From Stansberry Digest 4/28/2017: Loans for education and cars contributed to 90% of the growth in consumer debt since 2012. By 2015, roughly 25% of car loans were made to subprime borrowers. But why should the banks care? These auto loans are securitized, just like the bad mortgages were. In the last five full years, …
— The End of Alchemy p. 27 In China alone, over 70 million manufacturing jobs were created during the twenty-first century, far exceeding the 42 million working in manufacturing in 2012 in the United States and Europe combined. The pool of labor supplying the world trading system more than trebled in size. Advanced economies benefited …
— The End of Alchemy p. 17 Capitalism, as I use the term here, is an economic system in which private owners of capital hire wage-earners to work in their businesses and pay for investment by raising finance from banks and financial markets.”
Palm Beach Letter April 2016 There are no real assets in the Social Security trust fund. Now, add a couple of more problems to the mix. Social Security has had two problems from the start. The first is retirement age. When the government designed the program in 1935, it set the retirement age at 65. …
Bill Bonner Diary 4/5/2016 All wage and inflation numbers are a little fishy. So, let’s keep it simple. The basic transportation for a working man 40 years ago was the Ford F-150 pickup truck. In 1976, that truck, the SuperCab model, had a manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) of $4,600. That was when the average …
The Old Testament tells us that God chased Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden with this curse: “By the sweat of your brow, you will earn your food until you return to the ground.” From then on, you worked… you earned money… you could buy bread. Or lend it out. Or invest it. …