Inflation is hurting many!

Thanks Rich. That whole post was a great read. And I can confirm - what I do is stupid - I play in the hope of winning. I'm pretty sure my dopamine levels don't move when I buy the tickets. More on that later. I went back to playing on a whim years ago - and won about $100 on my first ticket! I'm sure I've given that back quite a few times. You know what they say about insanity - doing the same thing over and over, hoping for a different result? That's me.

And I KNOW better. Here, the Lottery Commission is required to show you odds on every prize offered. I won about $30 on a $1 ticket some time back. Out of curiosity I looked up the odds of winning that $30 prize --- around 7,000 to 1! I get small prizes occasionally - teasers -$10 here, free tickets there. I think MY dopamine levels rise when I think about what I'd do with the BIG prize... which I'm never going to win, of course. But yeah, there's some fun in a 'what if.' And I can afford it. As far as money goes, it doesn't really matter if I play or not. So I play. If it mattered, I wouldn't. This way, if I can't "live the dream," I can at least get a ticket and fantasize about the result - and my imagination is a pretty good place....

Thanks again for an illuminating piece.

 

I like Warren Buffet's observation which goes something like this: If you can't explain how an investment generates wealth don't invest.

 

That's why he bought himself a train set for Xmas.

 

I like many of Warren Buffett's observations - and the fact that he's very, very disciplined, knowledgeable and thoughtful about what he does. He's an extremely wealthy person, who did not make his money by screwing others, so I think he's earned his train set, at the very least. I'm not even on the same planet as him, wealth-wise, yet I have eight guitars. If I can do that, he's more than entitled to all the train sets he can find room for.

 

The train set, as I expect you know full well, is the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railroad which cost a mere $44 billion. Big, yes, but a train set is a train set I always say!

 

Did it come with the hat?

 

No - honest, I had NO idea! You got me good, this time, Nosborne! I thought it was just a folksy and charming story. Maybe .... a Lionel train set?
Now, I'm not just pleased that Warren got some toy he wanted. I'm in AWE!

 

AAAND suspenders!

 

I don't think he can fit it into his basement but then again, I've never seen Warren Buffet's basement...

Seriously though, Buffet bought an investment that's pretty easy to understand basically how it creates wealth and how it makes a profit. No one has ever managed to explain to me how buying bitcoin does either one.

 

The numbers are in this Friday the (pink slip day) Inflation is at 8.6%

• The consumer price index rose 8.6% in May from a year ago, the highest increase since December 1981. Core inflation excluding food and energy rose 6%. Both were higher than expected.
• Surging food, gas and energy prices all contributed to the gain, with fuel oil up 106.7% over the past year.
• Shelter costs, which comprise about one-third of the CPI, rose at the fastest 12-month pace in 31 years.
• The rise in inflation meant workers lost more ground in May, with real wages declining 0.6% from April and 3% on a 12-month basis.

MSNBC

 

Nationalize the oil companies.

 

Right. AND the Universities...

 

Maybe the funds that are sent to overseas and other countries to purchase oil, we should keep in the US and increase domestic oil production?
This may help to lower the price and reduce the inflation?
Instead of our money staying at home with US producing oil and gas companies, we’re shipping it overseas to these petro dictatorships where they are then gaining more political power because they have more money to distribute inside of their country and increase their political standing.

Inflation is rising world wide, in the US it began rising in 2021 and just keeps going up and up long before Russia invading Ukraine in Feb 2022.
We did had COVID affecting economy, shut downs etc. American consumer prices in Spring 2020 fell for three consecutive months as the pandemic struck.
"Rents prices dropped, hotel rooms went empty and oil prices turned negative.


"Then in 2021 sure enough on April 13th statisticians announced that consumer prices in March were fully 2.6% higher than a year earlier, up from 1.7% in February.
The increase in headline inflation was the biggest since November 2009, when similar “base effects” were in play after the global financial crisis.
In March alone prices rose by 0.6% compared with the previous month, the fastest pace since 2012. Much of that was driven by a big increase in petrol prices but even the “core” consumer-price index (CPI), which strips out food and energy prices, was up by 0.3% (an annualized pace of 4.1%). Services prices in particular have started to rebound: hotel rooms were 4.4% dearer than a month earlier and rent, a big component of the index, has firmed in recent months."
If I'm not mistaken in 2022 Core CPI went from .3% in March to .6% in April, then stayed at .6% in May."

 

The reason the administration is not considering reducing the export of oil is that it would make it much harder for European countries to stop buying Russia oil.

https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insights/latest-news/oil/052522-biden-administration-weighs-us-oil-export-limits-again-but-analysts-so-far-doubt-action

 

I was kidding. But I DO thing they need to be more regulated and, in current times, required to produce more (because the Saudis agreed to lower production when the previous administration requested it.)

 

They ran on Green deal and now appear to be hostages of it.
Why not increase US production of oil and gas?

 

We are. We have. But oil supply isn't like turning a tap. It costs about a million dollars to drill a well in the Permian Basin. Add the time and infrastructure and it's a lot of investment that might not pay off if oil prices fall again which they surely will. Heck, Los Angeles sits atop a series of oil fields totalling some 10 billion barrels of recoverable crude. That rivals Saudi Arabia. But getting to that oil would be politically very difficult and expensive.

 

California does recover a lot of oil every year. Those fields aren't going untapped. But yes, production could be ramped up.

 

My home state of New Mexico just sent out $500 checks to every family as a distribution of surplus oil severance tax revenue. The State government has literally more oil money coming in than it needs even with Covid. The idea is to offset the increased price of gasoline.