The US personal savings rate eased in September to 3.1 percent from 3.4 percent in August. In September 2021 the savings rate stood at 7.9 percent. By popular thinking, a decline in the savings rate during an economic slowdown is regarded as supporting economic activity.
As of 2022 the national student debt reached $1.6 trillion with the average student loan debt at about $28,000. Many former college students are discovering it is difficult to pay back such a large amount of debt. This is especially true of students that graduate with fruitless degrees like sociology, for example. These majors are only good as prerequisites to a master’s degree.
Do people have a right to go wherever they want and for whatever reason they like? Certainly not. I have no right to use or occupy your rightful property without your permission. And the same applies for you and everyone with my property.
Do people have a right to migrate to whatever part of the world they please? They certainly do. If they don’t violate the life and property of another person, nobody has a right to limit theirs.
“Democracy” is the new “revolutionary.”
We’ve made it to November. The Fed continues its Quantitative Tightening (QT) path. With each passing day the cries for a Fed Pivot grow. On some level we must accept that the economic outlook for the near-term future does not look good.
In 4 Months of QT Down, on October 5 the total balance sheet was standing at $8,759,053,000,000 ($8.76 trillion). The latest release on November 2 the balance stood at $8.68 trillion.
Rather than an election day, for most of the country, today is the conclusion of something resembling an election month. While one would expect any first-world nation to be capable of concluding an election on election night, the same institutions that fortified 2020 have already warned us that the official count could take days or weeks. It is, of course, the most important election of our life. Democracy itself is on the ballot.
Whatever you make of it, Trussonomics didn’t detain us long. Liz Truss was appointed prime minister of the United Kingdom on September 6. A would-be Margaret Thatcher, Truss appointed as her chancellor of the exchequer fellow free marketeer Kwasi Kwarteng, who gave his emergency “mini budget” to Parliament on September 23.
The warning lights on the dashboard of your car suddenly light up. You naturally take it to a mechanic to diagnose and repair. Cars are complex. You don’t have the time or accumulated expertise to figure out what is happening or to fix it.
It’s been a rough year for advocates of modern monetary theory (MMT). After nearly two years with all the budget deficits and money printing MMTers could have wanted, the doctrine’s popularity seems to have faded now that we’re well passed the honeymoon phase. Twenty twenty-two has clearly demonstrated that creating a lot of new money and running massive government deficits does, in fact, come at a cost. We should let this theory die before it causes any more destruction.
