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The Deja Vu Is Redolent

A weekend topic starting with Reuters. “Lampooned by fiscal hawks as belief in a ‘magic money tree’, ever higher public borrowing and spending had seemed manageable and sensible for many years – hinged as they were on persistently low inflation that allowed central banks largesse to square the debt sustainability maths. Embrace of the coincidentally acronymed Modern Monetary Theory – which espouses active use of cheap borrowing to invest in future growth and a sustainable global energy refit – marked a crescendo of that thinking. But the big test of these ideas is coming far quicker than many suspected only 12 months ago.”

“On Tuesday the head of the world’s main central bank forum – the Bank for International Settlements – called time on the era of accommodative monetary policy in a speech entitled ‘The return of inflation’ and rebuked calls for easy policies come what may. So what does that mean for government borrowing or the fabled money tree? A report released by asset manager Janus Henderson on Wednesday detailed how global government debt has almost tripled in the past decade even though easy monetary policy associated with successive crises meant that the interest cost has only increased by a third. The latter part of the equation was now about to adjust sharply, they warned.”

The Globe and Mail. “The big investor is in the Vancouver market expressly because growth is the expectation. Patrick Condon, University of B.C. urban design professor and author of Sick City: Disease, Race, Inequality and Urban Land, argues that the housing crisis stems from the commodification of land, which is no longer based on its value for housing, but for its value as a global asset class. ‘Housing is no longer valued for its utility. It is now valued as a commodity, just like gold, Bitcoin or stocks and bonds,’ he said in an e-mail. ‘We have moved from an economy based largely on wages to one based largely on investments, with investors now in the driver’s seat. It’s extra complicated, because most of us participate in it and benefit from it, with our RRSPs and our pension fund contributions, not to mention the baby boomers benefitting from a passive gain of $4-million for their Dunbar home.'”

“‘When the dotcom collapsed in 2000, that sort of released a lot of capital and that money began to flow into commercial real estate. I’m talking globally. … When that money started to flow, it never stopped and it began to accelerate. So what you’ve got now … is really institutional capital that is driving predominantly home development,’ said developer David Fullbrook. ‘I always look at Vancouver investors as being rewarded for speculation. They buy property and they may over pay. They don’t really know what a downturn looks like. So there has always been money to be made, and the province is constantly trying to manipulate the system to drive or incentivize capital to behave in a certain way – and we are just too late.'”

“‘I don’t judge it,’ he adds. ‘I just recognize it as being a factor of the market, that there is an avaricious quality to investors.'”

From KCTV in Kansas. “People looking for a new home in the Kansas City metro are running into a new obstacle that’s driving the price of some homes out of reach. ‘You are dealing with investors who are coming in with unlimited money, and they are not worried about appraisals, they are not worried about inspections. They wave everything and they are bidding higher, and a lot of buyers can’t necessarily compete with that,’ says Erich Goldstein, associate broker for Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate.”

The Waco Tribune Herald in Texas. “‘We can host an open house on Saturday, and we’re getting offers by 5 p.m. on Sunday, maybe 10 or more, and these are half-million-dollar houses,’ said Kirsten Clements, an agent with Camille Johnson Realtors.”

From Denver 7 on Colorado. “Denver7 sat down with Jeff Tucker, a senior economist with Zillow. ‘Yeah, it’s kind of a classic tale of ‘drive till you qualify’ and it’s become very true during the pandemic. Q: But still, you’re saying hold on to hope. JT: We’re definitely seeing more homes hitting the market.”

From KPBS on California. “A story by Voice of San Diego Managing Editor Andrew Keatts reports on the experience of Dohney Castillo and Maricela Lopez-Beltrán and their quest to buy a home. The couple, who have two children, work in San Diego. Castillo is a sanitation worker at Republic Services in Chula Vista and Lopez-Beltrán is a social worker with San Diego County. They chose to buy a home in Murrieta five years ago after qualifying for a loan of up to $450,000. The choice was between a two-bedroom condo in San Diego County or a four-bedroom home in Riverside County.”

“Castillo now leaves his home in Murrieta for work at 3 a.m. and gets home at 7 p.m. leaving him about two hours with his 4-month-old daughter, Mila, before going bed. Castillo and Lopez-Beltrán are now two of an estimated 50,000 Riverside County residents who work in San Diego County, based on Voice of San Diego reporting. ‘For me, it’s still worth it — there are small moments where I get to see her, and I cherish those moments,’ he said. ‘I spend so much time commuting and working that, even just seeing her sipping a bottle or sleeping, I cherish those moments too.'”

From BBC. “Since 2015, property prices have increased faster than incomes in most major economies, including Canada, Germany and the UK. The disconnect has worsened since the pandemic hit in 2020, when policymakers around the world slashed interest rates. ‘We’re in kind of a unique time where housing prices are rising disconnected from household income and part of that is because of the incredible amount of money, of finance involved in housing,’ said Suzanne Lanyi Charles, professor of city and regional planning at Cornell University.”

The Washington Post. “It has been nearly three decades since mortgage rates spiked this quickly. And there’s no indication they are going to slow down anytime soon. ‘Like Einstein’s theory of relativity, when the Fed wants rapid reductions in balance sheet holdings, the market rate of interest to consumers will have an equal and opposite reaction and rise just as rapidly,’ said Derek Egeberg, certified mortgage planning specialist at Academy Mortgage.”

“The demand for mortgage-backed securities has softened, and the Fed may be forced to sell its mortgage-backed securities’ holdings ‘after balance sheet runoff was well under way,’ according to the minutes.”

From CNBC. “‘Whether or not what they’ve got plotted out is enough, we will find out in time,’ Paul McCulley, former chief economist at bond giant Pimco and now a senior fellow at Cornell, told CNBC in a Wednesday interview. ‘What they’re telling us is, if it’s not enough we will do more, which is implicitly recognizing that they will increase downside risks for the economy. But they are having their Volcker moment.'”

From CNN Business. “‘There are a bunch of things that are troubling signs that suggest that home prices are getting ahead of the ability of people to live in those homes and afford them,’ said Christopher Mayer, a real estate professor at Columbia Business School. ‘At some point investors have to sell to someone. They can sell to other investors — that’s a bubble. But … eventually houses have to be affordable for the people who live in them.'”

From Mises.org. “‘Two of the main negative consequences of Fed money creation are inflation and the boom-and-bust business cycle, both of which lower living standards significantly. Inflation raises living costs and erodes savings, while the business cycle wastes scarce resources by encouraging their allocation to bad investments. At least Greenspan has been honest about the Fed’s inability to forecast the economy: ‘People don’t realize that we cannot forecast the future. The number of mistakes I have made are just awesome.’ Greenspan also admitted that the market is much larger and more powerful than the Fed: ‘The market value of global long-term securities is approaching $100 trillion now swamp the resources of central banks.'”

“The Federal Reserve cannot control the economy or even the money supply and interest rates. And Fed leaders clearly cannot predict the economy, even though the media and Wall Street hang on their every word. But the Fed can lower living standards by destroying the value of the dollar and causing the boom and bust cycle. Economic theory and economic history have proven that government central planning does not work in creating stability or prosperity. That includes centrally planned monetary policy.”

The Stamford Advocate. “The oracle of all home values — Zillow — says that the average Connecticut home now costs over $340,000, a 15 percent increase just in this last year. This explosion of price is higher than a robust inflation rate and more than an increasing mortgage rate. The result, for whatever reason, is that more people want to buy more homes than in any year since the advent of The Great Recession, almost fifteen years ago.”

“If the past is prologue, this boom will bust, but in the meantime the huge influx in cash that a housing boom generates means a fresh bombardment of hype as Big Real Estate (developers, agents, even architects and builders) use profits to fan the flames of irrational exuberance. Given that this is the fifth boom that I have experienced in the 45 years I have been in architecture, the deja vu is redolent. It may be a good time to offer up some insight into the hype machine. There are ‘push button’ triggers used by those marketing homes, and all of them have one foot in our values and the other in our aspiration to virtue signal them in our home.”

“The ‘Flip’ home is a ‘pig in a poke.’ In booms, flawed homes are purchased in good neighborhoods, then cynically tarted-up to make a quick sale, then abandoned to new owners that deal with the motivations of those seeking profit. The ‘Tear Down’ has re-emerged for the fourth time in thirty years. The ‘Great Location’ of an ugly home can have a value in a housing boom profit-driven market greater than the value of embodied energy every building has.”

“In a housing boom, you may be able to sell your home for far more than you ever thought possible, but no matter what you buy now will probably be far harder to sell when this bubble pops. If you live in a cliche, or a home with failed technology, or the never-ending leaks of a roof built to sell more than shed water, that sale becomes even harder. Think before you buy, and buy what you know, not what you aspire to be.”

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This Post Has 114 Comments

  2. ‘Embrace of the coincidentally acronymed Modern Monetary Theory – which espouses active use of cheap borrowing to invest in future growth and a sustainable global energy refit – marked a crescendo of that thinking. But the big test of these ideas is coming far quicker than many suspected only 12 months ago’

    I’ve long said one of the spookiest things I ever heard was ‘Reagan proved deficits don’t matter’ about the same time as this:

    ‘The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

    These people are clearly insane. But it indicates what we see in other ways. The now-common term elites shows what they think of themselves and us. Central bankers are firmly in the “you’ll own nothing and etc” camp. We aren’t going to vote our way out of this.

    1. “A New York Times reporter is being slammed by critics after opining that former President Barack Obama’s birthday party was a low COVID-19 risk due to the “sophisticated, vaccinated” guest list.

      https://news.yahoo.com/nyt-reporter-slammed-calling-obama-220842756.html

      “as is so often the case, the most disturbing aspects of elite behavior are found not in what they have prohibited but rather in what they have decided is permissible. When it comes to mask mandates, it is now commonplace to see two distinct classes of people: those who remain maskless as they are served, and those they employ as their servants who must have their faces covered at all times. Prior to the COVID pandemic, it was difficult to imagine how the enormous chasm between the lives of cultural and political elites and everyone else could be made any larger, yet the pandemic generated a new form of crude cultural segregation: a series of protocols which ensure that maskless elites need not ever cast eyes upon the faces of their servant class.”

      https://nypost.com/2021/09/15/masks-for-waiters-and-servants-but-not-for-aoc-and-the-rest/

      “These hypnotized by this process are unable to recognize the lies and misrepresentations they are being bombarded with on a daily basis, and actively attack anyone who has the temerity to share information with them which contradicts the propaganda that they have come to embrace. And for those whose families and social networks have been torn apart by this process, and who find that close relatives and friends have ghosted them because they question the officially endorsed “truth” and are actually following the scientific literature, this can be a source of deep anguish, sorrow and psychological pain.

      https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/mass-formation-psychosis?s=r

      2. “Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Moscow) may be so dumb she hadn’t heard of John Maynard Keynes’ famous (-ly wrong) prophecy about a 15-hour work week until years after graduating college with an economics degree (and also thought his name was “Milton Keynes”), but she is in a class of her own when she’s doing her job, which is getting people to look at her.”

        Keynes’s ghost must be laughing outloud at that one.

    2. These people are clearly insane.

      Bill Gates has gone insane. Mark Zuckerberg, too. Jack Dorsey is mentally gone. Jeff Bezos appears to be suffering from delusions of grandeur. Elon Musk is in a full-on narcissistic mania. The list is long with these globalists.

    3. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

      That’s incredibly rich! I am reminded of grey hair’s demise in “The Last of the Mohicans.”

  4. “drive till you qualify” … “leaves his home in Murrieta for work at 3 a.m. and gets home at 7 p.m.”

    What a sh*tty way to live. At least it was cheaper than renting.

    1. This is one of the reasons I left So Cal 30 years ago with a vow never return. Sat down one night, did the math on a hour and half commute and discovered that one month out of the twelve that make up a year was spent on a freeway. Nope!

    2. I wouldn’t even do it for a week. Remember that clown who used to post here about driving his Tesla 5 hours to Salt Lake City, or wherever, so he could manage short term rentals or some such? He even said a Tesla was a perfect home that you could sleep in. Was he transgender, eating avocado toast while on “self-driving mode?” He seemed to check all of the boxes in this current sh!t show.

      1. I think you are referring to oneagaisntmany or something like that. The odds weren’t in his favor.

    3. Castillo is a sanitation worker at Republic Services in Chula Vista and Lopez-Beltrán is a social worker with San Diego County.

      Nonsense like this is what drove HBB to come up with the Oil City Plan. You can be a sanitation worker and social worker in hundreds of towns in this country. So why live in a high-cost area?

  5. “The oracle of all home values — Zillow — says that
    Yep, those geniuses at Zillow!! Good for a laugh on a Saturday morning.

    1. They are so brilliant at estimating home values that a division of their company went broke by relying on those estimates for the homes they purchased.

    2. Shillow couldn’t even make money flipping houses in the biggest real estate bubble in history. Anybody relying upon their values is a mouthbreather.

  6. “Lampooned by fiscal hawks as belief in a ‘magic money tree’, ever higher public borrowing and spending had seemed manageable and sensible for many years – hinged as they were on persistently low inflation that allowed central banks largesse to square the debt sustainability maths. Embrace of the coincidentally acronymed Modern Monetary Theory – which espouses active use of cheap borrowing to invest in future growth and a sustainable global energy refit – marked a crescendo of that thinking.”

    There once was a Magic Money Tree.
    I called it MMT.

    But then it died in the arse.

  8. “The choice was between a two-bedroom condo in San Diego County or a four-bedroom home in Riverside County. Castillo now leaves his home in Murrieta for work at 3 a.m. and gets home at 7 p.m. leaving him about two hours with his 4-month-old daughter, Mila, before going bed. Castillo and Lopez-Beltrán are now two of an estimated 50,000 Castillo and Lopez-Beltrán are now two of an estimated 50,000 Riverside County residents who work in San Diego County, based on Voice of San Diego reporting.”

    Major bummer. Is it good for the planet to have a commuter fleet of 50,000 vehicles transiting from Riverside County down to San
    No wonder our air quality and traffic suck.

    Diego and back every day? And how about if gasoline prices rocket up to $6 a gallon, for good measure? Sucks in so many ways…

      1. I did a road trip a month ago and was driving through Victorville around 7AM. That is about 85 miles from downtown LA. Traffic headed toward LA was bumper to bumper. Maybe they don’t commute all the way into LA, but still that has to be 3 hours each way with the traffic I saw.

        1. In the Antelope Valley north of the L.A. Basin, there is only one highway into L.A.–that’s the 14 Freeway. By 5:30 AM every weekday morning, the traffic is bumper to bumper going 65-70 mph. By 7:00 AM it slows to a crawl. It’s about a 50-75 mile commute into L.A.

        2. driving through Victorville

          The last time I was in Victorville, the Roy Rogers Museum was still there. As a teen, I had one of Bullet’s granddaughters. It made me kinda sick to see Bullet there stuffed on display.

          I don’t remember much traffic.

      2. I did a 70 mile commute to L.A. for almost 20 years. However, I was able to hit the road after the morning rush hour period which was 6-9:30 AM. Then it was about a one to 1.5 hour drive. Going home the traffic wasn’t nearly as bad.

        With the salary I got as an academic cancer researcher (and NOT a government worker), I could never afford to live in the L.A. Metropolitan area. And that was true all the back to 1990.

      3. MILES is not the important factor here. The real important number is TIME. I had colleagues that lived 40 miles away in Orange County (FYI, a 40 mile commute in L.A. is common). It still took them as long or longer to commute compared to other people who commuted 60-70 miles on routes where the traffic wasn’t as dense.

        Ever try and get anywhere on the 5, 10 or 405 freeways at rush hour? The other day it took me over an hour to go from West L.A. to the northern end of the San Fernando Valley. That’s about a 20-25 minute commute when the 405 is running un-congested.

        1. MILES is not the important factor here.

          and risk. A long commute in heavy traffic presents daily near death experiences.

          1. Actually driving L.A. freeways when the traffic is heavy (stop and go) is very safe and low risk. Why? You’re only going 5-15 mph! So it’s almost impossible to have a high energy accident.

          2. “A long commute in heavy traffic presents daily near death experiences.”

            Yes, and let’s not forget the fatal cardiovascular events that’ll be triggered by viewing one’s monthly gasoline bill.

    3. Riverside County is an armpit. You can read the County Sheriff’s website for updates on all the murdered bodies they find in the desert on the regular.

    4. “The choice was between a two-bedroom condo in San Diego County or a four-bedroom home in Riverside County.”

      Either way they’re anxious to leverage up to their eye sockets!

      1. “Either way they’re anxious to leverage up to their eye sockets!”

        It is truly amazing how the combination of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and Irrational Exuberance can override a person’s ability to exercise due caution. The RE shills and Media know how to exploit this dynamic all the way up until the Big Fat Black Swan takes a huge steaming dump on the markets…wherein cold, hard, skull-crushing reality hits them like Thor’s hammer.

  9. Housing.

    Housing, property taxes, public education.

    Here a trio of links, all published within the last 24 hours, from the front page of the Gateway Pundit about sexually grooming children in the public education system:

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/04/biden-administration-threatens-hold-states-accountable-passing-laws-protect-children-gender-surgery-puberty-blockers-video/

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/04/democratic-senator-amy-klobuchar-refuses-answer-question-whether-saying-two-sexes-considered-health-misinformation/

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/04/pete-buttigieg-says-prohibiting-classroom-instruction-sex-gender-identity-kindergarten-classes-will-kill-kids-video/

    This is what your property taxes are paying for.

    This is what happens in dying civilizations.

    1. The globalists & their Quislings want to turn Planet Earth onto one big Epstein Island, consequence-free.

  10. “Castillo now leaves his home in Murrieta for work at 3 a.m. and gets home at 7 p.m. leaving him about two hours with his 4-month-old daughter, Mila, before going bed.

    How sustainable is this when gas hits $7 or more a gallon?

    1. “$7 or more a gallon?”

      This is Clownifornia. Try $10+ a gallon.

      “They’re not sending their best”

    2. Engineer I work with to make things I design lives in Phoenix AZ and works in Poway CA . He told me that I figured he wont be around long but hes still there. Crazy

  11. Oh dear…the financial house of cards built on the gusher of funny money “stimulus” since 2008 is starting to look shaky.

    Warning as thousands could be impacted by construction company collapses

    https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/other-industries/warning-as-thousands-could-be-impacted-by-construction-company-collapses/news-story/548089eb06066385e762bd1ef7c7b54e

    A building insider has revealed the shocking state of the industry with half of construction companies in trouble and a “terrible” impact in store for customers.

  13. ‘Housing is no longer valued for its utility. It is now valued as a commodity, just like gold, Bitcoin or stocks and bonds,’ he said in an e-mail. ‘We have moved from an economy based largely on wages to one based largely on investments, with investors now in the driver’s seat.

    There needs to be a post-collapse reckoning with the gold collar criminals at the Fed, their private equity accomplices, and policymakers that aided and abetted this wholesale fraud against the middle & working classes.

    2. There are lots of ways to characterize it. Securitization is key. Guberment backed MBS’s makes things much worse. How many of these middle & working classes aren’t expecting to use the current system to cash in that sweet equity?

      Anyhoo, I found that “fed may be forced to sell MBS” thing interesting.

    1. Yellow vest lovely Marguerite & friends with their divine French performance of “The Good Guys, the Bad Guys.” (English subtitles). YouTube has removed millions of “likes” from this video but hasn’t shadow-banned it – yet. Watch it while you still can.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBiHJxGxz1g

  15. Foreclosure.com sent this to me this AM and I found the shacks matching the photos:

    $1,450,000 3 bd 2 ba 3,266 sqft
    15739 Rabbitbrush Rd, Parks, AZ 86018

    https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/15739-Rabbitbrush-Rd-Parks-AZ-86018/71595138_zpid/

    4/6/2022 Listed for sale $1,450,000 (+1281%) $444/sqft

    5/31/2001 Sold $105,000 (+31.3%) $32/sqft

    9/27/1999 Sold $80,000 $24/sqft

    I’m guessing the previous sales were the lot. Cash out refi, construction loan? It doesn’t look like it’s in Parks, which is most definitely a sh$thole. Somebody is going to lose a lot of money on this.

    1. If you don’t stop posting all these medical misinformation links we’re gonna get you banned from Twitter!!!

      Oh, wait…

    1. Reality: The largest expansion in consumer credit in U.S history in February.

      Translation: people are using credit cards to pay for everything, and are not paying the bill in full.

      1. Correction: people are using cash out refi’s to pay for everything, including mortgages, and have been for 8 years.

    2. The largest expansion in consumer credit in U.S history

      I anticipate mass credit card defaults.

      A big bank is in trouble, and no one knows which one or why

      The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. likely made a large addition to its problem bank list, experts say, as the agency reported a spike in troubled assets managed by firms in the fourth quarter.

      The volume of assets held by banks on the FDIC’s problem bank list — a tally of banks that received poor ratings from regulators — jumped by about $120 billion in the fourth quarter, according to the agency’s fourth- quarter banking profile released last week. That’s more than triple the previous figure of assets under problem banks, and it’s the highest that asset number has been since the third quarter of 2013.

    1. There are Ukrainistan flags all over the place around here in South Denver. These virtue signallers obviously bought them in the last 6 weeks, it’s not like they just happened to have one tucked away with the Christmas decorations.

      None of these people give a f* about millions of poor people in poor countries starving.

      They now have a blue and yellow flag “piece of flair” on their Twitter handle, which matches nicely with their blue checkmark, because they are soul-less NPCs:

      https://ibb.co/JtvfBbk

      1. We all know that if you removed your Birkenstocks, your toenails are painted blue & yellow in solidarity with Ukraine.

    2. deranged money printing

      Confusing people about what inflation is softens them up to accept solutions that don’t remotely address the cause of the problem.

    1. 5% is just a warmup. Just wait until we hit 6% or 7%

      BTW, would seem to me that higher rates for the 30yr fixed will affect other asset classes such as crypto.

  20. Oh dear…the Biden regime & DNC will be in full pearl-clutching mode if residents of Shanghai join the global push-back against COVID tyranny.

    Shanghai residents revolt over Zero Covid lockdown: Videos show mobs looting stores for food and destroying barriers after being confined to their homes for 22 DAYS (and cases are still going UP thanks to Omicron)

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10702811/Shanghai-residents-revolt-Zero-Covid-lockdown-Videos-shows-mobs-looting-stores-urgent-food.html

    Emergency supply points in Shanghai were looted last night by desperate residents as the city’s lengthy, severe lockdown groans on.

    Videos shared on, and swiftly deleted from, Chinese state-censored site Weibo shows crowds of Shanghai residents storming stores for undelivered food parcels.

    A record 23,600 new Covid cases were recorded in China’s biggest city on Friday, according to official statistics, which are likely to be understating the true amount of infections.

    1. And those are just the ones that collapsed. As we saw in the Miami tennis tournament, 15 players had chest pains and withdrew. 15 out of how many? 100?

      “Post-Pandemic Stress Disorder”

      And you know what’s sad? People are buying this BS. And as the drop dead count accelerates, they will remain in denial.

  23. Now that Spring has sprung, I’m pleasantly surprised at how many hardy HBB posters made it through the winter of “severe illness and death” the Brandon White House assured us would be the fate of the unvaccinated.

      1. Here in Northern Florida the only mask wearers seem to be vibrants. I guess it keeps security cameras out of play when shoplifting.

    2. ** “Now that Spring has sprung, I’m pleasantly surprised at how many hardy HBB posters made it through the winter of “severe illness and death” the Brandon White House assured us would be the fate of the unvaccinated.”

      pshaw! after years of renovating ANOTHER hoarder relatives dwelling, removing 6+ dumpsters of trash, 60+ truck loads of garbage, 20+ cats (many mummified skeletons), rooms of cat trees w/mounds of dried, charcoalled cat poop, and ammonia-stained everything, I pretty much just assume an acquired immunity to anything weaker than a nuclear blast.

      and yep: this time I took lots of pictures, as no one could comprehend the destruction from the first time it happened.

      2. Scary stuff right there. I remember watching a few cringe-worthy episodes of “Hoarders.” It was truly amazing the level of denial these folks engage in in order to justify holding on their useless and sometimes dangerous crap. That being said, there was a universal underlying reality to the cause…severe mental illness, often amplified/triggered by some prior emotional trauma.

        The human psyche can only handle so much trauma or negative life-impacting events. Between Inflation, Covid and Ukraine (possible WWIII), I think we’re going to see a lot of crazy, destructive and desperate behaviors emerge when this “everything bubble” explodes and leaves devastation in it’s wake.

        1. From what I have read, most hoarders know they are hoarders and that their behavior is abnormal, but they cannot resist the compulsion to hoard.

    3. the winter of “severe illness and death” the Brandon White House assured

      When the old pants-sh!tter barked this out was when I started hoping for him to take a dirt nap. Fock ’em.

    4. “I’m pleasantly surprised at how many hardy HBB posters made it through the winter of “severe illness and death”

      I almost lost all my toes when I fell through the ice while trying to get my unvaccinated @ss as far way from Covid as possible after hearing the Dementia Patient in Chief’s dire warning but I pulled through.

      1. Covid won’t kill them. They likely don’t even have it at all. Notice how in almost all cases it’s asymptomatic. And every single one is imploring people to get another dose of the kill shot.

        It’s pure Kabuki theater.

      1. I still can’t get over the Democrats openly pandering student debt relief for votes. That’s taxpayer money, and the high court’s silence is deafening.

          1. Start with Equal Protection under the 14th amendment. Why do student loan borrowers get a break, but no other debtors? Or Due Process. They signed a contract, and they owe us payment in full with interest and penalties. Brandon has no standing to nullify a contract.

          2. “What about this do you suspect is unconstitutional?”

            I was under the impression that the elections commission provides an equal amount of seed money to both parties, the DNC and the RNC. Beyond that the parties have to raise funds privately, IIRC. Why doesn’t the DNC pay-off those student loans using their corporate donations? But honestly, I don’t know diddly about our election laws.

        2. “I still can’t get over the Democrats openly pandering student debt relief for votes”

          Well at least AOC is in line to have her student loan forgiven.

          100,000 Borrowers Qualify for Public Service Loan Forgiveness. Are You One Of Them?

          Alix Langone
          April 8, 2022 1:45 p.m. PT

          While it may not have fulfilled all of the promises made on the campaign trail, President Joe Biden’s administration has made some progress on student loan forgiveness.

          Last month, the US Department of Education announced that it had identified 100,000 borrowers who were eligible for Public Service Loan Forgiveness under the new waiver. Since revamping its PSLF program last October, 70,000 borrowers have had a combined $5 billion in student loans forgiven, as of this January. Approximately 30,000 more have been deemed eligible for loan forgiveness.

          Who is eligible for PSLF?

          To qualify for PSLF you must be employed full-time by a US federal, state, local or tribal government agency — this includes the military — or a nonprofit organization. You must have direct loans or other types of federally backed loans that have already been consolidated into direct loans, and you must make 120 qualifying payments (10 years’ worth of payments). Examples of borrowers who qualify for PSLF are workers like teachers, nurses and firefighters who serve their local communities.

          https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/loans/100000-borrowers-qualify-for-public-service-loan-forgiveness-are-you-one-of-them/

  28. Why would it be a “shock” that French young people reject a globalist stooge who offers them only a bleak future as “strangers in a strange land” in a multicultural dystopia?

    French presidential election race narrows further as shock poll shows tidal wave of support for far-Right candidate Marine Le Pen among young voters as Macron battles to remain in power in Sunday showdown

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10703161/Shock-poll-shows-tidal-wave-support-far-Right-candidate-Marine-Le-Pen-French-election.html

    1. Western countries

      We’re simply dishonest. Steal their money and then declare them unwilling to pay in USD.

      1. Who needs details when its the narrative that matters. Also never mind that the sanctions are hurting the West far more than Russia.

      2. After Putin’s swirly and burial Russia will get their funds unfrozen, and it will be business as usual. Meanwhile, the energy pipelines to Europe continue flowing.

        1. energy pipelines to Europe continue flowing

          From what I hear, until existing contracts run out.

          Putin’s swirly and burial

          Unlikely.

          1. Back when Crimea was annexed I came to the conclusion that the former Soviet satellite countries along Europe’s eastern edge should remain as a non-NATO security buffer zone.

            FWIW, I live with the second largest Ukrainian-Russian emigrant population in the U.S., and they get along just fine, inter-marry, etc., with each other. It’s their political systems.

    1. Even though the infection rate is trivial, and most of those who test positive have no symptoms at all, they still aren’t waving any white flags. They still want that needle in your arm, they still want the spike protein in your body. They still want mandates.

      Remember, 500,000,000 is their target for global population. That means 15 out of every 16 people go bye-bye. Of course, the jab is but one tool in their toolbox to achieve that goal.

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