Hear that?
That's the sound of the gavel closing the door on another $480,000,000,000 to the Coronavirus bailout. To that, you can add the $2,000,000,000,000 already spent,. Taxfoundation.org reports there were about 141 million taxpayers in the US in 2016. So the total spent on the bailout now amounts to roughly $17,000 for every taxpayer in the United States. When you consider that the median household in the US only has about $12,000 in savings you get some perspective: For the majority of households in the US, the bailout has just blown out your entire life savings. Or, put another way, if you took all those bailout dollars and put them end-to-end, they would...oh, I don't know, I'm not gonna work it out...but they would probably get you to Alpha Centauri a whole bunch of times. Round trip. With enough left over to pay for all those trips.
And it's only going to get worse. Congress has indicated they aren't close to being done.
To many, the shrug shouldered response will be "Congress will be Congress, but it will work itself out." But will it? Can the US really afford to increase the deficit by more than 25% of the entire GDP, and keep going? Sooner or later, the rest of the world is going to notice. Pre WWII Germany started off thinking they could slip all that extra printing press action under the rug, too. By the time people where moving wheelbarrows of 100 million Mark notes around to buy bread, there was a growing realization that maybe, just maybe, there is a limit.
The markets have recovered--somewhat--from their short term lows in the middle of March, but there's absolutely no reason for that recovery, and no reason to expect we won't revisit those lows and then some. Unemployment numbers are increasing like crazy, the oil industry is about to fully collapse, the vast majority of businesses are barely hanging on for dear life. The market has been a Ponzi scheme powered by artificially low-interest rates for years, but the utter lack of correlation with reality has been put in high relief in the past few weeks. Some argue that the markets are reacting to the influx of printed bailout money. Perhaps so--perhaps we are seeing the strung-out heroin addict after they've been granted one last fix. But we all know how that story ends.
It's political madness, not justified by the data. It shows what happens when politicians have too much power and a nominal inclination to consider the long-range implications of their actions.
Right now, every politician on both sides of the aisle is trying to assure you that everything is going to be OK, that we're turning the corner, and that we'll weather this storm. I doubt even they believe it.
Certainly, you shouldn't.
That's the sound of the gavel closing the door on another $480,000,000,000 to the Coronavirus bailout. To that, you can add the $2,000,000,000,000 already spent,. Taxfoundation.org reports there were about 141 million taxpayers in the US in 2016. So the total spent on the bailout now amounts to roughly $17,000 for every taxpayer in the United States. When you consider that the median household in the US only has about $12,000 in savings you get some perspective: For the majority of households in the US, the bailout has just blown out your entire life savings. Or, put another way, if you took all those bailout dollars and put them end-to-end, they would...oh, I don't know, I'm not gonna work it out...but they would probably get you to Alpha Centauri a whole bunch of times. Round trip. With enough left over to pay for all those trips.
And it's only going to get worse. Congress has indicated they aren't close to being done.
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| Trump announces a "beautiful, beautiful" bailout |
The markets have recovered--somewhat--from their short term lows in the middle of March, but there's absolutely no reason for that recovery, and no reason to expect we won't revisit those lows and then some. Unemployment numbers are increasing like crazy, the oil industry is about to fully collapse, the vast majority of businesses are barely hanging on for dear life. The market has been a Ponzi scheme powered by artificially low-interest rates for years, but the utter lack of correlation with reality has been put in high relief in the past few weeks. Some argue that the markets are reacting to the influx of printed bailout money. Perhaps so--perhaps we are seeing the strung-out heroin addict after they've been granted one last fix. But we all know how that story ends.
It's political madness, not justified by the data. It shows what happens when politicians have too much power and a nominal inclination to consider the long-range implications of their actions.
Right now, every politician on both sides of the aisle is trying to assure you that everything is going to be OK, that we're turning the corner, and that we'll weather this storm. I doubt even they believe it.
Certainly, you shouldn't.
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Keep on topic!