Alien Money

It’s Thanksgiving Day.

And oh…are we grateful, or what? We have a roof over our heads…food, fire, family…we’re still able to drive a nail and a car (not at the same time!). We’re free to go where we want…do what we want…think what we want…

But, today, we look beyond our own comfortable world!

By our reckoning, about $38 trillion of spending has happened since 1971 — with no offsetting output. No extra goods. No extra services. It was as if the money came from outer space. Like aliens pretending to be human…it walked like real money. It talked like real money.

But there was that funny green tail…

A house today serves the same function today as it did when we were children. It is dry and warm…a place to sleep, to work, to entertain ourselves and others.

The average house cost $28,000 in 1971. Today, it costs $420,000. The house may be bigger. It may have granite countertops and air-conditioning. But is it really worth 15 times as much? And who pays cash? With the proposed 50-year mortgage, it will cost $1.2 million, including interest payments.

These numbers tell us how much the alien money has taken control of our financial world. Many people still live happily in the houses they lived in 50 years ago. But nobody spends this new money the way he spent real money in 1971. Back then, if you wanted a car or a house, you had to earn money and save it. Yes, you could get a mortgage, but you were expected to pay it off. People bought the important components of their lives back then; they didn’t just depend on credit from extraterrestrials.

Our point is not just that prices have gone up…but that our material lives have been taken over…clandestinely subjugated to strange and unnatural money. And now, we all depend on it. Money Magazine:

Late Car Payments Are Piling Up at Record Levels as More Drivers Face Delinquency

Time was…people owned their cars. Interest rates could go up. Unemployment could go up. They still had wheels.

Even through the Great Depression…people generally held on to their cars…and their houses. Because they owned them. But now they belong to someone else. In the 2008 mortgage finance crisis, for example, some four million families had to give their houses back to the mortgage companies and move on.

And now…house prices are falling again. Newsweek:

More than half of U.S. homes are declining in value, according to a recent report from Zillow, the largest share since 2012.

A study by the online real estate marketplace, released on Monday, found that 53 percent of all U.S. homes have seen their valuations drop compared to last year, with a nationwide average decline of 9.7 percent compared to their peak price.

The alien money is fed into the economy as credit. It may come ‘out of nowhere.’ It may have no value. And yet, Americans must pay for the privilege of using it. If they want a car or a house, they typically borrow this ersatz money, thank the lender and pay interest on it.

But where did the lender get the money? It was never earned. Never saved. And it has no real value. And yet, the finance industry nevertheless lends it out at a profit.

Pity the poor borrowers. Fed and housed, they are kept like turkeys.

They live in houses they will never fully pay for. They drive cars that don’t belong to them. They pay for food, streaming services, gas and entertainment with credit cards, not with cash.

The result is: they don’t own anything. And come a crisis, their cars and houses go back whence they came.

The consumers’ challenge is to keep their incomes in line with their monthly expenses. The challenge for the financial authorities, meanwhile, is to get them to take more of this fake money…putting them deeper into debt and more under the thumbs of the Wall Street/Washington/alien money cabal.

Gobble. Gobble.