Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via The Daily Reckoning,
This is the reality: the American Dream is now reserved for the top 0.5%, with some shreds falling to the top 5% who are tasked with generating a credible illusion of prosperity for the bottom 95%.
The question about who still has access to the American Dream is starkly answered by this disturbing chart:
Alexander Hamilton, George Washington’s Treasury Secretary, in his first “Report on the Public Credit” in 1790,
put forth the concepts of “assumption” and “redemption.”
He argued that the federal government should assume the Revolutionary War debt
and pay those debts at “face value” in full to the bearers of such debt on demand.
In order to redeem the $75 million of bonds, Hamilton promoted the creation of a “sinking fund”
that would pay off five percent of the bonds annually.
Just under a year ago, US home prices finally surpassed their prior all time highs, one decade after the 2006 bubble...
... and haven't looked back since. Which, all else equal, would be great news for America, where the bulk of middle-class wealth is not in the stock market contrary to conventional wisdom, but in its biggest, and most illiquid asset-cum-investment: one's home.
Authored by James Rickards via The Daily Reckoning,
President Trump is expected to nominate the next Federal Reserve chair within a matter of days.
As I’ve explained before, Donald Trump has the opportunity to appoint a higher percentage of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve system at one time than any president since Woodrow Wilson.
Last December we joked that the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund had responded to sinking returns and withdrawals required to fund budget deficits by allocating another $130 billion in assets to what appeared to be an already massively overpriced equity bubble in return for an extra 40bps of "expected average annual real returns" (see: Norway Buying $130 Billion In Global Equities As Sovereign Wealth Fund Continues To Bleed Cash). The extra equity purchases pushed the fund's total equity allocation to a staggering 70% of their $860 billion in assets under management.