epic economic collapse has started
The collapse is coming.
Plan to embrace it.
If you want to see inflation, just look at the intellect of our political class.
Rational thought and common sense have all but disappeared.
Yet, they all have become millionaires.
Companies like Blackrock are buying up entire neighborhoods is another reason prices are skyrocketing. They turn them into rentals and let the neighborhood decline since renters have no stake or ownership in the house, they let it run down, and these big companies do the minimal amount of upkeep so they can increase their profits.
A dollar is worth what it is worth. It is a medium of exchange.
Now, print and circulate more dollars, and each dollar becomes “worth less” relative to the previous number of dollars in circulation.
Therefore, to reach the same level of “worth” requires more dollars.
Price inflation is the increase in prices that results from this softening of the worth of a dollar.
In the 1970s, there were too many dollars chasing too few good, hence the cost of goods went higher. Oil and gas were the most obvious example of this situation, but food, rent, and everything else cost more too.
Then, because employers found themselves “spending more” they “cut costs” and “lay off” (code for “fired”) a bunch of “expensive employees. Unemployment went sky high.
Therefore, everything costs more, and there are fewer wage earners to earn and spend the dollars needed to drive the economic engine. This resulted in a sluggish economy (and a spike in crime caused by black market economy in drugs and prostitution). The term “stagflation” was coined to indicate inflationary conditions where the economic engine stagnated and could not move forward.
Two things fixed this – one was the advent of the personal computer, which created an entirely new technology market that drove innovation and consumer confidence back to the market. Think “Crazy Eddies” and the consumer electronic boom of the early 1980s. You get the idea.
The other thing was President Reagan’s economic policies, wrongly called “trickle-down economics”, which used borrowing and credit by the federal government to drive down interest rates. That made banks more willing to lend and borrow, thus restarting the economic engine, but at a cost .The debt and deficit spending increased dramatically and Congress as usual never resolved the debt; they just continued to spend like Russian ransomware authors.
This time around, there is no new, innovative technology to drive the economy, and there is already twenty-eight gazillion dollars of debt, so deficit spending is not a viable option.
At some point, the piper must be paid, and the economic collapse is going to make the Great Depression look like the “mild downturn” of the 1980s.
You have been warned. Watch the Big Short for how to profit off this idiocy.