According to Axios yesterday in a short note, they reminded us that banks in the United States are holding three trillion dollars worth of Treasury bills in their vaults. Here’s the thing: if there’s a default, what will those Treasuries be worth? Let’s discuss that.

Thought experiment. It’s June 12th, and there’s no lifting of the debt ceiling. Addlepated Joe won’t invoke the 14th Amendment or claim a platinum coin to continue payments. I suspect he vowed after the Republican Senate lowered taxes for the rich under Trump never to negotiate with terrorists called R people again. That wasn’t very well worded, but you get the idea. So the game of chicken will go to the end. But who is Ren and who is the bully? Recall from Footloose, Ren, aka Kevin Bacon, Five Degrees of Separation man, got his Converse sneaker shoelace caught around the gas pedal and couldn’t jump off the tractor. He looked brave, but instead he was stuck. I think that’s, ironically, the other Kevin, aka McCarthy the hapless. If he blinks, he loses his speakership. If he stays the course, he’ll try to blame AJ, aka Addlepated Joe. So that makes AJ the bully who will end up in the canal across from his overturned tractor .

So back to my point. The United States, for the first time in its history with the exception of a few technical defaults, will declare itself closed for business and shutter the payment window. At first, there should be no discernable impact. Gee, must be ok. A week goes by. Now it’s June 19th, 2023. On the 14th of June, we will not have received my Social Security deposit. Others like me but more dependent on that money, will be subjected to a barrage of requests for profile from the likes of CNN, New York Times and The Washington Post. We’ll be shaking our fists, or moaning about not being able to pay our debts. Axios will profile the blame game from D.C. My Home Depot store will be practically empty. A few contractors will buy a little paint here and there, but customers will cancel the work because they aren’t sure if they will be receiving their Social Security, Veterans Retirement, and all the other payments that go out from the Treasury. That affects 52% of Americans. Not a small number.

What happens next? Those in the rest of the world who hold the bulk of Treasuries will sell them – at any price. 80% of that is held by two countries, China and Japan. China at $870 billion can afford to do that, and they wish us harm. Japan at a trillion dollars can’t afford to do that, their leadership isn’t strong and they will worry about their balance sheet more than our ability to protect them from China. So the price of Treasuries would drop to near zero. That makes interest paid on those remaining go up – way up. Inflationary? You betcha. But what about those $3 trillion in Treasuries in the vaults of those banks? Nothing has really changed about the bank’s holdings in real terms. But on paper, their ability to pay depositors their money has disappeared. Result? Massive run on banks that will make Silicon Valley and First Republic failures pale in comparison. Now we’re talking Citibank, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Chase. Shades of 2008 all over again.

So will smart bankers start to slowly sell their Treasuries even before the default, having done a similar thought experiment to mine? If they do, same result over time. So even the anticipation of a default could be inflationary. This is a most dangerous game being played in D.C. It is very similar to my previous post about Weimar Germany wanting to get out of reparations, and violating the Versailles Treaty to do it. Bruning and Schacht. The impact from that poor decision was a significant continuation of pain in The Great Depression. It wouldn’t surprise me if we see a similar outcome here.

So what is one to do? Since half the country will be in the same boat, it is very difficult to say. When this is over, inflation will be soaring. That will make the value of my house go way up, and my credit card debt will be devalued. But here’s the thing: what happens to my reset mortgage in September when interest rates are 20%? I’d have to sell my house. But who will buy it at those levels? Nobody. That will apply to everyone else in my situation. Oh, but wait. Think about all those people who refinanced when interest rates were near zero during Covid? The banks won’t be getting enough income to offset interest rate increases. Another hit to their holdings. Ouch. In my case, Wells Fargo will have to settle for something less in a monthly payment. Real estate market frozen all over the country.

Depression coming. This is what I sensed over the last few weeks. So we’ll keep talking about it. Strange times.

Yes, I’m back to talk about the same topic I’ve been beating to death over the past six weeks or so – the economy and whether we will be able to add a default on the debt to the elements of disaster equation. That’s a reference to the Air Disasters metaphor I invoked a few entries ago.

But now I want to talk about historical precedents, specifically that of Weimar Germany in 1931. A guy named Bruning was the chancellor and another fellow called Hjelmar Schact was in charge of the German reserve bank. If you recall, reserve banks came into being between the late 1800’s in Germany and in 1913 in the US.

Without going into excruciating detail, let me describe what happened in Germany that led to the end of the Weimar republic. No, it wasn’t the early inflation in 1923. That was relatively short-lived, and got fixed pretty rapidly with the Dawes plan. It wasn’t just the Versailles Treaty alone that destroyed the republic. It was human error. Vanity? Hatred? Yes, and perhaps a fundamental lack of understanding of the potential for disaster brought on by the actions of Bruning and Schmidt. More detail, you ask? Well, OK, if you insist.

In ’23, the Germans were having trouble with reparation payments to Britain and France. When they were late delivering some telephone poles (I’m not kidding – really!) France invaded the Ruhr valley, which was akin to the old ‘cutting off your nose to spite your face’ kind of move. That started a tit for tat between the two countries, leading to more economic pain all around. And that inflation previously mentioned. Big inflation – you know, the wheelbarrel full of Marks to buy a loaf of bread inflation. Like Zimbabwe.

After Dawes, everybody bumped along for a while, mostly on borrowed money for Germany. Borrowed American money. Then came 1928 and the boom market in the US. Many Germans put their life savings into American stocks – you know, adding to the musical chairs players at the end just before the music stops. And stop it did, in October of ’29. Then Germany was in big time trouble. Nobody could pay anybody back. So by ’31, Bruning had had enough of trying to repay reparations. He wanted them gone. So with Schact’s blessing, he made a customs union agreement with Austria. Well, that really set things off with the French, as it was in direct violation of the Versailles Treaty. What little money was left in German and Austrian banks went elsewhere. First the Austrian banks failed; then the German banks. Since Germany wasn’t paying the money back it had borrowed from the Americans, American banks started to fail. The French franc was in trouble too, since trade stopped when nobody had any Marks or Dollars.

So the so-called Great Depression was not a seamless event caused strictly by the Wall Street crash in October of ’29. Things got worse after 1931 because of the guys in charge doing really stupid things. Kinda like today. You know – the default on the debt?

Some estimate the likelihood now at 60%, a big jump from previous expectation. The Reps are gonna try to pass some legislation this week intended to force Dems to negotiate a spending cut. If we’re on our way to a recession, does a spending cut make sense? Not if you’re a Keynesian economist, which the Reps are not. This is just another wide swing of the economic pendulum that will result in, by one estimate, the loss of a million jobs.

Where will those jobs be lost? Travel and hospitality. Housing. Home improvement – oops, hitting close to home for me there. In other words, anything that isn’t absolutely necessary for survival. Will that bring on a recession? You betcha. Will it go too far? More than likely. This is a global economy after all. Britain is already in trouble. France can’t get their people to agree to work another two years before retirement. And Germany? Who knows. But it’s a safe bet when there’s a run on banks in America, Britain and France, Germany will feel the pinch. And what about China? Russia? Instability everywhere? That’s a post for later on as the pinching spreads. But it doesn’t bode well for any of us, economically or likely politically. That will have to wait for another post as well. Will it bring Trump back? Depends on how healthy Joe Biden stays. Scary, huh?

Add in the effect of the Covid pandemic on people staying home to work. This is now a ‘thing’ and the ramifications are significant to one additional problem in the financial sector. What might that be? Commercial real estate and the loans taken out to pay for those buildings. Who’s hurting most? From a cursory glance, it appears commercial real estate in large Texas cities have the most vacancies. Why is that? I thought everybody was moving from California to Texas? Let’s check that out.

I’m back! The answer isn’t clear from a quick Google search. But this is my sense: commercial real estate vacancy rates in these large Texas cities have been high for quite some time – likely since the crash in ’08. Oil prices dropped below zero at one very fluky point. That had to have an impact on that commercial space in those big cities.

God knows how these developers have hung on as long as they have. Low interest rates probably helped. But that’s not the case anymore. There’s talk about turning older commercial buildings into residential housing, so I suppose that means there’s no going back. Oil will likely range in price between $70 and $80 a barrel for a long time to come. No wonder Texas is crazy.

But I digress. To summarize: the country’s financial situation reminds me of those episodes of Air Disasters on The Smithsonian Channel. It is always at least three things going wrong that cause airplanes to crash. How does that apply to the economy? So now we see interest rates rising leading to regional bank failures with high commercial vacancy rates, negatively impacting commercial mortgage backed securities and the crazy Republicans in Congress threatening to default on the debt. That’s four factors. Looks like a perfect storm for crashing the economy to me.

Here’s what I’d ask: if we’re gonna crash, can we do it before September? That will help my interest rate scenario previously discussed if the Fed starts cutting rates. Who ever thought I’d be hoping for a crash? Sorry to be so parochial, but hey: it’s every man (or woman) for himself/herself now. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I’m sorry if I’m beating this poor horse to death, but I feel compelled to get it down in bits and bytes, if for nothing else than posterity. It’s the Economy Stupid, the smartest thing ever said by a redneck named James Carville way back in the Clinton Era. It’s always about the economy, forever and ever, world without end, Aaahhhmmen.

Right now I’m sort of noodling, as the future in the next three-four months will be opaque, but of the utmost importance. So indulge me a bit as I try to parse through this thing.

Here we go. Money right now is flowing to safety and to higher interest. Per Axios today, half a trillion (yes, Virginia, I said trillion) dollars has flowed out of banks and into treasuries and money market funds since last April. Why is that time frame and the receiving institutions significant? It’s when the Fed started raising interest rates. After twenty some odd years of low rates, now we’re in the stratosphere, relatively speaking. Another quarter point increase from the Fed this past week. Three bank failures in the past three weeks. Result? Treasury prices are up, which means interest rates are down. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? It depends.

Interest rate hikes make borrowing more expensive for everyone, including the federal government. That adds to the deficit. Treasuries, or T-bills as they are called, are used by the federal government as a means to borrow money. If the interest rates are going down, that’s good for keeping the deficit numbers in check. Does any of that matter? We shall see this summer when the Republican-led Congress has to vote on increasing the debt ceiling. Let’s talk about that a bit.

The chair of the House Budget Committee is a Republican named Jodey Arrington, a man who thinks it’s a good time to default on the debt by not raising the debt ceiling. This is to pressure President Biden to cut spending on social programs. But not raising the debt ceiling means Social Security checks would not go out. That’s 44% of our monthly income. Ouch. I’ve already alerted Emily that she needs to be hoarding her paychecks for the next three months, just in case. There’s another issue for us. Our variable rate house mortgage with Wells Fargo will reset to a 15 year fixed rate mortgage in September. This will triple our mortgage payment. If we cannot refinance with them or another bank, the impact to our budget will be significant. So all this noise regarding the financial system, Congress and banks really hits home with our personal budget. Right now, the odds of the government defaulting on its debt are around 11%. Each month that goes by without an agreement increases those odds and lends more instability to the system. So with money flowing out of the banks within this unstable financial system, the logical next step is for financial institutions to cut back on lending.

So the big question for us, is: what will interest rates be on mortgages come September? It’s anyone’s guess at this point. But I’ll be watching closely. I’d advise you to do the same.

Nearly two years ago, I wrote a blog piece about Credit Suisse. The gist of my post was that the esteemed bank/holding company had finally gone too far, and was destined to fail. So what is happening right about now? Yesterday, the Swiss government had to backstop its failure with a fifty billion dollar bailout. It’s lost 75% of its stock price. It has to redo its books for the past two years. In other words, a bank too big to fail appears on the verge of failure. So what can we learn from this?

First of all, once again I foretell the future. I figured it would happen last year, but these things do that time. Second – the Swiss government sure has a lot of money in its coffers. No big surprise there. All those billions stashed by oligarchs and other assorted criminals generates fees and interest. Finally, after a decade of mismanagement, Credit Suisse is finally getting its comeuppance. Even a French derivation of Swiss in its name can’t save it this time.

So what’s different from last year or before? Interest rate hikes. Global interest rate hikes. All those central banks working in synch to make money more expensive. The management at Silicon Valley Bank ignored the trend and now they’re likely going to have to give back a whole bunch of dough. All those crypto investments hawked by Tommy Boy Brady and Matt Demon (oops, Damon..sorry, autocorrect didn’t catch that one) are collapsing, because there never was anything behind them anyway. This is clearly a return to the heady days of late 1929, where everybody everywhere all at once was investing in crazy market offerings.

I’m changing the subject slightly, but it will tie in with the above, I promise. We’ve taken to gathering in the evenings that I’m not working and watching serials on television. We did Deadwood (previous post), The Man Who Fell to Earth (ditto – I think?) and now we’re doing Babylon Berlin. Berlin – in 1929. The series does a good job of capturing all the elements of what went on in that hotbed of hedonism in that time frame. But the main thesis is the rise of Nazism, in reaction to those excesses and a desire to ‘make Germany great again’. Kinda like today. With the likes of Ron DeSantis (ooh: am I going to have to register as a blogger since I mentioned that bully’s name?) worrying about ‘wokism’, we’re on the verge of rewalking the path that led to world wide disaster.

The other thing I watched was Frontline from Tuesday night, talking about easy money since the crash of ’08. There were lots of sound bites, but it was more about furthering the blame game than truly explaining the situation that we face at the moment. So let me try to do that (back to talking about economics).

There are conflicting pressures at work. Inflation has finally arrived. Where did it come from? The Covid pandemic. Supply vs demand. Demand stayed constant; supply dwindled. Not too many dollars at first: too few goods. Then we got used to prices increasing at Publix. We didn’t stop buying toilet paper; we just paid P&G more for the Charmin. That was the case throughout 2022. The Federal Reserve and Central Banks worldwide finally decided that inflation was not temporary or even transitory: it was pretty much now baked in, some places more than others. So they used the only tool they had at their disposal and raised interest rates. Since they were late in acting, they undoubtedly went too far too fast. The objective was to cool the economy and stimulate layoffs. That hasn’t happened. It isn’t likely to happen. However, now we’re seeing the real fallout from their actions. Bank holdings are diminishing in value. It’s all about bonds they hold to park their money. Old bonds are worth less because new bonds carry higher interest rates. When the bank attempts to shore up its balance sheet before getting a ratings hit, word gets out through Twitter that depositor’s money isn’t safe, and what happens? The age old phenomenon of bank runs. People standing in line to withdraw their capital. In the case of Silicon Valley Bank, those withdrawals totaled about forty billion dollars. That’s a whole lotta money. Signature’s failure was too much crypto. Same with Silvergate Capital, which didn’t fail, it just closed up shop.

But there are other factors at work here, ones you don’t hear much about. They’re causing great confusion amongst the bankers because they are contrary to ‘normal’ inflation dynamics. Those factors are demographics and mortality. We were already short of workers because of reduced birthrates over the past two decades. Add in the half a million American workers who died from Covid. Then there’s the hundred thousand per year dead from overdoses. Finally, consider the effect of all those layoffs when everything shut down . Lots of people went from the workplace to early retirement. The net result? A giant hole punched in the pool of available workers for business. It doesn’t matter how much interest rates rise. Business can’t layoff workers because they don’t have enough to begin with. A true conundrum, eh?

But I just read that the European Central Bank raised interest rates another half a percent a short while ago. No flinching on their part. Stay the course. Even if it’s heading to that iceberg, it’s what is expected of us. Give me a break. What will happen? We will see more pain coming soon as central banks keep trying to build levees to hold back the rising tide of the financial collapse, greatly exacerbated by their actions. It’s like Andrew Mellon is back at Treasury, advising Herbert Hoover in 1929 not to intervene with direct financial support, because the downturn will burn off the bad stuff. Think of the consequences. Guess we’re about to see a live version of Babylon Berlin.

The final installment of the HBO Series The Last of Us aired last night. Recall this series is based on a video game of the same name. There are two primary characters: Joel, the protector, and Ellie, the 14 year old allegedly immune to the fungus turning people into zombies. They’d spent eight previous episodes enduring all manner of misery in order to reach Salt Lake City and the ‘fireflies’ who can use something in Ellie to create a vaccine. At least that was the story they believed.

But alas, that wasn’t the entire story. For humanity to live, Ellie must die – via brain surgery. Oh, and there are no guarantees that this can save humanity. “The Surgeon thinks” this might work. Well, that’s not good enough for Joel the protector. He says ‘no dice’, then proceeds to shoot everyone who stands between him and Ellie, his substitute daughter. Perfectly logical reaction, right?

OK, first the overtones. Salt Lake City – Mormon Central, that sect not known for lionizing women. Ellie, the Christ-like sacrificial lamb. Not a 33 year old Nazarene this time: a 14 year old girl is the savior of humanity. Through flashback, we get a glimpse of why Ellie is immune. Just after her birth, Ellie’s mother is bitten by a zombie. She cuts the umbilical cord and the idea is the fungus is in the newborn’s brain, and somehow that makes her ‘one of them’ without being ‘one of them’. Yeah, whatever.

The NY Times reviewer for this episode included a link to a review of the video game from ten years ago. A guy named Chris Suellentrop wrote about its shortcomings and the industry as a whole back then. Apparently it was difficult for the player to assume the role of Ellie for much of The Last of Us. Another link to a 2014 review suggests that episode 7 of the HBO series was a subsequent, separate game. Finally, the review of The Last of Us Part II makes it clear that the HBO series ends with that game’s beginning. Before Joel dies. At the hands of a vengeful woman called Abby. But undoubtedly that’s the stuff of the second series which HBO has already approved.

There is so much to be said about it all, but the episode that really got me wasn’t this final one, it was its predecessor, Episode 8. That was the first time we saw Ellie as something very different: a killer. She was a kid before meeting a cult-like leader who also happened to rationalize and indulge in cannibalism. Normal kind of behavior right? It was inevitable in this landscape. That changed her virtually overnight; she effectively grew up because of her exposure to this man and his followers. Sounds very similar to my plot in the first five books of Suffer the Children. But oh man was I ever naïve in writing that series. There’s this whole world out there – the video game world, its players, reviewers – a virtual industry previously unknown to me. It pushes the limits of everything that is terrifying and hopeless. I’m not entire sure I want to know more about it. Emily and I discussed what I perceive to be a nihilistic bent for her generation. But when we watched Episode 9 together, even she said it was, in her words, ‘really dark’. These are, indeed, times of transition for all of us. We should all just hold onto our hats..it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.

New topic: the recent failure of several banks, some affiliated with crypto, others primary money suppliers to startups. All ‘iffy’ banks. Silicon Valley (SVB) and Signature Bank both went under in the last few days, the result of bad managerial anticipation of the impact of interest rate hikes and skittish depositors. Over the weekend, the Fed tried to find a buyer for SVB with only partial success. The answer? Make all depositors whole, using an alleged ‘one year’ loan to staunch the outflow of cash. Will that be sufficient? According to Marketwatch, there are nine other ‘iffy’ banks out there. If you were a depositor at any one of those, would you leave your money in? Not likely. There will undoubtedly be more fallout to come. Stay tuned, and I’ll write more as it manifests itself.

It’s a fascinating world we live in, eh? Tomorrow we’ll talk about the Saudis making nice with the Iranians and what MBS wants from the US in exchange for God knows what. Can you say nook you lar? George W. Bush did, once upon a time. Later!

Last evening, the Chiefs shone in the second half of the Super Bowl. They dominated the Eagles the entire two quarters. Philly players looked stunned by the outcome. C’est la vie. But I found such irony in another fact. The show playing opposite the Super Bowl was set in Kansas City. But there was little celebrating going on in that plot: it was The Last of Us, Episode 5, entitled “Long, Long Time”. Joel and Ellie arrived in Kansas City to find the city overrun, not by killer mutants but by killer humans, bent on revenge on collaborators with the newly-overthrown government. There were no surprises until the very end, when one of the human horde’s SUVs gets swallowed up in a sinkhole, revealing a swarm of mutants that kill the vengeful last vestige of humanity in KC. Kinda looked like the Chiefs’ defense swarming over the Eagles’ attempts to pursue yardage.

There were some issues with the show (no, not Rihanna’s half-time program), but The zombie one. First, there was a big issue with casting. The ‘bad girl’ Kathleen was played by Melanie Lynsky, who will forever be Rose on Two and a Half Men for me. She was most unconvincing as a ruthless killer. Too lispy. Then there’s the soundtrack. Now I know this show is based on a video game, so the music is aimed at a slightly younger demographic. But geez, guys, to call it insipid is to be generous. Moony girl voices, singing songs I know nothing of, add nothing to the proceedings. Often the cleverest shows include songs in the closing credits that appeal to a different age. In this case, they could have gone with the old time pop tune “Kansas City” by Lieber and Stoller, sung by Wilbert Harrison in 1959. But that would be too obvious. A better option would have been to honor Kansas City’s contribution to jazz that began in the 20’s in the Prohibition era. The town was overseen by a political boss named Tom Pendergast. 12th Street and Vine had about 50 jazz clubs, the site referenced in a verse of Wilbert’s song.

KC is where the likes of Count Basie and Charlie Parker got started with their particular form of jazz. So the end of the show could have featured Basie’s “One O’Clock Jump” or maybe “April in Paris”, but it feels like neither of these fit. Instead, I think the Charlie Parker songbook would have been more appropriate. “Bird of Paradise” would likely have been too obscure and too upbeat for the mood. The one I would have picked would have been ‘Don’t Blame Me”, title appropriate to the theme of the show, and just the right tempo.

It’s too bad the show runners aren’t better educated on musical genres apart from current EMO-ish tunes. They missed a real opportunity last night. But speaking of EMO, I had some other thoughts about The Last of Us. Recognizing it’s based on a video game, I started to notice by Episode 5 that everyone dies, some sooner, some later. But everyone except Joel and Ellie die. No one is left behind, waving goodbye. But that is the nature of video games. No! Often that is the goal of a video game: kill everyone. How very sad for young people. No wonder you’re all so jaded and depressed. No wonder these mass shootings occur. No, I’m not suggesting a causative relationship between video games and mass shootings. What I am suggesting is that a hopeless young person often acts out their rage and despair in one last act that will give them notoriety. If you can’t find it in a video arena, why not real life? Whatever that is.

I tested positive for Covid-19 last Sunday, so today is technically day 7 of the illness. My biggest issue now is waking up with a very dry mouth and a dull headache, likely a sign of dehydration. I’ve been drinking plenty of fluids, but the combination of having the heat on and mouth breathing from a clogged nose is causing trouble. Will this ever be over?

I expect to return to work on Tuesday of next week. According to the Department of Health who phoned yesterday, I should be ‘uncontagious’ after seven days. Since I’m off Sunday and Monday, that puts me back to work on Tuesday. I have to go back, no matter what. It’s the principal of the thing that old broads can recover from their illness and carry on. Right?

So is this as good as it’s gonna get? Have I reached a health plateau with nowhere to go but down? If so, that really requires some new thinking about priorities and the future. When do you ever know? If you knew your time on this planet was limited, how would you spend your final, healthy hours? Guess for me that means returning to writing as much as possible. That will certainly require some thought about working. More discussion to follow.

I think I’ll wait until I finish watching all the episodes of Season 3 of Deadwood to discuss it. After all, there’s three or four more to go and the climax of the story has yet to happen. Sounds like a buildup, huh? Sorta. But here’s my point – according to David Milch’s autobiographical book Life’s Work, there was no intention to end the series after Season 3: John from Cincinnati was in the works and he couldn’t write two series at the same time. So Deadwood ended, only to return years later as a movie. Haven’t seen that one yet either. So best to wait to opine about this series that I failed to watch when it was new in the early 2000’s.

Then what’s to talk about? Planning for the New Year and deciding to beat this infernal illness. Is there anything more vital than that at this time? If there is, I can’t think what it might be.

Well, I tested positive for Covid this morning. After Erik got it about ten days ago, I guess my chances of escaping it were about nil. Sadly, I have the flu first, so that made wearing a mask difficult. Now I call home Germ Central, and am plotting GPS coordinates for my ashes to be scattered next to the pond. Just kidding..I hope.

So my perfect attendance record at HD is shattered. Ah well, couldn’t last forever, not at my age, right? I really could use a rest anyway. So much for my career as a paint maven. Tomorrow I have a pre-interview for a construction company. No illusions about how it will turn out, but it’s all copy, right?

If I felt better I’d write a post about Deadwood, the HBO series Aunt Jopie and I have been watching for months. I have lots of thoughts about the series, but right now it’s just not in me to collect those notions. Later.

January 1st of 2023 – seems like it sure took its time getting here. All the reviews of 2022 referenced the war in Ukraine, how badly the mid-terms didn’t go, and the current economic trends. You know – you’ve seen it everywhere in major media. So what will ’23 be like?

Let’s start with the economy: will there be a recession or will we stumble through without it? It’ll be hard to say as there are so many conflicting signs. Not enough workers means the effect on unemployment will likely be negligible. Demographics and lack of immigrants will greatly affect that element. So what’s a recession without a significant increase in unemployment? Wage stagnation? Not likely. Young people will job hop for a nickel an hour raise. I suspect business will finally begin to see that the trend they thought was temporary is here to stay. Wages will stay firm, but inflation will keep us all at about the same place. Do we care? Likely not. What will we care about?

I know what I’ll care about – finally being rid of Covid-19. Erik got it last week. Son-in-law Colter has it this week. Fortunately, granddaughter Kiernan with the dodgy ticker has escaped its wrath so far. So my New Year’s resolution is for the family to remain Covid-free. That’s more a matter of luck than skill now that whichever variant we’re on is so highly transmissible. And there’s no Fauci any more to explain where we’re at. People: we’re on our own. The little dude left for a well-deserved retirement.

Second goal? Reduce my sugar intake and work on improving dental health. Found a new dentist that is terrific, so it’s time to work on making sure good oral health is a top priority. New front teeth for starters. My current ones are 45 years old, so it’s well past time for a change. They were lost in a tank accident about that long ago. No, not a Sherman, a rolling grain feed silo on a rampage. Is there really a correlation between Alzheimer’s and sugar consumption like the pop docs would have you believe? Who knows – just know too much sugar is bad all around. So water instead of soda. Can’t hurt – can only help.

What else? Keep working on my goal of learning to be a better mother. It takes a whole lot of effort and I surely don’t ever succeed at every juncture. But the goal is out there, so I’ll keep working on it. It’s really important.

Anything else people? Oh yeah: pray the war in Ukraine is over soon before any more havoc is wreaked on the innocent families of that country. Vlad the Invader lost the PR war the first day when Zelensky stayed. Putin’s power is slowly coming to an end. Time to get it over with and let Russia find a new way to live, using Ukraine as a model. Otherwise, nobody wins.