Forget it. I’ve been laughed out of political gatherings for suggesting that our city should save for known eventual expenses - like the clean-up of our local toxic plume or treatment of water when we fail to clean it up (a much more likely scenario). City Council members told me they would rather not save, that suggesting saving is political suicide, and that “when we need the money we will bond for it”, in other words, they would rather borrow & spend with interest than save. Easy to say that when rates are so low. But in 20 years when we WILL need to money, who knows what interest will be?
So looking down on saving is built into the system, at least in our Democratically-controlled city. And this brings me to my next point, which is that increases in property taxes and fees for city services have increased at many times the rate of inflation these last 10 years - in some cases up to 29x the rate of inflation - which is really cutting in to my ability to save - for anything, at all, ever.
Yes, he was, but that’s not particularly exceptional- reigning in the money supply as a means to fight inflation wasn’t new. For me, maybe the greater credit was in refusing to bow to pretty significant political pressure from both sides of the aisle as interest rates shot up.
4 years of tightening the money supply does not equate to 40 years of stable inflation rates. There are simply too many moving parts to make this claim, and when you consider the wage stagnation over that same period, average people are worse off and carry significantly greater debt-loads, what does it even mean? Congrats, last year milk cost $2.50/gal, this year it’s $2.60, a fairly low level of inflation, but if your hourly wage only rises $0.02, you aren’t keeping up. (not real figs.- only for emphasis)
Agreed. Overall, I’d say Volcker is a sharp dude, knows his shit, and speaks pretty plainly. I just can’t get past seeing his chairmanship of the Fed as a tipping point towards the current neoliberal consensus.
You described exactly what we ended up doing, except we splurged at 1150 square feet. We went for cheap and small in a great school district near commuter rail.
We bought in 2003, and I first realized the bubble was due to break when my mortgage broker said that we were borrowing far too little. He said we were approved for roughly 5 times what were looking to spend. I looked across the table and told him that he was out of his fucking mind.
We’re doing OK, but as this post suggests, I just wish I could get some freaking return on my savings.
One of the towns on Maui; not a particularly upscale or fast growing neighborhood. Yes, Hawaii property is relatively expensive, but has the same mix of rich and poor neighborhoods, less and more desirable, and drops in price by about half once you leave Oahu, the most populous island. It’s not even as outrageously priced as San Francisco or New York, more like Portland or Chicago if you include the suburbs.
