“Like I told my last wife, I says, “Honey, I never drive faster than I can see. Besides that, it’s all in the reflexes.” – Big Trouble in Little China
I tried to buy a hamburger with cheese, but they wanted cash instead.
Yellow Freight® shut down. They had been around for 99 years, starting business way back in time when Bernie Sanders was trying to ruin Austro-Hungarian Empire or Bulgaria or wherever he came from.
Yellow Freight© was an old company and 30,000 people lost their jobs. What went on? Well, Yellow© borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars emergency ‘rona bucks. When they went bankrupt, they had an outstanding loan balance (backstopped by you and I) of $729.2 million. During the two and a half years that they’d had the loan, they’d paid down $54.8 million in interest. They’d also paid down $230 in principle.
Not $230 million. Not $230 thousand. $230, so I’m guessing their strategy was to pay it off at $10 a month, which would ensure that they’d pay off the loan in roughly the year 6,079,523.
Oddly, no one would take a risk on refinancing a company that had such powerhouse earnings, and so all of the people who used to have pensions with Yellow™ found out that their pension value would be paid out at the same rate as the loan was being paid out, and it’s pretty hard to split $10 among 30,000 people each month.
I hate to point fingers, but whatever executive thought orange was yellow just might be at fault.
Most of the 30,000 folks from Yellow Freight© will find another job – truckers are still in demand, and other companies have picked up the slack so far.
This isn’t the first. Just like the banks who had money in Treasury paper took a hit (Silicon Valley Bank®, I’d be looking at you if you were still here) because the “super-safe” bonds making 1% were worth a lot less when interest rates went up to 4%. The FDIC™ requires the banks that they insure to report data. It’s kinda scary when the FDIC© uses the X® (the social media company formerly known as Prince) to notify banks (and the American public) that banks might be in trouble again.
I guess no one is making them account for their problems?
The same thing is, perhaps, happening to the dollar itself – today lost its AAA bond rating from Fitch™ and is now producing AA bonds. Still a good rating, but it’s a big hit from “nearly perfect plus has nuclear missiles” and the first step to becoming a “drunk wine aunt country that can’t afford to take vacations”, like Uzbekistan.
As I’ve written before, it’s awesome to have “the reserve currency”, since that means you can print all the cash you want and spend it on things like iPods™ from China, Hello Kitty™ slippers from Bangladesh, and tequila from Mexico (what’s known as a “Hunter Biden Saturday Morning Special”). Losing it means a loss of that ability, and all of a sudden you have to work for all of that stuff rather than just printing cash.
Hunter Biden’s credit card company called him about suspicious activity. Seems that someone made a payment.
That’s difficult, because there’s always competition in having the reserve currency. One competitor, of course, is precious metals. Another is land. My father-in-law liked to say, “if it blows up, at least you still have the hole.” After the debt ceiling deal (translation: spend as much as you want until after the general election), the debt shot up, climbing $1.8 trillion in just two months. I mean, that’s a crazy number, we don’t even give that much to Zelenskyy in a year!
I know mortgage payments are going up, but just try telling a homeless person how lucky they are.
Eventually that has an effect on all assets. Although Darth Powell doesn’t exactly have the understanding of how home prices work, it is closer to say that at the same payment at a 7% mortgage rate, you can afford a heck of a lot less home than you can afford at 2.7%. Unless wages go up or BlackRock© decides to buy houses because they ran out of illegal aliens to import this month.
Or, if the bankers get absolute control over who uses what cash and when. That’s the goal. Will that happen if things are going well, and we’re surrounded by prosperity?
Of course not. In order to get control, the idea is chaos, uncertainty, war, and mayhem. If you’re old enough, how do the 2020s compare to the 1980s? The 1990s? The 2000s? In nearly every way that doesn’t involve ludicrously cheap televisions, each of those decades was objectively better. I’ve noted before that Peak USA probably hit somewhere before I was born to when I was a little kid.
Why do central bankers never travel together? They’re a bunch of loan wolves.
I’m normally a fan of the idea of ineptitude being responsible for at least being some contributing factor to the problems that we have, but when I look at the gross mismanagement of the economy for decades it almost seems like it’s planned.
But I’m sure I’ll hear Bernie lecturing us all that socialism and more government is the way out from the balcony of one of his three houses soon enough. After all, it’s worked out pretty well for him, what with him never having had an actual job and all.
You know, this costs money, but I’m just thinking of the joy of all of those people in India when they get unexpected packages.
“Cheap tvs”
Still trying to poison people so they keep them cheap. Also a part of the circuses.
Either way, cut out tv and msm. At this point all of my news is from various aggregators and blogs since news companies lie so much.
Been doing the same for about 2 1/2 years. Makes for a much happier life.
One reason they are cheap is subsidies. The streaming services pay to be pre-installed on the TV, and they make their money thru surveillance and aggregating data about what you watch, search for, and what keywords you mention when near your TV.
Vizio used to mention it in their annual report.
If you just use them as visual output devices, never connect them to a network, you can be reasonably sure they aren’t listening and watching. There is some speculation that they can connect to wifi and cellular data on their own, but I’ve not seen any proof.
They won’t last as long as TVs made before this revenue model became prevalent. The boards are thinner, the connectors less robust, the traces on the boards are thinner and narrower, and the components are cheaper and lower spec. But, the pictures do look great.
nick
I’ve not seen MSM in ages, except for clips to mock it.
Well, what I am hearing from our Marxist insect overlords is that real economic collapse has never been tried here before. So how do you know it’s such a bad thing?
You don’t. So stop making with all the gloomy predictions. Who knows? Maybe you will like living in a cardboard box under the freeway overpass and eating worms. I’ve never been Venezuelan before, so I am not going to make uninformed knee-jerk pronouncements about how awful hyperinflation is.
Sheesh. Everybody’s an expert nowadays.
Look for more downgrades as the budget explodes upward in the next 2 years…Don’t buy long bonds…
Ha! Yeah. Last year everyone was thinking recession. This year “everyone” is thinking happy days. Happy days is when it hits.
Some interesting data points on the upcoming economic rollover published today by Egon:
https://goldswitzerland.com/its-all-about-economic-survival-got-gold/
In other news, there’s a POTENTIAL scientific mega-breakthru underway that would be as big a deal as the invention of the transistor. IF it is true, we’re about to undergo as big a societal “rollover” as electrification was to cowboys. “If you’re not following LK-99, you’re missing out on the most fun thing happening on the internet right now…”
To wit:
“Since 1999, a tiny group of Korean scientists, working in obscurity and in their off-time, pursue the dying wishes of their materials professor who has his own theory about room temperature and pressure superconductors, a century-defining material, the holy grail of materials science and an instant Nobel prize.
A week ago, one of them went rogue and published a paper describing how to produce their substance, LK-99, which may or not be this holy grail material. It requires no exotic materials or equipment to reproduce, but the paper omits a lot of detail about the specifics of the synthesis.
They accompany it with pictures and a video. There are mistakes in the paper, but they authors say they are trivial, will be fixed, and all of them stand by their claims, even as they feud with each other.
This kicks off a world-wide race to deboonk or reproduce. US, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian labs all drop what they’re doing and give LK-99 a shot. One guy at a startup in California tries on his own as well, and 10,000 people tune in to watch a Twitch stream of a webcam pointed at a kiln. The process takes a few days.
A Russian anime catgirl joins the fracas, ruthlessly making fun of both the original Korean scientists for their bizarre methodology, and of Western/Chinese labs for simply following the steps without understanding what they do. She applies the Soviet technique of ignoring the steps outlined and instead trying to figure out what they actually do, and comes up with her own procedure using shit just laying around her apartment.
She produces a small grain of the floaty rock, takes a picture but refuses to take a video, and mercilessly ridicules everybody who keeps asking her for more proofs because it was so easy to do, they should just be doing it themselves if they weren’t mediocre westoids. She’s catty and great.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK-99
>>A Russian anime catgirl…
That makes me feel funny down there.
I’m hearing that LK-99 has been verified at multiple locations, but need to hear that from more sources. Why would you doubt the Koreans? Or do you think Asians are bad at math?
I’m normally a fan of the idea of ineptitude being responsible for at least being some contributing factor to the problems that we have, but when I look at the gross mismanagement of the economy for decades it almost seems like it’s planned.
Most politicians and senior bureaucrats are evil. The middle class has a hard time imagining that some people don’t have morals like they do. That’s why they write stern letters to their elected representatives, using one hand, because the other hand is handcuffed to the inside of the boxcar.
Stifling regulation and welfare is used to destroy populations, because it has better optics than just shipping dissenters to death camps in boxcars. Your challenges are to: a) figure out what the modern replacements are for boxcars (hint: currency inflation, plandemic, starting a war with Russia for no reason), and b) cheaply and effectively resist them. You could replace the current president and congress with a bunch of Ron Paul clones. You could use one of the twenty free forms of social media to find and select these replacements easily in your spare time. Or you could just accept whatever injections you’re told to, and the pureblood survivors with large families and cheap electrical power will pick the Ron Paul clones. Your choice.
Excellent, excellent comment. Accepting it? Not in this life.
There’s a man up here who claims
to have his hands upon the reins
There are chains upon his hands
and he’s riding upon a train
(J. Taylor)
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/superconductor-breakthrough-replicated-twice
This is all of great interest to me as in the mid-1990s I was involved in the NASA evaluation of the Podkletnov anti-gravity claim and even met Dr. P in the flesh. I’ve still got a BSCCO disk sample in my study right now that I made myself during that effort.
Cool! Was he sincere?
‘I’ve noted before that Peak USA probably hit somewhere before I was born to when I was a little kid.’
Peak USA about 1962, after which they slaughtered the Christian (yes, again) in a nationally televised blood-rite. Very much their style. After that the office essentially went to Masonic Executives. The ‘Great Society’, Civil Rights Act, mass-immigration and welfare followed quickly.
Civil Rights btw ain’t for the likes of you. Oppressor.
America still a fantastic place to live until around the Eighties, when the Prog and Feminist rot began to rule the institutions. Been downhill since, kinda like the US is, heading east from the Rockies.
As for dinero, can report in my remote third-world locale the dollar plummeted last year vs. the national currency, 23 or 24 percent. Diversity is our Strength.
1957
Sure, I’ll go with that.
Plus ’57 had the fin-tail Chevys. Easy to distinguish from the ’55 and ’56 models.
1913 and time
I can buy ’62, though it was certainly before I was alive and kicking. Ouch (dollar strength) that means the end is near.
For them it is.
The BRICS meeting is happening I a few weeks. Could be…interesting.
Yup.
The BRICS meeting is happening in a few weeks. Could be…interesting.
Or get droned
Yup 🙂
I don’t know how we’ll all get on, when we all become members of Club Collapsitarian, of course, I’m hoping for the best. I take wry comfort in the fact that Leviathan thinks that when it’s all on the plate, they can “control” things. Like Cpt. Ahab, they’ll find their White Whale, and like Ahab, they’ll go down with it. Such as it has always been with kings, emperors, and various despots in history. They usually forget that no plan survives first contact, intact.
The Captain of the Titanic was at the controls, too.
There is also the cost of trucking due to environmental climate cult crap.
Wiping it all out is by design and culling 80% of humanity.
Patriot pages warned of this before banana Brandon was even (s)elected.
The average drooling dullard normie isn’t even remotely ready for the spork that is coming.
Sinister plans in the works for Christians and Normal Americans.
Read a shocker about dot mil male rape up almost 25% since Year Zero under Bathhouse Barry.
The rainbow rump ranger brigades will have a hard on to purge those shirkers who held up the workers utopia with wrongthink.
Property is theft or you’ll own nothing and like it in the pods with the immune system destroying bugs is the goal of the depopulationists.
Use the time wisely making yourself hard to kill.
Yes! Imagine what new regulations they’ll write to keep diesel off the road. Things get crappier, and the Left will pretend it’s all an accident.
A food-for-thought Blogvel might still be on the John Galt Shenandoah website. The title is THE DAY THE DOLLAR DIED. I read it about 10 years ago and it scared the peanuts out of my M&M’s. Fast forward to now. It would appear now life is about to imitate art. There is also the PATRIOTS series by Rawles. In both narratives the collapse and subsequent wars and riots are a result of failed economies. Plan accordingly. Bleib ubrig.
Loved that series. I read one of Rawles’ books. Be safe out there.
Funny I bet those in the know have been loading up the shorts recently
I think that’s right.
In the words of the greatly underappreciated Tonio K. :
“That’s right, we’re talkin’ about the good life
In the foodchain
Love among the ruins
I guess that you’ve finally come to accept
It’s just nothing you can do about it
It’s kind of like carving the turkey
Kind of like mowing the lawn
Everything gets to this certain dimension
Winds up on a customer’s plate and then gone”
Love among the ruins . . . I like it.
Pez is up 12%
That, my friend, is a crime.
From the FDIC: “Dream First Bank, National Association, of Syracuse, Kansas, Assumes All of the Deposits of Heartland Tri-State Bank of Elkhart, Kansas”
As of March 31, 2023, Heartland Tri-State Bank had approximately $139 million in total assets and $130 million in total deposits. In addition to assuming all of the deposits, Dream First Bank, National Association, agreed to purchase essentially all of the failed bank’s assets.
The FDIC estimates that the cost to the Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) will be $54.2 million.
———————
For those of you who might be new to this topic, a bank “asset” is typically a mortgage (or other loan), and it’s stated value is the amount owed to the bank. Why, if you have $139M in assets, and $130 million in deposits (a/k/a “liabilities”), does it take $54M extra cash from the DIF to square up the deal? I guess it’s because those “$139M” assets are only actually worth something less than $84M.
Wow. And how many more are in wait?
Hemingway on going broke: “At first, gradually and then, all at once.”
Yes. Like going over a waterfall.
“…unexpected packages.”
Hey, Apu and his wife “Daht” probably ate them.
Also, I think my retired CEO cuz at Landstar was prescient when he and his dad converted to 100% O/O from the get-go.
Hey, maybe we could send Leftists over there, too?
>>Reserve currency
You leave me no choice but to tap the sign again…
https://machciv.com/2022/03/03/the-ria/
Heh heh heh!