Comments by "LRRPFco52" (@LRRPFco52) on "Why I’m Not Worried About the Banks (Yet) || Peter Zeihan" video.

It has really hurt millennials who had been saving, paying their bills, and thinking there would be a market correction to bring an affordable home purchase into their reach. Instead, home prices increased by 30-40%, and interest rates doubled, leaving many professionals stuck in renter limbo.
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@valdius85 The first thing most Americans do is try to perceive a situation or problem through partisan lenses so they can then pull-up the opinions issued in each of those cases. It's one of the most frustrating things to watch as a well-traveled US citizen with a European mother. Especially on foreign affairs and economics, you see some of the most painfully-retarded ideas from both political parties that don't match reality.
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@Ckomon That was a great move. If you can budget to beat up your mortgage and auto loans, I highly recommend it. In fact, if you sell your vehicles for profit and buy older reliable Toyotas or Hondas and own them outright, then set aside a fraction of your auto loans for maintenance and put the rest towards your mortgage, you're close to being home-free. My wife and I haven't ever had a mortgage or auto loan throughout our marriage, and it feels awesome. Took a lot of sacrifice, but was so worth it. You can physically breathe easier when you don't have mortgage or auto loans. Neither of us have ever had student loans either, but we have multiple degrees.
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@Rob_F8F His math is way off, and millionaires means net worth, not million annual income. Broke people in LA, San Diego, and San Francisco with $1.7 - $3m bungalos tied-up in equity and personal assets are technically millionaires. You have a lot of small business owners who are millionaires, but live a middle class lifestyle due to business expenses and can't take time away from the business.
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@FadeRunnerOG I have EU citizenship too and have lived there off and on since 2005. No thanks. EU has far more problems, mainly demographic ones caused by idiots in the various parliaments. EU parliaments make the US look sane, and that's saying something. EU will have multiple civil wars erupt as the North African immigrants destroy more of it. The place is unrecognizable since the 1970s-1980s, and almost all in bad ways.
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@johndelta00 Baby Boomers are all retiring, have been retiring for 16 years, and they didn't have a lot of kids. Gen X and Millennials are not large enough to match Baby Boomer consumption rates, so there's a natural contraction. That's one reason why unemployment is so low, and why there are so many job openings.
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@July41776DedicatedtoTheProposi If you mention minimum wage in a serious discussion about jobs and economics, it means you haven't learned the very basics. 2021: 73,300,000 US hourly wage earners. 247,000 minimum wage earners, namely teenagers and young college kids.....3% of the hourly wage population. We don't bring up minimum wage in a serious economic discussion about the job market or US economy.
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 @TK-kf8zc Trump was the best President for the US economy in the past Century though, if not the past 2 Centuries. The numbers support that statement and can't be argued with.
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 @HR_8035_YEA Did you mean 6.58% of the US population? 22/334=0.0658
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@johndelta00 The days of baby boomers buying new homes, cars, appliances, TVs, entertainment, computers, etc. are coming to an end in the next 3-4 years. They're more of an elderly care economy now, moving into nursing homes or retirement communities, drawing on Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid, and dying. Many of them are dead already. Early Gen X are eligible for retirement in 3 years. Gen X was a very small cohort. Millennials are much bigger, but nowhere near as big as Boomers. Millennials are crunched by insane home prices, auto prices, student loans, and rising interest rates. The ones who bought a home before the recent interest rate hikes are in a better financial position when you could find a home for $250k-$400k at 3%. Those same homes are now priced at $350k-$680k at 5.5% interest. Average used car transaction price broke over $25k in 2021, and hit $31k in Sep 2022.
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@what7is7TRUTH A lot of people used their Biden bucks to pay CC loans and buy food.
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@adamh1228 If you don't mind me asking, what's your current vehicle situation? Loans vs paid-off, or value in vehicles? What about student loans? I don't need to know the numbers, but you can account for that easily. Reason I ask is if you swallow some pride, sell your vehicle(s) and then buy older, reliable cars for much less, you can free up some cash-flow towards a home. Auto loans nowadays are freaking stupid-high.
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@JimVanderveen We're in an economic situation with no precedent and no models: 1. Baby boomers retiring or dead, not buying big ticket items anymore. 2. China manufacturing de-coupling from US, high unemployment in China, demographic collapse has begun there. 3. Europe has entered demographic collapse. 4. Russia has entered demographic collapse. 5. US has steady growth, manufacturing re-shoring, consumption driven by a small cohort of Gen X and large cohort of Millennials. 6. Housing availability for Single Family Residences is way behind on supply. 7. Foreign investors who have lost billions in Wall Street have moved into residential real estate, inflating the median unit prices with corporate money, and then rent out those homes. 8. Interest rates are still relatively low, but median home prices are dramatically higher than ever. 9. Auto loans have crept up into intrusive and prohibitive % of median household income. 10. Student loans have inflated preposterously, while education quality has dropped inversely to the amount of money spent. 11. Natural gas is almost free for the US to extract and distribute, and we're effectively energy independent. 12. The US military has been in strategic withdrawal from Europe since 1992, as well as the Pacific.
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Median Mortgage payments have gone up dramatically, as have interest rates. That's just two sources of significant cash-flow increases for the banks. Then look at student and auto loans. Brutal rackets that predate on young students and buyers, sucking up all their liquidity. Banking sector revenue has increased thusly: 2019: $477 Billion 2020: $491 B 2021: $503 B 2022: $513 B 2023 has been really good for them so far.
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