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Update: I write my blog articles several weeks before they actually posted. Current-event ones like this one I write 4-7 days in advance. The problem is that things are changing daily with the coronavirus. Therefore, I have added several “Updates” in italics to this blog article that I have added on the fly after I initially wrote it. By the way, these Updates have not been reviewed by my proofreaders and may have typos, so if you see any of those, tough shit, I don’t care, and I’m not going to fix them because I’m too busy.
-By Caleb Jones
I wish I had better news today.
I don’t.
But I’ll try to end with a positive.
As I’ve been talking about at my other blog, the damage, pain, chaos, and destruction we are all experiencing and will continue to suffer through is not because of the coronavirus, but because of society’s reaction, and in many cases overreaction to the virus.
Individuals and companies are certainly guilty of this. Yet, front and center, the biggest culprit and biggest source of our current and future problems are, of course, our collapsing Western governments, which have done just about everything wrong in handling this crisis and are continuing to make things even worse.
And the billions of people on Earth who will never get the coronavirus will suffer for it.
Government’s incompetent, corrupt, corporatist, socialist responses to this virus is like the extreme radiation treatments that kill the cancer patient who would have survived without it.
There are too many horrible things our governments are doing to report. I’ll just give you the more obvious highlights.
March 11th – Tantrum Trump bans all travel from Europe except those countries where he has golf courses. I’m not kidding. (This guy is president, folks. And a lot of you voted for this corrupt piece of shit. And before you say it, yes, Hillary would have been horrible too. Not relevant.) He does it without warning the EU [source].
He bungles his announcement so badly that he causes needless mass chaos in European airports as Americans pay up to $20,000 for return flights they don’t even need since it doesn’t apply to them. He crashes the cargo trade market when he says the ban applies to cargo. As usual, his staff freaks out and corrects a bunch of his incorrect statements, saying it won’t apply to cargo and won’t apply to American citizens.
Tantrum Trump then says cargo will not be affected, which is a blatant lie since 75% of air tonnage is on passenger jets [source]. I could go on, but you get the point. Our collapsing country is run by idiots.
March 12th – As I predicted, the Federal Reserve injects $1.5 trillion into the credit market by purchasing repos (repurchase agreements) to prevent its crash. It crashes anyway. [source] Theoretically the $1.5 trillion was supposed to be repaid in 24 hours, but I have not seen any data to verify this yet.
March 15th – Since that didn’t work, the Federal Reserve does the only thing left it can do. It artificially cuts interest rates to zero and then pumps $700 billion of quantitative easing [source] into the markets. As I’ve been railing against at this very blog for years, quantitative easing (or QE) is probably the second biggest reason the USA will collapse in our lifetimes. It basically means creating money out of thin air, which enriches the super-rich at the very top who get the money first, but screws literally everyone else once those dollars circulate into the greater economy and become worth less.
And it won’t work either, not long-term.
Worst of all, the Fed has lifted reserve requirements for the banks. This means that, under certain conditions, American banks no longer need any reserves in order to loan money. That means your bank can now loan out assloads of money with no backup reserves, and if those loans don’t get repaid… well… how comfortable would you be if you had money in that bank?
It’s the stuff that lead up to 2008 all over again.
March 17th – As I predicted at this very blog, Tantrum Trump, (who has always been a fan of big government), and his administration shift to the hard left and start proposing universal basic income (UBI) where they will actually start sending cash to Americans [source]. Our government, the largest government in the history of the world, which already spends $8 trillion per year (state, local, and federal combined) plus is already $23 trillion in debt plus has over $120 trillion in unfunded liabilities plus has a multitrillion-dollar empire all over the world now wants to spend billions, if not trillions of dollars handing out “free” taxpayer cash to everyone, even after reducing the value of that cash due to QE.
Update: Looks like they're doing it [source] "The Senate bill, unprecedented in its size and scope, would send $1,200 checks to many Americans, create a $367 billion loan program for small businesses, and establish a $500 billion lending fund for industries, cities and states." They're going to bail out not only individuals, but mismanaged industries like the airlines, most of whom deserve to go out of business right now. Great.
Regardless of whether or not you think this is a good idea to do right now, this move is either A) very good for America’s future; B) very bad for America’s future; C) won’t affect America’s future at all. I think we all know which it is, even rational left-wingers.
Update: March 20th - The Federal Reserve promises to issue overnight loans to banks at the rate of $1 trillion per day, something that has never before happened in all of human history. Moreover, the Fed purchases $75 billion in Treasuries and $47 billion in mortgage-backed securities in one day. [source] It has committed to buy another $100 billion in the next few days. Compare this to the last time they ran QE in 2012, when it took them an entire month to buy just $45 billion. We've never quasi-governmental bailouts/purchases like this before.
Update: Recessions are good. Much of the pain suffered during a recession is necessary. Many companies need to go out of business during a recession. It's a key part of the capitalist system. The problem is that we don't have a capitalist system, but a corporatist one, which is far worse, worse even than socialism. If you try to bail everyone out during a recession you simply create bigger and more painful problems that will occur in the future. Read this for more detail. I'll discuss this more in future articles here.
I said on this blog that if Bernie Sanders got the Democratic nomination (which he did not, the Corporatist Left crushed him by backing a corrupt corporatist who is literally suffering from senility) and ran against Trump that Trump would have to shift to the left in order to beat him. Well, he didn’t need Bernie Sanders to push him to the left after all; the coronavirus did that instead.
Bernie Sanders didn’t even need to win in order to make the USA more socialist.
It’s now entirely possible, and I mean this, that Trump could win re-election on a platform of UBI and/or Medicare For All (something he’s always supported, as he said in numerous debates and interviews in 2016).
Wouldn’t that be nice? That’s not a prediction; I’m just saying it’s distinctly possible.
And the hilarious part is that Trump supporters, the new Trump Left, would still support him.
Okay… I said I would end on a positive.
Pretty much every asset class in the known universe is down right now. Domestic stocks, foreign stocks, bonds, precious metals (though gold is shooting back up now, yay!), commodities, cryptocurrencies, and now, real estate. This is a fantastic buying opportunity, probably one of the best we’ve had in over 30 years.
Real estate, the one I’m watching the most carefully (since I’m planning on buying this year for the first time in years) is the most exciting. Imagine real estate prices down 20% or more while interest rates are at zero. With these two factors combined, 2020 could very well end up being the best time to buy real estate in all of modern American history.
My plan is to buy some real estate in the fourth quarter of this year. I’m hoping interest rates and the real estate market are still extremely low by then. Likely they will be. If so, I’m going to be a very happy boy.
If you were planning on buying a house, condo, or rental property in the next few years, you should accelerate your plans. Real estate millionaires are going to be made in the next several years from moves they make this year.
As always, just because something is bad for society doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad for you. The Alpha Male 2.0 finds opportunities in both good times and bad. Sometimes the opportunities during bad times are better than the ones in good.
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