Food prices have skyrocketed at regular grocery stores over the past year. The only way to contain the damage is to play the weekly sale/reward club game. My grocery bill has been somewhat contained over the past year only because I started shopping at Costco, an option unavailable to poor people, especially in urban areas, and even if they could get to a Costco they don’t have the “working capital” to buy quantities more than their current week’s paycheck can cover, which isn’t enough to buy in bulk. But as you often say, the Fed doesn’t much care about what happens to the poor and middle class.
I'll sometimes try to save a couple bucks by buying 'sale' items at Whole Foods. Half the time what 'sale' means is 'rotten' - one sale item was milk, one was turkey cold cuts. Then when I get to the register, I have the option of paying with my palm, a new feature. I can' wait till they just do non-consensual facial recognition... So, I started buying beef from a local farmer. So far so good on that front. It's not that the Whole Foods industrial complex is so great, it's just that it's fairly hard to get good food these days. Even at Whole Foods there will sometimes be 'organic' seedless watermelon. Seedless means GMO. GMO is by definition not organic, but that doesn't stop the people running the show from making the claim.
Well, let’s be real. A 50 lb bag of black beans, lentils, garbanzos, an a couple of bags of rice plus Choulula will tide me over while the populace goes rummaging for scraps in the first month....
Off topic (which topic?)….yesterday I was distracted by a shiny object ….EB Sledge’s book With the Old Breed (documenting the WW2 marine battle for Peleliu and Okinawa).
Reading along, something jumps off the page at me….he mentions that a Marine grunt in the thick of the horror show was being paid $60 a month.
That was approximately 30 years after the advent of the Fed, and it just struck me how nothing has ever changed. They were borrowing/printing like hell to build (buy) planes and tanks, but nothing for the fodder.
Fast forward to the latest war (Covid) and look what happened.
That Titus interview is great. Thanks for putting him on the radar. Sounds like he found his way to essentially agreeing with the thesis of Creature from Jekyll Island. I've been bitcoining for a while and started reading Creature a few months ago. That book pairs well with what I've learned via bitcoin
resources and is helping me make more sense of the fed's "bumbling" ... toward centralization.
Thank you for that TLDR....reading it just makes me a bit, angry. "So if your assumption is correct, your evidence is sound, the bank, the lending company, created a fraud. And the ratings agency that is supposed to test the value of these assets knowingly entered into the fraud. Both parties are committing fraud by intention."
Firstly, it amazes me that the only people that got into trouble were the servicers because they were drowning under the mess that the originators made while TARP funds were diverted to marketing campaigns and more of the GOS drug. So weird how that got so decoupled.
Secondly, I remember what our EXCEL SPREADSHEETS looked like that we had to submit to the Fed on off-balance sheet securitizations, etc. and other risky assets. PUHHHHLLLEEEAAAASE. Maybe they have an app now, but the ones I still do for some smaller clients look pretty similar.
Food prices have skyrocketed at regular grocery stores over the past year. The only way to contain the damage is to play the weekly sale/reward club game. My grocery bill has been somewhat contained over the past year only because I started shopping at Costco, an option unavailable to poor people, especially in urban areas, and even if they could get to a Costco they don’t have the “working capital” to buy quantities more than their current week’s paycheck can cover, which isn’t enough to buy in bulk. But as you often say, the Fed doesn’t much care about what happens to the poor and middle class.
I'll sometimes try to save a couple bucks by buying 'sale' items at Whole Foods. Half the time what 'sale' means is 'rotten' - one sale item was milk, one was turkey cold cuts. Then when I get to the register, I have the option of paying with my palm, a new feature. I can' wait till they just do non-consensual facial recognition... So, I started buying beef from a local farmer. So far so good on that front. It's not that the Whole Foods industrial complex is so great, it's just that it's fairly hard to get good food these days. Even at Whole Foods there will sometimes be 'organic' seedless watermelon. Seedless means GMO. GMO is by definition not organic, but that doesn't stop the people running the show from making the claim.
I have a farmer friend who laughs at "organic", but he profits from it.
Well, let’s be real. A 50 lb bag of black beans, lentils, garbanzos, an a couple of bags of rice plus Choulula will tide me over while the populace goes rummaging for scraps in the first month....
I love Cholula. My go-to spice.
Off topic (which topic?)….yesterday I was distracted by a shiny object ….EB Sledge’s book With the Old Breed (documenting the WW2 marine battle for Peleliu and Okinawa).
Reading along, something jumps off the page at me….he mentions that a Marine grunt in the thick of the horror show was being paid $60 a month.
That was approximately 30 years after the advent of the Fed, and it just struck me how nothing has ever changed. They were borrowing/printing like hell to build (buy) planes and tanks, but nothing for the fodder.
Fast forward to the latest war (Covid) and look what happened.
That Titus interview is great. Thanks for putting him on the radar. Sounds like he found his way to essentially agreeing with the thesis of Creature from Jekyll Island. I've been bitcoining for a while and started reading Creature a few months ago. That book pairs well with what I've learned via bitcoin
resources and is helping me make more sense of the fed's "bumbling" ... toward centralization.
I'm not really a Bitcoiner but Bitcoin has been a great impetus in educating people about what I call the scam of central banking.
Thank you for that TLDR....reading it just makes me a bit, angry. "So if your assumption is correct, your evidence is sound, the bank, the lending company, created a fraud. And the ratings agency that is supposed to test the value of these assets knowingly entered into the fraud. Both parties are committing fraud by intention."
Firstly, it amazes me that the only people that got into trouble were the servicers because they were drowning under the mess that the originators made while TARP funds were diverted to marketing campaigns and more of the GOS drug. So weird how that got so decoupled.
Secondly, I remember what our EXCEL SPREADSHEETS looked like that we had to submit to the Fed on off-balance sheet securitizations, etc. and other risky assets. PUHHHHLLLEEEAAAASE. Maybe they have an app now, but the ones I still do for some smaller clients look pretty similar.
G’day from Australia where the ponzi real estate scheme is alive and well!
Great stuff! Pretty crazy to realize that this is only four banks in a single derivatives market (although the largest).
I wonder how much equities derivatives are hiding?