The economy this morning

[jellyrug]

CPI this morning, 7.5%.

The last time we had inflation this high, was 1982.

Last year around now, sometimes I could get gas at $1.99 a gallon. Now close to $4.00.

My business is paying $1,000 a day for one guy to install residential and commercial cabinetry. All he needs is a pickup truck and around $2,000 worth of tools and equipment. I can’t really grow my business as even at that price, several times that one guy is fully booked and can’t help me. So I have to go install myself. Pic of the last just completed below.

My insurance company asks a few questions over email, which takes 5 minutes to answer, then charges me $600 for an audit. When I cancel the policy they say “you are welcome”.

NC state decides to audit my business and when I send them 1,500 pages of bank statements and receipts, they go missing in action and USPS returns the box full of documents to me. Finally the auditor gets fired and they agree to drop the audit if I pay them $2,600 for their trouble.

My prices to my builders the last year have gone up around 40%, they still buy and I still beat my competition every time. Problem is, my net profit has actually declined.

The Fed is asleep at the wheel, they have put the economy on steroids to where it has now overdosed. Still they have done nothing but talk about it. So, the free market is responding with increasing inflation and bond yields all by itself.

Biden screams Electrical vehicles, but Lithium mining permits take forever, if ever to get approved.

CNN viewership goes down drastically, because Trump is no longer around to entertain drama.

Our border patrol and enforcement shows concerning suicide rates, no one talks about it.

Below is a pic showing a small part of the last job we finished Friday, but I’m thinking maybe I should rather go sit on the beach and make leather pouches.

So are you all happy with your new Administration one year later?

Finally, that is my rant for today.

 

[fallenarch]

Do you think Biden "accomplished" all that in part of one year?

 

[Taylor]

”My prices to my builders the last year have gone up around 40%, they still buy and I still beat my competition every time. Problem is, my net profit has actually declined.“——so raise your prices, if you are beating your competition every time, your priced way to low, you don’t want to be the cheapest, you don’t want to be the most expensive.

I own a small flatwork company, I see this all the time, raise your prices, new construction is going like crazy right now, people don’t want to be in the trades anymore, it’s almost limitless on what you can make, with not enough workforce to do the labor, you set the price.

 

[Zerks]

Here is my take on this. The 08 mortgage crash / equity scam was another case of political insiders doing the dirty work. A bill was passed called The Commodities, Futures and Modernization act of 2000 and it put the Wall Street betting casinos in business. ( This arrangement was made illegal over 80 years ago and took place in "Bucket Shops"... a place where you could bet on people not paying their mortgages. ) It was signed by Slick Willy in his final days in office in 2000. The mortgage loan business sold a lot of derivatives that were stuffed with junk ( liar loans ) to investors all over the world. (watch the movie titled "The Big Short) When the bomb that blew up Wall Street blew up the Feds raced in with hundreds of billions and started bailing out all the big banks and AIG. To bad for the tax payer and homeowners... we are going to take your homes and equity and let the too big to fail banks live another day.

What should have happened was no bail outs... Let the banks fail. Let the markets sort it all out. Once the books were cleared in a year or 2 then reset the interest rates at no lower than 5% for the next three years.

Had that played out in this way normal markets would have been with us for a while... 2012 was the last year prices were somewhat reasonable. Now we are headed into another crash because the protections against foreclosure have expired and the banks are already getting a little bit sketchy. In recent news the 5 largest banks in Canada were shut down for about 5 days and no explanation has been given for that.

You ain't seen nothing yet...