Frances Farmer will have her revenge on Malaysia.

Roll with the changes.

Turns out I’ve already come up with enough for another post, featuring, among other things, the Covid Cantillon Effect®, Jamie Dimon’s imperviousness to justice, the Apes vs the Kleptocracy, housing extremists, emerging market crises, the dollar/Treasury wrecking ball, death, inflation, taxes, evil, oil, the French Revolution, the Apple iPhone 15 Pro 1TB Blue Titanium, and REO Speedwagon, oh my…

Everything hits at once.

2021 was a particularly amusing year.

NFT

The Covid-Era Cantillon Effect

Via Grant’s:

“the Federal Reserve’s newly released survey of household finances shows…the wealthiest cohort retains an 8% inflation-adjusted increase relative to when the bug bit…The bottom 40% of households, meanwhile, have absorbed a near 10% decline in inflation-adjusted savings since early 2020.”

This reminded me of a dataset John Titus pointed out:

Post Q3 2019, when QE restarted, through Q3 2022 (latest data):

• Checkable Deposits and Currency Held by the Bottom 50% went up 3.4x

• Checkable Deposits and Currency Held by the Top 0.1% went up 16.8x.

“Americans outside the wealthiest 20% of the country have run out of extra savings and now have less cash on hand than they did when the pandemic began, according to the latest Federal Reserve study of household finances. For the bottom 80% of households by income, bank deposits and other liquid assets were lower in June this year than they were in March 2020, after adjustment for inflation.”

- Only Richest 20% of Americans Still Have Excess Pandemic Savings

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"Last year, JPMorgan Chase reported $37.7 billion in net income. A fine of $15 million for 40 million violations of law is something that traders will make jokes about around the water cooler."

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Gamestop

I’ve never owned Gamestop, and have no position in or opinion of the stock or its valuation. As usual, what interested me in it was the hysterical overreaction of Wall Street, the Media, and the Federal Reserve to it going up.

"It's a movement against what they feel is an unfair playing field…Have you talked to the people who bought GameStop?…If you ignore the fact that millions and millions and millions of people were pissed off enough to buy Gamestop to stick it to one hedge fund, I think you're blinding yourself to what's going on."

- Ben Mezrich

That’s exactly what most of our media has done: blinded themselves to what’s going on. CNBC spokesmodels, for example, who live in a bubble touting the 0.1%, do not understand this, and if they thought any differently, they wouldn't be in the positions they're in.

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Wall Street Bet Big on Used-Car Loans for Years. Now a Crisis May Be Looming.

Spending was fueled by pandemic-era federal aid, which helped American households cover their bills, including monthly car payments. Lenders then used that steady revenue to fund a massive increase in new loans, particularly to people with low or even nonexistent credit scores. As a result, since 2020, the nation’s auto-loan balance jumped 28% and now totals more than $1.5 trillion, making it the fastest-growing type of consumer debt in the U.S.

History repeats exactly.

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