It was a familiar refrain in prison, and trotted out to anyone who claimed to be smart or good at anything.
Take a look at the current global economy, stock markets, currencies, debts, QE, are you so smart, you actually can see behind the veil?
Do you actually know what is going on?
Let’s take me, been waiting for the house price crash since 1995, and since 1995 houses around here that were 50k back then are now 150k, am I so smart? 19 years is a long time waiting for something that was “unsustainable” in my eyes back then to crash.
So how about this, what if the crash already happened, and all we are seeing now is everyone pretending it hasn’t, sure, we didn’t kill Bobby and eat his flesh, he has just nipped out for some smokes, he’ll be back any day now.
What if we use the OLD definition of inflation, an increase in the money supply, then the house going from 50k to 150k in 19 years is just a 300% inflation rate, one 2014 Pound will buy what 33p did in 1995, so, have your wages tripled since 1995?
It’s an old adage that those living through an age don’t realise it from the inside looking out, it is only in later years that other point at that period and say mmmm, this the era of the end of the thermionic valve.
It don’t matter what currency they used when my dad was a boy or how much he earned an hour or how much things cost, what matters is how far things went…. how many hours labour (a finite resource ever week) did it take to buy a meal that would keep you alive for a day?
There is no good asking how long it would have taken my dad as a young man to earn enough to buy a blu ray player…things like the price of copper and tin per ton used to mean something, but in the manipulated market everything is manipulated, rehypothecated and so on, so now there are apparently at least 100,000 tons of aluminium and copper that should be sat in warehouses in china, and it isn’t there, and no one is sure if it ever was, gold is the same, you wanna buy gold, hang on, are we talking PHYSICAL gold here? and even that is subject to fraud, at the highest levels, that gold? or tungsten wrapped in gold?
Hell I was old enough to watch man land on the moon, live on 405 line VHF monochrome teevee, and go to school and read and study, and be surrounded by records of anything you cared to shake a stick at, I could open a school text book and look at the price of coal per ton from 1800 to what was then the present day.
Nowadays, in the fucking computer age no less, I am fucking surrounded by cunts showing graphs with manipulated axes (eg not showing the full scale to highlight a difference, or making one scale out of scale with the other, etc) and all sort of shit, and all I hear all the time is that these fucking charts are based on data SINCE RECORDS BEGAN IN 1979
Cunt. I was around before 1979, I can assure you for a mother-fucking fact, records began a *lot* earlier than that bucko.
Think my 300% (as a fucking minimum) inflation in the past 19 years is shit?
In 1995 I could walk into the local main dealer for Yamaha, Honda, Suzuki and Kawasaki, a big bike shop, with £3,500 pounds, and ride out on the top of the range anything I chose, nowadays that number is closer to £12,000, and they should actually be CHEAPER, because while the cost of making a 4 cylinder block in energy terms is pretty much the same (irrespective of size too actually) a lot of the shit that used to have to be manufactured from metal is now cheapo solid state electronics, or plastics, or composites.
The rule of thumb for interest is divide 70 by the rate, and the number you get is the doubling period.
70 / 10% apr = 7, so 7 years is the doubling period.
1.07 (7%) exp 19 = 3.616 (361%) so we have a ball park, inflation has been running about 7% a year for the past 19 years.
1995 I was doing long distance motorway recovery work, 14 p a mile, and that meant including loading and unloading and all that shit I was doing an average of 65 mph (exempt unrestricted trucks) so 65 x 0.14 = £9.10 an hour.
I KNEW it was good money for the job back then, I knew it was more than say the guys driving the Tesco arctics were on, and on a par with the guys driving ADR tankers, hey, remember when being a truck driver was a good paying job…
£9.10 an hour time 361% inflation = £32.85 an hour.
Guys driving motorway breakdown trucks NOW should be on £32.85 an hour, or if they work 30 hours a week that’s coming on a grand (£1,000) a week… they are on a fucking third of that.
*sure* the price of a CD writer has plummeted in that time, we also now have giant flat screen telly’s an shit at affordable prices, but boys, we don’t buy that much of that shit, I’m still looking at the one I bought 7 years ago…. but everything else, food, fuel, housing, transport, energy….
The truly, truly, truly fucking stupid are the ones who have been using the house as an ATM in the interim, and spending the “profits” they were “earning” when the “value” of their house climbed inexorably from 50k to 150k.
================================================
Last night I was texting this friend, she lives slap bang in the middle wales, she ain’t from there, she moved there a few years ago.
I told her a year ago, GET THE FUCK OUT, not just for you, for the kids, they have NO future there, nor do you… and some fell on stony ground.
Last night she is telling me she is becoming a local… I’m all meh
Bitch can’t see what is in front of her face, DESPITE the resent economic boom and euro money pouring in, there is shit on the fucking High street, garages that closed when Morris was a standalone brand, fucking thing went bust in the seventies.
Fucking wales was fucking full of shit you could buy for FUCK ALL in the early eighties, cos everyone got the fuck out in the late seventies, because there was nothing left, you could buy a real nice small semi detached house in a devon village for 25k, or you could buy a farm and three outbuilding and 4 cottages sat in 75 acres in wales for the same money, or a whole street of former miners cottages up the valleys.
I’m not even going near the fact that things that even today the rest of the country take for granted, like you can go to the various supermarket websites and order shit online and get it delivered for free if your order is over £25, doesn’t exist there.
Tesco’s opened a store, so they deliver locally, apart from that there is Amazon, and apart from that if you want it, you fucking go get it yourself.
Hey, I lived in Cornwall in the seventies, cornwall and wales got a lot in common, economically, so this isn’t slagging the fucking welsh off, this is reality.
This is boom time at the top of the fucking bubble and the state handouts are still flowing in full force and the bitch is broke, sure she wastes money left right and centre with piss poor money management and weekly prudential door to door loans, but even without that, if she managed her money properly, it wouldn’t be a well paying gig… I left her place one morning last winter and it was -6 celcius, drove home to my place, about 100 miles directly south as the crow flies, +2 degrees and that 8 degrees difference make a huge difference to your heating bills, clothing, laundry, you name it, and that is just one factor.
WHEN the bubble bursts, eg when the crash that has already happened starts revealing more and more of itself, it is going to be fucking unsustainable, there is nothing but fucking and drinking and drugs, and drinking and drugs take money, which has to be taken from someone else, one way or another.
I don’t want to give y’all the impression that I care about her fate, or the fate of her children, bed, made, lie, I just cannot fucking fathom the mentality.
Despite her lack of resources, at this time she is still entitled to vast help from the state tit, and instead of grabbing it while the going is good and relocating to somewhere with greater opportunities, she sits there are talks about becoming a fucking local… does.. not.. compute..
How can you possibly not see the train of doom fucking rushing at ya?
How can you possibly consign your kids to a life of alcohol and drug abuse and petty prostitution?
DETROIT motherfuckers.
The fucking industrial heart of Amerika.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-06-07/death-and-decay-detroit-real-time-seen-streets
Cunts are leaving in DROVES, same shit as happened in wales in the late seventies, when the work goes, there is nothing left to stay for, except the booze and drugs and prostitution.
Then you get that other thing, before the welsh in the late seventies, there was the Irish in the early seventies, economic migrants.
Fore-runners of the Polish, when they joined the EU and flocked to places like the UK.
No cunt welcomes economic migrants, trust me on this, y’all are seen as shit.
Knew people who took the ten quid to emigrate to oztralia deal, they told the same story, economic migrants are never fucking welcomed.
Why?
Because they are always the ones who refused to see the writing on the wall and left it too fucking late to get out, so when the left they took a whole fucking load of their problems with them.
I may not be smart.
But compared to some of the DUMB motherfuckers out there, just call me fucking einstein, failing that, call me one beer, and I’ll drink to your health, fnaar fnaar, a crappy old joke there for my german readers…. three beers later I’ll be a *real* fucking genius.
[…] More here: If you're so smart, what are you doing in here? | Wimminz … […]
Pingback by If you're so smart, what are you doing in here? | Wimminz ... | SmartphonesSmartphones — June 8, 2014 @ 1:10 pm
I agree with every word, but I think we are past the point of no return. We’re either in for years and years of stagnation, or if/when it goes, it’s going to be BIG.
‘They’ seem to be keeping the plates spinning for now…
Comment by Tim — June 8, 2014 @ 3:16 pm
I agree entirely, the crash already happened, so by definition we are well past the point of no return…
Comment by wimminz — June 8, 2014 @ 3:24 pm
At what point do you think it happened? Genuine question, 1995 is way before I became aware of anything except imminent puberty 😀
Comment by Tim — June 8, 2014 @ 3:38 pm
I honestly don’t know, I think like it says in the post, it’s one of those things you can only positively identify with 20/20 hindsight, and I dunno we are yet at the point where you can use hindsight.
Also, it’s a process, so you can’t call a time on it and say this happened on 6th June 1997 at 4pm, I think it’s more a case of in 1990 a bus driver could genuinely buy his own home on a 20 year mortgage, as in buy it and pay it off and own it outright, and in 2000 he couldn’t, and in 2010 he couldn’t, and in 2020… who knows… maybe there will be no more bus drivers..
Comment by wimminz — June 8, 2014 @ 5:19 pm
That makes sense, thanks for the clarification. Very interesting point about not even being able to use hind sight yet.
Comment by Tim — June 8, 2014 @ 5:21 pm
what’s your position on the supply of fossil fuel energy relative to fiat currency inflation?
Comment by Joe — June 8, 2014 @ 11:12 pm
I remember the P/E ratio of `96, shaking my head in disbelief, telling to whom would listen that buying stocks was stupid. Well, the sheeples went along for 4 more years and propulsed the P/E ratio to outer space. I looked stupid.
The whole problem with looking at and acting according to fundamental data in this debt-driven system, is that it only really has significance if a majority also does. Until then the next wave of unsustainable credit will just keep the show alive. The madness is astonishingly resilient because the crowd of sheeples is decidedly mad.
I used to believe it would all end by the end of this decade. I am not so sure now. Even though the Soviet Union didn’t have a sustainable economic model and and people knew it, it took so long to unravel that people were taken by surprise when it imploded in ’89. I wouldn’t be surprised to have to wait very long to see this system die.
I now tend to look closer at this type of thinking:
http://armstrongeconomics.com/models/7219-2/
Martin Armstrong says the house prices will contract from 2015 to 2033, and that only by 2033 the system will be dropped. Just in time for me to reach retirement age.
Comment by Wake — June 9, 2014 @ 12:08 pm
” gold is the same, you wanna buy gold, hang on, are we talking PHYSICAL gold here? and even that is subject to fraud, at the highest levels, that gold? or tungsten wrapped in gold?”
The hits do seem to come in closer, don´t they.
It´s obvious by now that the “real” power-elites of this planet (the ones we DON´T know the names of) are almost done looting the system.
They usually trigger some world war when they´re done.
I´m about to get my beach chair and a cold beverage ready for the show.
Comment by hans — June 9, 2014 @ 1:09 pm