It sucks here in eastern NC. I know by first hand knowledge (i guess this is somewhat first hand knowledge) what is happening and what to expect going forward. My best friend, whom you may remember from my podcast (CL), is good buddies with a guy in the fuel industry here. Yesterday, CL talked to him right after the guy got out of a 2 hour long meeting with top level execs and they basically broke it down this way. For every day the pipelines aren't pumping, it equals 1 week of the craziness at the gas stations, and they are HOPING to get this back going by friday. That means 3 weeks at least of this shit. I saw 2 dudes about fight this morning at the pump. This shit is out of hand. It will come down to things closing and people not being able to drive to work. Plain and simple.
Tim Pool, pretty popular youtuber, mentioned in his morning show today that he'll see insanity in one state -- drive 15 minutes North and it's just normal traffic at the pump and no outages. That was in reference to last night, the State he's in being WV and the more Northern state being MD.
Nonetheless, just drive 15 minutes and go from no fuel and insanity in lines to just regular life -- it's pretty funny.
If there's one thing I learned, long ago, it's not to believe what people say -- even if they really believe it. I remember, back in 2008, I was home shopping. I'd been working with a lender, had pre-approvals all in place -- just looking for the right house. A couple months into this process good old George W. Bush pops up on TV and says OMFGBBQSAUCE BANKS ARE DYING WE NEED 700 BILLION CASH OR WE ALL DIE, NO LOANS, HOUSING MARKET CRASHING!!!!!
The next day my bank was like, sorry, no loans -- we basically want to be sure we get part of that $700 billion handout.
And, so, the lie became real over time. Banks actually did stop lending. As a result the market prices dropped rapidly. The fed dropped rates like mad, which is really about free money for ultra-wealthy -- and it all combined to create the reality of a housing market collapse because people saw 30% of the value of their home vanish and interest rates go from 6-7% to 3-4%.
You could let your house foreclose and buy twice the house for the same payment later. And so millions did exactly that. And the whole scam appeared real.
Mind you, that same excuse that Bush used to claim they were collapsing back then -- that banks were coming to the fed for overnight loans over 200 miiiiiiiillion dollars? Yeah, they've borrowing from the same fund to the tune of more than 2 TRILLION dollars. A night. All the time now. So it was all a lie. A giant lie. But most people still believe it -- so much so that they made real.
www.snopes.com
www.pbs.org
