I have a web portal set up to serve news from various sources. This morning was the layoff reporting day I guess. Articles each on Tesla, Netflix, a large aluminum producer in KY, Redfin and Compass, and Coinbase. Reading one article occasionally on a layoff is normal, 5 articles in one morning is a first. Makes me wonder if this is the beginning of cracks forming in the market that will become more common as we move forward. Inflation, higher interest, and inflated labor costs converging to make it difficult for companies to survive. Am I being paranoid or are you seeing a trend as well?

Any industry that is reliant on cheap money is vulnerable now.

yep. locally, all counties and surrounding counties were up .5% on unemployment. This isn't 2008/9... but it has started. The economy is cooling... somethings are still inflating in price... but others are coming down (lumber).

How bad the slow down will be on Main Street is an unknown and many CEOs are playing the downsize game ahead of time. The real impact on real estate market place values will not be for another six months......but leg one is dropping as I called it. The stock market is in bear territory.

I follow macroeconomics a lot these days. The Federal reserve is under pressure to fight inflation, and they know that we're past due for a market crash. They want to be able to lower rates in the future to respond to the next crash, but rates were already too low to go much lower.

So the Fed doubled the rates over the course of the last year. That means the same amount of purchases made on credit cost way more, because the interest payments are doubled. In turn this means that people and companies relying on debt to finance spending have to spend way less.

So how do they do that? They cut out all the spending they don't need. They cut Netflix subscriptions. They cut Airbnb rentals. Then companies that supply those luxuries have to lay off half their workforce, and the people laid off have to cut their expenses too.

People sell off investments to pay bills, and that drops the price of stocks. Then people who bought stock on margin get margin calls, and their selling off drops the price even lower.

The U.S. economy is already in recession, but the recession hasn't been announced yet. When people are more worried about the recession than they are about inflation, rate cuts and stimulus spending will happen again, but these measures will cause more inflation, and may not be enough to reverse the recession. Also watch out for the effects of more "food shortages" this fall, which will drive up the price of food, and thus cut discretionary spending even more.

"they are not looking to raise rates now so they can lower later"

Really? You live in Texas. Did you ever tour the Federal Reserve museum at 2200 N Pearl St, in Dallas? They have an exhibit in the museum on using interest rates to influence the economy.

The point of the exhibit is to teach that the Fed has to constantly adjust rates to keep economic activity from getting either too hot or too cold without overshooting the mark. It has a clear plastic pneumatic tube, and the public is invited to adjust the airflow in the tube to keep an object levitating in the center without overshooting in either direction.

For years the Fed was toying with the idea of negative interest rates, but one of the problems with negative rates is that people can just take their money out and store it as cash. Switching to CDBC will be a way to cure this, and the Fed is now pushing CDBC.

Typo. I put the letters in the wrong order.

CBDC = Central Bank Digital Currency

It would use the same kind of blockchain technology as Bitcoin, but would be issued by Central Banks and be a replacement for existing currencies. In the case of the United States, a CBDC would be issued by the Federal Reserve, and be a replacement for the dollar.

"Advantages" are that:

* The money could not exist outside of computers, and therefore pulling your money out of the system and storing it under your mattress would be impossible. That means no avoiding negative interest rates.

* Transactions are only possible trough updating distributed legers, and therefore no transactions that the government can't see.

* No counterfeiting.

* No irreversible or untraceable wire transfers.

* No employing someone off the books and hiding payments from the government if they're paid with CBDC.

* No selling a used boat and taking a payment for $4,500 but writing $1,000 on the bill of sale to cut taxes.

* The central government giving money to people, taking it away, or freezing assets can be done almost instantly from a computer terminal in Washington no matter where in the world the target is.

If you watched what happened with funds sent to the "Freedom Convoy" in Ottawa, or what happened with the Russian Government and payments through SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications), you can see that CDBC solves a great number of problems for the U.S. Government.

Before someone says the Fed isn't working on this: newsflash, they already wrote the software and tested it. They plan to roll it out, but are giving people a while to get used to the ideal. Less than two weeks ago Fed Chairman Jerome Powell announced:

You really think they were stupid enough to believe that inflation would be "transitory"?

First inflation wasn't happening, then it was transitory, then it was caused by COVID, then it was a good thing that we should all welcome, then it was caused by Putin. If a tenant comes up with five totally different and contradictory reasons for not paying rent, do you think they're confused about where the rent money went, or do you think they're trying to bs you?

Do you think crypto-currency ponzi schemes make it harder for the Fed to foist CBDC on the public? I think the bursting of the ponzi schemes, and plummeting prices for Bitcoin gives them an opportunity.