President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

A lot of people who have been a part of the ecosystem can't even afford those upgrades at this point. It's not like it is a entirely preference choice. Consumer debt probably peaked already -- with rates rising, people are starting to feel the squeeze on their home equity lines and their credit card balances. There may have been one last "fuck it" splurge into the holiday season, but that was into the rising rate environment. That last bit of recklessness is pretty typical of late cycle behavior. People were still trying to flip homes in Las Vegas well into 2008, for example. This time, consumer autos have already started to roll over. We saw it all last year, even though it wasn't what people were posting about on here. We'll see if credit card charge offs start taking off if rates are actually allowed to normalize to any degree beyond where we are -- I say that because I am prepared for the Fed to reverse course, and try to keep the house of cards standing with more debt piled on top of their mess. Markets are betting that that is what is going to happen, because they already have high probability of recession. The Fed is what it is. It is not going to let their creation implode without creating an even bigger crisis first to try to kick the can down the road. It will take negative rates now, and asset buying that blows up their balance sheet into the tens of trillions of dollars. They are going to have to totally hijack the debt markets to price fix them. And that is if they can even buy any amount of time more with debt levels this high. Because they may have no control at this point.

In a place like China, monetary inflation also created a lot of paper wealth over the last few decades. Their misallocated capital has created ghost cities, unused train stations and crazy derivatives products that people piled into to try to get returns in a low-yield world, and are now ticking time bombs. But in a place where the average income is what, $11,000 or $15,000 even with the mammoth increases of the last X years. ... Is it any surprise that Apple has never really dominated that market with $600, $700, $800, $1000, and even $1200 phones? That is a big chunk of income for most people there. As things slow down, it's just going to clock Apple's sales even more. The slow down is because the last spurt of growth was on the back of enormous debt creation, not true market-driven economic activity. With the fake booms that have been engineered in a coordinated way, you get tremendous busts on the way down. But that isn't just the story of where China is, and China has been a small part of the Apple story. It's the fact that they can't grow at this point in the US and other developed markets that Apple is dealing with.