Wednesday, June 22, 2022

The two best videos to understand rising prices, inflation in general, and the economy right now


This is Joe Brown, of Heresy Financial channel, picking apart President Joe Biden's inflation plan.

If you drive a car or ride a bus, you use gasoline, or natural gas, to create electricity for electric cars, or to power many buses.  Both gasoline and natural gas have gone up a lot in pricein the last two years.  Traveling on the streets is more expensive now, and so are most other things, and this blog is about not only my life on the streets, but also how to survive and thrive in the crazy decade of the 2020's.  Joe Brown, with his Heresy Financial channel (above), gives some of the best overall analysis of today's economy that I've seen.  If you want to understand today's rising prices, the video above is a great place to start.

OK, I'm sick of hearing numbskulls blaming President Biden for the current rising prices.  The president, any U.S. president, by themselves, has very little to do with the economy.  Working with Congress, they can pass laws and programs that affect the economy to some degree.  But the federal Reserve (aka The Fed), really controls our money supply, and influences interest rates, which ripple through the rest of the economy. 

You can blame Biden, if you want, for keeping Jay Powell as the head of The Fed (the Federal Reserve), who caused our current price inflation.  The federal deficit (gap between money coming in from taxes and money spent by U.S. federal government), has gone up since the federal budget was balanced during the Bill Clinton presidency in 1999-2000.  Democrat and Republican administrations have both spent more money than brought they brought in, over the 20 years since.  The Covid-19 pandemic response caused the deficit to soar, first in 2020 under Trump, and now under Biden.  


Nomi Prins was a quant, which means a super math geek, at Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers in the 1980's and 1990's, and has been a financial journalist/author since about 2001.  She is one of the smartest people around to explain the financial markets and the how economy works.  This recent interview gives her the chance to explain what she sees happening in today's world with high inflation, falling stock markets, slowing real estate markets, and everything else going on.  

These two videos are a heck of of lot of information to digest, particularly if you don't pay much attention to economic issues in general.  But these are the best to current videos I've seen to understand what's going on, why prices are so high, and why we may need another huge bailout (which will cause more inflation in 2-3 years) at some time.  

Everybody complains about rising gas prices, food prices, and other high prices.  But very few people really want to learn the basics of how the economy actually works, and where things may go from here.  If you're one of those few people, check out these videos.  If not, keep whining as prices keep going up, loans get harder to get and more expensive, and real estate starts going down in the coming months.  

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