Joe Perez's side hustle:

 

 

TIL Joe Perez posts on 4chan:

 

These chickens might get sick because a couple of others in this building are sick. Let's execute all of them.

Why not let the chickens die that are going to die and the ones that survive will be forever immune to the virus or at least won't get as sick the next time.

 

More in the "when democrats were MAGA" series:

 

More in the "When democrats were MAGA" series.

X - Formerly Twitter

 

 

When Biden was "elected", I was fearful. The middle class has been under the gun for a long time, and I thought it was the beginning of the end.

Since Trump has been in office, I see now how very screwed we are, and the more they dig, the worse things look. The politics game has always been shady, but the things I have been seeing and reading make me horrified. This corruption goes very deep and has been going on for a very long time. Spend a couple of hours on Reddit to see how brainwashed the young are, without the foundations of things like basic economics or history to balance it.

If I were a religious person, I'd be praying.

 

This is not the first time I've seen someone make this argument. But I've never seen anyone explain how it might be possible.

The US Federal Debt is not a mortgage or a credit card account. The $29 trillion in external federal debt (excluding the $4 trillion in "debt" owed by one part of the Fed to another) exists mainly in the form of Treasury Bills, Treasury Bonds, and Treasury Notes.

These securities are pretty much all the same, differing mainly in the duration for which they are in effect. They all work similarly to a Bank Certificate of Deposit, where a person (or corporation, or investment firm, or foreign government) buys (as an example) a 10 year T-note with a coupon rate of 5% for $100, then at the end of 10 years they will have collected a total of $150; 5% of the principal annually non-compounded, plus the return of the original $100.

There is no way to "re-finance" that, because the note has a clearly defined maturity term. It's not like a mortgage or an auto loan, where you can pay it off early and skip out on all of the interest payments you would have had to make otherwise.

The Fed could obviously elect to not honor that term, but that would be a default, not a re-finance.


I'm open to explanations as to why I'm wrong, obviously.


In terms of real-world examples of that not being the case, the US Federal Funds rate (the "interest rate") was roughly zero from Dec 2008 through Dec 2015, and then again from March 2020 through March 2022.

I took advantage of that second period to purchase a house, signing 15 year mortgage at a fixed rate of 2.125%.

The treasury yield obviously dipped during those times, averaging between 2-3% on the 10 year T-note during the '08 recession and aftermath, and briefly dipping all the way to 0.7% in August of 2020 before quickly rebounding.

No outstanding treasury securities were "re-financed" during this period, because as I stated right at the beginning of this post, that simply isn't a real concept. And relatively few new bonds were issued, because nobody wants to make fixed-term investments in ultra-low-yield assets.

 

The poor have nothing to do with this, as they lack the resources necessary to participate. As with most market manipulations, the rich will merely be getting richer.


During the 2020 market crash, I moved $100k cash into my brokerage account, and invested it all into a single S&P 500 index ETF. That investment had slightly more than doubled by the end of 2024, so I'm doing pretty well on it despite the 14% (and growing) decline since Trump took office for the second time in January. It would have been nice if I'd have been pessimistic enough to sell it all a month ago, but I honestly didn't predict that the markets were going to react this negatively.

At any rate, I'm neither brave enough nor politically-connected enough to be shorting the market as it drops, but I am absolutely going to buy into the rebound when it occurs. I deposited an additional $100k cash into a different brokerage last week, and I think I'm going to add $50k more to it, as things are still dropping. I will probably put that into a NASDAQ composite fund once things appear to be re-established on a growth trajectory, the timing of which I will not attempt to predict ahead of time.

 

You have provided a really excellent example here of why it's important to read beyond the headline.


We will start with a map of Chicago:





At the upper-right, that's Wrigley Field, home of the Cubs. That's Chicago's north side, which in my profile I have indicated as "the less-murder part." I live just to the west of there, not quite to the I-90/94 freeway shown in orange. This is a nice neighborhood, with lots of trendy shops and no bars on the windows.

At the lower-right, that's Comiskey Park (now called Rate Field), home of the White Sox. That's Chicago's south side, an area which is described as "diverse" and "culturally rich" by the leftists who write blog articles which attempt to re-frame gang rape and murder in a more positive light. The sort of neighborhood where the Walgreens had nearly everything locked up behind plexiglass, before they closed down altogether and abandoned the building.


Now, I watched the entire video. Not a single part of it took place anywhere near Wrigley Field. Here are two still-frames which illustrate the point:





Exit 55A off I-90 puts you at 35th street, which is how you get to the parking lots depicted in the "White Sox Parking" sign. All of the extortion-type activity taking place in the video occurs in that general vicinity.


Now, if someone familiar with Chicago had read that headline, but not bothered to watch the video, then they'd have come away with an impression of "Holy ****, WTF is happening here?"


By contrast, seeing this on the south side is unsurprising. That con has been going on for years, and I'm assuming that David Santa Carla is not from around here and only just learned about it.

 

In hindsight, at what point would you cut your "losses" and bail out and sell? I ask this with taxes in mind since you would pay long term cap gains on $100k (since it doubled) if you sold it. So the 14% decline is slightly less devastating than it sounds. Emotionally, I hate paying taxes so much that it's very difficult for me to make the decision to sell, plus it actualizes any losses. It's logically flawed, I know.

 

'Tis better to have gained and paid tax, than never to have gained at all.

A well-connected person, such as a friend of the Executive, would have known to sell everything right at the beginning of the second Trump term, and take the capital gains. They would have then shorted the market during the engineered downturn, covered their short positions (taking more gains) at the bottom, and finally re-invested in their original positions.

I am not a well-connected person, so the best I can do with any confidence is wait until things seem to have bottomed out, and then increase my already-existing long position in the market.

 

The only reason to sell would be if you wanted the capital to take advantage of the downturn otherwise I would keep any company that was not inclined to go bk. When deciding to sell you might also consider how long you have owned the stock because of the short and long term capital gain rates. More millionaires were made on Friday than will be on the turn around.

 

 

Meme drop

 

Moar memes

 

Moar moar

 

This does an excellent job of encapsulating a phenomenon which we (here, on the right) seem to encounter time and time again; the claim that "people" will wise up and change their beliefs and opinions, just as soon as they see whatever the latest thing is.

Just wait until the Laptop Contents are published!

Just wait until the JFK Report is unsealed!

Just wait until the Epstein Files are made public!

Just keep waiting!

It's all theater, of course. Just the most recent act in a never-ending play designed to reassure the electorate that Politician X will finally make a difference, and you need to support them, because they truly have your best interests in mind.