Happy Thanksgiving 🦃 and Hanukkah 🕎 and welcome to the WalletBurst monthly newsletter for the month of November 2021. Let’s dive in!
🇺🇸 For my history buffs, Morgan Housel’s essay How This All Happened is a great brief but thorough economic history of the United States from World War II to the present. A key trend that Morgan traces is the relative equality among social classes from the 1940s thru 70s to the rising inequality in the decades that followed, and how this happened. Morgan points out that it’s not all doom and gloom though, as advances in healthcare, communication, transportation, and civil rights have had widespread benefits, and workers have gained power as unemployment is the lowest it’s been in decades.
🖨 I enjoyed Lyn Alden’s detailed piece titled: Does QE Cause Wealth Inequality? Lyn is a well-respected investment analyst in the space and she always does a great job distilling macro trends down into positioning your investments as an individual. The TL;DR from her analysis is that to position against our devaluing currency, choose hard assets like commodity producers, value and growth-at-a-reasonable-price stocks, real estate, global stocks, precious metals, and bitcoin.
🏠 Here’s a cool visualization courtesy of howmuch.net showing the salary needed to buy a house in the 50 largest US metro areas. In San Jose, CA you need a household salary of about $255k to afford a house, while in Pittsburg, PA you only need to make $38k annually to afford a house. It would be interesting to see these normalized for local pay, for example what percentile income do you need to afford a house in your area?
⚡️ Over on Twitter, Sahil Bloom posted two great tweet storms that I wanted to share.
The first is about the Cantillon Effect, which helps to explain why low interest rates benefit asset owners the most in our modern financial system:
Building on this, Sahil then proposes an interesting idea to combat the rising inequality as a result of the Cantillon Effect, with what he calls The Baby Grant. What I find most interesting about The Baby Grant is that it would cost about $36 billion per year, which is only about 0.5% of the total federal spending.
New on WalletBurst.com
End Note
Thanks for reading! If you’re enjoying my newsletter, I’d love it if you shared it with a friend or two. You can send them here to sign up.
And if you have any feedback on my site or come across any interesting personal finance content, send it my way to andrew@walletburst.com. I love to hear from my readers/users!
Have a great day,
Andrew ✌️