"This isn't 2008" - Part 1 (Oh really? Maybe it's worse.)

Anytime I see some идиот in the media reassuring us that we could just never have another 2008 ever, ever again, I realize we're going to see something similar or perhaps even worse.

Let's take a little stroll down Memory Lane and reexamine what that time was like and what kinds of shenanigans and chicanery happened. I think you'll find that history is repeating itself in a pretty eerie way.

Links I mention:

https://causeyconsultingllc.com/2022/12/29/this-isnt-2008-%f0%9f%98%92/

https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/how-severe-would-a-recession-be-5515020/

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1125110/11775961

https://money.com/jobs-barack-obama-presidency/

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/great-recession.asp

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/8249181/Deepening-crisis-traps-Americas-have-nots.html

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/a-real-jaw-dropper-at-the_b_791091

https://www.pasadenastarnews.com/2010/01/12/fed-posts-record-profits-for-last-year/

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/how-inequality-fueled-the-crisis

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2010-01-28/secret-banking-cabal-emerges-from-aig-shadows-david-reilly

https://ourfinancialsecurity.org/2011/06/nytimes-a-secretive-banking-elite-rules-trading-in-derivatives/

Need more? Email me: https://causeyconsultingllc.com/contact-causey/ 

Transcript

0:15

Welcome to the Causey consulting podcast. You can find us online anytime at Causey consulting llc.com. And now, here's your host, Sara Causey. Hello, Hello, and thanks for tuning in. In today's episode, I want to take a walk down memory lane. Unfortunately, it's not going to be a nice pleasant little stroll. shiny, happy people holding hands. Birds chirping in the sun shining? No, I'm afraid not think we need to go back and revisit what happened during the Great Recession. It's a good little refresher for all of us, even those of us like myself, who were working that had adult responsibilities at that time. Looking back on it, yes, there are things I remember quite clearly. And there were things that I could stand to refresh my memory on. Because I was working a lot, I was doing whatever I felt like I needed to do or I had to do just to survive. And so I think we could all use a little freshening up of our memory banks here. Over the break, I did a bit of writing, I did quite a lot of reading, but I did some writing too. I was focused a lot on trying to get my book, my little mini book slash quick and dirty Field Guide, will you survive a job market crash, I was very focused on trying to get that out and get it published and get it available. So that as people need it, they can find it. I hope to God that nobody does need it. But I really do think it's to your benefit to rough out a job loss survival plan. So much better to be prepared than scared. But I also dropped a blog post on December 29. About this isn't 2008 Because I saw an article on LinkedIn. And I just thought, you know how there are certain things I don't know how someone says them with a straight face. I don't know how someone says them in good conscience. And to be completely fair, let me throw up a disclaimer here. Before I go any further. I believe there are some people who are just in denial. Some of them might mean well, some of them might be in such a entrenchment of toxic positivity and toxic optimism that they think like a toddler plugging their ears lalalala, I don't hear you. If I just don't pay attention, it won't happen. If I don't acknowledge the storm clouds brewing on the horizon in the economy, then nothing bad will visit my house. I do think some people, they're just in a state of denial. And they think by ignoring the problem, the problem will just simply go away, or it won't impact them. I know I'm gonna get hate mail for this, but some of them may not have good critical thinking skills. Some of them may not have good functioning literacy. So they may just not know what they don't know. Now throw rotten tomatoes at me. I'm trying to just keep it real with you. Maybe some of them don't. Maybe some of them don't know how to connect the dots. Some of them without a doubt in my mind are paid corporate shills. They're being paid and directed to advance a very particular narrative to keep john and jane Q Public asleep, so that they don't know what's going on until it's too late. And these hyper elites can come in and swoop up whatever the hell they want on the cheap. This is reality. Not everybody that comes out and says this isn't 2008 has nefarious intent, I want to be very clear about that. I just don't get their line of thinking. It's not something that I can get on board with. So in this blog post I wrote, the more the media talking heads tell us this isn't 2008 or 2008 was a once in a lifetime thing. It would just never happen again, the less I believe it. In fact, the more I hear that, the more I think we're assuredly headed into the Great Recession to point out an article appeared on LinkedIn was one of the things that inspired this, and it was titled How severe would a recession be? The global economy is at a tipping point heading into 2023. The three largest economies the US China and the euro area are slowing sharply warns the World Bank. The picture for 2023 has darkened concedes the World Trade Organization. The worst is yet to come declares the International Monetary Fund. Wait for it. But the downturn in the offing is not likely to be an economic tailspin. 58% of global business leaders say they expect an impending risk Session to be mild and short. In other words, this isn't 2008 and quote. Right? You know, as I've said many, many times, don't pay attention to what these fat cats say to John and Jane Q Public, watch what they do. And watch what they say in private, to the shareholders, to the Board of Directors, to the investors. Because if they are going this 58%, who even are these people, right 58% of global business leaders say, according to who, like Seinfeld, who are the variable, who are they. Nevertheless, if they're on a public stand, ah, an impending recession is likely to be mild and short. But then privately, they're telling their investors, you've got to buckle the hell up. Because this is going to be truly awful. And it may even be unprecedented. It's really up to you which side of that coin that you want to pay attention to? I know, for me, I would much rather pay attention to what they're saying in private. I've quoted so many different hedge funds and investment firms that have said, You better buckle up, it is going to get bad and is going to be a rough, rough ride. You can choose to believe that or not. I really, really encourage you to do your own research on the matter and come to your own conclusions. Also, in this blog post, I drop a prediction alert. And I say we could very well see something as bad or worse as the Great Recession slash global financial crisis. Unemployment across sectors could shoot up as it did, then, corporations will snatch up anything they want on the cheap homes, businesses, land, assets, etc. When people are jobless, scared and hungry, they will rapidly lose their work from home idealism, and go sit in a cubicle just to have work. I hope none of that will happen. I want to be wrong on this. In the meantime, I'd suggest you watch what the fat cats and power brokers do. Not what the talking heads in the media say to keep you pacified and quiet. Watch what the fat cats do. If they are telling their investors privately that the crap is going to hit the fan and be brutal. I pay attention to that much more than someone trying to delude you into thinking 2008 can simply never happen again. Indeed, so. Ah, yes. And speaking of jobs and unemployment, why don't we drift back in time a little bit. I'll visit an article on money.com summing up jobs and the Barack Obama presidency. As the end of Obama's term in office neared, the unemployment rate stood at 4.6%. That's the lowest it's been since August 2007. And a drastic improvement compared to unemployment levels hovering near 10% During Obama's first two years as president, yet critics say the unemployment rate is misleading, because it only measures those without jobs who are actively seeking employment. What's overlooked is the huge population of workers who have simply dropped out of the labor market. For nearly every month over the past three years, the unemployment rate has been below 6%. And the workforce participation rate has ranged between 62.5 and 63%. That's significantly lower than the 66% rate before the Great Recession. workforce participation hasn't been as low as it's been lately since the Jimmy Carter era economic malaise of the 1970s How many people have given up on seeking jobs in 2014 538 estimated that 8 million working age Americans were not employed, but also not counted in the unemployment rate because they'd stopped looking for jobs. Roughly one out of every six prime age American males ages 25 to 54, has either dropped out of the workforce or is otherwise unemployed. Obviously, if all of these men plus all the others who have given up on the labor market were counted in the unemployment rate, it would be higher than the sub 5% levels of 2016 and quote, does any of that sound familiar to you? Do you remember the episode I dropped not long ago, where men working age men were being blamed for the so called labor shortage. And we were told that all of these men had moved back in with grandma and we're living in her basement or they were some kind of deadbeat boyfriend hanging out on a girlfriend's couch, smoking weed and playing video games all day. Here we are, it's the same story it is literally the same freakin story. And the same kind of shenanigans and chicanery in my opinion, that the BLS is doing with the unemployment right now to make it look like wink wink nudge nudge the unemployed that rate is so low, we couldn't possibly be in a recession and home. Well, if we do go in one, it's not going to be that bad because the labor market is still in such good shape, but it's going to be totally fine. If we crash it. The same BS that we're seeing now is the same BS that we saw, then it's a really great way to preserve a president's legacy to just start cutting out data that doesn't match your narrative. If you say we just won't count people who have given up or we just won't count people who are not actively whatever that means. What does it mean to be actively looking for a job? Does that mean that you're on unemployment, and you're having to apply to five jobs a day and go on two interviews a week? Or whatever the standard is? Now? I mean, what is that? What does that even mean? What does that even look like? So these numbers can be very easily manipulated, to reflect whatever you want them to reflect. It happens then it's happening again. Now. There's one parallel we should be able to see very easily, including, basically verbatim, the same bullcrap that we're hearing about all of these men who have just given up and they smoke drugs, and they play video games all day on someone's couch. Like, here we go again, verbatim. Let's take a look at a little something else that might sound familiar to you. Over on the summary that investopedia.com has for the Great Recession we find during the American housing boom of the mid 2000s. Financial institutions had begun marketing mortgage backed securities and sophisticated derivative products at unprecedented levels. When the real estate market collapsed in 2007, a housing boom in the mid 2000s, followed by a real estate market collapse in 2007. These securities declined precipitously in value. The credit markets that had financed the housing bubble quickly followed housing prices into a downturn as a credit crisis began unfolding in 2007. The solvency of overleveraged banks and finance financial institutions came to a breaking point beginning with the collapse of Bear Stearns in March 2008. You may also remember Jim Cramer saying that Bear Stearns was going to be just fine. And then I collapsed. Things came to ahead later that year with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the company's fourth largest investment bank in September 2008. The contagion quickly spread to other economies around the world, most notably in Europe. And as a result of the Great Recession, the United States alone shed more than 8.7 million jobs, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, causing the unemployment rate to double. So that's what they're willing to admit to how how much do you want to bet it was probably more than that. Further, American households lost roughly $19 trillion of net worth as a result of the stock market plunge. According to the US Department of the Treasury, the Great Recession official end date was June 2009. In quote, yeah, sure. Sure. Yeah. That's when it had an official ending. You can't make this stuff up. Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. So we had a credit crisis. We had a housing bubble, followed by a housing market collapse, we had these investment banks and investment firms becoming insolvent. Does any of this sound familiar to you? Do you not remember the FOMO and the Yolo and then artificially inflated, in my opinion, housing market that we saw in 2021 People just buying no inspections. Some of them even only seeing the house and pictures are in a video walkthrough and buying it and then realizing that they got a lemon. And now a lot of them are upside down, because the house is worth less than what they've paid for it. Oh, and plus it needs a boatload of repairs. Yep, also a lot of people relying on Buy now pay later and credit cards for basic necessity items. I'm sure you can see the parallels here. Speaking of derivatives. On December 11 of 2010 Louie's story published an article in The New York Times titled A secret of banking, elite rules trading and derivatives. I'll read now, on the third Wednesday of every month, the nine members of an elite Wall Street society gather in midtown Manhattan. The men share a common goal to protect the interests of big banks in the vast market for derivatives, one of the most profitable and controversial fields and finance. They also share a common secret the details of their meetings, even their identities have been strictly confidential. Drawn from giants like JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the bankers form a powerful committee that helps oversee trading and derivatives instruments which like insurance are used to hedge risk. In theory, this group exists to safeguard the integrity of the multitrillion dollar market. In practice, it also defends the dominance of the big banks. The banks in this group, which is affiliated with a new derivatives clearing house have fought to block other banks from entering the market. And they are also trying to thwart efforts to make full information on prices and fees freely available. Banks influence over this market and over clearing houses like this one, like this one. This select Group advises has costly implications for businesses, large and small. I'm going to scroll down just a little bit. How did big banks come to have such influence that they can decide who can compete with them? Ironically, this development grew in part out of worries during the height of the financial crisis in 2008. A major concern during the meltdown was that no one not even government regulators fully understood the size and interconnections of the derivatives market, especially the market and credit default swaps, which insure against defaults of companies or mortgage bonds. The panic led to the need to bail out the American International Group, for instance, which had CDs contracts with many large banks. In the midst of the turmoil regulators ordered banks to speed up plans long in the making to set up a clearing house to handle derivatives trading, the intent was to reduce risk and increase stability in the market. Now, speaking of AIG, and the bailouts and the derivatives, I'm going to hop somewhere else for a second. Bear with me, I know that we have like a weird interconnected web here, but such as the American banking and finance system, if you don't know that by now, I'm not sure what to tell you. So there was an article in Bloomberg News written by David Riley, where he talks about the bailout of American International Group AIG. And he describes this committee members and the AIG insiders as a secretive group deploying billions of dollars to favored banks operating with little oversight by the public or elected officials. And he goes on to say, the idea of secret banking curveballs that control the country and economy is a given among conspiracy theorists who stockpile ammo, bottled water and peanut butter. What's wrong with bottled water and peanut butter? You're gonna need that if you have a blizzard. Geez. After this week's congressional hearing into the bailout of American International Group, Inc. You have to wonder if those folks are crazy, after all, huh? Yeah, Indeed, indeed. He also writes the Federal Reserve Bank of New York whose role as the most influential part of the Federal Reserve system apart from the matter of a IGS bailout. And then we note here that the Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner's, was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York during the AIG debacle in 2002. deserves further congressional scrutiny. I'm going to butt in long enough to say this should also tell you about the situation we have with crony capitalism, people in politics coming from these banks, people from these banks going into politics, do you really think that they're not scratching their own backs? Come on man. The New York Fed is in the hot seat for its decision in November 2008 To buy out for about $30 billion insurance contracts. AIG sold on toxic debt securities to banks, including Goldman Sachs Group, Merrill Lynch, and Deutsche Bank, amongst others, that decision critics say amounted to a backdoor bailout for the banks, which received 100 cents on the dollar for contracts, that would have been worth far less had AIG been allowed to fail. Now, I'm not saying Congress should be meddling in interest rate decisions or micromanaging bank regulation. Yet, when unelected and unaccountable agencies pick banking winners while trying to end run Congress, even as taxpayers are forced to lend, spend and guarantee about $8 trillion to prop up the financial system, our collective blood should boil and quote, yacht should but it's not going to what what did any of us do about it, then? What will any of us do about it now? I've told you before at the risk of sounding very cynical, I'm not recording these episodes my Saturday broadcast to try to wake somebody up. I think at this point, if if you're not getting it if you don't understand then you're not going to someone who is way more concerned about gossip in the royal family. They're worried About the Kardashians, they want to mindlessly watch tiktoks all day, they're not going to tune into a podcast like mine anyway, turn them, they're not coming here. And if a friend or a family member tried to share an episode with them, or even the little mini book that I've written, if somebody gave it as a gift for 99 cents and said, Hey, I really think you should follow these steps as a just in case protocol. They're not going to do anything. I know it sounds really cynical, and it sounds really bad to say that certain people are just beyond hope, but they probably are. So anyway, Did we do anything about it, then? No. Are we going to do anything about it now? Also? No, I really don't think so. You know, there was the episode I did where I talked about that diabolical video that Dick folds was in where he was like, We squeezed and I want to I want to get there still a beating heart out of their chest and eat it in front of them. It is just, in my opinion, pure evil, just evil, a bull, wicked, awful, heinous and evil. And there was one of the former VPs of Deutsche Bank, I think, who was talking in that same documentary, the public always forgets that Ken gets kicked down the road. We get this financial crisis put behind us put in the rearview mirror and the public will forget. How well has that worked for us? How well has that mentality of kicking the can down the road? And forgetting the times when we are mercilessly screwed by these Wall Street bankers and fat cats and their cronies? How does that work for us? Yeah. So speaking of bailouts, and what happened with the money and all the things that we were not allowed to know. On December 2 of 2010. In a guest spot on the Huffington Post, Bernie Sanders contributed an article titled A real jaw dropper at the Federal Reserve. The byline reads after years of stonewalling by the Fed, the American people are finally learning the incredible and jaw dropping details of the Fed's multi trillion dollar bailout of Wall Street and corporate America. Huh? Yeah. Yep, yep. Yep. All read. What have we learned so far from the disclosure of more than 21,000 transactions. We have learned that the $700 billion Wall Street bailout signed into law by President George W. Bush turned out to be pocket change compared to the trillions and trillions of dollars in near zero interest loans and other financial arrangements the Federal Reserve doled out to every major financial institution in this country. Among those are Goldman Sachs, which received nearly $600 billion, Morgan Stanley which received nearly $2 trillion Citi Group which received $1.8 trillion Bear Stearns, which received nearly $1 trillion and Merrill Lynch which received some $1.5 trillion in short term loans from the Fed. Can you fathom that amount of money $1.5 trillion. I can't even picture it. I read a statistic once that said something like a trillion dollars if you printed it out in paper money, like if you had $1 bills, it would be something like the distance from the Earth to the Sun and back again. $1.5 trillion. We also learned that the feds multitrillion dollar bailout was not limited to Wall Street and big banks, but that some of the largest corporations in this country also received a very substantial bailout. Among those are General Electric, McDonald's, Caterpillar, Harley Davidson, Toyota, and Verizon. Perhaps most surprising is the huge sum that went to bail out foreign private banks and corporations, including two European mega banks, Deutsche Bank, and Credit Suisse, which were the largest beneficiaries of the Fed's purchase of mortgage backed securities. Deutsche Bank, a German lender sold the Fed more than $290 billion worth of mortgage securities Credit Suisse, a Swiss bank sold the Fed more than $287 billion in mortgage bonds. Has the Federal Reserve of the United States become the central bank of the world? Hmm, wow. Oh, Bernie gets a little close to the truth there and they Woo. The Fed said that this bailout was necessary to prevent the world economy from going over a cliff. But three years after the start of the recession, millions of Americans remain unemployed, and have lost their homes life savings and ability to send their kids to college. Meanwhile, big banks and corporations have returned to making huge profits and paying their executives record breaking compensation packages as if the financial crisis they started never happened in quote Do you not think we're saddling right up for the same crap all over again? I mean, seriously, probably with some of the very same players, how many of those names that I just read off to you from Bernie Sanders article? Do you recognize how many of them are still around, probably going to come back again, with their hat in their hand looking for that taxpayer money, looking for the Fed money. I mean, this, this shouldn't be a surprise. And by the way, you know, I'm gonna really put on my tinfoil hat here, I would encourage you. With those, let's say European banks, in particular, I would really, really encourage you to take a look into their history. In the same way that I recommended that you watch that video with Russell Brand, and Vandana Shiva, where she talks about these companies now that are involved in food and agriculture. What were they doing in World War Two? Who are they aligned with? How are they behaving at that point in time, I would really, really, really, really encourage you to do the same type of research with these European mega banks. What were they doing? Who were they supporting, and what was going on at that point in time, I'll just leave that for for you to make up your own decisions. Speaking of the Fed, let's take a little look see into them. There was an article that was published at the beginning of 2010. By the Associated Press, I had to do some digging to find it. Again, some of these articles have been scrubbed, some are behind paywalls. Some appear to have just disappeared into thin air, I had to really do some digging. To find some of this information for you. I want you to go and read these articles for your self. And make up your own mind. If there's any that you think you might want to revisit. In the future, I'd highly recommend that you download them or print them off, save them to a PDF put them somewhere where you can find them again, because at some point down the road, you may just not be able to. So this article by the Associated Press, I was able to find a copy of it in the Pasadena Star News and the title is fed post record profits for last year again published on January the 12th of 2010. The Federal Reserve generated record profits last year, so this way they wouldn't be talking about 2009. Reflecting money made off its extraordinary efforts to rescue the country. From the worst economic and financial crisis since the 1930s. The central bank announced Tuesday it logged a record windfall of $52.1 billion of that total a record 46 point 1 billion gets turned over to the Treasury Department and marks both the biggest profit and payment to the Treasury on records dating back to 1914 when the Fed began operating. The previous record payment turned over to the treasury of $34.6 billion was registered in 2007. In 2008, the Fed reported a payment of $31.7 billion. The feds efforts to end the crisis are separate from the$700 billion taxpayer funded financial bailout program authorized by Congress in 2008 and overseen by the Treasury Department. Originally set up to shore up banks money from the publicly derided Program, also has been doled out to rescue other types of companies, including General Motors, Chrysler and JMac. President Barack Obama is weighing a levy aimed at recovering tax dollars from government rescued financial institutions. The bigger profit reported by the Fed came from $46.1 billion in earnings from the securities it held last year. Such income went up as the Feds holding of securities mushroomed and, you know, so as you can see, the Fed had their hand in this pie back during the Great Recession, they have their hand and it very much again, what they're doing with the interest rates, what they're doing, where they say pretty openly, they want to crash the job market. They want to see unemployment go up and they want to see wages stagnate, I think realistically, we should expect wages to go down not to stagnate. I'll continue to read just a little bit more from this Associated Press article before I move on. The Fed launched several securities buying programs last year to help revive the economy. Its goal is to drive down rates on mortgages and other consumer debt. Under one program that ended last year the Fed snapped up $300 billion worth of government debt. Under another program. The Fed is on track to buy $1.25 trillion in mortgage securities from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and an additional $175 billion in debt issued by the mortgage giants. Those programs have boosted the value of securities held by the Fed and quote I've told you this So have some other authors like Jared a Brock they are going to snap up whatever they want. They always do. They will buy whatever they want on the cheap after the economy goes completely in the dumper and people are desperate, they'll snatch up whatever they want. So we're the cronies on Wall Street and in these big banks and in these investment firms and in corporate America, this is what they do. This is what you need to be prepared for. If you think this could not happen again, this time around. In my mind, the only person you're fooling yourself something I think we can put in the column of the rich get richer and the poor get poor and the people in the middle get the squeeze. We've seen data over 2022 that luxury item buyers are still doing whatever they want. Remember, I read you articles on the broadcast about people going in places like are May, Louie Vuitton Gucci Prada, buying whatever they want to buy like these high end luxury retailers are saying well we're not seeing a slowdown the people that come in here to buy from us are still buying it and making it do what it do. Meanwhile people shopping at the Dollar Tree the Dollar General the Walmart's were getting really squeezed. And some people that had six figure incomes were going into a Walmart for the first time or going into $1 General for the first time because they were struggling. Hmm. Wonder if the same thing happened back then. Well, golly, gee whiz. You know what it sure did. Over on the telegraph. There was an article published in January of 2011, titled, deepening crisis traps America's have nots. The byline reads, The US is drifting from a financial crisis to a deeper and more insidious social crisis. Self congratulations by the US authorities that they have this time avoided a repeat of the 1930s is premature. And funny enough, they have a photograph when you go to this article, you'll see it in the photograph juxtaposing what they're calling a tale of two shoppers, Louis Vuitton has helped boost the luxury goods stock index by almost 50 percentage points since October, yet Walmart has languished and so they show a picture of this very high end well lit Louis Vuitton store juxtaposed with a woman shopping at a WalMart where it says always low prices $9.88 Looks like she might be in the like the kids shoe section. Yeah the more that that things change the more they stay the same. Yeah, so that's another parallel we can draw the luxury shoppers the people with money that have been talking about how they just haven't been impacted by inflation, they can still go and buy their Louis Vuitton and their Gucci they can still order it What was that Rolls Royce, we saw a price of like $400,000 then you can still go and buy that crap. But you know, the average person that just needs to buy a loaf of bread on the way home from work. Good God. I used to be that you could run in the Dollar General and get a loaf of bread for 99 cents. The last time I looked in there, I think the that same loaf of bread now is like $1.59 Right? But yeah, we only have that eight or 9% inflation. Oh, and it's starting to cool off. Oh, and it's starting to abate. Yeah. Right. But the haves can still go and buy their expensive purses and their cars and their jewelry. Hello, we are so much in another verse of the same song or another chapter of the same book. On that note, I'm going to wrap it up here because this this could go on all day if I sat here truly I mean I've done a lot of research I've put a lot of time and energy compiling this information try to synthesize it together for you to bring you this episode. I could be here all damn day. Really, if we wanted to look at all the similarities for all of these Nimrods that want to tell us Oh, we got a dozen whenever. I mean, it can't get any planar. It cannot get any plainer. So there was an article written in July of 2010. I'm going to try to do my best with this name and I hope I do not butcher it. But it was written by ROG ROG rom Rajon titled How inequality fueled the crisis. Before the recent financial crisis, politicians on both sides of the aisle in the United States, egged on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant government backed mortgage agencies to support low income lending in their constituencies. There was a deeper concern behind this newly discovered passion for housing for the poor, growing income inequality. Since the 1970s wages for workers at the 90th percentile of the wage distribution in the US, such as office managers have grown much faster than wages for The median worker at the 50th percentile such as factory workers and office assistants, a number of factors are responsible for the growth in the 9050 differential. Pardon me, I had to hit the pause button for just a second and cough. Perhaps the most important is that the technological progress in the US requires the labor force to have ever greater skills. A high school diploma was sufficient for office workers 40 years ago, whereas an undergraduate degree is barely sufficient today. But the education system has been unable to provide enough of the labor force with the necessary education. The reasons range from indifferent nutrition, socialization, and early childhood learning to dysfunctional primary and secondary schools that leave too many Americans unprepared for college. The everyday consequence for the middle class is a stagnant paycheck and growing job insecurity. Politicians feel their constituents pain, do they, but it is hard to improve the quality of education for improvement requires real and effective policy change in an area where too many vested interests favor the status quo, unquote. Yeah, there's a lot of fat cats in corporate America that want workers, they don't want you to think, quite frankly, it's to their benefit. If you don't, it's to their benefit. If you're not a critical thinker. If you don't put the puzzle pieces together, if you don't read, you have talked before about the staggering number of adults in this country who cannot read at a sixth grade level. It's deeply troubling to me, although not completely surprising, I'll read just a little bit more. Therefore, the political response to rising inequality, whether carefully planned or the path of least resistance was to expand lending to households, especially low income households, the benefits growing consumption and more jobs were immediate, whereas paying the inevitable bill could be postponed into the future. Sounds like buy now pay later doesn't not cynical as it might seem easy credit has been used throughout history as a palliative by governments that are unable to address the deeper anxieties of the middle class directly. I'm going to read that one more time. Cynical as it may seem easy credit has been used throughout history as a palliative by governments that are unable to address the deeper anxieties of the middle class directly. Unquote. Yeah, bread and circus, have your entertainment, have a STEMI check and go buy some crap you don't need will dole things out to you. We'll keep you entertained. We'll give you a little money here and there. We'll give you easy credit. Well, I've talked before about those ninja loans. I got postcards for those things all the time. All the time, no income, no job, no assets, but come on in here and get this free money. Meanwhile, it is not free money. Believe me. It's more like loan sharking. I feel like this is yet another parallel. keep people happy. Keep them amused. Keep them distracted. Let them worry about other things. Keep telling them we would just never have another 2008 Tell them that the labor market is burning hot. Things are great. There is not a recession, then go ahead and tell them Well, yeah, okay, there is an impending recession, but it's going to look very mild. It's not gonna be anything that you should worry your pretty little peon head about let your overlords do that for you. Yeah, I mean, you can't make this stuff up. But yeah, that easy credit. It was easy to get into and hard to get out of and I am so glad that I never took out one of those payday loans or Ninja loans but because of my income status, I was living paycheck to paycheck and and how much money I bought a foreclosure home and I was trying to fix it up when and where I could. I got invitations for them all the time. Evidence has shown that those predatory loans went after the elderly, they went after women and they went after minorities. It's it's predatory. It is predation. It is they want to get you on the hook so they can take everything you've got. Yeah, I really, I really, really, really, really encourage you. Please do your own reading. Please do your own research. Go back and read all of these articles for yourself. Don't take my word for it. There may be information that jumps out at you that didn't jump out at me. There may be even more parallels that you find or that you see. These are just a few that I had time and energy to pull together to really drive it home as best I can. I don't know what the future holds. I'm not an Oracle from ancient times. I'm not an economist, a power broker. I don't sit on any of these hedge funds, or any of the movers and shakers. That's not me. I do believe I'm Intel. legit enough to recognize a pattern that repeats? And to be able to read the tea leaves and say, You know what? I've already lived through this before. I feel like I'm in a time loop. I'm seeing so many shadows of Oh 708 And oh nine. And the more that I am told, No, kind of like these are not the drones you're looking for. This is not the economy you're looking for. This is not the data. This is not the evidence. This is not the research, the more that someone tries to gaslight me into thinking that the parallels I see are not real. And then I need to just sit the hell down and take my pablum like a good little baby, the more concern that I become. Think for yourself, make your own decisions. Stay safe, stay sane. And I will see you in the next episode. Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a quick second to subscribe to this podcast and share it with your friends. We'll see you next time. Bla