks, let’s see if we can’t have Twitter© ban anyone using the r-word.”

Meeting adjourns. BIDEN remains seated, looking uncomfortable.

BIDEN: “I was told there would be ice cream.”

Now, the meta content. On Monday, I normally get a copy of the post delivered to my inbox for a couple of reasons: the first is to show that the software worked. Since it’s worked nearly 800 times, I was surprised it didn’t. The second is to make sure the content showed up.

On Monday, that didn’t happen. Why? I’m still not sure. I went to the website and saw that the website itself was down. Why? Still not sure. It turns out that I’ve been fighting the hosting company of the site for the better part of four calls (over three hours of time) and it seemed like everything they did made things worse.

I think it’s all working now, though. Let me know if the RSS or any other component isn’t working.

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.

Economics In 2022, A Picture Book

“Stay classy, San Diego!” – Anchorman

I think the Chairman of the Federal Reserve® is required by law to drive a Fiat®.

Recently, part of the revolution has been televised . . . the Dutch government has decided that farming is evil because it keeps people from eating bugs and living in the pods:

Of course, the Dutch have commies there, too:

But who thinks hunger is good, besides the commies at Antifa? Oh, the United Nations:

Well, we know the UN never comes up with their own ideas, they’re too busy with waste and corruption. So where did this idea come from?

Oh, yeah, the World Economic Forum.

Thankfully, they’re not at all evil, right?

Karl nods approvingly:

But the World Economic Forum® has plans to help, right? How it started for Sri Lanka:

How it’s going, I mean they’ve had four years to implement The Plan:

But they’ll help Europe, right?

How it might end:

But the United States is not immune from economic illiteracy:

I’m sure this won’t put 40 million people on edge:

But Joe Biden is coming to the aid of the American people:

And Kamala is planning on how to leave Kabul Washington.

While all of this goes on, there are differing views on the economy:

At least Amazon® will help us:

But in the end, maybe we will come to an ethical conclusion:

Stay classy, America!

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 Economy – At Seneca’s Cliff?

“Well, what do you expect to find? A story about a guy who drove his car off a cliff in a snowstorm?” – Misery

Why don’t the sounds of pigeons echo? A coo sticks.

I have written before about Ugo Bardi’s (Living Italian Economist) theory that he called Seneca’s Cliff. Seneca’s Cliff is a restatement of something Seneca (Dead Roman Dude) philosophized about. It was a simple idea: stuff gets built only slowly. But when it comes down? It comes down all at once, like falling off of a cliff, hence Bardi calling it Seneca’s Cliff.

A house is a good example of Seneca’s Cliff. A house is built over time – in most cases it takes several months to build one. But if there’s a fire, that same house can be burned to the ground in a manner of minutes. There are exceptions, of course: in a Mexican neighborhood in Canada, the house might be saved by a hose, eh.

Race car backwards is . . . race car. But race car sideways is . . . James Dean.

So, that’s Seneca’s Cliff. I wrote about it myself back in the day, when I was trying to write a novel. It started, “The world had been a web . . .” This is a metaphor that has always stuck with me – the web of interconnections required to maintain society as we know it.

The world is a web. As I write this, I’m writing it on a laptop that was built halfway around the world, with components and materials sourced on nearly every continent. Dude, I got a Dell®, but the Dell™ came from everywhere.

When everything works, that’s great. People communicate with each other through price and supply and demand and produce things like computers and cars and wedding rings and beer and PEZ® and the burrito that Amber Heard ate before she left a “grumpy” in the bed.

Believe all women? That’s the dumbest thing I’ve Amber Heard.

Unfortunately, we’ve been working at a world that’s based in efficiency, too. Efficiency is nice if you’re a company that’s trying to put together a lot of iPads® or Funko Pops©, but in reality efficiency sucks.

Why do you have two lungs? Two kidneys? Two bellybuttons? Because those are really, really important. I have a buddy who lost 90% of his lung capacity in one lung due to the flu back in ’92. Guess what? He conducts a full life like it never happened. He coached a wrestling team, and rides bicycles long distances.

When something is important, you don’t want an efficient system, you want an inefficient system. This is why the water department can make more water than it needs to.

What does Ghislaine Maxwell and July, 2022 have in common? Neither of them will see August.

But our global systems, at the top level, are efficient. We don’t produce 10% extra oil. We don’t have that capacity. In spring and fall we generally have plenty of excess electricity generation, but tell me how summer looks? Lots of spare capacity?

No, not so much. Sure, there are substitutes for lots of things – we can have Wheaties® instead of Rice Krispies™. But in the end, we have to produce enough food to feed 7.96 billion people, and enough energy to grow the food and move it from place to place as well as make clothes and iPods© and pantyhose.

If Biden made dumpsters, they’d be called trash can’ts.

But this means that we’re in a world where there is simply less food because there is less energy, and also because war took out production of a significant amount. This was added to by the Biden sanctions on Russia. They are strange sanctions, indeed. So far their result is that it actually resulted in more cash going to Russia every month. Oh, higher prices on energy mainly to Europe and the United States. The shortages we’re seeing now in food, which will soon become much worse will have an even larger impact.

It has already created stress in the developed world. But in fragile places, like most of the Middle East and all of Africa, food prices will increase to the point where many of the poorer governments will simply cease to exist as the revolutions start. The last time this happened, mass migration into Europe was the result. It’s possible that this time, violence will be exported to Europe, as well.

I hear that Miley Cyrus will star in a remake of Silence of the Lambs as Hannibal Montannibal.

These are the conclusions if things go well, based on where we are now. From everything I’ve seen, we’re not on the trajectory of things going well. The capital markets are slowly failing in the West. Why? All the spending from the decision to print all the cash to paper over the previous holes in the economy that were caused from all the cash printed to paper over the holes before that is a game we can’t play anymore. The holes are too big.

The delicate web that keeps goods moving is stressed now, and strands are missing, putting a greater strain on the whole web. It took hundreds of years to build up this economy.

How fast will it fall down Seneca’s Cliff?

Get Woke, Go Broke: Disney Princess Edition

“I woke up on the floor of some Japanese family’s rec room, and they would not stop screaming.” – Anchorman

I knew that Disney® was broke when they wouldn’t give R2-D2™ a brother, only a transister.

As is probably obvious now, I like movies. I think that they can convey complex ideas, and can exemplify that which is best in all of us. When done properly, they provide a shared mythology that replaces the stories that we used to tell each other around the fire after a successful mastodon hunt. They would sometimes even sing songs, I mean most people who killed a mastodon are in the mood for some Hairy Elephante.

Movies can be subtle propaganda. Certainly, looking back there were large elements of mainly harmless propaganda added into the media that I watched growing up – trying to convince me to eat properly, brush my teeth, get enough sleep, and not start a criminal drug trafficking gang.

Data Point Number One is a Hollywood® movie that certainly has more wholesome values built-in, Top Gun: Maverick. Going as far back as the first Top Gun, the idea was fairly simple: America and Americans were trying to be the good guys. We were brash, we took Polaroid® pictures of Russian pilots, and we had shirtless, sweaty volleyball playing . . . dudes?

Well, at least Kenny can get spare parts if he has a footloose.

Okay, they did make some mistakes in the original. But it was nationalist. It focused on excellence. And the latest version has some of the same notes. Amazingly, people seem to like feeling good about their country and seeing excellence in action. Top Gun: Maverick will end up making over a billion dollars.

So, mainly wholesome. Sure there were some less wholesome parts built in there, but I’m still planning a post on propaganda. Some of the propaganda has been awful, and lately, it’s been worse. Hollywood® has recently been all-in on propaganda, and not the good kind.

That brings us to . . .

Data Point Number Two is Lightyear. Disney® movies used to be a bastion of wholesome values. Parents. Kids. There would be a conflict, but the end would almost always be resolved in a way that showed the importance of values. Disney©, however, has decided to showcase a family arrangement of two lesbian moms. This is a lifestyle that would have been:

Not legally enforceable across the country a decade ago,
Widely shunned two decades ago,
Subject to a visit from Child Protective Services thirty years ago,
Ruled out either of the lesbian moms to be able to work as a teacher forty years ago, and
Caused them to be burned as witches fifty years ago, though my timing might be off a bit on that one.

Jeff Epstein tried to give Hillary a high five, but she left him hanging.

Now? It’s a lifestyle being celebrated as normal in a Disney® film. To most parents (remember, it takes an actual woman and an actual man to make a baby, even in 2022) it’s not the propaganda that they want to have in the minds of their little kids. I did the math, and (to the best I can find) 0.14% of kids were being raised by lesbian moms.

Add in people who are hard Lefties who buy their kids Transition Flakes™? That’s your Lightyear audience.

Thus, it’s no surprise to me that the film failed. Lightyear has greatly disappointed the folks at Disney® due to its poor financial performance. People are simply declining to pay money to take their kids to become indoctrinated with the Latest Thing®.

Disney™ seemingly doesn’t care is actually blaming the audience, from some interviews I’ve seen.

I hear AOC met her boyfriend on Tinder®. That must have been awkward.

It’s not just Disney®, though they’re the absolute worst today. I’ve noticed that most movies made after, say, 2018, are awful. It’s not just Coronachan, either. It is the movie content. I don’t know if all the screenwriters suddenly became activists after Trump was elected, but the movies became awful.

How? They became drenched in Leftist propaganda. If it were just that, it might be interesting entertainment. But Leftism screws everything up. Character development doesn’t exist, because Strong Woman can never, ever be inferior to Man, even if Strong Woman just started piloting starships and Man has been piloting them for decades. Oh, and she’s stronger, too. And can beat anyone but another woman in a fight.

I wonder why they didn’t call her Mary Sue?

Yawn. It’s not even interesting, and combined with the bales of propaganda that gets thrown in, it just turns into a poorly written script that ends up making a movie that’s not very interesting. What are the stakes when the hero is perfect from the first moment of the movie?

It isn’t just movies. Books started to get infected with the same nonsense even before movies did. For a time, I stopped reading fiction because the books ceased being enjoyable. I thought it was me. I thought that I had grown up, and science fiction has lost its appeal because I’d grown out of it.

Then I picked up an older book, (Lucifer’s Hammer, by Niven and Pournelle) and was happy to find it wasn’t me – it was that science fiction books started sucking, and for exactly the same reason. Leftism kills everything that it touches.

I’ve noticed that most larger businesses don’t seem to care. Star Wars® (another Disney© product produced some of the weakest, worst content ever. Why? Retreaded stories and a protagonist that wasn’t interesting because she was already the Best Ever® at everything. Disney stock wasn’t impacted.

Until now.

If you pour root beer into a square glass does that just make it beer?

It has lost about half of its value since last year, with over $170 billion in market value lost. This started before the big market slide with the Biden Bust.

Wherein I Use Greek Mythology To Show How Screwed We Are

“Would Homer cut away from Odysseus’s journey just as he was being enticed by the siren’s song?” – BoJack Horseman

My lack of knowledge of Greek mythology is often my Achilles’ Elbow.

We’ve reached the Scylla and Charybdis stage of our economy.

Scylla was, in Greek mythology, a six-headed monster that was probably less scary than the average half-dozen Congresscritters, and certainly less dangerous.

Charybdis was a whirlpool that sucked inside everything that got close to it three times a day, so it was pretty much exactly like Kamala Harris.

The idea is that if you’re between Scylla and Charybdis, life is on the edge because there are dangers on either side. When Odysseus tried to sneak between the two, he lost six crewmembers, one to each head of Scylla. Thankfully they didn’t go too close to Charybdis, since Kamala has a mean-looking canker sore, and some gifts last forever.

Trying to thread the fine line between Scylla and Charybdis: that’s where our economy is now.

Could it be that the Odyssey is just a made-up excuse by a husband as to why he’s ten years late?

As inflation rages through the system, every minute that we have an interest rate well below the rate of inflation, inflation is being fed. To quote Joe Biden from January 24, 2022, “It’s a great asset – more inflation. What a stupid son of a bitch.” You can tell he’s excited to Build Back Better!

Oddly, it’s not inflation in everything. Some items are starting to deflate now. Houses, for instance. The price of a house is tied to the interest rate – the more interest wrapped into a monthly payment, the fewer the number of buyers that can afford or qualify for a loan. And in Biden’s America® people have to qualify for more important things, like a Quarter Pounder™ or a tank of gas.

But back to home loans: fewer people qualify? Less demand. Less demand? Lower home prices.

When we moved to Modern Mayberry in the middle of the Great Recession, some houses had been on the market for longer than 350 days. These were decent houses, but there just wasn’t any demand. Recently, as people began to take my advice and flee the cities, houses disappeared off the market in days here in Modern Mayberry. With all the city folk moving in, at least I know what a hipster weighs: an Instagram®.

One hipster I knew poured water from an ice tray into his beverage. He liked ice before it was cool.

Now? Interest rates for mortgages are going up, so demand for houses will be going down. Eventually, the market for houses will go back to where it was when I got here. That’s okay, I never expected to walk away from Stately Wilder Mansion with a single dime of profit. For me, a house is where I live, not an investment.

So, interest rates up, housing prices down. Simple.

Also, interest rates up, stock prices down. For the last decade, stocks have been just about the only game for people who were trying to keep up with inflation. This was a continual pressure upwards on stocks. Now as interest rates go up, there are other options.

Traditionally, there was (this was something I read in an article a long time ago) a formula showing the value of a stock in relation to the interest rate: Maximum P/E=20-Prime Rate. That meant, with an interest rate of 0%, a stock was at fair value with a Price to Earnings ratio of 20. Likewise, if the interest rate was 10%, the fair market P/E would be about 10.

Obviously, it’s such a one-dimensional analysis that it was made back when “digital computing” meant counting on your fingers. There’s no way I’d suggest anyone use it to pick stocks (nor would I suggest taking the advice of an Internet humorist on any investment advice no matter how witty, charming, and handsome he might be), but it does show how the relationship between interest rates and stock prices and earnings was thought about once upon a time. But it summarizes the same idea – interest rates up, stocks down.

I bought some speakers. At least that was a sound investment.

Heck, it even led me to a never-fail way to manipulate individual stocks: if I buy a stock, it goes down.

There are other impacts, too. For instance, it makes debt harder to pay back for people around the planet. If Egypt owes money to ChaseAmericanFargo™ Bank and the interest rate is variable, that means that Egypt will have to start selling items to pay back New York, or London, or Beijing. Heck, the British would already have the Pyramids, but they wouldn’t fit in the British Museum

More money to the banking centers? Less money for chow for the Egyptians. We saw this exact scenario play out in the Arab Spring in 2012. Expensive stuff caused people to go hungry and then hungry people with no hope do what they always do when they can’t watch Netflix™ and buy Twinkies©.

They swap out the government. The new boss looks a lot like the old boss in Egypt, and it’s exactly the same boss as it was in Syria. Some things don’t change. If it’s bad enough, it also craters the economies in South America and, even Canada might have its assets frozen. Or, more frozen.

How did Kamala get her cold sores? She dated Herpules.

But when the interest rates go up, it’s not just the government in Egypt that gets squeezed. The current debt in the United States is $30.5 trillion. The total US debt, including personal debt, student loans, credit cards, and I.O.U.s to me from that one guy that owes me $20 is about $91 trillion. (All numbers from usdebtclock.org)

When the interest rates go up, the payments on interest go up. That means less money available for everything else. When last I looked, the mandatory payments the Federal government were as much as or more than the amount of money that they took in. That means that printing more money is now the only way the system can work. It’s like having a tobacco cessation class with a two-cigar minimum.

That leads to the difficult bit – the hall of mirrors. If we don’t raise interest rates, and raise them quickly and raise them high enough, inflation will devastate the economy. If we do raise them, interest payments will freeze the economy and dry up all the PEZ®, pantyhose, and elephant rides the government buys daily. We are in a classic trap, but it is a trap entirely devised by the Fed® and the politicians working long-term problems on short-term incentives.

By attempting to push back the moment of financial reckoning by any means possible, we’ve created a failure that is much, much larger. If we would have let financial companies fail in 2000 and 2008, and fixed the structural problems with Medicare, perhaps, just perhaps we wouldn’t be here today.

But we are.

How bad are things?

Again, people have been trying to gauge when things in the stock market are out of whack – Gregory Mannarino came up with a market risk index that he called the Mannarino Market Risk Index, which was modified by Nobody Special Finance into the Modified Mannarino Market Risk Index. You can watch the video on what makes it up here (LINK). It’s only twelve minutes, and it’s pretty simple. The MMMRI is simple, but it’s still quite a bit more sophisticated than the 20=P/E-Interest rate formula from back in the Stone Age. The summary is of selected past MMMRIs is:

Black Monday (1987), MMMRI 234
Dotcom Bubble Pop (2000), MMMRI 208
Great Recession (2008), MMMRI 169

Right now?

You can find tracking information on MMMRI here (LINK) on Mannarino’s website.

Yup. MMMRI is screaming loudly that the stock market is really, really messed up. But you knew that. Things are broken, and they’re breaking faster as things go downhill. So, whatever you do, don’t buy canned goods and storage food and precious metals and PEZ® and ammo. Nope.

I’m sure that the team of Biden and Harris along with Janet Yellen, Treasury Secretary, (who had no idea that inflation was even a problem) or Jennifer Granholm, Energy Secretary, (who said that high gas prices are “a very compelling case” to buy an electric car) will be here to help us charter a safe course between Scylla and Charybdis.

Oh, wait, Biden and Harris are Scylla and Charybdis.