Fed Repo Desk Gone Haywire: Taper Coming

Sig said:
And those puritan "good" nations that stayed on the gold standard are all killing it....oh, wait a minute there aren't any such things. But really if you prefer the standards of living of 108 years ago you can join the Amish, anything else is pretty hypocritical.
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This post comes out of the 1950s thinking....lol. USA living standard and quality of life is pretty low Except for NYC and Parts of Cali and Texas.. Well below nations that don't print and live deeply in debt. Maybe you haven't traveled around other countries. Or maybe you haven't traveled around the USA. Its pretty ugly. Just the opposite of your statement. Our kids and grand kids don't have a chance in hell.

(Actually in the mid west, the Amish farms are the the nicest by far.)
 
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Rickshaw Man said:
You mean when a working man could buy a house, let the wife raise the kids. Put them thru college all on a working man's salary. I'm 59, my grandfather raised three boys, sent them all to college my grandmother stayed home. They had 4 acres of land in a small college town. They had a garden, chickens. TAMU is where two went to college and the third went to UT in Austin Texas. Try doing that now....Not a chance. Inflation...you ain't seen nothing. Just wait another decade.
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Let's talk reality here. Your grandfather, or at least the Normal Rockwell prototypical thing you've got stuck in your head, most probably lived in a sub 1000 square foot house with one bathroom and no garage. He probably had one car that would be lucky to reach 75,000 miles. He couldn't afford to even call people outside a radius of 100 miles from his home for more than a few minutes a month, let alone communicate instantly worldwide at a whim as you're doing here. If he had a TV it was small and black and white, no way to access movies outside the theatre or what was being shown on TV, and he certainly didn't have any gaming systems. He had access to 10 radio stations for entertainment, 5 of them AM. He had no access to MOOCs, lucky for him he lived in a college town otherwise if he wanted to learn about something new it would be largely unobtainable for him. He probably never flew his family across the country, let alone to Europe, Asia, or South America for vacations, a flight to Europe for the family would be more than his annual salary. And we could go on and on and on about the ways in which your idealization of that era fails in the face of reality.

Lets say you had a blue collar skilled labor job, lets say a welder at median wage of $41,000/year. You too could pick a backwater rural area and buy a house equivalent to his and opt to go without anything that was in common use since 1950 for someone of his income level. If you enrolled your kids in a Texas state school and you were in-state, then with the various income based discounts you'd probably end up paying a couple thousand a year in tuition, heck if they got into Stanford they'd get free room and board and tuition at that income level. Bottom line, you could live just like your grandpa on today's salary if you limited yourself to only what your grandpa had. But you don't actually want that. You want all the benefits of today's life living where you want to live. What has "inflated" is our standard of living, which most of us actually appreciate. I sure has hell wouldn't want to live the way your grandpa did, that's my version of hell! Oh, and you seem to think the whole wife barefoot and pregnant staying home with the kids thing is considered ideal apparently. OK Boomer.
 
Pricechange said:
This post comes out of the 1950s thinking....lol. USA living standard and quality of life is pretty low Except for NYC and Parts of Cali and Texas.. Well below nations that don't print and live deeply in debt. Maybe you haven't traveled around other countries. Or maybe you haven't traveled around the USA. Its pretty ugly. Just the opposite of your statement. Our kids and grand kids don't have a chance in hell.

(Actually in the mid west, the Amish farms are the the nicest by far.)
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I served 20 years in the military which means, I've lived in 15 states and spent time in literally every one as well as spending time in a couple dozen other countries. I'd be interested to hear your commiserate experience that leads to your observations, seems only fair to provide after your dismissive statements that couldn't be further from reality don't you thing?

There are certainly countries that have different priorities than the U.S. when it comes to what they spend their money on. Lack of universal healthcare, for example, is an embarrassment to the U.S. It also has nothing to do with the U.S. debt level. I'd be interested to hear your list of a half dozen countries with sizable economies (yeah, I get it that Switzerland has a nice niche as a financial center but it it's formula isn't replicable in an economy the size of the U.S.) that you consider to have higher standards of living, what their debt levels are vis a vis the U.S., and how that difference in standard of living is directly tied to debt level?
 
SunTrader said:
We do have a nice standard of living bought and paid for with ........... IOU's that one day will come due.
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Except that's the "macro is the same as your personal checkbook" viewpoint. While it's tempting to collapse all the complexities of macro economics to something simple like that we can all easily relate to, it's as nonsensical as the whole picture of atoms circling around a nucleus model is to physics. Good for soundbites and 3rd graders, not so much for modeling reality.

Again, I'd be interested to hear about the countries which stayed on the gold standard and issued no debt and how they're doing these days?
 
Fed to Sell Corporate Bonds and ETFs Acquired During Covid-19 Crisis

https://www.wsj.com/articles/fed-pl...-corporate-bonds-etfs-by-year-end-11622666400

Fed Plans to Wind Down a Pandemic Corporate Credit Facility

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...ind-down-a-pandemic-corporate-credit-facility

“This move highlights the Fed’s discomfort with holding these instruments -- and the associated credit risk -- on its balance sheet, even with protection from a Treasury backstop,” said Nathan Sheets, chief economist at PGIM Fixed Income.

“This should have no impact on the corporate credit markets, given the small size of the Fed’s holdings,” said Ashok Bhatia, deputy chief investment officer of fixed income at Neuberger Berman. “The Fed now has a blueprint for successfully supporting credit markets if the need ever arises again.”

Note from me: According to FRED, the Fed's Asset Balance Sheet currently stands at $7.9 Trillion. As a point of reference, the US 2019 GDP was $21.43 Trillion.
 
Sig said:
Except that's the "macro is the same as your personal checkbook" viewpoint. While it's tempting to collapse all the complexities of macro economics to something simple like that we can all easily relate to, it's as nonsensical as the whole picture of atoms circling around a nucleus model is to physics. Good for soundbites and 3rd graders, not so much for modeling reality.

Again, I'd be interested to hear about the countries which stayed on the gold standard and issued no debt and how they're doing these days?
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About as well as those who stayed (umm used to stay) on the dollar peg.

Realty sucks.

Meanwhile you know damn well why no one is on the gold standard.
 
Sig said:
Let's talk reality here. Your grandfather, or at least the Normal Rockwell prototypical thing you've got stuck in your head, most probably lived in a sub 1000 square foot house with one bathroom and no garage. He probably had one car that would be lucky to reach 75,000 miles. He couldn't afford to even call people outside a radius of 100 miles from his home for more than a few minutes a month, let alone communicate instantly worldwide at a whim as you're doing here. If he had a TV it was small and black and white, no way to access movies outside the theatre or what was being shown on TV, and he certainly didn't have any gaming systems. He had access to 10 radio stations for entertainment, 5 of them AM. He had no access to MOOCs, lucky for him he lived in a college town otherwise if he wanted to learn about something new it would be largely unobtainable for him. He probably never flew his family across the country, let alone to Europe, Asia, or South America for vacations, a flight to Europe for the family would be more than his annual salary. And we could go on and on and on about the ways in which your idealization of that era fails in the face of reality.

Lets say you had a blue collar skilled labor job, lets say a welder at median wage of $41,000/year. You too could pick a backwater rural area and buy a house equivalent to his and opt to go without anything that was in common use since 1950 for someone of his income level. If you enrolled your kids in a Texas state school and you were in-state, then with the various income based discounts you'd probably end up paying a couple thousand a year in tuition, heck if they got into Stanford they'd get free room and board and tuition at that income level. Bottom line, you could live just like your grandpa on today's salary if you limited yourself to only what your grandpa had. But you don't actually want that. You want all the benefits of today's life living where you want to live. What has "inflated" is our standard of living, which most of us actually appreciate. I sure has hell wouldn't want to live the way your grandpa did, that's my version of hell! Oh, and you seem to think the whole wife barefoot and pregnant staying home with the kids thing is considered ideal apparently. OK Boomer.
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I gotta hand it to ya... that was one hell of a retort, cause I kinda liked Rigshaw's post too. :D
 
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