It has always seemed to me that there`s two other things one can do with money besides first consuming and second investing .... in a very general sense, one thing is donating, and the other is hoarding ....one can get into an extensive discussion of each of them......but Id like to suggest that the present environment, incuding the factors that you talk about here, aging demographics, an economy with abundant overproduction capacity, and an expectation for diminishing returns going forward ...is quite conducive of hoarding .... this is some of the motivation behind acquiring real estate, or mineral reserves, or gold or silver or other commodities that can be stored, or fine art, or blockchain derivatives ....the boundaries are fuzzy of course but to some extent the motivation for purchasing any of these is often primarily wealth retention and protection rather than investment and production ....
Right now Im trying to watch worldwide oil inventories, which is difficult since everyone wants to hide what they have .... but 18 months ago in the USA at least storage reached the point of being absolutely full, driving futures prices below zero because there was simply no place to put any more. However since then the production has been consistently less than the consumption and the storage tanks are being steadily drained worldwide.....meantime the people who earnestly believe that the economy can be retrained to work without any oil at all within 10 or even 30 years are betting heavily on shorting oil futures contracts and oil companies, and so the futures are heavily in backwardation and anyone who has a choice between selling oil in storage or drilling new wells is choosing the first choice ....and Im starting to get intrigued by the possibility of a rather unexpected collision when the tanks all get close to empty ......
Inequality, Interest Rates, Aging, and the Role of Central Banks
It has always seemed to me that there`s two other things one can do with money besides first consuming and second investing .... in a very general sense, one thing is donating, and the other is hoarding ....one can get into an extensive discussion of each of them......but Id like to suggest that the present environment, incuding the factors that you talk about here, aging demographics, an economy with abundant overproduction capacity, and an expectation for diminishing returns going forward ...is quite conducive of hoarding .... this is some of the motivation behind acquiring real estate, or mineral reserves, or gold or silver or other commodities that can be stored, or fine art, or blockchain derivatives ....the boundaries are fuzzy of course but to some extent the motivation for purchasing any of these is often primarily wealth retention and protection rather than investment and production ....
Right now Im trying to watch worldwide oil inventories, which is difficult since everyone wants to hide what they have .... but 18 months ago in the USA at least storage reached the point of being absolutely full, driving futures prices below zero because there was simply no place to put any more. However since then the production has been consistently less than the consumption and the storage tanks are being steadily drained worldwide.....meantime the people who earnestly believe that the economy can be retrained to work without any oil at all within 10 or even 30 years are betting heavily on shorting oil futures contracts and oil companies, and so the futures are heavily in backwardation and anyone who has a choice between selling oil in storage or drilling new wells is choosing the first choice ....and Im starting to get intrigued by the possibility of a rather unexpected collision when the tanks all get close to empty ......