Keep Our Service Free-Donate

Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Easy Money Is Rotting America from the Inside-Out


Poor Man Survival

Self Reliance tools for independent minded people…


ISSN 2161-5543

A Digest of Urban Survival Resources

 


Bottom Feeder News…

 
It's only a matter of time before the next economic downturn comes along. How ready is your state?

Beyond the divisive politicking and culture wars (mostly distractions, a trick as old as bread and circuses), there’s something more insidious afoot.

Cloaked in opaque language and circular reasoning… So boring in its approach it pleads with us not to pay any more attention… to leave it to the experts because we’re too stupid to pay attention.

From Flint, Michigan to Afghanistan, two words are at root of this rot.

Today, to give you the deep dive on America’s moldy crawl space, we invite David Veksler, Director of Marketing at FEE, to the show.

How Easy Money Is Rotting America from the Inside-Out


By David Veksler

The Federal Reserve has been the main cause of business cycles in America since 1913. For several decades, it has tried to hide the consequences of its policies by enabling easy credit during each recession.

As Jonathan Newman wrote yesterday, pouring trillions of dollars into the financial sector obscures the external signs of the recession such as low asset prices and high unemployment and promotes economic malinvestment.

This malinvestment creates the conditions that cause the next recession. Some of the consequences of the Fed’s policies, such as stock market and housing bubbles can be directly attributed to its policies. In other cases, the artificially low interest rates and other “easy money” policies foster an "infrastructure rot" that erodes the efficiency of the American economy, the standard of living of consumers, and eats away at American infrastructure. These effects are difficult to trace back to the Fed's policies, so let’s concretize some examples to understand how Federal Reserve policies affect America.

At the city level, low interest rates allow cities to fund new public projects such as parks and bridges. While this may seem fine and dandy, all infrastructure projects have a maintenance cost. It’s not sufficient to build a park. One must also have the money to maintain it every year. If there is not enough revenue to pay for maintenance, the park will literally rot until the playgrounds fall apart, the lawns are overgrown, the lights fail, and the park becomes too dangerous for families to play in.

The same thing will happen to streets, bridges, and plumbing. This is one of the ways urban decay happens: easy money policies fund unsustainable urban infrastructure projects which make politicians look good, but end up crumbling a few years or decades later. The Flint water crisis happened in large part because the Federal government funded infrastructure projects that were not sustainable by the incomes of the people of Michigan.

Easy money from the Fed also rots the guts of American corporations. New money goes to the most politically-connected businesses first, and funds projects that would not be possible in a free market. Because private investors haven’t actually saved enough to see the projects through to completion, and consumers don’t value the product enough to cover production costs, the companies getting free money from the government either fail or receive endless bailouts. For example, easy money encouraged unsustainable commitments like high union wages and pensions, forcing US automakers to sell cars for prices that consumers could not pay given their actual savings rate. When sales dipped in 2009, the government was forced to bail out GM, Chrysler, and Ford in 2009.

While small businesses are the last to get access to the Fed's easy money taps, big banks received over $700 billion in TARP bailouts and even more selling U.S. Treasury bonds to the Fed under the QE program. Obama didn’t have clue as to why that amount of money was required-that sum was literally pulled out of the air and Obama simply said OK without any kind of review…what the hell, taxpayers were on the hook and they’re aren’t exactly savvy when it comes to getting suckered by Washington insiders and the scamsters we elect.

Such subsidies signal to banks that their primary customer is the government, not consumers. As a result, financial services have stagnated, and banks have fought rather than embraced genuine innovations like the blockchain.

The 2009 crisis made banks cautious of making mortgages to people who clearly could not afford them. But the Fed kept giving away free money and enabled a new phenomenon: zero-interest auto loans. While this may seem like a good deal for consumers, the Fed's credit expansion has created an auto-credit bubble worth 9.2% of all household debt. Consumers are buying and leasing cars that they would not normally be able to afford.

Instead of being taught to save, millennials are learning to have a negative savings rate (acquiring more debt than assets) and trust their future entirely to the government. If a recession happens, millions of people will suddenly find that they are unable to keep their cars and lack any emergency savings. When millions of unwanted cars are dumped back onto the market, automakers will again be unable to keep up with their inflated liabilities, requiring another bailout.

Perhaps one of the most destructive products of easy money has been the War On Terror. The U.S. has spent about $5 trillion on this seemingly endless war, and most of the money has not come from higher taxes, but from selling bonds to institutions like pensions funds, and especially foreign countries such as China and Japan. American citizens have gained nothing of value, while our government has been spreading death, destruction, and revolution abroad.

While the national economy has gotten away with federal deficits and a $20 trillion dollar debt for decades, this trend is only sustainable as long as the rest of the world keeps lending the U.S. money. When they decide to stop funding our wars and financial irresponsibility, Americans will suddenly be faced with paying trillions of dollars in liabilities. This overdue correction will likely come with dramatic reductions to Americans’ standard of living.

My point in writing this is to help you visualize the destructive effect of the U.S. government's easy money policies from an abstract harm to the practical harm: collapsing bridges, kids poisoned from lead plumbing, millions of cars rotting in junkyards, scandalous bank services fees, bombs falling on innocent people all over the world, and widespread poverty once the easy-credit party ends.

This article originally appeared at FEE at this link.


Rising education debt may also be crimping consumers’ demand for other kinds of debt, according to the analysts. Total student loan debt reached $1.36 trillion in the third-quarter of 2017, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That’s up from $530 billion a decade earlier, and is the largest share of non-housing debt. It’s also "significantly more burdensome" for lower income households, the analysts said.

 

We’d like to think we can avoid another recession, but we can’t. Economic expansion followed by recession is simply the way things work in a capitalist society.

Since we know it’s not a question of if, but rather when, a recession hits, we all need to be prepared. For families, that means having an adequate emergency fund. For states, it requires putting enough into reserves to ride out a downturn.

Moody’s Analytics analyzed state reserves to see how well they would weather a moderate recession. The group compared actual reserves, as a percentage of state revenues, with the necessary reserves a state would require to comfortably withstand an economic downturn. (How much a given state needs to hold in reserve varies depending on particular economy and tax structure.) While 16 states are looking good and 19 states could probably squeak by, there are 15 states that are going to be in serious trouble if we have a recession in the next one to two years.


 
Bruce, the Contrarian curmudgeon!

 


How to Survive the War on the Middle Class

14 of the best reports I’ve assembled on protecting your freedom…Here is the download link. http://1drv.ms/1d9kfiU

 

Sticking With a Frugal Lifestyle
These tips can help you live frugally month after month.

 

Related posts:


  1. Things You Can Do To Be More Self-Sufficient
  2. Small Scale Self-Sufficiency
  3. Top 10 Tips For Urban Homesteading
  4. Get your free credit score
  5. Cost cutting tips and tricks
  6. Sources of extra cash

7.       Knowing When and How to Stockpile Groceries
Stocking up could save your grocery budget!

 

8.       John Braddock’s, A Spy’s Guide to Thinking

How to think spy gadgets are fun, real world stuff…not James Bond


 

 

A Final Note…

Contributors and subscribers enable the Poor Man Survivor to post 150+ free essays annually. It is for this reason they are Heroes and Heroines of New Media. Without your financial support, the free content would disappear for the simple reason that I cannot keep body and soul together on my meager book sales & ecommerce alone.

 

Improve your brain

Battling brain fog?  Chlorophyll doesn’t just make plants green, it also switches on enzymes that help your liver quickly break down and excrete fatigue-triggering toxins, according to recent British research.  No wonder tiredness and brain fog are often the first signs that your liver needs a chlorophyll boost.  Get it by eating at least four daily cups of green vegetables such as peas, broccoli, spinach and/or kale.  UCLA researchers say fuzzy thinking and fatigue can be reversed in as little as 10 days.


>>Find more ways to improve your brain here [we’ve now included an instant download link at a cheaper price too]:

 

You Have a 16-Cylinder Brain-Learn How to Use it & Re-Awaken the Genius Inside You!

 


I know everyone is short on time in this hectic world so I’ve kept this PDF short and to the point with links to expert how-to articles and guides including:

 

·         How to Increase Your Intelligence

·         6 Step Brain Exercise Steve Jobs Used to Boost Creativity

·         6 Simple Habits to Boost Your Intelligence

·         The Best Vitamins to Increase Brain Function

·         How a Harvard Brain Specialist Keeps Her Brain Healthy

·         A Review of the Top 10 Brain [Limitless] Pills

·         How to Protect Your Cognitive Function

 


 

Support our efforts by shopping my storefront…


 

 

 

A Smoking Frog Feature, Shallow Planet Production

 

3 comments:

Larry said...

Americans party like it's 1999! Our national motto is the same as Mad Magazine's Alfred E Neuman "What, Me Worry?"

Yvonne said...

Easy money and the Fed has been a curse to this nation. Politicians are like drunk sailors, one drink is never enough.

Ulv said...

Interesting blog-one of the more intelligent I've run across.