Is Time on Your Side? – Fat Tail Daily
Boomers hold almost all of the stocks in the US…and most of the risk in the event of a crash.
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The latest news, Common Dreams:
‘Biggest Wealth Divide in Modern History’…Shocking Reality of US Economy
Data released by the University of Michigan and Gallup this week showed US consumer sentiment cratering even as stock markets hit record highs.
“Absolutely incredible,” commented Kobeissi Letter. “Over the last six years, the S&P 500 has risen +130% while US Consumer Sentiment has collapsed by -55%, to its lowest since data began in 1952. We are witnessing the formation of the biggest wealth divide in modern history.”
What’s going on?
How about this: the rich are getting richer; the poor are getting poorer.
But this is not just a financial divide…it is evidence of a fraudulent economy…and of a demographic chasm, now opening up in American society.
Looking back at the Thomas Massie defeat, we see how the wealth divide played a leading role. First, it was a defeat that was completely paid for by Big Money people who may have never even set foot in Kentucky. Massie consistently voted against foreign aid…even to Israel. The Israel-Firsters wanted him out. They got him out — at a cost of $32 million dollars.
Second, this was a battle won by Boomer voters. IJR:
Seventy-two percent of voters between the ages of 26 and 35 supported Massie, while 16.2% backed Gallrein, according to a Quantus Insight poll from May 13. A majority of voters ages 66 to 75, 61.8%, supported Gallrein and 27.1% of that age group supported Massie.
Massie also held a 37-point lead among voters ages 36 to 45 and a 16-point lead among those ages 46 to 55, according to the poll. Gallrein led among voters ages 56 to 65 by a 54% to 36% margin.
A separate poll from Friday found that voters ages 18 to 29 supported Massie by 81.5%, while voters ages 30 to 44 supported him by 70.7%, according to Big Data Poll. Voters over the age of 65 supported Gallrein by a 61.1% to 38.9% margin. One month prior, 78.5% of voters ages 17 to 29 supported Massie and 65% of voters over the age of 65 supported Gallrein, Big Data Poll found on April 8.
The same survey found that Gallrein only held a lead with voters over the age of 65.
Why the big gap? The Boomers, apparently, still cherish the post-WWII idea of a virtuous Israeli state…and can’t imagine that it could be contrary to Americans’ real interests. But a deeper cause may be the aforementioned wealth divide.
In a delightful essay signaled to us by our old friend, Doug Casey, John Carter explains that the Baby Boomers did not get rich simply because they were lucky:
‘The baby boom generation took out tens of trillions of dollars in debt in their descendants’ names to pay for social welfare programs that only baby boomers will enjoy.’
We could add that they also entertained and flattered themselves with unnecessary wars at a cost of $10 trillion or so. And now, who will pay America’s $39 trillion in government debt? Not the boomers.
Speaking as a boomer, our lives have been marked, from cradle…to fast-approaching grave…by improvement. There were technical improvements — air conditioning, power steering, cleaner air, TV, TikTok, the internet, open heart surgery, and so forth.
We also were generally able to find jobs, with rising incomes and rising assets. And all we had to do, in the 1970s, was to buy a nice house and some nice stocks…and then follow Bernard Baruch’s advice. He said he got rich thanks to his ass; he bought property and sat on it.
For boomers, if you avoided getting your ass killed in Vietnam, or wasting it on idleness, drugs, alcohol…fast cars or fast women…things generally turned out alright. Carter writes:
‘For the boomer, deferred gratification always had a payoff.’
‘For the zoomer — and the millennial, and generation X — this has simply not been the case.’
And here’s the key insight:
Boomers have profited from a kind of generational Cantillon effect: they were born close to the time when inflation first began in earnest, meaning that the money they were lavished with would always be worth more than whatever spare change their children could scrape together
Richard Cantillon was an associate of John Law. He noticed that the first people to get the inflated money benefitted from it most. They could spend it as if it were real.
Later, the value of the fake money went down. As we’ve pointed out many times, measured in gold, the dollar has lost 99.111% of its value since 1971. We got the full value of the dollar 54 years ago. Our children get only a chemical trace of it.
We were lucky. And faithless. We didn’t plant trees for our grandchildren. We cut them down to enjoy a warm fire for ourselves.
We could but on our ‘baggies’ and surf the big waves…in the job market, the housing market and the stock market. We could increase our dollar wealth as much as 50 times (in the Dow).
And the house we bought for peanuts in 1975 is now so expensive our own children can’t afford it.
More to come…
