Accounts are widely out of balance
How bad, you might be asking yourself, will the economy get? We’re about to find out.
The orange line is US wealth. The blue line is US GDP. The gap is the amount of wealth American households and non-profits must surrender. You see, these two lines must move in lockstep. They do over time. When they get out of sync, something will put them back into sync.
The gap is debt.
Accounts must be settled. It’s called “a reckoning.” And the reckoning is here knocking on the door.
To put this gap into historical perspective, here’s an extended view of the same data with Dr. Hunt’s markups.
From 1951 to about 1997—the year the Monica Lewinsky story broke and Howe and Strauss published The Fourth Turning—the two lines moved in lockstep. Then Alan Greenspan decided to tinker, to grow wealth without growing GDP and without kicking off inflation. ...
What that gap represents is one of two things:
Money stolen from other people (other economies).
Money stolen from future generations of Americans.
How We Borrow from the Future
A few years ago, in the 1990s, we heard a lot of stories parents going to jail for identify theft perpetrated against their own children. About 1990, the government required babies to have a Social Security Number before they left the hospital. (I remember because it happened between our second and third children.)
Some shiftless parents soon realized they could apply for credit using their kids’ SSNs. They could default, and the creditor could do nothing. You can’t collect from a six-week-old infant.
This, of course, constituted credit fraud, so the parents who did this (and there were many) went to jail. (Not sure what happened to their kids who were left with no parents and lousy FICO score, but that’s not the point.)
The point is, all of us have been doing what those parents do only legally. The government allows us to run up our kids’ and grand kids’ debt as long as we do it with the government’s approved identity-theft programs.
So we did.
If you look at that chart, about 1/3 of our household and non-profit wealth is stolen from other generations or other countries. And we have to pay it back. Now. Or soon. ...
How We Borrow from the World
Some months ago, I wrote a series of posts about the US dollar (USD) as the world’s reserve currency and the petrodollar. (Here and here.) To summarize, almost all international debt is settled with USD regardless of the two local currencies involved. Britain settles its debts with Costa Rica in USD, etc. This includes the oil markets. Saudi Arabia, in turn, buys US treasuries (national debt) as a store of value for its copious oil profits. This allows the US run up massive debt knowing there’s always a market for our bonds.
Until there’s not.
Have you notice that Saudi Arbia is drifting out of the US orbit?
I wrote it about in those earlier posts, but the most certain sign of the Kingdom’s pending divorce with from Uncle Sam happened this week. Saudi Arabia disclosed that Joe Biden tried to strong-arm the Saudis into delaying OPEC+ oil production cuts until after the November elections. In diplomatic worlds, this was a slap in the face insult to the US and, particularly, to the Biden regime.
Rumors say Biden threatened to cut military sales to the Saudis if the OPEC+ cuts were announced before the elections. Not only did OPEC+ announce the cuts on its timetable, the Kingdom told the world about Biden’s threat (without disclosing the exact terms or names). Among “partners,” such public humiliation is a sign of pending breakup.
In return, the State Department and Joe Biden announced they would reevaluate the US’s strategic arrangements with Saudi Arabia after the election. That should be interesting.
What it means is that the US might not have as eager a buyer for debt as we’ve grown accustomed to. And that means the price of US treasuries will decline. Less demand means lower prices. When the price of bond goes down, the interest goes up. ...
I’m not saying the Saudis are about to stop taking our checks—I’m saying the for the first time since the Nixon administration, they’re acting like they might. Which means the are going to demand a bigger discount—the difference between the face value of the bond and sale price. That discount is the interest, and the bigger the discount, the less cash we have to spend tomorrow.
That’s one way to close that gap. You reduce the amount of cash you get in return for a future promise to pay. The amount you owe stays the same, but the amount you get now gets smaller.
How Our Kids Get Their Money Back
Remember the two ways we built that gap between wealth and GDP? That’s the first way. The holder of US treasuries want to cash their bonds, and they don’t want to buy new ones.
The gap begins to shrink, and that shrinking is mostly in household wealth.
The second way is intergenerational theft. So how do our kids and grandkids force their accounts settled?
Have you heard about the labor participation rate? Have you heard about the labor shortage?
An odd thing about the jobs numbers in recent months. While the number of “new jobs,” also known as “new hires,” has been strong, the number of people working has been going down, down, down. Why is that? ...
The kids aren’t taking our post-dated checks, either. They’re simply not participating in the US economy—at least, not in the official US economy. They siphoning of that excess household wealth NOW, in the present. They are not working in ways that grows the blue line (GDP). They’re shrinking the gap by lowering the orange line (wealth).
Wonder where inflation is coming from? We’re spending the excess household wealth without increasing the products and services available to buy with it. Inflation is how future generations close that gap. They spend your excess wealth without producing. And it’s happening right before our eyes. ...
In truth, we will only lose our ill-gotten gains.
While, we didn’t personally rob from the kids and foreigners, we were participants in a rigged game—a game that’s getting unrigged in a hurry. We enjoyed the spoils of the petrodollar and zero interest rates.
This account-settling process is called a reckoning, which sound harsh because it is.
https://www.epsilontheory.com/hollow-men-hollow-markets-hollow-world-2/
