John T. Reed’s news blog

This headline in today’s Wall Street Journal jumped out at me. “Americans’ Cash Hoard Could Cushion a Downturn.”.Their WHAT kind of hoard?.“Cash.”.I read the article to see if the author, Justin Lahart, is aware of inflation and what inflation does to cash. Cash, meaning US dollar-denominated bank accounts, bonds, certificates of deposit..The article says US households held $17.8 T at the end of the first quarter of 2022..The most recent 12-month inflation rate was NOT MENTIONED IN THE ARTICLE: 8.6%..You know what 8.6% inflation does to $17.9T in cash? $17.9T x .086 = $1.539T purchasing power “up in smoke” in...

Stop talking about interest rates before inflation and taxes. The current mortgage interest rate is 6.79%. Inflation is 8.6%. That means the real interest rate is minus 1.81%. That is good news, not bad news. . If the interest is deductible on your income tax return, that means the AFTER-TAX cost is less if the real interest rate ever gets to be positive. . Hannity and others are so eager to paint Biden as bad, and uninterested in the truth, that they mislead by omission. Biden is bad in many, many ways, but driving down home prices is not one of them so...

Hannity just said home prices will plummet due to interest rate hikes. Was this idiot in a coma in the 1980s?. Here are home prices from that period from my book https://johntreed.com/products/an-american-principal-residence-is-the-most-advantaged-investment-on-earth-maximize-yours and mortgage interest rates from that period from my book Best Practices for the Intelligent Real Estate Investor https://johntreed.com/collections/real-estate-investment/products/best-practices-for-the-intelligent-real-estate-investor.year interest rates home price1970 8.56% $24,0021971             $25,7871972             $26,9001973             $27,5511974             $28,7901975             $32,0341976             $33,6931977 9.00% $36,6071978 9.70% $42,0441979 11.16% $48,8141980 13.95%...

Argentina hyperinflation Argentina currently has hyperinflation. They sort of always have hyperinflation. Furthermore, millions are not fleeing the country or starving. Why? Apparently, dolar blue; Dollar Blue in English. Hyperinflation in a country always results in that country adopting what I call the Five Bad Laws:• capital controls• price controls• rationing• anti-hoarding laws• financial-repression laws.Argentina has capital controls. Capital controls prohibit Argentinian citizens from possessing foreign currency. Actually, Argentinians may exchange pesos for up to $200 USD or other foreign currencies a month. But that is not enough for them to live off of..Then there is Dollar Blue. There is...

I am half-way through reading Michael Pillsbury’s book The Hundred-Year Marathon China’s Secret Strategy To Replace America as the Global Superpower..Pillsbury is an extremely hard-working scholar who has spent his adult life deep diving into all of this..The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are lying, paranoid, conniving murderers who want to take over the world and kill us non-Chinese. They are trying to prevent us from knowing that, although they are not very good at keeping it secret—a word that is in Pillsbury’s subtitle..Hard to call it secret if Pillsbury wrote a book about it and I am writing about it...