How many average workers can afford to pay $40,000 a year in rent? After taxes, even techies earning $80,000/year would have little to show for their labor once they paid $40K after $20K in taxes and deductions have been subtracted from their annual wage.The current Gold Rush will collapse, and as the newly fired marginalized workers pack up and leave, nobody will be renting the flats for $4,000/month. The owners will try reducing the rents to $3,000/month, and with no takers, they will go bust and the gleaming towers will be auctioned off. Eventually rents will decline to what people can actually afford.This process will take a few years, as owners are reluctant to accept secular declines in rent and the resulting insolvency. Restaurants and other secondary businesses that arose to serve the techies will hang on, paying insane rents, for a few months and then give up losing money and close.
This coincidence must alert readers that a tempest is brewing on subjects noted: lurking inflation, increasing debt, suppressed interest rates and the shifting of hegemonic power. There are only two important questions in investing that also apply to subjects impacting the future stability of the world — tell me why and tell me when. Plender gives us the “why”, the ever-increasing “intolerable burden” of government debt and suppressed rates leveraging the global financial system. He gives us the tipping point. What we await is “the when”, as in when do we know we have “tipped”. Paul Hackett Madison, NJ, US Letter: Why the geopolitics of international currency choice matters
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