{"id":31903,"date":"2018-03-04T12:20:52","date_gmt":"2018-03-04T17:20:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=31903"},"modified":"2018-03-04T12:20:52","modified_gmt":"2018-03-04T17:20:52","slug":"broken-promises","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=31903","title":{"rendered":"Broken Promises"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Broken Promises <\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
\n

Demanding More Debt<\/strong><\/p>\n

Consumer debt, corporate debt, and government debt are all going up.\u00a0 But that\u2019s not all.\u00a0 Margin debt \u2013 debt that investors borrow against their portfolio to buy more stocks \u2013 has hit a record of\u00a0$642.8 billion<\/a>.\u00a0 What in the world are people thinking?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>A blow-off in margin debt mirroring the blow-off in stock prices. Since February of 2016 alone it has soared by ~$170 billion \u2013 this is an entirely new level insanity. The current total of 643 billion is more than double the level of margin debt at the tech mania peak and 15.4 times<\/em> the amount of margin debt just before the crash of 1987. [PT]<\/p>\n

Clearly, they\u2019re not thinking.\u00a0 Because thinking takes work.\u00a0 Most people don\u2019t like to work.\u00a0 They like to pretend to work.<\/p>\n

Similarly, people may say they care about debt.\u00a0 But, based on their actions, they really don\u2019t.\u00a0 When it comes to the national debt, the overarching philosophy is that it doesn\u2019t matter.\u00a0Government debt certainly doesn\u2019t matter to Congress.\u00a0 Nor does it matter to the President.\u00a0 In fact, their actions demonstrate they want more of it.<\/p>\n

Big corporations with big government contracts want more government debt too.\u00a0Their businesses demand it.\u00a0They\u2019ve staked their success on the expectation that the debt slop will continue flowing down the trough where they consume it like rapacious pigs.<\/p>\n

The higher education bubble is also based on a faulty foundation of debt.\u00a0The business model generally requires signing credulous 18 year-olds up for massive amounts of government backed student loans.\u00a0From what we gather, federal student loan debt is closing in on $1.4 trillion.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Total student loans outstanding (red line \u2013 the data are only available from 2007 onward) and total federal government-owned student loans (black line). The former figure was closing in on $1.5 trillion as of Q4 2017. [PT]<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Broken Promises Demanding More Debt Consumer debt, corporate debt, and government debt are all going up.\u00a0 But that\u2019s not all.\u00a0 Margin debt \u2013 debt that investors borrow against their portfolio to buy more stocks \u2013 has hit a record of\u00a0$642.8 billion.\u00a0 What in the world are people thinking? A blow-off in margin debt mirroring the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5728,195,3725,353,11763],"class_list":["post-31903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-acting-man","tag-debt","tag-debt-to-gdp","tag-gdp","tag-mn-gordon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31903"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31903\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31904,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31903\/revisions\/31904"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}