Yes, insane asset prices are the new normal.
From NFTs that appreciate 10Xs to 100Xs in less than six months, rapid and irrational price appreciation in the shares of SPACS (blank check companies or Special Purpose Acquisition Companies) to overbloated US stock prices including TSLA, BA, CMG, and DB that are respectively significantly down from recent monthly highs but still clock in respectively at $677, $252, $1,531 and $12.30 a share, despite possessing fundamental valuations multiple times lower than all these share prices, insanity devoid of any reality has become the new normal. How can a digital piece of art created by an artist that previously had never sold a piece of art for more than $100 appreciate from $66,666 to more than $66.6M in less than half a year’s time? The answer is simple. Central Banker deployed policies based upon MMT have destroyed the middle class all over the world and recreated 18th century like economic dynamics of nobles and serfs, expediting the noble’s seizure of the lion’s share of wealth in every nation to the point of excessive greed and narcissism that spending $66M for a piece of artwork that would have only fetched a couple hundred dollars at best a couple of years ago has been lauded by the financial media as visionary investing instead of being labelled as grotesque overindulgence.
In the past 12-months, 497 people joined the billionaire club around the world as billions of other suffered the mean-spiritedness and unnecessary consequences of economic lockdowns that destroyed the middle class lifestyle of tens of millions of people around the world. However, since the financial media has an absurd definition of middle class, a lifestyle that if you forced any of the newly minted 497 billionaires to live would be defined as extreme poverty by them, the reality is that likely hundreds of millions of people around the world lost their middle class lifestyle over the past 24 months. For example, half of all American workers earned $30,500 or less in 2020.
Having lived in major US cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles before, I can tell you that even if you earned $100,000 or more, after mortgage payments, monthly utilities, federal and state income taxes, auto insurance and various other taxes, even if you were single, such a salary barely would qualify one for a “middle class” lifestyle. So that means that US couples would have to earn $200,000 or more, pre-taxes to have a middle class lifestyle in most major coastal cities in America, and this was more than fifteen years ago. Today, that figure would likely be inflated much higher due to the enormous purchasing power devaluation of the USD over the last 15 years.
The problem of real struggle for people worldwide, after adjusting for the wide disparity in cost of living among various nations around the world, would not be for those still earning over six figures per person in America as those workers would still likely be doing fine though forced to make some sacrifices in the past couple of years that they did not have to make five or ten years ago. The problem is with absurd definition of “middle class” deployed by State governments and the media all around the world. For example, in America, US government officials have decided that if you are a member of a family of five, and your family grosses more than $2,451.67 per month, before taxes, that you are not living in poverty and may still be considered borderline “middle class”.
If you wonder amidst the economic devastation you have witnessed people suffer over the past year, how only 54 million people worldwide could have fallen out of the middle class as reported by the mass media, it is because in the US, the middle class’s income definition can range anywhere from an annual household income of just $29,000 for a family of five up to a few hundred thousand dollars. And though this scale is much lower in developing nations, this scale is often just as absurd in developing nations to define the “middle class”. Because the low end of the income scale for middle-class is so low, a family that firmly resided in the middle class before 2020, and whose income was halved in 2020, though they would no longer self-identify as middle-class, are still identified as middle-class by government officials to obscenely underestimate the tragic economic consequences of the lockdowns.
In 2020, nearly 70% of all American workers grossed $50,000 or less in annual income. No matter where you live in America, if it’s not a small rural town, a gross $50,000 or less annual income is going to be hard pressed to produce a quality of life worthy of being called middle class. Thus, if a proper definition of middle class quality of life was used in America, I imagine that in America alone, tens of millions of Americans may have fallen out of the middle class as opposed to only 54 million in the entire world. And regard the entire world, as I stated above, I imagine the more realistic number is hundreds of millions of people have lost their middle class lifestyle, not just 54 million.
However, in the end, we all know that the absolute hardest hit workers in the world from the unnecessary global lockdowns were those already dwelling in poverty. The United Nations estimated in 2020, that 265 million people would be plunged into the brink of starvation and into famine of Biblical proportions by the end of the year if economic lockdowns did not end. We all know that they did not end at the end of 2020 and in some nations, like Canada and France, new lockdowns are being imposed this month. However, this year, there has been absolutely no follow-up to these prior year reports, as if the mass media cares not if more than a quarter billion people suffer not from hunger, but from acute hunger, and starve to death.
I’m quite sure that the situation for those 265 million people living in poverty, at risk from starving to death, has worsened, and not improved, since these last reports, but mainstream journalists have deemed the horror of millions of people starving to death, increasing suicide rates, and soaring incidences of young girls and boys being trafficked as a direct result of economic lockdowns as completely insignificant in relation to the necessity to keep stoking the absurd, irrational fear of young adults of a virus that poses extremely little threat to their health, to forward stories[JS1] about billionaires and hundred millionaires willing to spend $66M for a piece of digital art for which no one would pay more than a hundred dollars a couple of years ago, and to stoke the buying frenzy around SPACS, though the US SEC recently handed down regulations that should greatly dampen the SPAC frenzy.
Polls conducted in the United States that reveal nearly half of all adults between the ages of 18 to 34, the very demographic that should have the least amount of worries about contracting the virus according to scientific risk, reveal that nearly half are worried about having social contact with their peers even after lockdowns eventually end. This reveals that high school and college graduate’s critical thinking skills have vastly diminished over the past decade and that this demographic is without doubt, becoming dumber over time in general. The fact that mainstream journalists can influence the extremely questionable beliefs of the general population is very troubling.
In the end, it’s difficult to assess if the insanity of young people that literally have a mortality rate of 0.02% or less, from contraction of the virus, being absolutely terrified of it as if it is ebola, or if the insanity of parabolic prices established among financial assets like NFTs and SPACS is greater.
And this is why insane asset prices are the new normal and how insanity has become the new normal.
