…imagine a typical householder. We saw him just the other day, courtesy of a Fed study. He has a house, but he has almost no money. He has no pension, no stocks, no bonds, and no savings. Nada. Zilch. His real hourly earnings are either flat for the last several years, or actually going down, depending on whose numbers you believe. He can barely pay his mortgage. He cannot seem to pay off his credit cards. When the week’s bills are paid, he has less money left over to spend as he pleases – according to Elizabeth Warren’s calculations – than he did during the Carter administration.<\/p>\n
Now imagine that his house suddenly doubles in value. Is he really better off? What can he do but borrow against the inflated value of the house. When he borrows, the air holes grow smaller. He’ll have an even harder time paying his bills. He can barely breathe as it is. Being a fatter cat makes him feel good about himself, but it doesn’t really help.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Somehow it’s all about Money and Illusions, except the wedding is actually shaping up pretty nicely. Think Appreciative Prairie-style Catholic Buddhist Open Space Hippie Solstice Drum Circle and if that doesn’t really mess you up, you might just have some sense of what is actually goin’ down this June.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Funny that I should run all of this together in one post, but such is life these days. First, I’ve been meaning to blog something for the last couple of days. I’ve got plenty of things to post, but the one idea that keeps screaming at me is that there’s nothing like a heavy dose … <\/p>\n
Continue reading “Money and Illusions”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":88889,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-money-and-markets","category-personal-reflections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/88889"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=601"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}