CW 1037 - DEBT, My Favorite Four Letter Word & the Re-Emergence of Wage Growth

Well, I like real estate just because I like the benefit of being able to have a mortgage pay off real estate over time so that when I retire I have something. I like the fact that it's boring. I want to be able to be entertained and travel and do a lot of things in my retirement. And that boring investment of real estate allows me to do that.

Welcome to the Creating wealth show with Jason Hartman. You're about to learn a new slant on investing, some exciting techniques and fresh new approaches to the world's most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create more wealth and freedom than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self made multimillionaire who's actually been there and done it. He's a successful investor, lender, developer and entrepreneur who's owned properties in 11 states, had hundreds of tenants and been involved in thousands of real estate transactions. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to your financial Independence Day. You really can do it. And now here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.

Welcome listeners from around the world. This is your host, Jason Hartman and thank you for joining me for episode 1037. 1037. Lots to Talk about today. Lots to talk about today. So I want to talk about my favorite four letter word. Yes, my favorite four letter word. You know what that is, don't you? It's debt. D, E, B, T. Debt. My favorite four letter word. And I just finished the awesome book that I am recommending highly to you and I want to play a few clips from it today and comment on them. I want you to get this book, it's entitled the First 5000 Years. It's fascinating. Really, really interesting stuff. Really interesting stuff. And as we are talking about debt on this episode today and you know, it's probably good to talk about banks because banks are very much related to debt. My favorite four letter word. And one bank that the, I would say definitely the scummiest, most disgusting big bank. Now there's lots of little scummy, disgusting banks in America, but the most scummy, disgusting big bank in America right now, they seem to rotate. You know, back during the financial crisis it was bank of America, right? They were the disgusting bank. But you know, I don't know if you could blame them completely because they, for whatever reason took over Countrywide. They the disgusting crooked lender Countrywide that engaged in all sorts of predatory lending and did all kinds of bad stuff. You know, they were the king of the liars loans, the NINJA loans, the no income, no job. It was unbelievable what happened. Now when we listen to a few clips today, a few clips that I have handpicked just for you, my dear listeners, you will see how the whole picture comes together. And I've talked about it before, but you know what, when you listen to an academic, see academics definitely have their place because I am not one. And they just put it all together.

In a really nice way.

So you hear him, I would guess from listening to David Graeber here. Well, he didn't narrate the book, but from listening to his book, I listened to that Crossing the World, Crossing the Atlantic and I finished it just the other day. In listening to him, I'm gonna guess that he is a left wing liberal, right? So don't say that. I'm not open minded. I never want to see any more of these Jason isn't open minded type things. I listen to people from every side of the political spectrum and I disagree with a lot of those people on my libertarian side of the political spectrum, okay? I disagree with a lot of them. I think a lot of them are just far out, idealistic, frankly, nut jobs. Okay. I mean, you know, I like a little bit of government. Okay. A little bit's all right. Not too much. A little bit though. But hey, before we get into the book, so the most disgusting bank in America right now, it was B of a Bank of America, right? And then what was it after that? It was Chase, JP Morgan Chase with their disgusting robo signing scandal. You know, you remember that? It was all over the news years ago during the financial crisis where they had one person, just one right, in the entire country to basically robo sign foreclosures. I was a victim of this. They dual tracked me. Dual tracking is illegal, I think in most states, if not all. Maybe all states, hopefully. Now dual tracking, when someone's applying for a loan mod, you cannot be foreclosing at the same time. You gotta keep your cards on the table and let us all know what you're doing so we know how to play the game. Dual tracking is something that Chase did and many of the other banks engaged in that they robo signed and millions of people lost homes because there was one person in the entire country. And remember when they did the math, they can't remember. Forgive me, these are not exact numbers, so don't hold me to it. But the concept is the same. They figured if this person worked like 60 or 70 hours a week, this one person that was robo signing all the Chase loans For foreclosure, they would take, like, what, seven seconds per file to review it and sign off and say, foreclose, foreclose, foreclose, foreclose. Just. Folks, you can't make this stuff up. It's too unbelievable to be true. So first we had B of A, then we had Chase. Hey, what's the other big one? The disgusting criminals at Wells Fargo. Well, they were only in the news twice last week for their disgusting behavior. The latest story is hundreds of people lost their homes because Wells Fargo had a computer glitch. Yes, this mistake contributed to hundreds of foreclosures that shouldn't have happened because Wells Fargo had a computer glitch. The disgusting criminals at Wells Fargo. So it says. Wells Fargo says a company mistake contributed to hundreds of foreclosures because it miscalculated customers eligibility for mortgage modifications. Per the Associated Press, the bank said in a filing Friday that the error caused about 625 customers to be denied or. Or not offered loan modifications they otherwise qualified for. Foreclosures were completed in about 400 of those cases. So 400 people lost their homes because of Wells Fargo's computer glitch. Now, if Wells Fargo didn't have enough problems, I mean, it's literally like a scandal a week with Wells Fargo, these disgusting criminals. Because there's another article I didn't even talk to you about yet. And here it is. Our listener, Christina, posted it in the content group here. It says, Wells Fargo to pay $2.09 billion. That's billion with a B. To end a U.S. mortgage probe. Okay, so you know, this is 10 years after faulty mortgages upended the global financial system. Wells Fargo & Co. Agreed to pay. I'll round it off. Hey, what's $100 million between friends? $2.1 billion to settle a U.S. probe into its creation and sale of loans that contributed to the disaster. Okay, now here's the sad thing about the way we do corporations in America, right? No actual person in the company suffers in any real way when this kind of stuff happens. You know who really actually suffers? The shareholders. Now, granted, most of the fat cats in the C Suite. The board of directors. Their shareholders, too, right? But really, the regular, common, everyday shareholders are the ones who pay for these disgusting things. And of course, nobody goes to jail when these criminals engage in this crap. I mean, it just really upsets me. It really upsets me. Okay, so let's get to a couple clips from this book. You're going to love it. You got to go. Go out and get this book, the First 5000 Years, David Graeber. It's really good. Remember as I have talked over the years about that rather famous article and I believe it appeared in of all places, Rolling Stone magazine. I know that's kind of an odd place. I just remember this article years ago. It was sort of a well known, heavily talked about, passed around article about the way the banking system and the way the investment banks like the disgusting folks at Goldman Sachs, the way they basically create what they call the giant bubble machine, right? And this is a whole collusion between all the highest powers of the financial system. The Federal Reserve, the other central banks around the world besides the Federal Reserve, the big Wall street banks, the whole mortgage system, the appraisers, the lenders, the fact that just nobody had any incentive to put the brakes on anything, right? And it is different this time. Famous last words of every investor. This time it's different, right? But it really is different because you know, this time around, if we're going to have another economic crisis, it's not going to be a big mortgage crisis, at least not yet. Now it might be. Say things get really liberal and the pendulum swings too far the other way. You know, the lenders get nuts again doing the ninja loans, doing the liars loans. If that happens, then hey, it could be led by a mortgage crisis. But based on where we have been over the past decade, I say that is highly unlikely under the current circumstances. But there are other things, right? So this concept is that the banks and the powers that be inflate asset prices in every cycle, in every economic cycle. And then all of the little people, that's you and I, I mean, some of us listening aren't that little. But most people are just the normal little everyday people, right? Not the super fat cats. And we go in and buy up the assets and help that climb occur right into the market peak. We help that happen, right? And the least informed people are the last in. And the most informed people are the first in. And who are the least informed and the most informed? Well, the most informed are the Wall street bankers and the central bankers, right? They are the most well informed of all. And why are they so well informed? Well, largely because they're not just informed, they're making it happen. They're the ones managing the puppet strings that run the system. They're the ones running the puppets in the puppet show. And so what they do is they inflate those prices as the curve goes up and all of the least informed money, the dumb money, comes in at the last minute and then it sadly has to ride the cycle down and those people have their credit destroyed and they have, you know, huge debt. Some of it's recourse debt, some's non recourse debt. Of course, what that means is can the lender come after the borrower and get judgments beyond the value of the asset? Mostly in real estate, or at least residential real estate with purchase money loans. That's not refinances, it's not home equity lines of credit where you've pulled cash out. It's just the purchase money loan the loan used to buy the property to acquire the asset. Pretty much that deal is return the collateral and just give it back and you can walk away. And that's the deal.

I want to interrupt this episode briefly. We have something new that you will love. It's called our Property Cast. This is essentially a podcast where instead of having audio, you will have Property Pro Formas. Yes. PDF files of Property Pro Formas, just like you see on our website@jasonhartman.com simply go to itunes or whatever podcast platform you use and look for the Jason Hartman Property Cast. Property Cast. Yes. It's like a podcast with properties and it's really, really cool because you will be able to see performance right on the RSS feed. Now, I have been told we are still experimenting with this a little bit, but I've been told and well, I've personally experienced that it's easy easier to see these if you are using an iPhone or an iPad to access our podcast through itunes, but it can also be done through PCs and androids. We're working to refine this a little bit, but check it out. It's brand new and you can see property performance as they become available on the Jason Hartman Property Cast. So please be sure to subscribe, rate and review that I'll say in air quotes show it's not a show in the traditional sense. There's no audio. It's simply property proformas. Yes. I discovered something totally new and innovative that you could actually put a PDF file in an RSS feed for a podcast. So there you go. The Jason Hartman Property Cast.

So this book is quite interesting as it examines 5,000 years of debt and how it's been managed throughout history in virtually every society on earth. Fascinating. Let's listen in for a.

Moment. The First 5000 Years by David Graeber. Narrated by Grover Gardner. Chapter One on the Experience of Moral Confusion Debt noun 1. A Sum of Money Owed 2. The State of Owing Money 3. A Feeling of gratitude for a favor or service. Oxford English Dictionary. If you owe the bank $100,000, the bank owns you. If you owe the bank $100 million, you own the bank. American proverb. Two years ago, by a series of strange coincidences, I found myself attending a garden party at Westminster Abbey. I was a bit uncomfortable. It's not that Other guests were unpleasant and amicable, and Father Graham, who had organized the party, was nothing if not a gracious and charming host. But I felt more than a little out of place. At one point, Father Graham intervened, saying that there was someone by a nearby fountain whom I would certainly want to meet. She turned out to be a trim, well appointed young woman who, he explained was an attorney, but more of the activist kind. She works for a foundation that provides legal support for anti poverty groups in London. You'll probably have a lot to talk about. We chatted. She told me about her job. I told her I'd been involved for many years with the global justice movement, anti globalization movement, as it was usually called in the media. She was curious. She'd of course read a lot about Seattle, Genoa, the tear gas and street battles. But, well, had we really accomplished anything by all of that? Actually, I said, I think it's kind of amazing how much we did manage to accomplish in those first couple of years. For example? Well, for example, we managed to almost completely destroy the imf. As it happened, she didn't actually know what the IMF was, so I offered that. The International Monetary Fund basically acted as the world's debt enforcers. You might say the high finance equivalent of the guys who come to break your legs. I launched into historical background, explaining how during the 70s oil crisis, OPEC countries ended up pouring so much of their newfound riches into Western banks that the banks couldn't figure out where to invest the money. How Citibank and Chase therefore began sending agents around the world trying to convince Third World dictators and politicians to take out.

Loans. Make sure you see that documentary that I've told you about before called Life and Debt. Life and Debt. It's all about Jamaica and the way the IMF basically just pillaged the country. I mean, it's. It's terrible, right? And I've been to Jamaica a couple times and it's. It's a pretty sad place, but yeah, let's keep.

Listening. At the time, this was called Dogo Banking, how they started out at extremely low rates of interest that almost immediately skyrocketed at 20% or so due to tight US money policies. In the early.

80S. Does that sound like teaser rates on adjustable rate mortgages? Hmm, same.

Concept. How during the 80s and 90s this led to the third world debt crisis. How the IMF then stepped in to insist that in order to obtain refinancing, poor countries would be obliged to abandon price supports on basic foodstuffs or even policies of keeping strategic food reserves, and abandoned free health care and free education. How all of this had led to the collapse of all the most basic supports for some of the poorest and most vulnerable people on earth. I spoke of poverty, of the looting of public resources, the collapse of societies, endemic violence, malnutrition, hopelessness and broken lives. But what was your position? The lawyer asked about the imf. We wanted to abolish it. No, I mean about the Third World debt. Oh, we wanted to abolish that too. The immediate demand was to stop the IMF from imposing structural adjustment policies which were doing all the direct damage. But we managed to accomplish that surprisingly quickly. The more long term aim was debt amnesty, something along the lines of the Biblical Jubilee as far as we were concerned. I told her 30 years of money flowing from the poorest countries to the richest was quite enough. But she objected, as if this were self evident. They borrowed the money. Surely one has to pay one's debts. It was at this point that I realized that this was going to be a very different sort of conversation than I had originally.

Anticipated. This is where it gets.

Interesting. Where to start? I could have begun by explaining how these loans had originally been taken out by unelected dictators who placed most of it directly in their Swiss bank accounts. And asked her to contemplate the justice of insisting that the lenders be repaid not by the dictator or even by his cronies, but by literally taking food from the mouths of hungry children. Or to think about how many of these poor countries had actually already paid back what they borrowed three or four times now, but that through the miracle of compound interest, it still hadn't made a significant dent in the principle. I could also observe that there was a difference between refinancing loans and demanding that in order to obtain refinancing, countries have to follow some orthodox free market economic policy designed in Washington or Zurich that their citizens had never agreed to and never would, and that it was a bit.

Dishonored. Can you hear the left wing propaganda woven in here? But he's still right. I mean, you know, he makes some really good points, but you know, free health care, free education. Yes, the Marxist fantasy. Okay, let's keep going I will stop with my political balancing act. I just want to balance it out a little bit. Just want to balance it.

Out. To insist that countries adopt democratic constitutions and then also insist that whoever gets elected, they have no control over their country's policies anyway. Or that the economic policies imposed by the IMF didn't even work. But there was a more basic problem. The very assumption that debts have to be repaid. Actually, the remarkable thing about the statement one has to pay one's debts is that even according to standard economic theory, it isn't true. A lender is supposed to accept a certain degree of risk. If all loans, no matter how idiotic, were still retrieval, if there were no bankruptcy laws, for instance, the results would be disastrous. What reason would lenders have not to make a stupid loan? Well, I know that sounds like common sense, I said, but the funny thing is, economically, that's not how loans are actually supposed to work. Financial institutions are supposed to be ways of directing resources toward profitable investments. If a bank were guaranteed to get its money back plus interest, no matter what it did, the whole system wouldn't work. Say I were to walk into the nearest branch of the Royal bank of Scotland and say, you know, I just got a really great tip on the horses. Think you could lend me a couple million quid? Obviously, they just laugh at me, but that's just because they know if my horse didn't come in, there'd be no way for them to get the money back. But imagine there was some law that said they were guaranteed to get their money back no matter what happens. Even if that meant, I dunno, selling my daughter into slavery or harvesting my organs or something? Well, in that case, why not? Why bother waiting for someone to walk in who has a viable plan to set up a laundromat or some such. Basically, that's the situation the IMF created on a global level, which is how you would have all those banks willing to fork over billions of dollars to a bunch of obvious crooks in the first place. I didn't quite get that far, because at that point a drunken financier appeared, having noticed that we were talking about money, and began telling funny stories about moral hazard, which somehow, before too long, had morphed into a long and not particularly engrossing account of one of his sexual conquests. I drifted off. Still, for several days afterward, that phrase kept resonating in my head. Surely one has to pay one's debts. The reason it's so powerful is that it's not actually an economic statement. It's a moral statement, after all. Isn't paying one's debts what morality is supposed to be all about? Giving people what is due them, accepting one's responsibilities, fulfilling one's obligations to others, just as one would expect them to fulfill their obligations to you? What could be a more obvious example of shirking one's responsibilities than reneging on a promise or refusing to pay a debt? It was that very apparent self evidence, I realized, that made the statement so insidious. This was the kind of line that could make terrible things appear utterly bland and unremarkable. This may sound strong, but it's hard not to feel strongly about such matters once you've witnessed the effects. I have. For almost two years I had lived in the highlands of Madagascar. Shortly before I arrived, there had been an outbreak of malaria. It was a particularly virulent outbreak because malaria had been wiped out in highland Madagascar many years before, so that after a couple of generations most people had lost their immunity. The problem was it took money to maintain the mosquito eradication program, since there had to be periodic tests to make sure mosquitoes weren't starting to breed again, and spraying campaigns if it was discovered that they were not a lot of money. But owing to IMF imposed austerity programs, the government had to cut the monitoring program. 10,000 people died. I met young mothers grieving for lost children. One might think it would be hard to make a case that the loss of 10,000 human lives is really justified in order to ensure that Citibank wouldn't have to cut its losses on one irresponsible loan that wasn't particularly important to its balance sheet anyway. But here was a perfectly decent woman, one who worked for a charitable organization no less, who took it as self evident that it was, after all, they owed the money. And surely one has to pay one's debts.

For the next few weeks that phrase kept coming back at me. Why debt? What makes the concept so strangely powerful? Consumer debt is the lifeblood of our economy. All modern nation states are built on deficit spending. Debt has come to be the central issue of international politics, but nobody seems to know exactly what it is or how to think about it. The very fact that we don't know what debt is, the very flexibility of the concept, is the basis of its power. If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence to make such relations seem moral than by reframing them in the language of debt. Above all because it immediately makes it seem that it's the Victim who's doing something wrong. Mafiosi understand this. So do the commanders of conquering armies. For thousands of years, violent men have been able to tell their victims that those victims owe them something. If nothing else, they owe them their lives. A telling phrase because they haven't been killed. Nowadays, for example, military aggression is defined as a crime against humanity. And international courts, when they are brought to bear, usually demand that aggressors pay compensation. Germany had to pay massive reparations after World War I, and Iraq is still paying Kuwait for Saddam Hussein's invasion in 1990. Yet the third world debt, the debt of countries like Madagascar, Bolivia and the Philippines, seems to work precisely the other way around. Third World debtor nations are almost exclusively countries that have at one time been attacked and conquered by European countries, often the very countries to whom they now owe money. In 1895, for example, France invaded Madagascar, disbanded the government of then Queen run of Alona the Third and declared the country a French colony. One of the first things General Galioni did after pacification, as they liked to call it then, was to impose heavy taxes on the Malagasy population. In part so they could reimburse the costs of having been invaded. But also, since French colonies were supposed to be fiscally self supporting, to defray the costs of building the railroads, highways, bridges, plantations and so forth that the French regime wished to.

Build. That's a pretty great deal, isn't it? You invade a country, I mean, you can't. This is just how people throughout history and present day can be. So evil is just beyond me. You invade a country, you take it over, you enslave its population. And if that weren't bad enough, you make the invaded country pay for the.

Invasion.

Wow. Malagasy taxpayers were never asked whether they wanted these railroads, highways, bridges and plantations, or allowed much input into where and how they were built. To the contrary, over the next half century, the French army and police slaughtered quite a number of Malagasy who objected too strongly to the arrangement. Upwards of half a million by some reports, during one revolt in 1947. It's not as if Madagascar has ever done any comparable damage to France. Despite this, from the beginning, the Malagasy people were told they owed France money. And to this day, the Malagasy people are still held to owe France money. And the rest of the world accepts the justice of this arrangement. When the international community does perceive a moral issue, it's usually when they feel the Malagasy government is being slow to pay their debts. But debt is not just Victor's justice, it can also be a way of punishing winners who weren't supposed to win. The most spectacular example of this is the history of the Republic of Haiti, the first poor country to be placed in permanent debt peonage. Haiti was a nation founded by former plantation slaves who had the temerity not only to rise up in rebellion amidst grand declarations of universal rights and freedoms, but to defeat Napoleon's armies sent to return them to bondage. France immediately insisted that the new Republic owed it 150 million francs in damages for the expropriated plantations, as well as the expenses of outfitting the failed military expeditions. And all other nations, including the United States, agreed to impose an embargo on the country until it was paid. The sum was intentionally impossible, equivalent to about $18 billion, and the resultant embargo ensured that. The name Haiti has been a synonym for debt, poverty and human misery ever since. Sometimes, though, debt seems to mean the very opposite. Starting in the 1980s, the United States, which insisted on strict terms for the repayment of third world debt itself, accrued debts that easily dwarfed those of the entire third world combined, mainly fueled by military spending. The US foreign debt, though, takes the form of treasury bonds held by institutional investors in countries Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the Gulf States that are in most cases effectively US military protectorates, most covered in US bases full of arms and equipment, paid for with that very deficit spending. This has changed a little now that China has gotten in on the game. China is a special case for reasons that will be explained later, but not very much. Even China finds that the fact it holds so many US treasury bonds makes it to some degree beholden to US interests rather than the other way around. So what is the status of all this money continually being funneled into the US Treasury? Are these loans or is it tribute? In the past, military powers that maintained hundreds of military bases outside their own home territory were ordinarily referred to as empires. And empires regularly demanded tribute from subject peoples. The US Government, of course, insists that it is not an empire. But one could easily make a case that the only reason it insists on treating these payments as loans and not as tribute is precisely to deny the reality of what's going on now. It's true that throughout history, certain sorts of debt and certain sorts of debtor have always been treated differently than others. In the 1720s, one of the things that most scandalized the British public when conditions at debtors prisons were exposed in the popular press was the fact that these prisons were regularly divided into two sections. Aristocratic inmates who often Thought of a brief stay in Fleet or Marshalsy as something of a fashion statement, were wined and dined by liveried servants and allowed to receive regular visits from prostitutes. On the common side, impoverished debtors were shackled together in tiny cells covered with filth and vermin, as one report put it, and suffered to die without pity of hunger and jail.

Fever. The part I want to play for you is toward the end of the book where he talks about the situation that we had from the, I think he starts in the 60s and he, he talks about it pretty interestingly, the 60s into the 70s. And we had this time of. And when I've had Dan Sullivan on the show a couple times, you might remember those interviews. We talked about that a lot. And I've just talked about it myself, about how prosperous America was then. I mean, the rest of the world, I'm not sure, I didn't keep track of that that well. But in terms of the US that was the time where Americans were really getting solid cost of living increases. I mean.

You know, these things are so complex, right? You've got to peel back the layers of the onions in so many ways at so many levels. But, but in some ways at that time, I mean, it was a glory days in a way, you saw government bureaucracies in the US expand like crazy. That was bad. And that's what happens when you give, when you give the kids too much money, okay? It's just like these tech companies, right? They, they just have too much money. You know, the markets, the public markets, the venture capitalists, they're too good to these companies and they become wasteful and stupid and socialistic and hey, and evil, frankly. Look at Google and Facebook, right? And so you get all these abuses and that's a terrible thing. And you know, he goes forward to show how really for decades Americans did not receive any real dollar cost of living increase. And the only thing that changed that by the way, decades later, was Donald Trump. The Trump recovery. I mean, hate him as much as you want, but you cannot argue with the fact that the economy is booming now. There are signs of some softening in the high end real estate market, that's for sure. But that's kind of a different subject in terms of the labor component of the economy. Wage increases, unemployment rates for women, the lowest they've been in 65 years. For African Americans, the lowest they've been ever, okay, Ever since we started keeping track, right, unemployment has dropped sharply. Real dollar wage increases are here. And we'll see if inflation outpaces them because inflation is rearing its head. I told you it would. And that's all part of it. You know, too many dollars chasing a limited supply of goods and services. You're always going to have inflationary pressures. So we'll monitor how that all plays out. Of course, here on the show. We will continue to do it. We will continue to do it. But I'm going long here again, so I better stop. So go get David Graeber's book debt the first 5,000 years. It's really quite interesting. Maybe I'll play you that little tiny clip toward the end if I can find it on another episode. Also, join us for Profits in Paradise, our brand new two day conference in Hawaii, Waikiki beach, first week of November. And then the Venture Alliance. We got a special deal. The only time we've ever offered a special deal on the Venture alliance, only because these two events are stacked up right near each other. One day later we'll take a day off for travel in between and then we'll go to Kauai the So go to jasonartman.com and check that out and we will talk to you on the next episode. Happy.

Investing.

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