A false perception of safety
You mean I can't trust private-credit car wash valuations??
“How little it takes to be happy! The sound of bagpipes.—Without music life would be a mistake. The Germans even think of God as singing songs.1”
If you missed it - here’s my recent chat with Wall Street legend Jim O’Shaughnessy
Loved this:
I had a similar rant back in 2021.
Our Beloved Legacy Financial Media
That last, aberrant headline came out this past Tuesday, on Politico.
“What if the numbers supporting the case for broad-based prosperity were themselves misrepresentations? What if, in fact, darker assessments of the economy were more authentically tethered to reality?
…These numbers have time and again suggested to many in Washington that unemployment is low, that wages are growing for middle America and that, to a greater or lesser degree, economic growth is lifting all boats year upon year. But when traveling the country, I’ve encountered something very different. Cities that appeared increasingly seedy. Regions that seemed derelict. Driving into the office each day in Washington, I noted a homeless encampment fixed outside the Federal Reserve itself.
“…the filters used to compute the headline statistics are flawed. As a result, they paint a much rosier picture of reality than bears out on the ground…In 2023 alone, the CPI indicated that inflation had driven prices up by 4.1 percent. But the true cost of living, as measured by our research, rose more than twice as much — a full 9.4 percent. And that laid bare the oft-quoted riposte that wage gains outpaced inflation during the crisis following COVID-19. When our more targeted measure of inflation is set atop our more accurate measure of weekly earnings, it immediately becomes clear that purchasing power fell at the median by 4.3 percent in 2023. Again, whatever anyone may have claimed from the prevailing statistics during the run-up to the 2024 election, reality was drastically more dire for the great majority of Americans.
…[GDP] reveals almost nothing about how the attendant prosperity is shared. That is, if a small slice of the population is awarded the great bulk of the bounty from economic growth while everyone else remains unenriched, GDP would rise nevertheless. And that, to a crucial degree, is exactly what has happened.”
Number Go Up!
Someone asked for this - so don't get all "chart crime" on me - but damn if this doesn't seem to support my long-standing outrageous claim that CPI greatly understates the rise in the cost of living. Remember, they started using Hedonic-quality adjustments in the late 1990's.
Below the fold: Adam Singer on Reddit, the Budget Deficit®, Office Space, the death of young homebuyers, Melody Wright, weekly (lack of) hours, Dan Rasmussen, Chris Whalen, Michael Kao, Mike Taylor, Dan Oliver, Jim Grant, A.I. making us dumber, Hamilton, the plot of Sicario, Large-Scale Social Deception, and more.
“Somewhere along the way, Reddit became political-brained. Not political in the classic sense of civic discourse and debate, but political in the way a teenager discovers socialism and won’t stop talking about it. Nearly every meme on r/adviceanimals, a 9.9M subscriber community of whimsy - which used to be about many topics and rarely politics - is now all political, all the time (and frequently quite deranged). Same with r/pics, a 31M subscriber community (#12 ranked by size). The community is about, and I quote “a place for photographs, pictures, and other images” but really it might as well now be relabeled political pics.
This quietly happened to many of the larger subreddits around the same time over the last few years, for reasons you are free to speculate on. There's become an obsessive need to filter every topic through a specific political lens, and view certain users and commentary inherently suspect unless prefaced by ideological disclaimers. The default assumption on the site is anyone with dissenting thoughts should be downvoted or banned and purity tests passed by all. The threads are all quite bad, and discussion is welcome by one side of the political party, not the other. You’ll be banned for milquetoast comments if they aren’t ideologically aligned even if you are left leaning (the far left eats themselves). It’s felt ever less like an internet forum and more a digital internment camp. And remember, many of these are the default subreddits everyone subscribes to when joining. Basically, if you join Reddit the assumption is you want mostly posts from leftist operatives. This is all an odd way to run a publicly traded social media company.”
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