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I’ve tried making that point to people before but it always falls on deaf ears. They don’t understand the relative strength of your purchasing power varies widely depending on where you go. But I’ve learned when it comes to finance/economics/math, Americans are horrible and can’t manage money.
That was especially evident if it wasn’t already, when you saw stimulus checks during the pandemic and the way people were spending. Holy shit. People don’t know when the Fed starts printing in anticipation of a deflationary environment, it isn’t printing ‘money’, it’s printing ‘debt’. And credit analysts were trying to point this out to public policymakers, that the inflation is going to come due in the years afterward. But to the average consumer, what do you mean, $1 is $1. Yes. Yes, homie. 1 is equal to 1. It’s the ‘value’ of said $1. People who were acting smart with the excess cash would’ve invested in stocks, because when the value of cash is decreasing and the economy is making a downturn, businesses have to figure out how to keep their heads above water by selling their products at a markup; so as knives are falling on the ground (cash), dinner is still being put on the table (equities).
People think concepts like volatility and risk are the same thing and they’re not. That’s finance 101 (“cash is trash”). Cash has no volatility but it’s risky as fuck to hold. But people just stare at you dumbfounded and in 2026 complain and say, “man why is everything so expensive today?” And sometimes I just want to look them in the eye and go “are you stupid?” You’re paying for those stimulus checks several times over and will continue to do so, along with the exogenous shocks of the war right now. There are ‘zero’ free rides in life, and the sooner people come to terms with that and learn to be responsible, their lives will begin to improve.
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