Can’t read due to paywall other than opening summary of a death spiral.
Any details of when economic armageddon hits this time ?
Just for discussion purposes, looks like debt has been at 99% or greater of gdp
for about a dozen years now.
| 2012 | $16,066 | 99% | Fiscal cliff |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | $16,738 | 99% | Sequester, government shutdown |
| 2014 | $17,824 | 101% | QE ended, debt ceiling crisis |
| 2015 | $18,151 | 100% | Oil prices fell |
| 2016 | $19,573 | 105% | Brexit |
| 2017 | $20,245 | 104% | Congress raised the debt ceiling |
| 2018 | $21,516 | 105% | Trump tax cuts |
| 2019 | $22,719 | 107% | Trade wars |
| 2020 | $27,748 | 129% | COVID-19 and 2020 recession |
| 2021 | $29,617 | 124% | COVID-19 and American Rescue Plan Act |
| 2022 | $30,824 | 123% | Inflation Reduction Act and student loan forgiveness |
Edit - adding in other other countries numbers for context. Japan is the basket case along with
Italy, two G7 countries. As of 2024, US debt to GDP appears to be around 118% from other numbers I’ve seen, so some progress has been made (note, that concl. is not in data posted) ???
| Economy by Gross Debt | % of GDP (2023) |
|---|---|
 Japan |
255% |
 Greece |
168% |
 Singapore |
168% |
 Italy |
144% |
 United States* |
123% |
 France |
110% |
 Portugal |
108% |
 Spain |
107% |
 Canada* |
106% |
 Belgium |
106% |
 G7 Average |
128% |
 United Kingdom |
104% |
| — | — |
 Cyprus |
79% |
 Austria |
75% |
 Finland |
74% |
 Slovenia |
69% |
 Germany |
66% |
 Croatia |
64% |
 Iceland |
61% |
 Israel |
58% |
 Slovak Republic |
57% |
We won’t see a lot of deflation. Prices will remain where they are for most goods and services. If some of you just want a party-branded economy regardless of the numbers, you’ll always gripe. And you do. Constantly. Most people are working and buying stuff, all of what they need and some of what they want. The people who are usually/always poor are still poor. That’s not many of us.
Housing (rent or buy) is expensive, but most of us aren’t moving this year. It’s one of the elephants in the room, and needs to be addressed.
Things can change for the worse and they eventually will. But we’ve come out of Covid pretty well.
Really?
Just keep skipping along the yellow brick road. This doesn’t end well for anyone.
“The office market has an existential crisis right now,” Barry Sternlicht, CEO of Starwood Capital Group ($115b AUM) told the Global Alts conference. “It’s a $3 trillion asset class that is probably worth $1.8 trillion. There’s $1.2 trillion of losses spread somewhere, and nobody knows exactly where it all is .”
I’m just going to repeat this every year. The below is from last March.
In comparison, the subprime mortgage market was 600 billion.
The thread I linked to above was also about another wide scale collapse that never happened, a collapse of the banking system.
You realize how close we came in 2008 with a $600 billion subprime market to a total financial collapse?
Now we face a $3 trillion commercial real estate market while the Fed still has an inflated balance sheet left over from 2008 and a Federal goverment overspending with no end in sight.
A recession is the least of my worries
Always something about to collapse. 
0% interest rates for a decade will do that
Except it hasn’t.
Yeah, so debt of 31.5 and gdp of 26.9 ; so that’s about 117-118%, which is slight improvement
over prior years. We were at 129, 124, and 123%.
The U.S. is expected to continue being the biggest economy in 2023 with a projected GDP of $26.9 trillion for the year.
Granted, debt stills “feels” too high, and is historically for the US. The trick to bring it down relative to GDP, will be to maintain a faster rate of economic growth.
As for CRE, yes I too think it will be/is the next big shoe to drop. But I view that at its core as a fundamental change in work patterns. CRE may go the way of blacksmiths and buggies when
the car became dominant. Not sure we will ever see towers full of office workers again. OTOH,
AI may make the CRE problem look like a walk in the park.
But cheer up ! Your fear of some massive new economic event is getting closer day by day. 0ne
day it will come, even if we appear to have averted the post covid mother of all recessions and
hard landing. Just didn’t happen. This time.
Inflation and its consequences:
Are you paying 20 to 30% more today than you were paying three years ago?
The answer is 100% YES.
Do people accept to pay 20 to 30% more than three years ago?
The answer is 100% NO.
What is the question , 20 or 30 % ?
30% - No, pretty much across the board. There are exceptions, but mostly drought related
items for 2 years in Texas.
For groceries, I’m probably more like 17 % for some items from 3 years ago, without
doing an in-depth accounting of personal spending on grocery items. My personal results largely align with the CPI Inflation Calculator, which is good.
https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm
Jan 2017 - Dec 2020
Inflation Calculator
$
in
has the same buying power as
$1.07
Jan 2021 - Dec 2023
Inflation Calculator
$
in
has the same buying power as
$1.17
So, 17% cumulative inflation for last 3 years vs 7% cumulative inflation for 4 year
period prior. Oh, and in case you have forgotten , there was this little bug going around the
world that killed millions, created supply shortages, wreaked havoc on global supply lines and caused similar or worse inflation in ALL countries.
Any which way you put it this is devastating for many families.
I’ve brought up something similar before. You have to go really far back to get to 30%. That’s when it became 20-30% instead of 30.
In any case, that subject isn’t a great fit for this thread.
I put it at what it is 17%.
Inflation of course hits those in the lowest economic tier the hardest. As do most things in life. And if you want to have a better understanding, you have to account for wage growth during this period and the delta above
the 2% desired target. Doesn’t by no means
whitewash the lowest economic tiers plight, but to claim 20-30% is just wrong. All things considered it’s probably more like a 13% net hit actually seen, above desired policy goals.
So not sure I’d use the term “devastating” to
describe their plight, but hyperbole and exaggeration are some people’s go to thing. I try to refrain from using highly exaggerated terms, but probably have so at times as well. It’s like the misuse of terms invasion and dementia and mental illness, etc.
Wages are not keeping up with inflation and far from it. To families that are on a month to month budget that is devastating. Credit cards debt is going through the roof.
Record numbers:
Refrain? Refrain from record indicators numbers?
If you want to worry about something, worry about the Chinese stock market.
It is crashing in 1929 esq style.