How concerned are you about the economy?

As for the OP.

As far as I am personally concerned, I am NOT concerned at all. I am fully able to exploit any situation, boom or bust. :smile:

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2008 bubble was caused by deadbeats who should never have been given loans in the first place. thereā€™s nothing wrong with mortgages, its the mortgagees that were the problem

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i really donā€™t get the whole crypto craze, you are literally investing in nothing.

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we stopped worrying about money supply a long time agoā€¦ thatā€™s gonna bite us in the ass. i have to wonder if the debt has gotten so far out of control that the banking cabal isnā€™t willing to monetize it.

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Some of us are too old to exploit a bust cycle. Personally, Iā€™m down about $70k since the New Year, not counting inflation. Thank you Brandon.

I saw a gold commercial on tv yesterday stating that the US Debt is 129% of our GDP. The commercial tried to make the case how bad that is. To me it actually looks pretty good, and much better than I thought.

If an individualā€™s total debt owed was only 130% of his annual salary, that guy would look pretty good. What am I missing?

They you know:
The mainstream NASDAQ buyer pointed to the declining value of ARK,
they laughed at her and they felt sorry for you. (They are good people.)

The old school Buffet type buyers pointed to the declining value of ARK,
they laughed at her and they felt sorry for you. (They are good people.)
.
.
.
.
The NAS has fallen so far (already). . . and Berkshire Hathaway has fallen so far (already) that all three have now fallen to the same level.

THAT my friend his how over-estimated the market was with all that hype and stimulus money. In the end, it was no better than ARK. All three are at ā€œdisgracefulā€ levels. You could have picked your stocks with darts and you would have wound up with Cathie Wood and ARK. EVERYONEhas done that badly.

Laughably bad is the new normal.

At the moment I said, ā€œI willā€ many decades ago, I became ultra conservative with money, understanding that if everything goes wrong, those who are depending on me will be ok. I donā€™t want our economy to sour butā€¦if it does, hopefully Iā€™m fully prepared?

Maybe this is what you are missing

This chart shows that stocks as a percent of GDP are at/ne
investing in the stock market is too high and will fall soon . . . the chart is correct.

Gold advertisers want to scare you (if you have money to invest) out of stocks and into hard assets like gold. It is hard to know if they are right because super-long term once the stock market falls etc. etc. the Fed works to drive people out of gold, rinse repeat.

Gold is a good Armageddon play, but if one predicts a garden-variety recession, there may be better investments to make.

Right, but the derivatives built on the MBS were just like crypto. Their link to the underlaying security was meaningless. They were a betting vehicle. And it was those derivatives that triggered the crises, and made trillions disssapear overnight.

The other important difference is - and I could be wrong about this - millions of small investors own crypto. So when it tanks, the effect is relatively shallow and wide spread. I donā€™t think crypto is dominated by a handful of investors is it?

When the MBS tanked, it was a handful of insitituions that owned trillions of then.

We are likely headed to recession. And a real estate bubble. But I donā€™t think crypto collapsing is going to have the same effect as the 08 crash.

They werenā€™t meaningless. There was still a house beneath them.
The buyersā€™ credit-worthiness was fake ( ā€œsubprimeā€) but the house was real.

What makes the crypto collapse in some ways ā€œworseā€ is that there is no underlying house to repossess.

Iā€™m not explaining myself well because I find all these stuff hard to conceptualize.

But my understanding is, the original MBS bundles yes, had mortgages in them, the derivatives did not. They were simply tied to the performance of the MBS. They were bets on how well or poorly the MBS would do. When you owned them, you didnā€™t really own the mortgages. You couldnā€™t cash them in for a piece of the bundle. Nor would you even find yourself holding them.

Not at allā€¦Nothing I can do about it. Why scrimp and not enjoy life? You donā€™t get a prize if you kick the bucket with a huge bank account.

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MBS have ā€œalwaysā€ existed. They were not a new thing. What was different was that people lied about the quality of the mortgages that were in the bundles. I am a conservative so I will point out that Fannie and Freddie did (lied) first and lied most but so did Lehman-type lying by the free market that almost made the banking infrastructure seize up.

If you have a $200k mortgage and I have a $200k mortgage and we each have a 1% chance of defaulting each mortgage holder (bank) has a 1% chance of needing to repossess each house.

So along comes a mortgage bundler, like Fannie or Freddie or Lehman. They bundle our mortgage together with those of 98 other families. they take the bundle and sell it to investors as bonds (MBS) telling them ā€œNone of you have to worry about your entire investment going into default-and-repossession. Statistically speaking 1% will go into default and the other 99% will be good.ā€

The mortgage-bundler then adds an important promise " We know this because the underlying borrowers all have A+ credit and homes that will keep their current prices."

When that last part turned out to be a lie (sometimes) bundle buyers did not trust ANY mortgage bundles anymore. They did not want to buy ANY of them. If the bundle buyers continued to be that way, the housing market would have crashed a lot, I mean CRUSHED. The 2008 recession is historic not for how bad and deep it was, but because of how close we came to falling off tremendous cliff.

That is not at stake here. What is at stake here is a recession which could be mild or could be as bad as that one actually turned out to be.

I wish you well.

True, but many people still made a mint on it. I stayed away because I didnā€™t think the government would allow them and it was only a matter of time before they got banned. In retrospect I should have factored in how slowly the government leviathan moves.

Ouch!! :frowning_face:

I left almost nothing in the market for Brandon to mess up.

Have a sister who has lost even more than you have.

They (the crypto industry) has been saying what they create is (for legal purposes) like a superman comic book, or gold, or an old painting. As such it should not be subject to SEC regulation.

They have at least one lower court decision in their favor.

Nonetheless they function like an etf (with a high expense ratio) and to make matters worse the so-called ā€œunderlying assetsā€ of one type of cryptocurrency are usually just tech stocks and other crypto currencies.

Mmm here I am trying to think of ways to describe ā€œitā€™s not pyramid, itā€™s a house of cards.ā€

So anyway,

The NASDAQ investor, and
The conservative Warren Buffet style investor, and
The Cathie Wood ARK investor,
are all in the same cesspool right now.

All three portfolios are within a few percentage point so of each other.

That is how far the markets have fallen (so far.) Sure, the first two investor types canā€™t point at the third, laugh and say ā€œyou took the stupid way here,ā€
but I am not sure that is how an outsider would describe it.

Right - Iā€™m with you that the original MBS has mortgages, and there fore real estate under them.

My understanding is some of the derivatives, like Credit Default Swaps, were not collateralized by the mortgages.