I'm Mr. Sunshine. My personal thesis is that we are headed for a massive recession. I'm expecting more and worse financial pain than 2008/9 delivered. Get ready for hell!
I got another little signal that supports my thesis a few days ago.
I was delivering to a gas station in Cheyenne, WY. The clerk was frazzled and I talked him up a little bit. He said a big reason he was so rattled is that they sold more lottery tickets than ever that day. He sold $2,000 worth of lottery tickets. At a few dollars a ticket, that's a lot of tickets. This is a small gas station and they are not used to this kind of volume.
I thought to myself that increased lottery ticket sales are a signal that people are hopeless about ever making it financially and they are playing the lottery just to get a smidgen of hope. I know that's the case for me.
People from Wyoming aren't stupid.
Well, most people from Wyoming aren't stupid. We do have a few potatoes I must admit. But most people aren't stupid and they know full well that they have zero chance of winning the lottery. I know this. But we still play it. We need to.
For most of American history, whether it was true or not, people really believed that hard work and consistent saving was all a person needed to do to become comfortably wealthy one day. It worked for so many Americans.
Things have changed though.
We've watched our parents and grandparents get rugged by the stock market, Social Security and Medicare schemes, and the broken promises of political savior after political savior.
The average American no longer believes that he'll be richer in the future than he is now. Most of us don't think we're going to keep up with inflation. We know our standard of living, on average, is going down.
I had this increased lottery sales as a harbinger of recession as an original idea. A quick Brave search and I see I wasn't the first to think of this. For once my harebrained ideas are backed by SCIENCE (TM).
Here is a link to a study showing increased lottery ticket sales correlate with economic woes. Study:
I play the lottery. I know it's dumb, but if hope only costs $1 per Powerball shot, it's worth it. Luckily for me, I've got true hope that I can earn a few extra smackers from Leo Finance and other Hive DAPPs.
