Financial, Economic and Social Mood Update (December 1, 2022)
The deceptive bear market rallies in the stock market cannot mask the truth of a very sick economy. Almost 40 percent of small businesses did not pay their monthly rent in October 2022 & almost 40 percent of American households have received help from a food bank within the last 12 months. Up to 70 percent of customer foot traffic business volume at grocery stores is due to government assistance such as the food stamp program (US government acronyms including SNAP, WIC and TANF). Loan demand at Wells Fargo Bank (at one time the country’s biggest mortgage lender) has collapsed by 90 percent year-over-year as of October 2022. The situation at other commercial banks is not much different. The cryptocurrency industry – which is basically a far less regulated segment of the financial industry (it also solicits money from investors and lends that money out in the form of loans) saw its market value collapse by 72 percent as of November 9, 2022 compared to November 10, 2021. The collapse in the market value of individual cryptocurrencies is even more stark – 78 percent for Bitcoin & Tron, 82 percent for Ethereum, 90 percent for Cardano & Polkadot, 91 percent for Ripple XRP, 92 percent for Dogecoin, 95 percent for Solano, 96 percent for Yearn Finance and 100 percent for Terra US Dollar, Mirror Protocol and Frax. In yet another valid indicator pointing to the demise of digital currency is that the billionaire Winkelvoss twins from New York (once the 3rd biggest holders of cryptocurrency in the entire world) have already sold more than 95 percent of their Bitcoin BTC holdings.
This debacle for the value of cryptocurrencies will likely mean 1) new & strict regulation of the industry not unlike commercial bank regulation, 2) the demise of most cryptocurrencies, 3) cryptocurrency companies eventually being very similar to online banks & lenders, and 4) the demise of global governmental plans to replace paper fiat currencies with central bank digital currencies – this final point being a big victory for individual liberty & freedom from government control & manipulation. Cryptocurrency “staking rewards” (this was supposed to work much like bank interest paid on customer deposits) is now dead in the water due to the de-facto bankruptcy of the Genesis company. As mentioned previously, cryptocurrency companies were basically attempting to operate like commercial banks and stock brokers – accepting customer “deposits,” making loans and selling cryptocurrency “coins” much like shares of stock. All of this is now in jeopardy.
And talking about market value, the titans of high technology (among the largest companies on earth) have seen their market value collapse by huge amounts in the last 12 months. Amazon (the largest retailer) has become the first company in world history to lose USD $1 TRILLION in market value – 61 percent of its historical high value. The percentage losses at Meta (Facebook & Instagram) and Neflix (a major competitor to cable & dish TV) are even higher at 80 percent. Meta recently let go of 11,000 employees – total layoffs in the Silicon Valley were 20,000 when one includes Twitter, Stripe, Salesforce, Amazon and Google. The market value loss at Tesla (the largest electric car manufacturer in the world and the 2nd financially strongest auto group in the world after Volkswagen AG) is 65 percent – and keep in mind that without global government subsidies, no electric car company would even exist. The market value loss at Alphabet (Google, the world’s largest Internet search engine, and YouTube – yet another major competitor to traditional TV) is 54 percent. The market value loss at Apple (the largest computer and the largest smart phone company in the world) is as high as 41 percent.
