"Economic Doom? You’re Soaking In It"
By John Wilder
“Two Purple Hearts – Leningrad and Siberia. Youngest man to be decorated by the president. You robbed the Federal Reserve Depository. Life sentence, New York Maximum Security Penitentiary. I’m ready to kick your ass out of the world, war hero.” – "Escape From New York"
"I’m a bit under the weather (sniffles). The good news is that some of the memetic content/graphs I found on the Internet about the current economy probably speak mostly for themselves. So, comments may be shorter than usual. I guess I’ll offer you this shorter post and an IOU for a longer one sometime in the future when I sober up get better.
First off – the dollar and gold used to have (depending on the era) a very similar volatility – at one point dollars were gold. What if the dollar was more volatile than gold, for the first time in 45 years?
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Normally, longer term bond and notes have higher interest rates than shorter ones. The reason is uncertainty – if I was going to borrow money for thirty years, there’s more risk of crazy things happening, like Civil Wars or George Lucas selling Star Wars™ to Disney© in a thirty-year time span than in a three month time span. But when things get uncertain, that ratio flips. If you look below, note that even a small inversion is a strong, strong signal of an impending recession. Well.
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How bad has Biden been? Median mortgage payments (average selling price and current interest rates) are higher than Hunter Biden at a Burning Man®.
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Homeowners aren’t the only ones paying huge interest payments. Here’s what’s happening on the national debt.
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But it didn’t have to be that way. If someone remotely intelligent was in charge at Treasury, it wouldn’t be an issue at all. Don’t know where this snip came from, but it’s spot on:
Janet should be managing a grade school lunch kitchen. How deep does the rot run in the Banking Industrial Complex? O’Keefe tells us tons with one of his people hacks:
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Thankfully the Fed™ has infinite money to lend. Or, at least the balance sheet shows that. In this case, this shows the economy as needing three times as much cash injected into the system as in 2008 to prop it all up and keep everything from draining into the abyss. In this case, the big vertical line represents the Silicon Valley Bank© failure.
That happened because Silicon Valley Bank™ had a lot of low interest, long term assets. Let’s just say I’m happy with my 4% mortgage right now, since I actually lose money by paying it back, since I can get 5%+ from banks. Silicon Valley Bank© had lots of crappy, long positions, and exploded.
When that happened, I really expected that the vibrations would shake the system into a bigger failure by that October – this stuff takes a while to propagate. Instead, the Fed pulled a very cunning move: it printed buttloads of cash, allowed the banks to deposit the crap they had with the Fed™ and then the Fed™ took the losses. Of course, since they haven’t sold the crap the banks gave them, those are “realized” yet, so those losses are like a girlfriend so ugly you make her hide in the closet when your friends come over.
In addition to that, the Fed© has also lost at least $161 billion, according to the Fed©. Total? A trillion? Who knows? It’s not like anyone’s counting.
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Back in the Before Time, the Fed™ never bought the debt of the United States. Why would they? They debt of the United States was to Ma and Pa Citizen, central banks all around the world, and, (oddly) to the United States when it spent the Social Security funds on Popcorn, PEZ™, Pantyhose, and Pachyderm Rides. Yup, the United States would spend the Social Security cash, and then write itself an IOU and put it (seriously!) into a filing cabinet in D.C.
Can you imagine a job that’s more futile? It’s like I wrote myself an IOU for stealing money from my kid’s college fund to buy beer, and then made my kid file the IOU, knowing full well that the file would experience “surprise combustion” in the backyard fire pit when I sobered up.
You really should be concerned. Unless you want to send me your cash so I can send you an IOU. I promise I won’t blow it on Popcorn, PEZ™, Pantyhose, and Pachyderm Rides."
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