Teacher Brian Didier

When I was a child our teacher taught us about risk, money and economics in the most interesting way possible: She made us run a pretend farm, as a competition. It was genius, because I still remember it three decades later, which I wouldn't have otherwise. It went like this: Every student had a ‘farm’ on a little piece of paper, with four fields. Every year you had to decide what crops to plant in what fields, and buy them with any available money. Some crops were like wheat; cheap, boring and low-yielding, but dependable. Others were like peas; expensive, super high-yielding if things went right, but unreliable. Get the wrong mix of sunshine and moisture for peas and you'd make a huge loss instead of making bank. We all competed for the most money over a series of ‘years’ and on each year the teacher would roll dice to determine if the weather was hot or cold, rainy or sunny. There were four combinations of weather for your four fields and up to four crops. There was all to play for, and you'd be built-up or broken by the roll of the dice. Some kids played it safe with lots of wheat and no risk. Others bet the farm on peas, peas, peas! Others hedged between sunny crops and rainy crops. With each round, a few of us exited the game and went bankrupt. The eventual winner had taken a lot of risk, but had hedged just a little bit and rode out the bad years. He got lucky, but that's what the game was all about. The teacher could have taught us by lecturing us. She could have gassed on about risk management and economics and market economics and blah, blah, blah… and been ignored by a bunch of teenagers. Instead she made it fun, she made it a competition! And after that short period, a classroom of kids walked out with heads full of strategy, debating how they'd run the farm, who got the most money and how they'd play differently if they did it again. In a little classroom in a Northern English secondary school, a bunch of adolescents had been introduced to capitalism and loved every minute of it! I forgot almost everything else from those years, but that lesson sticks with me. Good teachers really matter. And a little competition goes a long way.

😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

Inflation today can rhyme with the 1970s, but the economy underneath is not the same economy. Back then you had stronger unions, more wage indexation, a younger labor force, lower debt loads, different energy intensity, different CPI methodology, and a Fed that eventually had room to crush demand with very high rates. Today the system is older, more indebted, more financialized, more dependent on asset prices, and far more sensitive to every move in rates. What the chart misses is the balance sheet constraint. In the 1970s, inflation could keep feeding through wages, commodities, and prices because households, businesses, and the government were not carrying today’s debt structure. Now an energy shock hits a system already strained by credit cards, auto loans, mortgages, CRE refinancing, federal interest costs, and falling real wages. That means inflation can turn into demand destruction much faster. It also ignores the CPI construction problem. The 1970s CPI and today’s CPI are not measured the same way, especially around housing. Today’s shelter data relies heavily on OER and rent measures that lag and smooth reality, so overlaying the two periods like they are perfectly comparable is flawed from the start. The 1970s problem was a wage price spiral. Today’s problem is an essentials price squeeze colliding with debt fragility. Energy, freight, food, insurance, utilities, and financing costs rise first. Then households cut discretionary spending. Businesses lose margin. Credit tightens. Hiring slows. The labor market catches down later. Inflation can reaccelerate from here, and the CPI and PPI internals already show pressure. But this economy may not be able to absorb another inflation wave without breaking demand. The better read is not 1970s all over again. It is inflation now, demand destruction later.

Charle BABCOCK the king that you are quoting Ella Langley's "Choosing Texas" lyrics in his filing against Blake LIVELY's 47.1 claims 😭 MIC DROP 🎤