Our Lives In Upheaval

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Originally published on April 5, 2022 Our Lives In Upheaval [Jeffery Tucker] JEFFREY TUCKER Dear Reader, Last July, I was delighted to find locally raised grass-fed brisket for $2.30 per pound. This was in Texas. What a world! The highest price I had seen in the northeast was $5 per pound, and that was at a fancy shop where people pay more just to consume the status for having shopped there. Eight months later, the price of that same product has more than doubled. And the price at the fancy shop? It was $10. And clearly rising. Or you can compare product-to-product (local and grass fed) and find prices as high as $20 per pound. To check my sense here, I wrote to other friends around the country for their take on brisket prices. I was right: corn-fed is around $10. No wonder people are switching to grass beef. It’s gotten absolutely crazy out there. The Fancy People I did a little anthropological research at Whole Foods yesterday. The prices seem to run about 30-40% higher on most things than you would pay at the minimalist grocery store Aldi. Why do people pay it? These stores offer completely different experiences. Whole Foods gives you a large selection of brands deemed healthy. Everything looks perfectly beautiful. Shopping there provides a sense of prosperity and plenty. It is just a delight. I wondered who among the population is willing to pay for all of this. It’s the bourgeoisie. These people are not rich. They are who we used to call the “upwardly mobile,” until most everyone stopped being upwardly mobile. But the habit of only buying the best, amidst the possible experience, is still with us. These people don’t like paying 40% more now than last summer, but they still can’t shake the habit of blending food shopping with the display of social status. Aldi is famous for just giving you products. One brand. What you need. One kind of egg. One kind of flour. One milk. There is almost no variety. In the meat section, there is just meat, nothing fancy. It’s good, even very good, but no real choice. In fish, there are three kinds and reliably so, but never anything new, so far as I’ve ever seen. To shop there, you give up the sense of brand snobbery entirely. To some people, it feels Soviet; to others (like me) it feels smart. You also give up the feeling of luxury. The check-out scene is the very picture of industrial speed. You get there, fill your basket in record time (amazing how not having to choose saves time), and you are out. So yes, there is a massive time saving, but the entire experience is enough to alarm anyone with a Whole Foods addiction. Here’s the thing. Once the stuff you buy is put away in your cabinets and refrigerator, it’s mostly the same anyway. What people are really paying for with Whole Foods is mostly mental and psychological. They are buying an internal feeling of being successful enough to turn grocery shopping into a life philosophy. Ex-CIA and Pentagon Advisor: “This is How Biden will End the Republic” [Click here to learn more]( Former advisor to CIA and Pentagon Jim Rickards just got his hands on a Congressional document that he believes details Biden’s plan to end the Republic. [He’s urging you to take these five steps now…]( Because if you don’t prepare, you could soon lose your life savings, god-given rights and your constitutional freedoms. [Click here now]( because we can almost guarantee this expose will be censored by Big Tech and the corrupt media. How Inflation Will End Fancy It’s taken too long for people to figure out that they are being robbed. They are reluctant to face the truth. They believe that these price increases are short-term and life will go back to normal. How long will this lie persist? A bit longer. But it won’t last forever. At some point, people are going to realize just how much money they are losing by paying extra for an internal sense of social status. Luxury, at some point, is no longer worth it. Stores like Whole Foods (and we could throw many other institutions in here but let’s stay focussed on groceries) rose up in a unique period of prosperity. Everyone seemed to be climbing higher in socio-economic status. The world was everyone’s oyster. Prices were more or less stable. Generally, the whole economic environment was stable. Entrepreneurs came alive to market lifestyles to people. When you have everything else, buying status seems like a good deal, even if it is fake status. So the American economy commodified social status, and brilliantly so. Our identities were shaped by the brands we wear, the location of our apartments and houses, the label of food products, and the loyalties of our shopping experiences. To be a snob was to live a good life. And it pertained to everything from health to food to wine to cars. People became well trained to avoid the discount shops, the thrift stores, the low-end groceries, and turned toward a life of subscriptions to everything. It’s all in the interest of living a better life—or, if not actually living it, at least consuming products and experiences that made people feel as if their lives were good in every way. This training is now being brutally punished. It’s going to be very upsetting for a whole generation or two, but at some point, people are going to give in and recognize that keeping food on the table, paying the rent and cell phone bill, and buying gas for the car, is ultimately more important than continuing to feed identity perceptions. The downgrade will come as a shock but it will be necessary. Getting Worse What is the Fed doing about all of this? In the last year, M2 has jumped 10%, continuing a policy that has boosted the money supply by 42% in two years, and it is still rising right now. Not all of this is caused by the Fed itself. It is also influenced by the demand for money and the behavior of the banks. But the Fed could influence this through its very small toolkit. One of the best weapons it has against inflation is the federal funds rate. We keep hearing that this is tightening. In short: baloney. Have a look at the federal funds rate over time and observe where we are in this alleged tightening. This is from 1955 to the present. Observe the flat line on the far right. That's a zero-interest policy. That’s our lives today, compared to our prosperous past. [chart] Now let’s zoom in a bit on that flat portion to see what this “tightening” looks like. [chart] See that little tick-up at the very end? That’s it. That’s the crackdown. In other words, the Fed today is holding the only rate it really controls at a level identical to what it was in April of 2020 when this money-printing madness was kicked off! This is not a serious attempt to control the quantity of money. The much-advertised tightening is nowhere near happening yet. And why? It’s pretty simple. The Fed is more afraid of recession than it is inflation. It simply cannot and will not risk it given the timing: the November midterms. It is likely to happen in any case, but the Fed simply does not want its fingerprints on it. In practice, this means that the wild times of the last six months, during which times our stimulus checks were reduced to nothingness, while prices for everything have soared, will continue for the rest of the year. The Trauma of a Generation What is the look and feel of the coming recession? Anyone’s guess but here’s mine: it is going to hit these luxury stores beloved by the bourgeois very hard. Simply put, people will discover that status is too expensive to purchase in times when just getting by emerges as the priority. This is not only going to be an economic change but a cultural and social one too. The new austerity is going to rock the lives of nearly everyone under the age of 50, and upend everything they previously believed by themselves and the world around them. Regards, [Jeffrey Tucker] Jeffrey Tucker Urgent Notice From Paradigm CIO Zach Scheidt! [Click here to learn more]( Hi, Zach Scheidt here… I’m the Chief Income Officer at Paradigm Press. With inflation raging (and showing no signs of coming to an end any time soon), almost everyone in America is feeling the pain in a big way. Which is why, several months ago, I set out on a big mission… my goal was to create a [complete, step-by-step plan to surviving and beating inflation]( one that anyone could take advantage of. Today, after hundreds of hours of research, I’m revealing all of my findings. [Simply click here now to see how to survive America’s deadly inflation crisis](. [Paradigm]( ☰ ⊗ [ARCHIVE]( [ABOUT]( [Contact Us]( © 2022 Paradigm Press, LLC. 808 Saint Paul Street, Baltimore MD 21202. 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