All is Money

Inarguably, it's pretty bad right now.

Businesses are closing, unemployment is rising, and people are scared for their health.

Fortunately, governments are coming to the rescue with a swath of economic bailouts, stimulus checks, and hardship support.

And since we're living through an event that will shape economic policy for generations to come, it's an ideal time to explore what economic responses we want to replicate in the future, as well as which government policies have completely fumbled the economic response of 2020.

By doing this, we should be able to analyze the efficiency of government spending for the purposes of creating a strong economy.

Say you find yourself sitting on top of a vast fortune of funds that were acquired legitimately (or otherwise), and let's just say this vast fortune propels you to billionaire status. Congratulations! You've made it! ... well, sort of. All that’s left to do now is make sure your fortune is secure for generations to come (and not lost as quickly as it was made).

But before you can enjoy the high life, you are going to need to first check-off a few things. Luckily you are in the right place. So, take out your notepad and pen, this is the first video in a two-part series on how to become the master of your finances.

A home is in most developed nations in the world the centrepiece of the family finances, it is simultaneously the largest investment and largest expense of almost any individual lucky enough to break it to this increasingly unattainable market with a massive mortgage.

But is this all for the best? Have houses been conflated with poker chips, as people no longer look at them as shelter for a growing family but rather as an asset to make wild speculative moves on in the hope of equally wild returns.

The property market was at the centre of the last financial downturn in 2008, and as it seems we are on the precipice of another major recession it is probably a prudent time to re-evaluate what is going on with the world of real estate.

To do this we are really going to have to look at things on a few level’s from the macroeconomic factors like over-development and over-leveraging to issues on an economy-wide level which is ultimately going to boil down to answering a few key questions: What does a strong property market mean for the wider economy? Are their better investments out there? And are we over-leveraged right now?

The wild ride of 2020 continued this week with the news that the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un was in a critical condition and that his continued leadership of the nation was not necessarily guaranteed.

This has, of course, generated all manner of speculation given how secretive the hermit kingdom is at the best of times but even more so now as its future really is up in the air.

So, with that, there are a few key issues we must explore here. What will the potential economic outcomes of leadership change be why is it that a dictatorship inherently makes for a poor economy? What the potential outcomes will be for North Korea will be in the future. How countries have dealt with this type of situation in the past. And perhaps initially what is it that would stand in the way of a country like North Korea embracing a modern economic system, what keeps them poor.

Earlier this week we've started seeing articles noting that oil prices have now gone into the negatives (meaning investors are paying to give away their oil).

What is going on here? How does this make sense?

As always with these weird and wonderful things, it's all basic economics. And to properly understand this, we're going to need to look at 3 things: Negative value items, the 2020 oil market, and how oil is actually sold!

Ancient Rome was perhaps the most significant ancient civilization to have existed throughout history, the empire lived for over 1000 years and in that time, it gave us the foundations for our modern society. Democracy, a court-based legal system, Latin languages and alphabet, three-course meals, and perhaps it was one of the first modern economies to move beyond a simple agrarian empire and develop things like modern banking, lending, taxation and yes even financial crisis as we know them today.

In the same way that scholars study a dead language like Latin to discerned the foundation of meaning in our modern dialects economists can study the histories of ancient civilizations like Rome to determine basic economic functions in a time before modern financial systems could skew results and Rome was perhaps the most developed case study we could look at.

Is there such a thing as "good debt"? And how could something good cause so many issues? On top of this is there any way that we could just run an economy without debt and would we be better off for doing so. Well, it turns out we probably can, and in fact, there are many economies around the world today that are developing rapidly while going without this system that we just assume is a given.

If we can critically explore these questions it will offer insight into how our modern financial system works, and why it means that despite our best efforts we are almost destined to go into a recession once every 10 years or so.

This is China, what is still the world's foremost industrial economy has apparently been knocked down a peg as it emerged into the new decade.

There has been wild speculation about companies divesting from the country as a response to the critical flaws in supply chains that have been brought to light. The world today is heavily reliant on China to manufacture almost everything we take for granted in our modern lives.

Report’s of companies desperately looking for supply chain alternatives and speculation about countries that are going to move in to take their place have been all over the news, and perhaps there is some merit to this speculation, but a lot of this may be un-grounded in genuine economics and rather just be the product of things people want to be true.

It looks like this external shock will snowball on top of some underlying faults in the economy to cause an economic crisis that eclipses the 2000’s tech bible and the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008.

Most people of note from policymakers to money managers agree that this is pretty bad and it only looks like it is getting worse ... so why is it then, that amidst all of this chaos and uncertainty the stock market is on the rise again?

Is War Good for The Economy