Americans Are Pulling Cash from Their Retirement Savings to Pay Bills
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
If Exxon can correctly model climate change back in the 1980s the Fed can correctly model how deep to cut others to hamstring the masses acquisition of assets for themselves over 12-24 months
Every spare dollar a low/middle class person has in the US is destined to be sucked up by a mix of medical, education, pharma and housing.
People still having money in a 401k means there is money on the table these economic vampires are missing out on.
Once you realize that, your soul is saved. No more worries, no more negativity, paying the bills is what defines you as human and makes you complete. The water, electricity company, car, pharma, doctors, education system ... all help you in realizing your purpose in life by charging you as many bills as possible. You should rejoice!
It's really quite robust as a self-organizing system. It's hard to see a way out of this local minimum without some major, sudden, and total change in the social and cultural attitudes of the people involved.
Covid lockdown was the perfect time to just not login and make Congress deal with it.
Only 1 million sworn LEO in US including local, state, fed. No way police can pull together a door to door dragnet with those numbers and 3 guns per adult in US. I mean look at the Ulvad police and assume many are just like that. Pathetic.
Gen Z seems aware it’s all political chicanery so unless the rural nutters blow stuff up, GZ and Millennials could leverage their 170 million strong to steamroll over 50 million GenX via politics.
The goal of the Fed is to _crash the economy just in time for the election_ oops I mean control inflation.
Do you believe the GOP agenda of roling back civil liberties will stop at Roe vs. Wade?
"Virtual" once meant that!
GOP tried to repeal the ACA, and passed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
Democrats have not even come close to opposing any tax cuts that I know of. They complain in the media but still vote for them every time.
Democrats did not oppose the jobs act. Again, complaining in the media doesn't count.
By the way, since people are pulling money of their retirement accounts, this is new liquidity hitting the market or, essentially, inflation. The deflation, in this case, will happen at the people's retirement time; or on a very long-term interval (people trying to raise their 401k again by spending less). The only positive outlook is that this can convince paper holders that the Fed is strict and disciplined and ask them to trust the paper a little more.
The damage of the Covid liquidity package will be felt for years, if not decades.
It's so weird. Life went from so boring and predictable to 'may you live in interesting times' [1] in like 10 years. 2013 feels like a century ago, not a decade. In some ways it makes one have some degree of empathy for what those living around the turn of the 20th century might have felt. There's no way they could have known the ride they were about to step onto, especially as they started off living through the advent of the automobile, dramatic improvements in labor conditions, etc..
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_ti...
The problem with QE is it drove up the price of land/housing as I think a lot of it ended up as mortgage loans. Rents rise with land price increases which affects businesses. It would've been better if the QE had gone to business loans not mortgages. But home ownership trumps more businesses when it comes to getting votes so no govt official is going to make a stink if too many loans go out to land asset acquisition vs creating small businesses.
The economy is a dynamic beast: mass multivariate recursion, in dynamic causal networks, or some such hell. We must trust and improve models in order to design public policy, always being aware that when multiple stakeholders disagree, who gets the nod? Who wins in the economy.
I wish :(
If the Fed kept rates lower, inflation would be ripping right now and even more people would be sharing their wild conspiracy theories. This is such an absurd take.
They're in this sweet spot where they're neither held accountable by the voter, nor by the consumer.
The can be wrong over and over and over again and nothing is going to happen. A private company has to at least not loose more money then they can bribe politicians to give them.
> neither held accountable by the voter, nor by the consumer
Don’t know if you meant to do this but you’re implying that voter!=consumer. Citizens united strikes again!
> A private company has to at least not loose more money then they can bribe politicians
1 dollar 1 vote!
I'm not sure it would be too bad. The orgy porgy and soma could be fun you know? Though I guess in case you resist, you will be immediately found out and discarded.
The rest of the plot is good.
Using Quad4 | Google DNS | AdGuard | etc for archive.xxx lookups avoids the infinite recaptcha cycle.
Try it yourself:
https://www.hsabank.com/hsabank/Learning-Center/HSA-Savings-...
My employer and I pay these corporate mega giants every pay period for the privilege of them paying for my care. What do I get in return? Oh I still pay out of pocket until deductible met. Oh even after deductible met, there’s an out of pocket maximum. Only then will insurance fully kick in. Oh and you can only pick “in network” providers, otherwise another set of complex policies and limits take effect.
???
They create the rules. Make it as complex as possible for all parties (ie, medical coding/billing). Doctors get screwed as much as possible. Cost of medical care artificially inflated due to dedicated teams and high amount of time spent to properly code and bill each visit. Insurance companies even have dedicated teams to deny as many claims as possible. Want that expensive treatment for your rare illness covered? Insurance will fight your doctor until either you or doctor give up, pay out of pocket, or just forego the treatment completely.
We may have the most advanced healthcare in the world. But it’s largely not accessible, and it shows in world health care statistics
Companies I've worked for will also match up to a $500 contribution, so it's free money.
On top of that, the HSA is a triple tax advantaged account (even better than a Roth IRA), so you contributions are tax-free (lowers your taxable income today), the growth is tax-free (no capital gains), and withdrawals are tax-free (for medical expenses). You can invest the money in the HSA in index funds and such. As an investment account, it's as good as you can get.
If you're healthy young person who has enough cash to pay up to the deductible amount (mine is $2500 but depends on your plan) for unforeeseen medical expenses, and have a company match, you should at least contribute to a HSA up to the match amount. It's free money. And hold on to it until retirement. You also don't lose the HSA value when you switch or lose jobs.
Also if you do need to withdraw from the HSA for health expenses, you can. Although if you can afford the expenses, just hold on the medical receipts and leave the money in the HSA to grow. If you do need to do a large withdrawal, gather up your medical receipts and you can withdraw up to that amount with no penalty.
At Google the HSA is cheapest for almost everyone, whether you are a single person with almost no health expenses or a family with high expenses.
Despite common misconceptions, capitalism has nothing to do with markets (let alone "free markets", which are a myth anyway). Markets existed thousands of years before capitalism did and exist in other economic systems.
No, capitalism is simply wealth extraction from workers to the capital owning class. Now we are saddled with all kinds of debt: mortgage, student loans, medical, credit card, car loan. Less than a century ago, houses were bought for cash, education was cheap or free and there was no such thing as health insurance.
We got all those things to keep us complaint worker bees and to squeeze every last dollar from our labor.
We've gone through 2-3 years of rapid inflation. A lot of things didn't get intrinsically more expensive. It was opportunistic ie greedflation. How did we tackle this? By raising interest rates. Again, that extract more wealth from labor. We could've dampened the economy with windfall profit corporate taxes instead.
Unfortunately this also completely rules US foreign policy too. Look at all the wars the US has started since WW2 and coups the US has backed. Look at how often that happens after said country actually (or even just threatened to) nationalized some industry. Cuba, Guaratamala, Venezuela to name a few.
It honestly boggles the mind how intentionally blind people are to this reality. Some see themselves as ultimately benefitting form this system by being capital owners. Very few will be. But others will never be yet defend this system instinctively anyway.
Oh for some class consciousness in the US.
older people live longer, a lot longer for the wealthier and healthier. their assets are not distributed to the state or offspring until that child is almost at retirement age too
young people are not marrying outside of their class anymore-ish as there are big enough populations in the higher earning classes for the first time in history. This has disrupted upwards mobility for women that had an expectation or a fallback expectation of this being an option. this is exacerbating inequality extremely quickly and is a bit of a sleeper because the perceptions of appeal have not changed
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/1986-1...
the game of making everything fungible isnt done yet and is a fun, and lucrative, problem to help solve
Mansa Musa was sitting on a notional trillions, in an environment with a gini coefficient of basically 1 and no counterparties to trade with. Pointless
Regulations are meant to prevent monopolies, but that has simply failed. Legislation is meant to distribute wealth, at least to some degree, but in the past 50 years the top earners have gone from paying almost 80% taxes to almost 0% taxes. So while you’re right that this is what capitalism looks like, capitalism was just never maintainable without regulations and that part isn’t exactly new. It eventually leads to civil war and break downs of society, every time, except this time we’re fast approaching a world where the aristocracy will not really need a massive work force because AI and machinery will be capable of performing most tasks.
In many ways it’s basically the worst version of the cyberpunk we all read back in the 80/90ies come true. But the catch is that no other system works either and unless we manage to steer things back to regulated capitalism then the nationstate as we’ve known it for around 400 years is basically going to be replaced by something else. At least here in the west, China probably has it covered by their extreme version of regulated capitalism, but even they have massive economical issues because they cheated capitalism by making up things like house ownership.
There is a fairly clear path out of it of course. Especially housing. We simply need to get our governments to take ownership over all housing that is owned by equity fonds and give zero fucks about the massive economic impact that will have on the aristocracy. Our society and our economies as such can survive it, and it’ll be better than the crash that eventually happens when nobody can afford these houses. Which is sort of a weird thing for me to say, considering part of the investment bank I work for is into bricks, but even now we’re operating at an intended loss with 10.000 homes (which is a lot in my country) being empty because it’s too hard to increase rent once a home is rented out and our business prefers to keep them empty and hope for a better economy to rent them out at higher markups. Partly because the entire projects were financed with the assumption that the rent would never be below a certain rate, and it will be more expensive to actually earn money than to lose them, at least in the short time, but the short term is 7 years.
We have had royal families who owned basically every part of everything though, which isn’t the same but seems to have quite a lot in common...
I think the sentiment could be reframed as people are aggravated that rich people and companies are not conspiring to make everyone else’s lives easier
a much easier lack of coordination to quantify
Spend it if you got it cause tomorrow it will be gone.
a couple percent new loans to add to the 17% of fidelity administered 401ks with outstanding loans
thats not that deep yet
remember all: the entire strategy to fight against inflation is for people to run out of money and die starving and shivering in the cold. if people can still begrudgingly buy necessities at the higher prices then the mission is not accomplished. Fed speak for this is “demand destruction”. Demand has not been destroyed.