surprise_i'm_armed wrote: ↑Wed Dec 27, 2023 5:48 pm
Another angle to consider, with regard to banking issues, is the high and rising number of vehicle loan defaults.
And not just vehicle loans. My wife has a friend whose daughter is what I guess you'd call a "recovery agent." She's not real estate licensed--evidently you don't need to be for this--and what she does is help families whose houses have gone into foreclosure recover the balances owed them after the house sells at auction; she keeps a percentage of that recovery as her fee. I wondered if that was really a valid job niche. As a response, my wife told me yesterday that the woman had, this week alone, targeted a total of 54 new foreclosures as sales leads in a 2-mile radius in the Copperfield Area, just about 10 miles from we live.
That number in a limited area in a decent part of town shocked me. I gather what's happening is a compound effect of residual COVID-shutdown employment difficulties, high inflation, high interest rates, and little available cash (and probably declining credit ratings) on the part of any potential buyers. In other words, it isn't like the Obama recession where banks were giving people loans that left them upside down in their houses with high adjustable mortgage rates, but that Bidenomics and big increases in insurance and other costs are at a tipping point for more families who were making ends meet when Uncle Joe took office, and now can't balance the monthly books, have driven up their credit card debt, and can't find any buyers out there for their homes.
Dunno if this is an actual trend, but it seems logical that it could be. We all know the unemployment numbers are a false indicator when it comes to
under-employment, and that the base inflation rate is also bogus when you look at the real-world value of a dollar. The cumulative rate of inflation since just 2020 is 18.6% (
https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/), but the administration never talks about the cumulative effects, only how inflation markers are doing since the previous ones...so long as they paint the president and the Fed in a good light. But today, you have to spend $1.19 to buy the same stuff as you did for $1 at the end of 2020.
In the past decade, the cumulative inflation effect has been 31.8%. So just to keep up and break even, someone earning $60K a year in 2013 would have to be making $79,080 today. From 2013 through Biden's inauguration, cumulative inflation was 13.2%. So he's managed to add 18.6% to that in just three years. We may be in for a bumpy ride; I doubt there'll be a quick recovery from this.
