⚠️ Special Saturday Broadcast - A Storm is Coming... ⚠️

At this point, the power brokers are warning you that a storm is coming. Ignore that information at your own risk!

Key topics:

✔️ This is about preparation, not panic.
✔️ Be careful of normalcy bias, which tells you that everything is fine and will continue to be exactly the same. Well, not necessarily. If you were out in the workforce during The Great Recession, you know better.
✔️ Don't play 24/7 gloom-and-doom news, but DO pay attention to the markets and what's happening in the world.
✔️ When in doubt, talk to a professional financial planner or advisor who can assess your personal financial profile and goals, and help you with your decisions.


Links I discuss in this episode:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-03/corporate-america-is-sounding-the-alarm-on-the-economy

https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/time-to-ditch-single-family-homes-5355172/

https://nypost.com/2022/05/11/goldman-sachs-backed-firms-buy-entire-florida-community-for-45m/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOrS6buynAk

Need more? Email me: https://causeyconsultingllc.com/contact-causey/

Siren courtesy of Pixabay. 

Transcript

0:06

Hello, Hello, thanks for tuning in. It was important to me to carve out some time to do this on the fly, hurry up, get it out on the airwaves emergency Saturday message because things are changing. So fast. News is breaking at a pace that's fast. And frankly, it's not good news. My goal in doing this, as I've said before, is not to make you feel paranoid, or to stir up a spirit of fear. We don't want to live like Chicken Little and assume that the sky is falling or that the zombie apocalypse is about to happen. But we also don't want to bury our heads in the sand either and just play pretend that a bull market or the great resignation is going to last forever. I really think that the tide is turning. And it's important for you to be prepared, not panicked, but prepared. I have been trying on my blog, as well as in these podcast episodes. And anytime I hear from a journalist who wants a quote for me, or they want an interview with me, I have been trying to waive this banner. And I understand Believe me, if I sound a little bit like a doomsday prepper as it relates to the job market, that's fine. I'm willing to wear that badge without any embarrassment whatsoever. It's not about panic is about preparation. It's not about predicting that the world is about to end extreme gloom and doom, the ground is shifting beneath our feet. And some of the people who listen to this podcast we're not out in the workforce during the global financial crisis slash Great Recession of 08 through 2010. That was a tough freaking time. And I I'm just looking at the situation we have now and juxtaposing it with what it was like then the high gas, the inflation having to develop a budget and stick to it and just do whatever you could to survive. It was a little bit like that. And then the poster of the cat that's like, hang in there, only a lot less fun. I mean, you just dug your claws into whatever your situation was, and you did what you had to do to survive. And one of the things that worries me is we're coming off of such a hot streak, where employees and job seekers held all the cards. And they could hold fast and hold the line to whatever it was that they wanted. And the employers had to either say, No, we can't do that and walk away or they had to pony up. But the jobseekers had so many options that it's like, Hey, if you don't want to give me a 30% Pay bump to walk in the door, I just won't. If you don't want to let me work from home every day, then I'll just find someone who will. My concern here is that as the market changes, corporate America is going to set forth a list of demands, that's going to look totally different from what we've experienced during the Great resignation. And I just don't want anybody to be caught off guard. I feel like not to toot my own horn. But I feel like if you read my blog posts, if you follow me on LinkedIn, if you're listening to this podcast, you're already a cut above the average person that's just stuck in normalcy bias, or they have on such insane rose colored glasses that they're just not in tune to reality. So kudos to you for that. And if there's anybody in your life that you feel like, oh, this person thinks the great resignation is going to go on forever. They're just going to Job hop perpetually, and just make more money and more money and more money and more money and there's just never going to be another recession. But feel free to forward this podcast episode to them. And maybe we can make some headway together. Because it's getting dicey out there. I mean, I'm recording this on Friday night. And in taking a look at the side panel of my LinkedIn news. I just want to read the snippets to you. Job growth slows in May time to ditch single family homes. Eating out will cost you more Amazon workers tract to the minute Musk cuts to effect salaried workers. Pulled job offers shock tech workers. Even Sheryl Sandberg was burned out loom another unicorn reveals layoffs. US monkey pox cases on the rise. Policy genius cuts 25% of staff. It wasn't that long ago that the idea of layoffs, hiring freezes and rescinded offers seemed unfathomable especially in the aaaahhhh the ever so glorious tech sector, right. Remember the government saying if you've been made obsolete or you have been told that you're in a non essential line of work learn to code haha. And who's laying off now, tech companies? I mean, does that not worry anybody else because I'm looking at this going this is not, this is not a good sign, this is not a good sign. And then when you look at the overlay of where homes are grossly and egregiously overpriced now, compared to what it was like in 2007, the maps are virtually identical. Does that not scare anybody else? I mean, when you think about people who have gotten into these homes at exorbitant prices, the property taxes are gonna go up the homeowners insurance, flood insurance, et cetera, going to all go up? What if they get laid off? When you look at the number of households in America living paycheck to paycheck? And how few people have enough in their savings account to ride out even a minor emergency of let's say, $500 or less? What are these people going to do? And believe me, I understand this notion of well, we'll just continue to mutiny. You know, if Elon Musk says, come back to Tesla, or there's the door, I want everybody, but in seat in the digital panopticon, or it's your job, we'll just assume that you don't want to be here anymore, and you'll be terminated. Believe me, guys, I've seen every recruiter that wants to grab a little bit of flash in the pan credibility on LinkedIn going well, they'll just all resign, my company's happy to hire all these Tesla refugees, you just come on over to us and it's like, really, really? And how long is that going to last? I know that it's not in my nature to get on these broadcasts and to sound pessimistic. It's like Tony Robbins says you don't go out to your garden, see weeds and say there are no weeds. There are no weeds long along in law. You stooped down and you pull the weeds. Now you don't have to focus on the weeds, to the exclusion of seeing that you have beautiful tomatoes and peppers and melons and carrots and cucumbers like you don't want to focus just on the bad. But it does you no good to say there are no weeds, right? I mean, if you get on LinkedIn and you see this side panel and you go, oh, there are no layoffs. There are no hiring freezes. There are no rescinded offers. What planet are you living on? I mean it wake up. Earlier today, I got a news notification on my phone from I think it was Bloomberg. I'll drop a link to it in the write up for this episode. So you can read it for yourself. You can see that I'm not exaggerating anything here. And the headline was corporate America turns up volume on warnings about economy. The buy lines read long ways to go to fight inflation. R H CEO tells investors, retailers caution piles on warnings from bank CEOs this week. I want to read a little bit of this for you now. Corporate America is ratcheting up its warnings about the US economy. Executives from Jamie Dimon and Elon Musk to Gary Friedman, the head of furniture retailer RH all cautioned investors this week to be wary of an economic downturn, after months of strong consumer spending and supply chain improvements. And that's maybe a little dubious broker supply chain improvements. Some of the country's most outspoken corporate leaders have started intensifying alarms about decades high inflation and impending interest hate interest rate hikes, excuse me, and quote. So I'm gonna break in here long enough to say that, you know, the interest rates have already gone up so much. And when you look at what someone's purchasing power is, if they have, say, a two and a half percent interest rate on their mortgage, and in comparison to what their purchasing power is five and a half percent, even though you may be thinking well, three percentage points, it doesn't, you know, like on the surface of it, that doesn't sound like a lot. It is, you know, that can amount to hundreds of 1000s of dollars that you lose in purchasing power. So if we are yet again, going to see more interest rate hikes, I mean, where is it going to go? Some of the pundits that I follow are saying it's going to easily get to 10 or 11% interest rate for a conventional mortgage. I mean, Wow, just wow, this I mean, I sort of feel like that's all that I can say. I want to skip just a little further down in the article and I'll read again, Goldman Sachs Group, President John Waldron took up the theme the next day calling the current economic climate, one of the most complex he's ever experienced. The confluence of the number of shocks to the system to me is unprecedented. Waldron set in quote. I've talked before about George Carlin and the big club. It's one big club And you and I are not in it. But when you're talking about these huge global conglomerates and financial too big to fail banking institutions, there are real power brokers at those companies, people who are in the 1% people who are in the one big club that you and I are not a part of, that get to dictate the rules to the rest of us. And if they're telling you, yeah, this is the most complex situation we've ever seen, a hurricane is coming. You know, we don't know if it's going to be a small one, you know, more like a tropical storm or if it's going to be like Hurricane Sandy. We don't know yet. But you need to brace yourself and prepare, you know, then you have Elon Musk saying he's got a super bad feeling about the economy. And he's going to cut like, what 10,000 jobs or something from Tesla, this on the heels of his big announcement that everybody needed to come on back to the office, no more remote work, any any son on Twitter pretend to work somewhere else. Workplace feudalism, workplace, feudalism, and it's fine is right bear like, you know, I'm just going to assume that for all this time you've been at home, you've just been screwing off and having one big party, but the party's over now. Why would he feel empowered to do that? Well, it's not difficult to guess they're telling you what's coming. They are telling you what is coming down the pike, and whether it's going to be a minor recession, a market contraction of some kind that goes on for a few months. And we really, you know, we feel like we got a gut punch for six months, or whether it's going to be something really bad, like the global financial crisis that went on for a couple of years. We don't know that part where it is not being telegraphed to us what's going to happen, but they are telling you very clearly, that something, something wicked this way comes in the midst of this depressing news about the economy. There's this article published on LinkedIn called Time to ditch single family homes. I'll also drop a link to it so you can check it out for yourself. You can see I'm not I'm not making this up. This is real. The editor Melissa Cantor, in the little blurb writes, How does the housing crisis end? Some say the fix to soaring real estate prices is for Americans to give up on the single family dream? It's a question that's playing out in real terms in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, which has a rare opportunity to build affordable housing on 536 acres it received from an anonymous donor Time reports. But despite the link between density and affordability, many residents don't want to live in apartments or multifamily units. I would take a very, very small house, one person said during a community meeting and quote, also bear in mind that not long ago, there was an article published in the New York Post reporting that Goldman Sachs had bought an entire Florida community for $45 million, an entire community. It's a rental home community in Florida, and they bought this entire development for 45 million and Goldman Sachs did that. I mean, here we have this article on LinkedIn, saying that okay, well, I mean, is it possible that we could fix soaring real estate prices by you just simply giving up on the idea of having a single family home? It's almost like victim blaming, like, you know, I've talked before about my decision to strategically quit my real estate search. And one of the things that I encountered over and over again, were baby boomers, I'm a Gen Xer, I don't want to get a bunch of hate mail about this. I don't walk around saying, okay, Boomer and all that. In my observation, it was baby boomers that wanted to use their house as a 401 K or an ATM. Some of them had made crap, financial decisions, and they wanted somebody else to bail them out. Or they just got greedy. They saw the market and they thought, Oh, this is perfect. You know, I'm not saying saved a dime toward retirement. I was thinking of the grasshopper that saying all summer, I haven't saved a dime for my retirement, but it's okay. I'll just go ahead and put like a million dollar price tag on my home. Now the home is actually worth about 250. But I'm gonna put a million dollar price tag on it, and then I'll have a retirement and you know, so Well, for the guy that buys it and then gets completely screwed. Was greed involved in this inflated housing market? Of course it was. Do I think the solution to that is for everyone to just in unison give up on the single family home dream? No. I mean, can't you just sort of hear Klaus Schwab saying you will own nothing and you will be happy when you read a headline like that? How can you not I mean is the first damn thing that I thought of, if you go to the podcast episode that Russell Brand recorded, he has an episode on YouTube, they're called you will owe nothing and be happy. Dave owes 2022, the great reset. And when you go to watch that on YouTube, there's this context bubble that pops up underneath it about your go to Wikipedia and read about the World Economic Forum forum, because you know, you'll be able to see that it's been the focus of conspiracy theories. And it's like, well, wait a minute isn't a conspiracy theory, if you're using an actual quote, if the person actually said this quote, and you're just repeating the fact that they said the quote, I'm not really sure how that constitutes a conspiracy theory. But anyway, you know, just all give up, just just give up on the dream of ever owning a home, it's going to be out of your reach, and Goldman Sachs will buy up these communities and they'll start getting acreage, you know, so you can't farm anymore. They'll make sure that they scarf up all the acreage and start crapping out, tract housing or apartment complex is on it, and you won't own anything, and you'll live in a hovel, but you know, that's okay. So it's like, just do not get some kind of normalcy bias. And think that what has happened in the great resignation, where you can job hop over and over and over and over again, and constantly get these exorbitant pay raises every time you jump, it's not going to happen. And I'm not saying that, that it's anybody's fault. I mean, everybody looks at a situation like the baby boomers I'm talking about that wanted to use their houses a 401k, or an ATM machine. People look around and go, Well, all right. I mean, they're doing it. Why should I? The same thing with asking for more money? Hey, everybody, there's a labor shortage. Why should I not job hop? Why should I not go pursue a better option? And why should I not get paid for it? So I'm not sitting here saying like, Oh, jobseekers got greedy? No, it companies should not have offered a pay rate that they couldn't afford in a sustainable manner. But now we are seeing what has happened when companies got FOMO, sort of like somebody who bought a house at an inopportune time, and they grossly overpaying for it, or they waived the home inspection, they got caught up in the fever, and now they're in a house, that's a complete piece of crap, where everything's broken, and they can't afford to fix it. Some of the companies got themselves into that same situation, they got into a bidding war over a great candidate, and they paid the person a rate that they actually can't afford to pay that person in the long haul, which is scary. But I mean, I think that's where we're at. Deep, deep, heavy sigh. So keep an eye out on what's happening in the markets, if there's any way that you can suss out, if you're in an area of the economy, that's pretty stable, if you're in a company that's stable if your position is stable, do so I know that sometimes people really don't want to ask tough questions, or they, they, they want to just play pretend it's almost like if I don't acknowledge that something is going on in the economy, or I don't acknowledge that something's going on within this firm that I'm working for, then then I don't have to face it. I can just ignore it. I can just go on and everything will be fine. And, and it'll be okay. Well, I don't want to worry myself unnecessarily. And my goal in recording this emergency broadcast is not to worry, you either I don't want somebody freaking out going, the sky is falling and we're all going to die and it's the apocalypse. No, I don't think that at all. I do think a storm is coming. And you don't have to take my word for it. You can read the actual power brokers of this country telling you that a storm is coming now whether it's going to be a little tropical storm that comes and goes and that's okay, or whether it's going to be a superstorm, you know, category five hurricane that is really painful for quite some time to come. That part we don't know. But please, please don't get caught off guard. If you need to talk to a professional financial planner or advisor if you're planning to retire. And now you don't know if that's a good idea. If you're thinking about job hopping one more time and you're not sure if that's a great idea. Talk to a professional financial planner or financial advisor. Don't try to wing it. Don't try to hope for the best like really make good sound decisions and pay attention to the markets. Now I'm not a proponent of listening to 24/7 gloom and doom news. Playing that crap. 24 hours a day will make you feel horrible. You will go into a panic mode you absolutely will shift out of you know what I'm prepared. If a poop storm hits I can handle it. I have some food put away I have some money in savings. I know that I can survive I'll be alright my family will be taken care of I think will make it you go from preparation into the sky is falling and we're all gonna die. All right, and you're not in this space to make good coherent rational decisions when you're panic stricken and freaked out. Talk to professionals if you need to keep an eye on the market. Pay attention. Please. I'm begging you everybody that's listening. Don't be caught off guard. I'll see you in the next episode.