Lord Ratner

Honestly? As long as we're content to spend $850k per unit on "homeless shelters," increase SS for a generation that put much less in than they need, and knew it, spend unlimited money on endless medicalization of obese senior citizens trying to live forever, print a few trillion dollars to prop up the financial system's raping of the American savers and retail investors, and all the other ludicrous things we take on insurmountable government debt to fund, I'm quite happy to spend some magical-fed-bucks on arming a peaceful country that was invaded by one of the three biggest geopolitical threats the free world faces (China, Russia, Iran), while the rest of the neutered world stands by like Neville Chamberlain as the great democratization-of-totalitarian-regimes-through-McDonald's-and-Netflix theory crumbles to dust.

Let's not forget the context. Comey had rushed to close the investigation out with no charges against Hillary before yet more evidence of wrongdoing was discovered. So he had to reopen the investigation to save face. This didn't start with Trump. Lois Lerner was the canary in the coal mine. Trump just triggered the rest of them to mount their resistance. And yes, of course Trump is a piece of shit. There may be a few people here who disagree, but overwhelmingly the Republicans I know will all concede that point. However, as we have learned painfully over the past one or two decades, it is not a good-faith conversation, and in an unfair conversation, the targeted side will become reluctant to concede anything at all, knowing it will be used merely as a pretext to ignore whatever legitimate points follow in the conversation.

You generally don't make it very far in conversations where you've already decided someone else's motives, but this is an easy one. Because the people claiming climate change is a threat to humanity aren't acting like climate change is a threat to humanity. Watch what they do, not what they say.

Or evidence that kids were at risk.

If you can't apply the law evenly, you're better off not applying it at all. Fairness is an evolutionary trait that you can not violate. The response will be violent and immediate. https://youtu.be/meiU6TxysCg

The problem with all of this is that China is spending themselves into oblivion, and they have a much weaker foundation than we do. That may have been their plan 20 years ago, but the 20 years of horrifically inefficient spending (see the Chinese ghost cities) by a centralized government is catching up with them. Don't get me wrong, our horribly inefficient spending is catching up with us as well, but the Chinese have it much worse. I think the biggest threat is that when their house of cards starts to crumble before ours, they will resort to the only thing totalitarian regimes know to resort to. It's going to be an interesting winter.

Don't you worry, the second something happens and the sleeping giant is awoken, you can count on corporate America to dust off the American flags and change their profile pics to red white and blue. They are soulless money whores, not cowards or cosmopolitans. When the sanctions make their business model in China untenable, they'll suddenly be Made-In-America patriots.

It seems like democrats are hell-bent on getting Trump reelected. This is either some serious 4D chess or they are literally too stupid to breathe. Imagine the insanity of making a lunatic with a martyr complex into a martyr.

Well it's a disease primarily spread through gay sex, so those three states and the associated metros will cover many/most of the hot spots. Throw Miami in there for the full set. It is curious that during the covid emergency, dating was just one of the many normal human activities that was strongly discouraged by the government, but not protesting... And during this emergency it seems like no one is willing to discourage anonymous gay sex, which is the primary vector of spread... It's almost like public health is just another institution that's become subordinate to progressive social ideology.

Only if you're selling, now. Canada uses adjustable rate and intro-rate mortgages almost exclusively. The rate hikes are having much more immediate effects in Canada, and will profoundly impact the foreclosure and eviction statistics. Prices rarely stay above historical income ratios for long (for obvious reasons), so expect a big crash. And since, like here, there is political pressure to fix the "housing shortage," tanking the housing market is not going to cause much heartburn with the Fed, though that may change when the baby boomers see their only retirement plan (an overvalued home) vaporize.

I missed a couple other faulty examples you used: A mother is not exchanging with her children, that is a closed system. Also... Have you heard of daycare? Nannies? Au pairs? Babysitting? If you've found non-monetary daycare, please let me know. Slavery was massively deflationary, which is why it was so damn popular. Input costs, in money, were dramatically reduced if you put the cost of human effort to near-zero. The slaveholder was merely the collective representation of the entire plantations's productivity cost to outside buyers. You think the output of slaves was consumed by slave-holders? They were just hoarding all the cotton for themselves? Which money? Banks do not print dollars. Dollars are money. They don't mind for gold, which was money for a long time. Anyone can make money, if the system, as supported by the society, allows for it. Hell, even counterfeiters create money if they can get away with it. And in all cases, the creation of money reduces it's value relative what it can be exchanged for. Our system allows for the creation of money beyond the rate of productive growth. That will always be inflationary. It doesn't matter if the money is metal, paper, or digital, or if it came from a Fed printing press or bank database. If it can be exchanged for something that is not money, it will have a direct effect on inflation. They were talking about minting a $1T coin in 2020 to fund the government. What bank was that going to come from? If Congress passes a law tomorrow that says colon polyps can now be used as hard currency, then they will have created money. Not from a bank. And is it really creating a loan when there is no intention or ability to pay off? More linguistic trick fuckery. A loan is only a loan if it is paid back. I believe a fair argument can be made that the government has no intention of paying back the trillions of dollars in deficit spending they authorize each year. But we call it a loan so that the entire philosophical basis for the system can persist. But it's not a loan, no matter how much you or they proclaim it to be, and therefore the system is in effect already failed. If money is not being created as a loan, it is simply being created. Our system, this monetary system that I suggest will fail, is predicated on the idea that certain loans never need to be paid back. That is definitionally not a loan. So if the Federal reserve "prints money" by "loaning" it to the government with no honest intention of being paid back, then the money is being created without being part of a loan.

You keep saying things that are ridiculous. Millions of people are complaining that housing prices are inflated. Others like myself complain that the Fed doesn't consider them in calculations of inflation. OER is a joke, but then again, the Fed is a joke, so it fits. You are intentionally being obtuse. It's funny, because you speak a language that academics use when they are intentionally avoiding an attack on their thesis. Hyper focus on semantics and definitional disagreements instead of the concepts, which are obvious. If they aren't obvious to you, then you simply aren't smart enough for the conversation you're attempting to have. That might be why you sound like a bot, btw. Using a vocabulary based on pattern matching and imitation rather than understanding. We're seeing the same nonsensical arguments with the CRT and trans issues. Suddenly the definition of racism and gender aren't what they've been for thousands of years, and anyone who doesn't accept these new definitions are the idiots, not the clowns who decided to unilaterally redefine them to support their bankrupt ideology. Sounds like they new definition of money. A couple points on things you missed, before I'm completely bored with this circle jerk. All money creation is always inflationary. But in a healthy system the "created" money that is loaned out and inflationary is offset by "destroyed" money that is paid to the loan and deflationary. The private system usually maintains this balance, because failing to do so would lead to insolvency and dissolution. But here comes the Fed, buying private securities from the banks (MBS are a great example) which distorts the lending calculus and encourages bad lending that will never be paid back. The Fed will cause massive deflation if it meaningfully reduces the balance sheet, but no one expects that to happen considering the government would lose it's ability to deficit spend without a guaranteed buyer of low-interest bonds. No, because money ≠ productivity, and that fact you think ViperMan (or I) was suggesting that is the clearest indication that you are incapable of keeping up with the conversation. Productivity is the most reduced form of what any two participants in a system are exchanging when they use money (any form) as a method of exchange. Ultimately, money is a claim on human effort, and different humans have different prices for their effort. In your example above, money is (obviously) not created. The discovery of additional, previously unavailable human effort through the increase in productivity from Ctrl+Z Ctrl+V is deflationary, as the money supply is unchanged, but the available product has increased. It also explains why the Fed's reckless money "printing" binge has been able to persist for so long. The world has been increasing productivity exponentially over the past 20 years thanks largely to the Internet, but also to automation and globalization of manufacturing and services labor. That deflationary explosion in additional available human effort (productivity) had been offset by a clueless fed that was simultaneously increasing it's "money-printing" operations exponentially in pursuit of their arbitrary and idiotic target of 2% inflation. They openly admitted for years that they didn't know why their stimulus wasn't having an inflationary effect, yet they intentionally omitted the wild inflation of housing and equities, and completely missed the huge deflation of globalization. So they just kept printing. Then COVID hit and the deflation spigot slammed shut. Human productivity plummeted and spending did not. Boom, record setting inflation in one year. And if you actually use the housing-inclusive formula that was used in the 80s for CPI then inflation right now is the highest in American history. Ever. Thanks to Russia and China, the globalization experiment is dead, so we now lack the intense deflationary pressure we relied on to obscure the effects of irresponsible money-printing. The Fed claims to be fighting inflation, but until they reach a policy rate that impedes government deficit spending, we aren't going to escape inflation. Here's the best quote I've ever heard from someone we've been taking seriously for years, Jerome Powell. This was one month ago! "We understand better how little we understand about inflation.” But these are the people who are going to fix this? That's the system we're in, where the central authority for managing inflation literally doesn't understand it. We simply have too much debt in the system. Corporate, personal, and government, and too much of it was spent on unproductive endeavors. We either let inflation rage for a few years (5-10 I suspect) with ~0 growth or we tackle inflation and let the housing, equities, and debt markets collapse by about 50-75 percent. All that assumes we find Jesus on responsible spending which, to the howling of the Keynesians and MMT hacks, will look similar to smart personal financial actions: Don't spend more than you make, and only take it debt you can pay off. But what we're probably going to get is more academics arguing that money isn't actually real and banks can just create money and the Fed doesn't actually print money and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. A theory is not valid because the detractors cannot convince the supporters of it's realize fallacy. Theories are by default invalid until validated by outcomes. Our financial system has been constructed around the theory that debt doesn't matter at a macro level, and now the theory is collapsing, as it was always doomed to.

For sure, but I was just using the past couple months as an example.

This is the fundamental flaw in the entire ideology. If this was true we'd have no inflation. But we did have inflation, and that inflation will destabilize the societal faith in the system, which is a prerequisite to the functioning of the system. If faith in the system is lost, the system is lost. Watch what happens when the bond market decides to ignore. Money is a proxy for human output, period. If you increase the amount of money without also increasing the output (growth), you will eventually get inflation. The entire system of modern economic has been constructed to deny or disprove this reality, yet here we are. Between the Yen, the Eurozone bond divergence, and our own inflation, any suggestion that MMT or Keynesian economics are valid theories should be laughed out of the room. For my whole life the economists like Krugman have been trying to convince us that the laws of personal finance don't apply to macroeconomic systems. It's bullshit. The only difference is the time it takes to fall apart.

San Francisco is a tragedy. You're either wildly ignorant about what's happening or intentionally misrepresenting it.

Dude I get why people think you're a bot. What part of my response was sensitive? That's a pretty wild assessment from someone who had to go back and delete an emotional attack. Protesting at times? What alternate reality do you live in? Spend five seconds on YouTube and find the BLM protestors screaming at cops. Or how about the *two* attempted murders now of conservative political figures (Kavanaugh and the Republican NY governor candidate). If you have a point, you're not making it well.

That using protestors to find politicians in public and "make them uncomfortable" is a double edged sword. This is obvious unless you only follow one side of the political discourse.

Yup. The only people who fantasize about Europe as an enlightened paradise are the ones who have never lived there.

Not very familiar with the first amendment, huh? When you support a law you shouldn't think about how it will be used, you should worry about how it will be misused. This dude was making a political point. AOC is on the record saying that protests should make you uncomfortable. She specifically chose something that she enjoys without considering that the protest against her could be framed in a way to make her quite uncomfortable. Just because you can't see the political point doesn't mean there isn't one. And all of that is largely irrelevant. We have the first amendment for very specific reasons, and laws that prevent sexual harassment in the workplace have no applicability in the public forum.

No, but I am planning to transition from investing in the market (401k) primarily to investing in real estate and hard assets. Not entirely, because I could be wrong. But I don't trust the government to stop meddling with the market. The ECB just announced they will buy private debt if needed to stabilize their policy across the EU... "Purchases of private sector securities could be considered, if appropriate." That's insane. The entire premise of investing is using information and intellect to judge the likelihood of one business succeeding or failing in the marketplace. How can you make that assessment when the government can apply huge asymmetric force simply because they decided a company is useful in supporting their policy plans? I'm sure the selection process for these securities will be transparent and consistent... And yes, definitely buying gold. Not because I have use for it, but because that's where people and governments go when they get scared. Uh, yeah. What's that got to do with anything? The world kept working after Bear Stearns and Lehman vanished. But if you were financially involved with them, your world might have been rocked. The financial crisis gave way to Occupy Wall Street on the left and the Tea Party on the right. But there was no inflation, so the furor died down. Will it this time around? Dunno. The 20%+ inflation in some European countries isn't going to just "keep working" either. That's fine. You've established that pretty much anything that doesn't result in humanities extinction will count as success for you. You asked for specifics, and I've pointed out pillars of the modern financial system that I consider unsustainable, with pretty specific metrics. You seen to have confused the collapse of *this* financial system with there being "no financial system," which is clearly absurd.

It's already happening. Is Belgium developed enough to count? Because the farmer revolt isn't a minor dispute. Keep inflation above 6% and the natives are going to get mighty restless, especially if unemployment starts rising, which it *always* does during a recession. Also, how rare are you talking? It's been 100 years since the US had a major disruption. That's actually a long time, historically. We're due. We haven't, actually. Nothing is more dangerous to a society than demographics, and we are going the way of Europe as far as birth rates go. And immigration isn't a solution. Low skilled labor won't prop up an advanced economy, and poaching skilled labor from the rest of the world just outsources the problem for a while. Social Security and Medicare are excellent gauges of our country's ability to leverage a smaller population of more productive workers to pay for everyone else. It isn't going well. The only way out of debt without pain is growth, and our growth has been abysmal *with* unprecedented monetary and fiscal stimulus for well over a decade. What's it going to look like without the debt fairy? Agreed, but no one is arguing the extinction of the species. This is a bit too vague. I would consider the system unchanged if: - The dominant 5 currencies are all still fiat - Central banks are still engaging in Quantitative Easing *and* inflation is managed (<3%). - The Eurozone currency block maintains the same membership. In particular, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain remain while the Euro maintains relative parity with the dollar. - Tariffs, or a schism between the west and China, basically some sort of end to the free trade arrangements between the alleged superpowers. Taiwan must still be independent. - Social Security and Medicare largely remain true to their current incarnation. Same for the social safety nets of the European nations - And this will be the interesting one. 9 years you say? Then our debt will have to be *above* ~$50 trillion, since deficits are a feature, not a bug in this Keynesian world. The extreme austerity required to prevent this would be, I think, a sign the system failed. Changes to any of the above will be accompanied by massive social disruption. We disagree here. I see a system that magnifies bubbles to increasingly dangerous levels. And the growing income inequality, a direct result of the Fed's policy, clearly indicate that "everyone" is not getting richer. Inflation is going to kill the argument that "income inequality doesn't matter since everyone is still better off," an argument I've made for years, erroneously. Inflation will bring the ultra rich back to being rich and the "enriched poor" will be poor again. It could be something like crypto, but I doubt it. Whatever it is, it will tie a currency to a fixed asset. It'll be the only way to restore trust in a reserve currency. Surely. Believe me, I hope I'm wrong. But there were a lot of people holding your position in the mid 30's. They ignored the signs, as I think we are now. The pandemic just accelerated the timeline a couple decades.

It'll be riots either way, but how we exit is a big question mark. We now get to choose between runaway inflation or the collapse of the credit markets. The only eventual emergence from this mess involves the complete destruction of the modern financial system. Keynesian economics and MMT are dead. But it has to be unwound over time, rather than allowed to implode. Our entire system only functions with the fed "printing money" through two incredibly stupid mechanisms: - Bond purchases to artificially suppress interest rates so the government can maintain insane deficit levels. This in turn suppresses the private rates and encourages unproductive, irrational (wasteful) investing. Reference pretty much every SPAC from 2020/2021, and the housing market. - Forcing reserves down the throats of the banks such that the Fed has to offer a *higher* rate for overnight deposits than the fed funds target. So we force banks to take these reserves to "stimulate" the economy, then we pay them to do fuck-all with them. If your system *requires* a government entity with the unconstrained ability to spend money that does not exist, your system is broken. And everyone in the industry plays along with the bullshit excuse of "that's just how banking works" or "the modern world needs these instruments to keep the transactions flowing." It's all horseshit. We've been riding the high of a slowly and artificially decreasing interest rate since Volker blew everything up in the 80s. That allowed for ever-increasing borrowing, which only stimulated growth by taking (stealing) it from the future. Sounds great, except once you hit 0%, the party ends. And here we are. Now we have to reconcile the fact that 50 years after the wide scale adoption of fiat currency, the experiment failed. We've run out of countries with cheap labor to exploit and the boomers didn't have enough kids to sustain the growth rates they wanted. But they made billions in what effectively became a Ponzi scheme. It'll start with a recession, soon. Then once the credit markets crack, the Fed will step in and go back to the only thing they know: printing. That'll be the unofficial signal to the world that high inflation is baked in for the next 5-10 years. But now the loss of earnings means no raises. There's a lot less distance between the Sri Lankan riots and American riots than we think. With a savings rate of 4%, there's no slack to handle inflation like we had in the 70s. And the collapse of globalism thanks to China and Russia is only going to pour plutonium onto a uranium fire. At the end we'll end up back on the gold standard, or something similar. It'll be a generation or two before the world trusts fiat currency again. But they always go back to it, because rulers always have bigger dreams than they have wallets, and voters are easily bought. Lots of people have seen this coming, but they had no idea just how much the government could spend to prop it all up. Turns out inflation was the party-crasher we were waiting for.

You can't play a game where the referee is allowed to change the rules at will. This will end poorly

My guess is the government changes their tune suddenly and claims there is no longer a vaccination mandate, and thus the case has no standing to proceed. This is exactly what they did with the mask mandate when a federal judge issued an injunction, because they realized it would be much worse to their cause to have a completed ruling that sets a precedent. If they just admit defeat (by admitting nothing at all and simply dropping the mandate with no explanation) now, then 20 or 30 or 100 years later when the next pandemic hits, they won't have a clearly established precedent stopping them from doing what they want.

This is a growing sickness in our system. The ability to produce an excellent product or provide a great service seems to die with the founder. Then whoever the shareholder-elected board installs to run the company bleeds it dry one CEO at a time until a shell is left. Each pays themselves in stock options, takes on corporate debt to buy back shares and boost the price a few pennies, then quietly leaves a hundred million bucks richer while the stock works it's way down to zero. And when the consequences of their shitty management finally manifest, they are either long gone or pulling the handle on the golden parachute. Just look at Boeing. Capitalism is being raped by the modern financial system while everyone else argues over bathrooms and abortions. The Democrats have declared war on meritocracy and individualism, both prerequisites to a capitalist system, so that leaves the Republicans to save us. I'm doubtful. Tucker Carlson gets it, but he's a bit quick to embrace a conspiracy and his foreign policy views aren't playing out well either. Who will be our hero?