Wars are expensive.

October 10, 2020

"For the eleven quarters since the pandemic/recession ended, real average hourly earnings (which cover 119 million full time wage and salaried workers) FELL at a 2.9% annual rate."

Lacy Hunt

Wow.

During the July – September 2023 quarter, Treasury expects to borrow $1.007 trillion in privately-held net marketable debt, assuming an end-of-September cash balance of $650 billion.  The borrowing estimate is $274 billion higher than announced in May 2023, primarily due to the lower beginning-of-quarter  cash balance ($148 billion) and higher end-of-quarter cash balance ($50 billion), as well as projections of lower receipts and higher outlays ($83 billion)

Q2 2023 interest of $969.9B, on $31.5T of debt. Yellen's outfit just announced another $1 trillion of new debt by end of Q3. Maybe the problem is too much debt?

Wars are expensive. Dwight Eisenhower, 1953

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.

It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.

We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.

We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road. the world has been taking.

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

These plain and cruel truths define the peril and point the hope that come with this spring of 1953.

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After $700 Million U.S. Bailout, Trucking Firm Is Shutting Down

As of the end of March, Yellow’s outstanding debt was $1.5 billion, including about $730 million that is owed to the federal government. Yellow has paid approximately $66 million in interest on the loan, but it has repaid just $230 of the principal owed on the loan, which comes due next year.

I had noticed this deal, back in July 2020: “this is the government picking winners (and losers - YRC's competitors and private investors who likely could've cut a better deal). Big Corporate/Govt combos are basically fascism.”

I also noticed this, from September 2019: Apollo Leads YRC Worldwide $600MM Term Loan Refi

YRC Worldwide has completed a refinancing of its term loan obligations and entered into a term loan agreement with funds managed by affiliates of Apollo Global Management.

Apollo acted collectively as the lead lender for a $600 million facility which provides additional liquidity and has a less restrictive financial covenant.

I think this failed bailout - which taxpayers are now on the hook for to the tune of $730 million - was perhaps a bailout Leon Black and Apollo.

(Some have told me that this firm has assets of $3 billion and debt of $1.5 billion - or something like that, I’m paraphrasing here and haven’t looked it up - so all is well. We’ll see.)

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A few days ago…

TL;DR: Invitation Homes - which owns 82,837 homes you will never own - in the past 3 quarters sold 311 of them, total.

Same day the above was posted…

"A portfolio" of 1,900 single-family homes that no family will own. This is all new, post-Bernanke, Paulson, Geithner. Their legacy is feudalism.

Oh - they bought the homes from Barry Sternlicht fyi.