Boomers in the US have workplace stories to tell about newly hired Millennials losing interest at their job after just a few months. Many ad hoc committee groups or emergency overtime requests at work go unheeded by younger employees as if there is no expectation or requirement to do anything extra at work. To my surprise, this attitude is found in China–where social mobility is already an entrenched problem since the early 2000’s. The burden of three mountains, an uprising on May 4, and “a smaller slice of cake,” are all thought symbols of a beautiful calligraphy that is used in Chinese writing–but point to the difficulty of achieving in education, healthcare, and housing–in the world’s second largest economy. A sort of fatalism has been building in China, just as in the US–of a shoulder shrug of–“If it Doesn’t Work Out–Then it Won’t Matter.” Bai Lan is a term for being a slacker, such that a first response to do extra work is to immediately say, “Let someone else do it,” or “Ask me tomorrow.”
To be sure, this following chart says a lot about the carrot being removed as a treat to get to some goalpost. A drop in the working age demographics is found both in the US and China, and is described in Raoul Pal’s February 10, 2020 YouTube share on Real Vision with link in the caption box below:
In his timely and acclaimed centerpiece for Real Vision, Raoul quantifies why Bai Lan may be an entropy coming into the massive work machine within China, and as the US service trade industry becomes an outlier of job growth. In the US–as manufacturing has left the country–any trade other than finance–is creating a debt leverage of refinance instead of actual production of goods and trade like infrastructure maintenance, construction, trucking and wholesale. Here’s another interesting graph below:
Here we see a dwindling workforce participation keeping unemployment figures low, and a huge Fed balance sheet mirroring labor participation with free easy money keeping zombie companies alive and well for decades. A rise in interest rates with a shrinking balance sheet should get rid of all the alt-coin BS and companies unable to turn a profit by burning through cheap cash.
Finally, here are three more graphs about boomer retirement in the US and housing with a final destination!
To be sure, the best (and only) place to still buy a house for under $200,000 is in–drumroll please–Dayton, OH! The area surrounding Pittsburg, Akron, Canton, Buffalo, NY and NY cities along the Erie Canal–read Rochester–are the last rust belt towns where housing payments resemble anything close to a boomer’s generational memory.
Word Press generates great starters for writers, and the one up today is, “What do I complain about most?” and I’d have to say it’s the rent. I’m sure I’m on solid ground with this one after looking at the national charts of rent and housing in major US metro areas. But here’s my rub. Especially after watching Hello from Hawaii’s, “Everything Wrong With Hawaii/ My Response (Viewer Email)–on YouTube:
This video is hilarious in that a Californian cuts into the meat about what’s wrong with the state of Hawaii as compared to California, especially about housing. In it, a viewer states that Hawaii is in a grade B class of California’s policy, that it is just a half-assed replication with little help to those trying to live here by allowing dilapidated run-down building choices with outrageous rents. It’s unbelievably true. I’ve lived in San Francisco for 29 years in five different rent-controlled apartments, and retired early at 62 to move to Honolulu in 2020. What I’ve come to believe is astonishing. While each tenant situation is unique, I am seeing patterns in behavior of realtors representing owners leasing apartments in Waikiki, and I see no difference in owner behavior in a non-rent-controlled cash cow district like Waikiki, from the heyday goldmine of San Francisco’s rent-controlled status as a desired tech city from 2009 to 2019.
As the young man in Hello from Hawaii demonstrates–in the above link–a shortage of housing exists on Oahu. The Democratic Party politicians repeat this mantra in California–everyone needs affordable housing. A new video below, in “Hello from Hawaii,” demonstrates a good solution–building spartan complexes near the new rail line HART to link the westside to the Ala Moana Mall.
This is similar to the idea of building around BART stations in the Bay Area.
I thought I’d use the work-from-home Covid pandemic diaspora from SF to my advantage: I’ll give up my 22 year rent-controlled lease in San Francisco to move into an older 1960’s or 1970’s Waikiki building and take advantage of any cost savings advantage I may get by moving into a less-desired old building on Oahu. To be sure, the brick and mortar reinforced buildings I lived in at San Francisco were way older than those buildings in Honolulu, but the construction and upkeep quality of San Francisco’s proud beauties in the Tenderloin and Lower Pacific Heights shine just as bright as any new tower in Kaka’ako by the Ala Moana Mall. It worked. I’m paying less for rent than in San Francisco, and should I move back, like many do–time is on my side–as rents are still dropping in SF–and the upgrades to rent-controlled buildings are fabulous.
Interestingly, SFrent-controlled buildings are now priced higher than brand new buildings, perhaps because the owners feel they need to make up for the loss in fair-market-value when average rents in new tenant move-ins were up to nine hundred dollars higher than the long term residents still occupying their units. Also management equities groups in SF are very savvy and know what to do to keep value in their buildings. I guess a caveat to the rule of rent control is that when a city or area becomes highly desirable, rent control helps renters in the long run, and actually smooths out sharp upturns when the owner’s golden rule of being blessed with a good tenant falls away into,“What can I do to get fair market value?” This is when rent control works. Landlords have the tendency to turn tenants into mathematical statistics, not human beings and, being unprepared for an increase of three hundred dollars or more–creates a rent crises. To me, rent control prevents this from happening. The shock hearing of south Floridian’s dilemma in rent increases shows how progressive rent control can be when an area becomes hot. My takeaway: the competition between rent-controlled building and newer properties creates a healthy competitive balance.Waikiki doesn’t have this.
I do have compassion for landlords and realty companies. I was shocked at how property rights were placed in forbearance, such that tenants did not have to pay rent. Now, Joe in the White House, wants to spend more cash to make up for this original cause of a shortfall. So does Gavin Newsom in California. This is not the duty of government. Even Milton Friedman in his prologue and first chapter in “Capitalism and Freedom” who discourages rent control, does not believe that it is governments’ duty to subsidize housing. He does, however, start to change his tune in the eighties, such that after 2000 he begins to embrace socialism and shockingly changes his idealogy to “. . .political freedom, desirable though it may be, is not a necessary condition for economic and civil freedom.”
In the first chapter of this book, he acknowledges that although the men who have a concentration of power “initially be of goodwill” they will “attract and form men of a different stamp.” This is a polite way of saying power corrupts. My owner and landlord of my rent controlled building of 22 years, was genuine in upgrading and improving his building as “The Peoples” choice in the 1990’s before the dot com bomb. But when Facebook was going public in the spring of 2014, and the venture capital cash was being pumped into San Francisco like a stimmy check for stay-at-home in 2020, he became like any other impersonal REIT investor group and looked only at the numbers.
I have a new realty company which took over my building here by the Ala Wai canal, and they got burned by the outgoing realtor who had represented an owner who had passed away. Like anything else long term, the desire to make new or improve, fades, as was the maintenance of the building I moved into. The long term residents in this building seemed to be not unlike those in San Francisco who were on rent control. The landlord didn’t really seem to be doing anything to improve the building, and no one had any steep rent increases. The guys who lived here before me went for five years without any rent increase. When they got hit with a two hundred and fifty dollar rent increase they moved–into a similar sized apartment across the street for over nine hundred a month more. Their rent increase was still two hundred less than what I was to pay. In a way, they got fed-up with the rundown building I chose to move into, and used their savings over the years to move into a nice place. I used my twenty-two year savings from my rent-controlled building in SF, and I got a good deal paying $1950 a month for a two-bedroom of 800 square feet, better than anything I could get in San Francisco, and I got down on my hands and knees and scrubbed the place clean. It was so nasty.
I also put in black-out drapes to lower the heat from the sun, and got a new efficient air conditioner. The lack of curtains on the sliding glass doors to a lanai, and the tacky old air conditioners in these funky old buildings in Waikiki never ceases to shock me. The owners don’t do shit to keep the places nice. Photos on Zillow are years old, and Realtors end the tour by saying, “I’m just following the owner’s wishes.” Realtor’s here on Oahu don’t seem to be willing to look after renter’s interests at all. There’s no love lost here on their plight with the effect higher interest rates have for mortgages. There is one real estate agent for every 80 citizens on Oahu. Like the Gold-to-Silver ratio, let’s bring the per capita ratio down to earth! There’s legislation now being considered for home buyers–that now only the seller’s agent will be necessary–to represent them for a buy!
Friends I’m in touch with in San Francisco repeat a similar story. Many of SF residents living in rent-controlled units long term, moved into the nice new buildings built due to the increased tech influx of the previous decade. This then, also caused vacant units in rent-controlled buildings to be completely redone: new kitchens, bathroom fixtures and cabinets, and polished wooden floors or new floors altogether! I laugh when I see an unmodified unit in San Francisco, and the owner is still in denial about price and value, and is still charging 2017 rent prices for that same damn shower curtain holder and gaudy colored bathroom tile. Wake up and smell the Kona coffee! I pause like an Asian Tiger mom, refreshing my Zillow page in San Francisco to see the rents come down. Also very telling is to see how long a previous tenant stayed by looking at history. If someone only lived there for one or two years–don’t do it! They’re going to use psychological tricks to get you to move, like I had to do after my first year here in Hawaii in an Outrigger condo. Owners in flats in Waikiki don’t ever live here and it’s doubtful that they’ll ever see the place they own, much less move back here. They live in the Philippines, Indonesia, or Japan and are like a thirsty Millennial on a new Shopify store, salivating on ROI only as the new God King.
All-in-all San Francisco is being remade into a newer city ready for the next boom. Hopefully, so will Honolulu be–with the new rail line. But I’m not holding my breath!
THE SHAKKA OR HANG LOOSE HANDS UP SOLVES MOST CULTURE SHOCK—Photo by Soulful Pizza on Pexels.com
My favorite blogger is the Hello from Hawaii channel on YouTube. He talks in a general way that is liked by most people who watch his show. I’ve learned a lot listening to him. I didn’t catch his name, even when I crossed paths in real life. Here are some of the facts I learned from Hello from Hawaii.
Intro. Hawaii is meant for vacation. Three quarters of Hawaiians live in Honolulu. One and half million go to work everyday on Oahu, and it’s just another day of work. 347 thousand work in the in the city of over 800 thousand people, and it’s size and population is equal to San Francisco. Oahu is the third largest island by land mass of well over one hundred islands. It is the farthest south and western state in the US. I would add that it is 2393 miles from San Francisco, and SF is the closest city and airport from the islands because the bulge and curve of California coast, which “dents-in” around the LA basin area.
The second set of facts mentioned about Oahu are as follows:
Intro. Aloha is a state of mind from the mix of Polynesian, Japanese, and Anglo people who live here and they are just as relaxed as the warm water waves. Perfect weather about 270 days of 365. My comment is to point out that San Diego wins the perfect weather award for the US because it has over 300 days of sun per year. As I write this blog at the end of January, we’re having rain all day. The point is, our rain doesn’t destroy our beaches and our houses, and it doesn’t try to kill us. Our rain only gives us rainbows.
I don’t know how to quantify a cost-of-living estimate for weather desirability, but there are reasons why it “costs” more to live here. The weather has micro changes every day, just like San Francisco and the Bay Area, but it is warmer.
As for culture shock, it’s hands down the easiest “shock” I’ve ever met. Japanese manners of pleasing guests, and the simple idea of taking off shoes before entering don’t have a downside. Hawaiian potluck barbecue in the park doesn’t seem to be a culture I would do without. I do know I should bring a dish, and I found a way to make a trip to the ABC deli and microwave teriyaki chicken and Dole pineapples and mix them together to get kudos from those at the picnic. What I did learn, is that you better bring something, and if you don’t, it is not polite to take all the leftovers home!
The hang loose symbol is the best ice breaker for any culture shock situation. This includes lane changes or allowing a car to pull away from street parking. I use this when I cross busy streets, and I believe it actually helps me live longer!
Reasons cited for not moving to Honolulu on the island of Oahu: The Traffic
On every YouTube blog about things wrong with living on Oahu, and why one should be prepared for moving to Hawaii, is the congestion on the H-1 interstate, how long the trip from the North Shore to the southern side in the city of Honolulu can take before and after weekends, and the horrible commute from Aiea and Pearl City to the Waikiki area. My suggestion is to follow my example: don’t have a car.
It’s important to understand my demographic and view, which is that of being a single person– not needing a full-sized home–or deducting a mortgage and listing independents–of which most family households submit during their filing taxes. Indeed, a high tax rate for the state is also listed on the many reasons of why not to move to Hawaii. Coming from California, however, I did see a slightly larger take home pay by moving here from California because state taxes here are about two to three percent lower than California. I am already coming from one high cost area to another.
Since Florida has no state taxes, many Californians prefer to move east, rather than west, to save on income. A common theme I repeat is that there are always reasons for why things cost what they do. Hawaii suffers less hurricane damage than Florida, and has enjoyable soft rains replete with rainbows. Hawaii also has year-round trade winds, which make for a much cooler summer than Arizona, Texas, or Florida. Many regulars here do without air-conditioning all together. In my opinion, this can cancel out the expense of state taxes alone.
The Nimitz, Ala Moana Blvd., gets slow and sticky in the afternoon. The number 20 and 42 move through the traffic smoothly without having to do the driving!
Back to traffic. Boomers are the primary cause of traffic. We grew up with cars, and we love the freedom they bring. I submit that the freedoms a car provides, have become greatly reduced due to the cost of fuel, parking, and maintenance or repair. I don’t have to worry about a big ticket item parked out-of-sight of my view, or unexpected or immediate costs to replace a safety item of a vehicle. I just use a bus pass. I can listen to music, catch up on emails or social media, and text someone without being a safety issue.
It only costs me three dollars to go to the airport, and return. If I go shopping downtown or at the largest outdoor mall in the west, I can go to and fro for only three dollars. I have an HD backpack that’s comfortable to wear with large loads, and I have two sturdy reusable shopping bags to carry soda or paper towels outside of my backpack, if I’m stocking up large. Scooters also have storage to carry.
Scooters are also a great way to get around with easy parking!
One of the main reasons I am converting my YouTube channel to Walks on Waikiki is to continue my message of service to live an emissions free life, and get around without a car. This is easy for someone young or on a limited income, but I find freedoms created in other areas of my life if I don’t have to spend on owning a car. Fortunately, people are real friendly here. I had three different guys help me move by using their pickup trucks. People seem very willing to give me a ride home from gatherings, and expect nothing in return. So I do indirectly benefit from living in a place where many of my friends drive. In San Francisco, there are far fewer acquaintances who have autos. I had to rent a car just to go to a party in the Bay Area. Not so here on Oahu.
The HART Honolulu Area Rapid Transit Right-of-way is inching closer to the Ala Moana Mall!
One good tip about where to buy a home if you have a commute to either Waikiki or downtown. The smoothest inbound commute is from the Eastside: Hawaii Kai. The least favorable area would be Pearl City or Aiea. These two suburbs are west of downtown and have congestion, mainly because the department of cones is unable to create reversible lanes to add an extra lane for commute traffic.
If you like the changing of the seasons, you probably won’t want to live in Hawaii. Not everyone likes a tropical climate. If that be the case, stop reading, go into the garage, and enjoy inspecting your snow shovel blade and handle, or snow blower’s moving parts and lube schedule. Clearing the driveway makes for good exercise, as does pushing stuck vehicles. Why bloggers and YouTubers put weather down as a negative topic in considering a move to Hawaii baffles me. They show the annual weather temperatures graph, and I start laughing: the model shows a gentle wave of a pattern of daytime highs ranging from a chilly 78 degrees fahrenheit in January to a high of 84 in July. The lower nighttime range tracks an almost perfect congruent wave pattern ten degrees lower, without any spikes or gaps in the year.
First off, if you are in tune with Mother Nature, nothing like the knowing of the tides and surf conditions makes for a good waterman, and this understanding of nature is engrained in many who live here. The water temperature cools after several weeks of heavy Christmas or New Year’s rains, and there are those who know the best times to travel and visit Hawaii. Indeed, knowing when to wear a jacket in the morning does feel like a season change for those of us who call Hawaii home. I looked at my friend’s phone next to me at the dinner picnic table: Minneapolis 22 degrees–Honolulu 72 degrees. Do the math.
My world traveling friend–and there are a lot of them here in Honolulu–assures me over breakfast coffee, that nowhere in the world can a better climate be found. If you know of a place, respond. He smiles and assures me that a place with better weather doesn’t exist on the planet. Even though San Diego ranks higher than Honolulu because it has over 300 cloudless days of sun per year, Hawaii’s one hundred and seventy days of sun are caused by rainbow producing showers. What this means is great news for fair skinned folks who know that about half of the days at the beach contain some cloud cover overcast to keep down the burn. Add to that, the great green grassy areas dotted with palms, and there are many spots to lay in the shade really close to the water.
You can see in the above weather map, most of the winter bomb cyclones or atmospheric rivers track north of the Hawaiian islands before they hit the west coast of the mainland. Here you can see that Hawaii is actually even with Acapulco in Mexico, or just south of the Gulf of Baja. You can also see the wind direction flags changing direction around the Sandwich Islands of Hawaii, which is just SSW of the big H labeled 1021. We are unaffected by the big Lows which hit the Northwest, or now that Uranus can trine Jupiter or Neptune, which are very close in degree near the North Node and the Pisces Aires cusp, we have the 103 year super cycle for lots of rain.
In any event, there aren’t too many consecutive days without any breezes. This was a relief during my first summer here when I was worried about the heat. People just leave their windows open and walk around naked. My friend Andrew questions me about all my decisions, and leaving San Francisco for Honolulu was one of his “ongoing interrogations.” He said he thought it was going to be too boring for me to live here. I reassured him it wasn’t. There is plenty of ongoing natural beauty every day (or night).
While things like inflation seem to be unpredictable and labeled as a trailing indicator, one thing everyone seems to know off the bat–is that we’re all going into debt. Covid stimulus checks and staying home to avoid a commute to the office, saved us a lot of money. But two years later, what with the housing and rent situations, along with grocery prices and utility bills–things seeming to be spiraling out of control. Nothing paints this picture better as this above graph in Tom Brodrovick’s YouTube host channel on Palisades Gold Radio with guest Kevin Wadsworth.
Indeed, studying the charts on popular YouTube channels of Gold and Finance, a shocking picture emerges not really shown on major media outlets. Here’s a FRED graph of Urban CPI:
Consumer Price Index notwithstanding, we see the rush to spend on Covid has now been unleashed to Eastern Europe and the 107 billion dollar spending spree on arms for Ukraine. Joe says that this isn’t a blank check (like the 17 wars fought under Obama), but we now have heard from the mainstream media that our spending in Ukraine has topped 100 billion. Okay, it’s not a blank check Joe, but it sure is a big amount of money. Could we have started an high speed Mag-Lev train from Denver, CO to Indianapolis, IN along I-70? How about complete new highways with small hybrid nuclear powered electrical grid updates, wayside battery charging stations, and self-driving pod controls? We could use the two trillion collected by the bankers in 2008 to also fund this infrastructure. Oh, ri-i-i-ght, we need it for defense:
No inflationary problem here. Looks like all the countries on the left are joining Russia and China to stop paying in dollars, trade in gold, and stay away from the Swift system of money exchange, weaponized by US sanctions when countries do things we don’t like. It is so important for us to help a country like Ukraine and keep it “safe.” Good luck with that.
I propose a new label by the FED to calm markets once people begin to realize it isn’t that prices are going up, but that the value of the dollar is falling. The FED announced a term no one ever heard of after the Great Financial Crises in the mid-to-late 2000’s as QE, or Quantitative Easing. We then learned of the Dollar Milkshake Theory, and then, the Twist. It seems obvious the next new term, not found in any economic text book, or any class in middle or high schools, is. . . ta dah. . . The Squeeze. We keep hearing about the Silver Squeeze, such as in last February of 2022, now let’s do it for monetary policy. After all, the amount of money created has nothing to do with inflation, so why not reduce the supply?
The good news is that the US is the cleanest dirty shirt in the laundry of world wealth:
We in the US enjoy the benefits of the holder of the world’s reserve wealth, but is that priced in dollars or gold?
Everything looks okay here on the above gold tally holdings, but have you been aware of how much gold has been moved since May of last year? Apparently it’s a lot. Well, no matter, because treasury yields are going up. We can save by buying US debt. So how come yields are far below the inflation rate?
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According to Colonel Douglas MacGregor on a recent visit on YouTube with Gerald Celente, the only way change will occur is through a collapse or calamity. One thing for sure, the results of the wide economic disparity won’t make things much better:
May the force be with you. Hopefully we will survive when the “Empire Strikes Back.”
I wanted to be a television weatherman, a game show host, or have a comedy club–when I was young watching black and white television in the sixties. Google has made this possible whereby anyone can start their own YouTube channel. I remember how I yearned for a camcorder, but couldn’t afford one. Now, with our iPhone, we can create content videos on our own free Google website at YouTube. I admire the tarot readers and astrologers who have a large subscriber base and receive the YouTube plaque for having passed a viewership milestone. My latest favorite is Ryan Hall Y’all who showed me a month in advance of the storms to hit San Francisco and the whole state of California.
Now that I am retired and don’t have a twelve hour block in the day or evening taken up by my job, I have the most precious resource:free time. No more RDO (Regular Day Off) on weekends, no more OT to make up for spending on a new toy. The world is my oyster. To be young and in my twenties now, wow, you guys don’t know how lucky you are.
So, the above question prompt by Word Press is definitely catching fire. I can blog about the interstates, like Beaver Geography, put on high vibe music like David Palmer, or put my Brain side of pinky in the brain in over-analyzing anything!
But we do have to be careful on our vulnerable personal side. We are putting out our views to everybody. Just like when I started advertising on Facebook, it may only take one person’s mean-spirited comment to strike deep into the heart. I was trying to pitch the really cool electric pen for using a piezoelectric prick for soothing a crick in the neck, and an old curmudgeon from Vancouver said it was worthless. How could I respond? This was when I learned the art of not responding. Politicians do this all the time. The other thing I just learned was how to disable a feedback review on my book on Amazon. Someone wrote, “Total garbage. He thinks driving a bus in beneath him.” I hit the report button, and Amazon removed it. But that comment had been visible for over two months.
One thing anyone who has a big following on YouTube or Facebook or wherever, is that you do need to keep checking your links, and scrolling through all your pages. Links break, comments can be harmful, or destroy any future passive subscribers or sales.
I flirted with an astrologer about her vacuum tracks on the couch behind her desk as she was blogging on YouTube, and even though I was sincere about loving vacuum tracks on carpet and upholstery, it had nothing to do with her great YouTube posts, yet I feel it may have affected her in a way that might have made her feel vulnerable.
I laughed so hard when I saw on her next video that the couch had been cleaned, but the vacuum tracks were blurred out and gone. She must have read my comment about loving her vacuum tracks. This comment is not really negative, and is in these types of comments we have to ignore and let go. If we want success and the YouTube plaque, it means some crap will come our way.
In a way, my public service as a bus driver in a busy city did give me the tough skin I needed to keep the skin in the game!
The time to stack never closes, but the volumes of precious metals moving off of western exchanges is historically breathtaking. Jamie Dimon got caught with Nickel futures recently, and in my opinion, a similar crack-up boom may be coming for silver, maybe gold. One good source of accurate and calm analysis of gold mining production and central bank reserves in gold is from Jeffrey Christian of the CPM group on YouTube. He shows that there is plenty of silver and gold left to mine in the world, and he also a great new interview titled, “Gold, Silver Gaining Traction, 2023 will be Year of Transition,” on the Investing News Network.
The above screenshot from the Palisades Gold Radio on (my favorite) YouTube channel shows that the strong dollar peg may be coming to a close. Recent statements by Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other African nations point to a loss of dollar trading for oil. The season of the petrodollar is coming to a close, and the Congress would do well to rein in spending to help with Jerome Powell’s duty to reduce inflation. Monetary policy can only do so much–fiscal policy from the legislative branch–needs to be the second third for reducing the three major causes of inflation. If you look at past recessions, this FRED graph below, from Steven Van Metre’s Bond King channel, makes it clear a recession could be coming:
You can see when the blue line goes up, the gray area, a recession, seems to occur. The two big exceptions appear after 1950 and Eisenhower’s address to the Allied Forces, and in 2009, during the Great Financial Crises when Michael Burry’s “The Big Short” took place. We got the military industrial complex warning from Ike, and the outcome of bankers becoming traders, risking the farm, with no regulatory help.
According to maneco64 and his YouTube channel from the UK, he frequently quotes Ludwig von Mises “Human Action” on page 248 per the final flag down to a crack-up boom. Think of the wheelbarrow of fiat currency for a loaf of bread in Germany. I can only hope a new vision of a new version of Quantitative Easing, use of the Dollar Milkshake Theory, or Twist, can engender the full faith and credit of the United States Treasury as the outgoing world’s reserve currency. In the past, war breaks out when the dominant hegemonic empire crumbles. (See Ray Dalio)
Sound familiar with the US attitude towards Taiwan and Ukraine?
Here’s that snapshot from Ludwig:
A new GM full-size sport utility vehicle costs $95,000. The cost of maintaining a vehicle is far outpacing wages, job security, and its supposed convenience. The divide between those who bought a house two years ago until now is also showing dramatic signs of change. Here’s a peek at the recently booming Raleigh, NC and Nashville, TN and SE US metros. The amount of new housing waiting for buyers is becoming staggering:
You can see above that is there is a huge increase in unsold homes. Blackstone and REIT’s that gobble up homes make it even more difficult for newly formed families.
If we look below from a great visual chart from Core Logic in the WSJ, Rents or rent marginal values, are painting a dramatic picture for US households. I thought I’d never see rents in southern Florida approach and equal those in San Francisco! New units in the modest county of Martin, just above Palm Beach, below the treasure coast, appear to be equal to those in the Bay Area (CA)! The Venture capital boom in SF, now appears to have infected Boise, ID, Phoenix, AZ, and Austin, TX –just like what we San Franciscans went through starting in April of 2014, when Facebook went public. Please understand that I don’t wish inflation on anyone.
I retired early at age 62 in June of 2020. Miraculously, I put in my paperwork on February 13, 2020, just one month and a day or so before the Covid lock down. I was able to know that my three-month-window deadline before my birthday was complete and in the mail so to speak before all the city and county offices closed! Whew.
Stay tuned for more blogs on what my life has been like in retirement, and watch my writing evolve into some new category or venue as I figure out who I want to be now that I am no longer driving a bus.
I do have moments of joy as a bus passenger, pulling the string for a senior who can’t reach the bell, or helping someone trapped at the back door trying to exit, with a “Back Door!” refrain to the operator, that I learned so well at Muni.
These charts, graphs, and screenshots have come from over forty hours of watching YouTube videos that cover topics not in the mainstream media. Think of it guys, we can become our own Walter Cronkite, a weatherman, a tarot reader, an astrologer–on our own television channel. I still do have a kind of awe and wonder about how Google, Apple, and Amazon have changed our lives, forever–and not in a bad way.
Life is good with waking up with Hawaiian grown food and coffee!
The workhorse trolleybus of the 49 Van Ness and the 14 Mission from around 1993 to 2003 at Muni
Is it safe to retire? Can I enjoy being passing my primary Journey of Purpose of the last 22 years as a bus driver? Only I hold the key to my trolleybus of Happy Destiny. Indeed, we each hold our own keys. Back in the day around the new century, I was a newly minted bus driver, full of a new promising career.
Steven Van Metre with Lacy Hunt using data from the Hoisington Research Institute
Something just doesn’t seem the same since the crackup tech boom, commonly referred to by San Franciscans as “The Dot-com-Bomb.” in late 1999 into 2000. This was jokingly overlaid with a meaningless headline of the Millennial Crisis where the notion was that computers would fail once the “odometer” rolled over to a new century in 2001, but in an incongruent thought memory complex– would happen in 2000.
Here we see with this graph above, shown on Steve Van Metre’s popular “Bond King” YouTube channel, with Dr. Lacy Hunt at Himco, the possible mathematical view of why we don’t seem to be as confident about jobs or productivity in the US.
Jerome Powell’s desire for a moderate inflation rate target of two (point two) percent is very easy to come by when viewing this chart. GDP for the US historically tracked a growth rate of 2.2 percent for many decades, and with inflation below this amount, things seemed fine. My personal reason is due to the five-to-one ratio of finance lobbyists to congressmen, and the fact that few graduates study engineering or shop related manufacturing and building trades for the golden calf of Wall Street salaries.
In this chart above, you can see the black line dip created by the GFC, the Global Financial Crisis. Things really haven’t been the same since, and the opportunity to make banks accountable was missed during the Obama presidency–the “Too Big to Fail CEO’s” as seen below.
Not a single penny shed. Interestingly the Two Trillion lost during the initial T.A.R.P bailout of 800 Bn–in Obama’s first days, is now the same amount on the reverse-repo overnight spike at the FED today.
They say one picture is worth one thousand words. How about this next one?
We three knights who say, “Ni.”
Do I really need to say anything else? The failure of these three Kings, to do their job, is now falling upon us soon. I do appreciated Ben’s recent honesty about what he was thinking during his tenure, but rather than tear down all their experience and knowledge at a public stoning arena, can we get back to an honest reset, perhaps with all the money that created the loss of our dollar as a world US reserve currency started in the mid-two thousands? We need to get honest real fast, or I am concerned our standard of living will collapse.
Kudos to Janet Yellen by trying to do her best. And I do think Jerome Powell may still go down in history as the best Fed Chief ever, for his miracle in keeping the glue together with what he inherited. He is a true genius with his ability to guide the nation in his calm manner of newspeak. So far so good.
We need do nothing. Our spiritual leaders quietly tell us we need to be gentle and helpful to all we meet in our daily path.
It looks like the world will bring us back to a gold pegged currency in the Yuan or Renimbi, and with the BRICS nations agreements of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, the US will no longer be in charge of all trade. Indeed, Saudia Arabia and Iran lead the way to end the petrodollar.
Hopefully all the leveraged default, all CDO’s LBO’s EFT’s and futures trading on metals will be stopped. The original Glass-Steagall laws need be reinstated.
Unfortunately, Colonel Douglas MacGregor’s view is sobering: The only way he sees American’s standing up the the system is by collapse and a storming of the Bastille, so to speak. Watch this shocking video.
Now is a good time to look at our ancestral line, or take a look at life with a wide-angle lens, juiced up with the buzz of strong new energy. My personal drug has been that of anticipation, and staying in my head in trying to get answers found in my heart. Striking beauty and masculine energy can be found at the end of the wick of a Roman candle or in the launch tube of a firework ready to be lit. Beauty on a budget with entourage energy can be found on the dance floor or on a surfboard, depending on how deep the water is! But be careful if you’re riding a trolley number 22 Fillmore at Harrison and 16th street because you may be shocked at the result of stepping down into a puddle, or river, such as the remnant of Mission Creek, which used to flow along Harrison below the dip from Bryant Street!
I find it interesting that San Franciscans are surfing the streets in tow as the river of water is jetting all the way from Hawaii to San Francisco. Like everything we focus on, the water can be a huge blessing for all of Nevada and California on the grand scheme of the year of snowpack in the Sierras, but at the same time, can be a pain in the ass in rushing to fill sandbags which are no longer available at the store because they’re all sold out!
A weird angle to Mercury and Mars, along with Jupiter’s expansive energy into Aries from Pisces means I have to be careful to appear obnoxious when contrasting the overbearing with the forced relationships as opposed to the entry of the new and exciting relations coming to us in the new year.
In looking towards a new material goal or personal care change, am I looking at this all alone? Success is so much more possible when working with others–getting help and feedback from others who may have more experience than myself.
Abundance and security come from knowing our margins. And to keep to myself from exaggerating or bragging, and to just keep good stuff to myself and to be okay with that.
The Dao of Doug: A Bus Driver's Perspective 