[?fäld?räl, ?fôld??rôl]
NOUN
falderal (noun)
trivial or nonsensical fuss.
dated
a showy but useless item.
There's a lot of this folderol afoot. Much of it has been with us for quite some time. Some of it is recycled. Some is new.
Let's start with the dollar index or the Dixie (^DXY) as it is commonly known to the slithering creatures who “manage money.”
It's a joke. The dollar index is a construct made popular by some delusional specialists in the business of fractional reserve currency debasement. What they call "money" is not really that. It's currency at best, and, whether it's denominated in US$, yen, euro, yuan, pounds or loonies, it's value is approaching toilet paper status.
Anybody over the age of 50 recognize the traits of a depreciating currency, as they've lived with it continuously since birth. What used to buy a bag of apples in 1975, buys one, maybe two, today. The apples aren't bigger or better. They've pretty much stayed the same. What's changed is the purchasing power of the currency.
A 15 ounce box of Oreo cookies was 55 cents in 1974. You can buy a plastic package of Oreos for about $4.00 nowadays, but the net weight is probably some weird number like 13.2 ounces. You pay more, you get less.
What the dollar index does is compare the US dollar to a basket of other fiat currencies, i.e., backed by nothing, printed to infinity, eventual value approaching zero. It rises and falls in line with the varied perceptions of the rest of the gang, which are:
No, I didn't see gold or silver in there either, which is the point. Comparing the US$ to the yen or the pound, or comparing the loonie to the krona is like comparing rotting apples to rotting peaches, or rotting onions. There's a lot of rot and stench, but little value. Leave them be for a while and they'll be worth nothing other than more scrap for the landfill or the compost heap.
What the dollar and the rest of the fiat gang needs to be compared to is gold or silver or oil or apples or some other commodity that has been around long enough that it has some recognized value. Gold is a good choice. In 1971, the last time the US$ was tied to it, gold was $35 an ounce. It's been bouncing around $1800 lately and was over $2000 recently.
The gold Eagles your grandfather held in 1971 or thereabout were nice items. Today, they're priceless. You could have bought 10 one-ounce gold coins with $350 in 1971. That same money will get you a little less than 2/10ths of an ounce, if you're lucky. The gold didn't change. The dollar did. It lost value, about 98% of it. So, if somebody asks your opinion of gold and the US dollar, throw them a buck and tell them that's your "two cents."
If the dollar index isn't a bad enough measure of value, consider the government's use of GDP to measure economic activity. According to what the great minds in government and finance tell us, GDP measures the monetary value of all finished goods and services made within a country during a calendar year. Everything. New cars. Dental work. Your kid's lawn mowing. All of it. And that's all well and good, but it's fake as all get out because it's measured in dollars, and they're worth less and less every year.
So, if economic output (GDP) was $1.073 trillion in 1970, and a shade over $21 trillion in 2019 - before the pandemic - it sure looks like the United States has grown by leaps and bounds. There should be 800-story buildings, trains that travel at the speed of light, and everybody should be rich.
We're not.
The economy has improved somewhat, maybe, over the past 50 years, but is it 20 times better now than it was then?
Doubtful. We don't even have discos any more. In some ways, the country has gotten worse. Look at roads, bridges, the power grid. Most of that stuff hasn't been updated since the 1950s or even before. Infrastructure has stagnated. The rest is just inflation, or, devaluation of the dollar.
It's a nice day when the government announces some quarter of GDP was up three percent. However, failing to tell you that inflation was five percent exposes the fakery in their numbers. The country has been going backwards for at least the past 20 years, probably longer. Sure, we have the internet, smart phones, better automobiles. But, we're still building houses out of wood, concrete, and recently, plastic, and prices for those have gone through the roof (pun intended). The median price of an existing home was $303,900 in January, 2021. In 1971, the same house would have set one back about $26,000.
We've come a long way, baby.
And then there's our current curse, the COVID-19 pandemic, which, if chart-reading hasn't gone out of fashion, appears to have run its course. Date from the Covid Tracking Project shows testing, cases, hospitalizations, and deaths all plummeting, by anywhere from 30 to 70 percent.
For instance, the number of cases reported for a day fell from a peak of 295,121 on January 8 to 52,530. A majority of states are reporting less than 1000 new cases a day. Many, like Arkansas, Wyoming, Idaho, Iowa, Nevada, and New Mexico are well under 500 with deaths and hospitalizations falling in similar fashion.
This thing is over. People are done with it. We have vaccines. We've socially-distanced. We've worn masks. Sometimes two of them at once. We've isolated, lock-downed, sacrificed for the greater good, skipped work, kept kids at home, got jabbed with vaccines, there’s herd immunity, and we're done.
Wait, wait, wait a minute. Dr. Fauci tells us we're not going to be “out of the woods” until fall.
What is this guy smoking? This delusional, self appointed demigod of disease says that even people who have been vaccinated have to continue wearing masks and social distancing. What? Why then even bother with the vaccine? On the other hand - or side of his mouth - Fauci says that teachers don't have to be vaccinated to go back to work safely.
Yes. No. He's not confused. He's a fraud. He should take a permanent lid with the fake president. We're done with idiots.
Apparently, we're done with tech stocks, too. Look at that drop on the NASDAQ. Probably more where that came from.
At the Close, Monday, February 22, 2021:
Dow: 31,521.69, +27.37 (+0.09%)
NASDAQ: 13,533.05, -341.42 (-2.46%)
S&P 500: 3,876.50, -30.21 (-0.77%)
NYSE: 15,340.47, -22.22 (-0.14%)
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