A Year Later Nothing I’ve Predicted Has Happened
I expected crashes last fall (2020). Didn’t happen.
I read my summary piece last year, where I reference the many pieces I wrote during 2020. I see no need to update anything.
I didn’t expect that the government would extend rent and mortgage forbearance for this long. Or extend Pandemic Unemployment Assistance. Or continue buying securities. In some ways they were the humane thing to do. But they have to end at some point.
My reading of history is that such heavy-handedness, no matter how well-intentioned, ends in revolt. Okay, our graying population and lazy kids may ignore such historical imperatives.
If not, we’ll miss when Trump’s antics were enough to distract large parts of our population from their economic plight.
On a lighter note. China has been innovating throughout the pandemic. It’s “lie flat” movement among the young give the youth around the word something to do and believe in.
Go Chinese Youth!
Notes on Real Estate and Wages
There is no housing shortage. There is only greater difficulty in buying property in the neighborhoods everyone wants to live.
Drive an hour away from the place you want to live — plenty of housing.
Look at the humongous house in your nice neighborhood where an old couple doesn’t have to move because wages aren’t driving asset prices.
How is that so simple truth lost? How did people get the idea everyone can live where they want. And if they can’t, affordable homes can be built with the right zoning in place?
How can people walk around growing urban blight — more and more stores closed, homelessness, trash everywhere— look up at new skyscrapers and conclude, upon this foundation all will end well?
Notes on The Future
We like to split up the world’s problems into nations and races, despite all our basic human rights rhetoric. What the pandemic has exposed is a complete lack of global integration. The virus is a simple problem. Track, quarantine and vaccinate. To this day, no two nations are working together.
As climate change accelerates migrations and disrupts economies I see no working system of global cooperation.
At some point someone will get frustrated and the bullets will fly. Predictions then become impossible.
It won’t be the end of the world. People will adapt. And once again, say never again.
