Job No 784: Fill & Download for Free

I’m shocked. They’re surprisingly affordable if you take out the right loan.Apparently, they’re around NZD $4,000,000 - Bugatti reveals the Chiron, its NZ$4m Veyron supercar replacementImage source: NZ STUFFAt $4,000,000, that’s only 30 years of weekly payments at $3,924! (based on a 3% interest rate for the first year)If you give up the 784 coffees you buy at Starbucks every week and pour that money into repayments, you too can buy this car.Flag the house and live in the car! No house mortgage = extra savings.Get an extra job or work 20 hours a day.Then get another job and figure out how to operate on 4 hours of sleep a week since the servicing cost and repayments work out 160 hours of work a week on the average NZ wage.Timeshare the Chiron with others. If you go into it with 52 others (one week each) your costs go down to $76,000 (plus upkeep).To summarize, to own this car by yourself, you have to be ‘midlevel hella’ wealthy.

The economy was headed for a hard fall after years of mismanagement by the Bush Administration and the Republican-engineered repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act that Clinton was too politically weak to veto in the late 1990s. The housing crash had its roots in the Bush 1 era of securitization of mortgages allowing them to be cut up and sold as securities. In addition, there was then (as there is now) no control of the mortgage broker industry. Everyone knew Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were going to go belly up as early as 2001 and were talking about it then, but the gravy train was too hard to pass up and everyone got on. Meanwhile, Bush was suddenly cutting taxes and running a multi-trillion dollar war created unheard of deficits and to finance it was crowding out private investment. Some people will blame the CRA - but there is no evidence whatsoever that the CRA played any part in the collapse. The Lie That Won't Die: 'Poor Borrowers Caused The Financial Crisis'In the end, the straw that broke the camel’s back was when Bush refused to bail out Lehman Bros. In truth, it might have been the right thing to do but it caused a major shock in the credit market. At that time the NINJA mortgages that had their start under Bush 1 and the repeal of Glass-Steagal started to collapse affecting the industries that insured them - particularly AIG, possibly the biggest financial collapse in American history. The collapse of Lehman Bros put an end to the credit market which crippled GM and Chrysler. Ford had seen the writing on the wall and sold off Volvo and Mazda to bulk on cash and never took bailout money. But without credit, the other car makers couldn’t borrow the money to build cars anymore and the car industry crashed along with the housing industry. It became a perfect storm of fear and loss of liquidity.In the end, the Fed had to bail out the banking industry by creating over a trillion dollars overnight on impossible legislation that passed in something like two days. The idea was to get money into the hands of consumers by bailing out the banks - but the banks took the money and never passed it on to consumers. They used it to bulk up and smooth out their balance sheets. Bush later said, “I had to destroy capitalism in order to save it.”The biggest victim was Greece, which had invested heavily in American securities while cheating the EU out of billions of dollars to build infrastructure while maintaining two sets of books, both of which were false. When the German bankers outed the Greeks for real, the Greeks had the investigators jailed. No real reform has ever taken place in Greece which continues to expect Europe to bail it out forever. Meanwhile, Ireland, which was dependent on American manufacturing collapsed, as did Spain and Portugal. These were called the “PIGS” countries. Eventually, the Germans (primarily) and the French bailed out the EU using 50 years of pensions funds saved up by their hardworking citizens.Eventually, Bush was gone and Obama was stuck with using Keynesian economics, which demands government spending to correct recessions. He passed a 784 billion dollar tax cut and bailed out the auto industry. Within 18 months of the 2008 disaster the US was growing again, albeit slowly, and continued to grow uninterrupted for the entirety of the Obama administration. It was the longest growth cycle since WW2 and saw well over a dozen (I think 19) stock market records.The roots of the crash went back to 1991 but were compounded by the constant de-regulation of the financial markets and the inability of the finance industry to police itself. Looking back on it now, NINJA loans are absolutely insane - who would lend half a million dollars to someone with no job, no income, no assets? And yet no real reform of the mortgage market was made and we are going back to that era again and this will happen again.In the meanwhile, while Americans have actually somewhat reduced credit card debt to just about 1 trillion dollars, college loans have exceeded a trillion dollars and commercial loans are over 3 trillion dollars - and are currently at great risk (note the enormous number of failing malls and retail giants like Macys and others, like Sears and JC Penney, etc). Those empty stores are not generating rents and those commercial loans are becoming increasingly hard to pay off. A collapse of the commercial loan market would make 2008 look like a summer rain storm if it happens. And if you look at the auto industry, it would be a shambles if not for the fleet car sales the makers have. New cars piling up in storage lots are being crushed with 0 miles on the odometer because they cannot be sold. Sedans are history; the electric car has not taken off as fast as expected; there are no hydrogen vehicles to speak of and SUVs are the market leader. Chrysler WILL go bankrupt again; FIAT seeking a buyer to unload the low volume/high cost producer. The large bright spot is the growth in the oil energy sector which has caused low prices for a barrel of oil - which was as low as 17 dollars during the height of the recession and is about 65 dollars today. Low gasoline prices have a rapid impact on the economy because it’s like “creating” money in consumer’s pockets. Less money for gasoline means more money for something else.In the meantime, the government is continuing to deregulate; just as in the Bush era, your broker is allowed to give you bad advice on purpose and then hedge against you by purchasing securities for their benefit at your expense. There has been no real reform of the mortgage industry and after 6 years of declining deficits under Obama, we now have trillion dollar deficits again - and climbing. By 2022, we will be having 2 trillion dollar a year deficits and the government is now proposing draconian cuts to Social Security - while they continue to withhold your taxes - in order to cut the deficits. The Fed will have to raise interest rates just to be able to cut them if there is a recession. You can’t really cut interest less than zero (although it was tried in Japan - they were paying you to take out loans). And if there is a recession, government stimulus will automatically kick in and drive the deficits even higher. The entire thing sort resembles Russia just before its collapse in the 1990s. What predicated their collapse was their inability to get loans anymore. America doesn’t have that problem because it’s the safe haven in times of trouble. As one economist said, “America is the best looking horse in the glue factory”.And just as in Westeros, “Winter is coming.”

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