Economy
Last week the unemployment rate in the United States peaked at 14.7%, the highest since the Great Depression. Jobless numbers don’t look like they will get better in the near future.
As of May 6, the public debt in America reached a staggering $25.1 trillion. Consumer debt also hit a new record at $14.3 trillion with credit card debt falling. Credit card usage in March was down. However, education and auto loans were up. Over 4 million homeowners are not paying their monthly mortgage, which represents about 8% of U.S. home loans.
Some New York City landlords called for a property tax strike in response to combat recent rent strikes. The Change.org petition went after politicians who’ve been enabling tenants to not pay rent. There was one New York City landlord that made a viral video on TikTok about confiscating her tenant's packages until they pay rent, which is against the law. She later said it was joke.
The U.S. Treasury launched a 20-year bond trying to cover excessive government borrowing in an attempt to float the debt with a long term payment plan. “In light of the substantial increase in borrowing needs, Treasury plans to increase its long-term issuance as a prudent means of managing its maturity profile and limiting potential future issuance volatility,” said Brian Smith, Treasury’s assistant secretary for federal finance.
A $4 trillion reason why negative interest rates would destroy money market funds. “Nobody at the Fed wants to take the fed funds rate negative given the side-effects on banks and money funds,” said Krishna Guha, vice chairman at Evercore ISI.
White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow thinks a PPP small biz infusion 3.0 may be needed. Round two of the Paycheck Protection Program that was recently launched has provided over two million loans worth over $175 billion.
Goldman Sachs analyst Will Meade said the worst is coming by the end of the year for equities. He is predicting a 40% decline for stocks. Meade thinks current market conditions are eerily similar to the 2000 dot com bust. Not to mention that Warren Buffett was hoarding cash back in 2000, and the Oracle of Omaha is stockpiling billions in cash now. Mead gives the following advice on moving everything to cash, “Anything liquid and of value, sell now: art, coins, handbags, stamps, extra cars.”
Many of American’s big tech titans have become beneficiaries during the lockdown. Collectively for Q1, revenues for Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, and Microsoft came in at almost a quarter trillion dollars.
Subscription services are experiencing skyrocketing membership during the Covid-19 lockdown.
An economic expert, batting a thousand in calling recessions, thinks this one will be over by this December. Duke professor Campbell Harvey thinks it's all about the “inverted yield curve.” Harvey first identified the inverted yield curve’s predictive power in his 1986 doctoral dissertation.
Investing
Why Warren Buffet is an investing legend. Since he took over Berkshire Hathaway, his multinational conglomerate holding company in 1965, it’s had a massive 2,744,062% increase by the end of 2019.
According to one investment strategist, the immediate future will be a zigzag pattern for the stock market. The S&P 500 could fall lower than March’s low in the next half year.
Many companies are suspending their dividends, but Forbes is reporting there are some strong dividends still out there and are paying between 5% and 10%.
Charles Schwab is going after Robinhood, Stash, and SoFi Invest as it plans to offer clients the ability to trade fractional shares in June.
Hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer is bullish on gold. This is a good looking chart forecast for the precious metal.
Portfolio manager Mark Spiegel, advises investors going long to buy an S&P 500 index fund and some gold to hedge against inflation.
Big shot investor Paul Tudor Jones is loading up on bitcoin as a hedge against inflation, as it reminds him of the role gold played in the 1970s. Crypto Twitter is loving Jones’ purchase. You can get a summary of Jones’ investment thesis here.
Global Macro Investor CEO, Raoul Pal, is EXTREMELY bullish on Bitcoin making the case for a “vastly higher” BTC price. Pal shares the following chart.
And then there is economist Jim Rickards, an EXTREMELY harsh critic of Bitcoin. This is probably the worst case I’ve ever heard against crypto.
Entertainment and media giant Disney reported a decrease of 91% in profits for fiscal second quarter and canceled its July dividend. It’s estimated that the House of Mouse is losing about $30 million a day. But this investor keeps buying more when DIS goes on sale.
ExxonMobil reported its first quarterly loss in 32 years.
I can’t stop talking about the free fractional shares that Stash is giving away daily. I’ve built a spreadsheet of all the companies I now own thanks to Stash, $14.04 and counting!
I’m an amateur investor trying to keep up. I’m not doing balance sheet trend analysis yet and it may be some time before I’m running my own factor regressions, but Alpha Architect has opened their Factor Investing Data Library for free. Their library has over 300 factors to choose from.
Personal Finance
Homeowners may want to grab this emergency lifeline before it’s gone.
Looking for a side hustle? Here are 10 franchises that can be run part-time.
Here are some 20 year olds hustling and building wealth. And this 20 year old sees the value of risk. While this 20 something is talking about cash flows.
This eBay flipper already doubled her stimulus check.
A former attorney has made $7,000 in bank account signup bonuses in one year.
Escape debt, invest smarter by thinking like this.
Four smart moves if you've racked up credit card debt.
SoFi is giving away $2,500 to 20 lucky parents to help with the cost of their child’s college education. Enter to win by 5/16/20.
Cryptocurrency
There ain’t enough Bitcoin to satisfy demand.
While billionaire Warren Buffett is sitting on a pile of cash, he could take advice from professional crypto investor Dan Morehead and reconsider cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin had eight straight weeks of gains.
Square purchased $306 million Bitcoin in Q1 2020.
Fortune 500 companies like IBM and Microsoft are buying Ethereum.
77.7% of the outstanding Ethereum supply hasn't moved in half a year, 57.6% hasn't changed hands in a year, and 31.6% has remained unmoved for a full two years.
58% of Ethereum (ETH) transactions are for less than $20.
Biconomy brings gasless transactions to Ethereum.
Like me, many of you have earned $10 worth of free Orchid (OXT) cryptocurrency through Coinbase. You can earn an additional $40 of Orchid by sharing your Coinbase referral link with four other people. Doctor Of Credit, an amazing source for deals and money making/saving ideas, is allowing you to share your OXT Coinbase referral link, but hurry they are locking comments in a few days.
Uphold launches Stablecoin Center to buy stablecoins and earn interest. “Stablecoins provide genuine utility and we’re delighted to be making them easier and more cost-effective to access,” explained Uphold CEO, JP Thieriot.
Will green mining save the environment?
Learning
David Perell, the "The Writing Guy", believes paying thousands of dollars for a college degree can be overrated in many fields. Learn to write and self-publish, here’s one platform out of thousands of options out there. Perrel says, building stuff and writing essays is the best way to educate yourself.
Want to write fiction? Here’s how to create a powerful character arc (worksheet included).
Buying real estate seems like it went mainstream about twenty five years ago with Robert Kiyosaki’s popular book, Rich Dad Poor Dad. Besides investing in REITs (I do own some IRT in my retirement portfolio) I will never go into real estate investing for obvious reasons. This guy is with me on REITs. And yes, I know tremendous wealth has been accumulated owning real estate. Check out this Twitter thread targeting first time property buyers and ongoing property ownership costs in South Africa.
Cornell University has a free distribution service and an open-access archive for over 1.6 million scholarly articles including quantitative finance, statistics, systems science, and economics.
Be a producer, not a consumer. Think more!
Are you building an online business? Sahil Lavingia, founder and CEO Gumroad, summarizes going from bricks and mortar to the web.
Twitter allows you to access the brightest investing minds...for free. Google/YouTube have enough free information to lead you towards financial freedom.
Apparently text message courses have an extremely high completion rate. So there is a platform for that.
Free Kindle Edition of Franklin Roosevelt: A Captivating Guide to the Life of FDR on Amazon.
Video Games and Multimedia
Video game sales continue to spike.
EA is teaming up with Google’s Stadia.
Animal Crossing keeps crushing it, as it sets a 72 hour Nintendo sales record. Nintendo keeps selling a ton of Nintendo Switch and Switch Lite consoles. You can even mine Bitcoin in Animal Crossing for fun. And is Animal Crossing a game or a gig? An interior design service was launched in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, offering more than $50 an hour.
Twitch is trying out reality TV
In March, Fortnite surpassed the US population with 350 million registered players.
Roblox has 2 million developers.
GO Battle League Season 2 begins tomorrow, May 11 at 1:00 p.m. PDT (GMT −7).
Pokemon Go Trainers are cheating in GO Battle League.
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Disclaimer
Ideas and information presented in my articles are for educational purposes only and not intended to be investment advice. Investments in the stock market and cryptocurrency could be speculative and volatile, and result in money loss. Always conduct your own research. You may want to obtain independent legal, financial, taxation and/or other professional advice in respect to any information from this content. I may mention products or services and some of those products are affiliate links that reward me.
