Dec 30 2024 40 mins 28
Discover how inflation is destroying the value of your money and eroding the ethical foundations of society. Legendary author Doug Casey reveals the insidious ways rising prices lead to social decay, unethical behavior, and the breakdown of trust.
Learn how to protect your prosperity by shifting away from the falling dollar and into real assets like gold, real estate, and carefully selected investments.
Don't let inflation rob you - get the insights you need to thrive in this challenging economic environment.
Will you please leave a review for the show? I’d be grateful. Search “how to leave an Apple Podcasts review”.
Resources:
Visit internationalman.com to read Doug Casey's weekly articles and watch his "Doug Casey's Take" videos on YouTube.
Show Notes:
For access to properties or free help with a
GRE Investment Coach, start here:
GRE Free Investment Coaching:GREmarketplace.com/Coach
Get mortgage loans for investment property:
RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE
or e-mail: [email protected]
Invest with Freedom Family Investments.
You get paid first: Text FAMILY to 66866
For advertising inquiries, visit:
Best Financial Education:
Get our wealth-building newsletter free—
text ‘GRE’ to 66866
Our YouTube Channel:
www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation
Follow us on Instagram:
Complete episode transcript:
Automatically Transcribed With Otter.ai
Keith Weinhold 0:01
Welcome to GRE. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, inflation does not mean rising prices. Inflation is an expansion of the money supply which results in rising prices, and it leads to wider societal decay and moral breakdowns in ways that you've never thought about before. It misdirects inflation frustration toward people like housing providers and grocers, we explore it today on get rich education.
Mid south home buyers, I mean, they're total pros, with over two decades is the nation's highest rated turnkey provider. Their empathetic property managers use your ROI as their North Star. So it's no wonder that smart investors just keep lining up to get their completely renovated income properties like it's the newest iPhone. They're headquartered in Memphis and have globally attractive cash flows and A plus rating with a better business bureau and now over 5000 houses renovated. There's zero markup on maintenance. Let that sink in, and they average a 98.9% occupancy rate, while their average renter stays more than three and a half years. Every home they offer has brand new components, a bumper to bumper, one year warranty, new 30 year roofs. And wait for it, a high quality renter. Remember that part and in an astounding price range, 100 to 180k. I've personally toured their office and their properties in person in Memphis, get to know Mid South. Enjoy cash flow from day one. Start yourself right now at mid south homebuyers.com that's mid south homebuyers.com
you know, whenever you want the best written real estate and finance info. Oh, geez. Today's experience limits your free articles access, and it's got paywalls and pop ups and push notifications and cookies disclaimers. It's not so great. So then it's vital to place nice, clean, free content into your hands that adds no hype value to your life. That's why this is the golden age of quality newsletters, and I write every word of ours myself. It's got a dash of humor, and it's to the point because even the word abbreviation is too long, my letter usually takes less than three minutes to read, and when you start the letter, you also get my one hour fast real estate video. Course, it's all completely free. It's called the Don't quit your Daydream letter. It wires your mind for wealth, and it couldn't be easier for you to get it right now. Just text GRE to 66866, while it's on your mind, take a moment to do it right now. Text GRE to 66 866.
Speaker 1 3:12
you're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is get rich education.
Keith Weinhold 3:28
We are the GRE from Albany, New York to New Albany, Ohio, and across 188 nations worldwide. I'm your host, Keith Weinhold, and this is get rich education. You have probably heard it been said by now that money must have three attributes. It is a store of value, a medium of exchange and a unit of account. The US Dollar does not meet the first one store of value. That's due to inflation. How is the dollar a store of value, it is not so then the dollar is a mere currency, not money. You can make the case that gold is a store of value, maybe that Bitcoin is, although it's got a short track record and it's a volatile ride the S, p5, 100, you could say that's nothing more than a store of value long term. When you understand all the drags on it, you're only treading water long term with the s, p, I've discussed that on shows earlier this year. That leaves real estate as not just a good long term, stable store a value, but when it's done right, it is the vehicle where inflation actually increases your purchasing power. And here's a new way to think about it, money is your time and energy captured in an abstracted form for the government to take out debt. They are borrowing your time and energy. Government debt is the closest thing we've ever seen to time travel.They're borrowing the collective time and energy from your future. How do you achieve time travel? You borrow human time and energy from the future currency debasement steals the time and energy of you and everyone alive today. That's why you've got to protect yourself. And what this does is that it actually increases your time preference. Yeah, the term time preference, that's something that Bitcoin authors like Dr saifedean Amos often use time preference and actually think that it's sort of a confusing term. Time preference, though, it sounds like a good thing, it's actually a bad thing. It means that you would rather consume now and over consume now instead of later. Having a high time preference means that you want to all out, ball out right now, and not consider your future. Well, that's what inflation does whenever you see the term time preference out there. I think the best way for you to remember what that means is think of it instead as a now preference. I think now preference is more intuitive than time preference. Teach me how to Dougie, yes, we've got public figure and mega popular author Doug Casey back with us today to discuss how rising prices lead to social decay and makes humans have a higher time preference resultantly, I guess that is teaching us how to Dougie. Yes, indeed, that is a reference to that, like 15 year old song, teach me how to Dougie, and we would drop some bars of that song right now. Oh, you know that me and the team here, we really want to, but we would probably have some royalty issues with that one here, and I'll tell you that is such a stupid song. Teach me how to Dougie, but at the same time, once you've heard it, the next thing that you want to do is hear it again somehow. But it's pretty likely that Doug Casey and I have some more important things to talk about. So fortunately for you, rather than discuss a 2010, rap song any further, we're going to discuss how rising prices lead to social decay.
Monetary inflation is even worse than you think. This era's rising prices and falling values actually lead to social decay. Villains and unethical actors are getting rewarded and they're stealing from you. We're going to discuss just how the international man himself, a legendary and generationally popular author, is back with us for a sobering look at inflation and social decay today. Hey, welcome back in. Doug Casey.
Doug Casey 8:04
Nice to talk to you, Keith. I'm speaking to you at the moment from my farm in Uruguay, which is one of the, I would say, two, most stable countries in Latin America, and one of the two or three most stable countries in the Western Hemisphere, there's a lot of real estate in the world, other than in the US. And I know that you mostly talk about real estate. I've actually done a lot of real estate too, all around the world, in the Orient and in Europe and South America, and, of course, a lot in the US and Canada. So I'm generally friendly to real estate, and it's been very, very good to me.
Keith Weinhold 8:44
Well, you're truly living up to the International Man moniker again today, joining us from that small South American nation of Uruguay and Doug. Before we talk about the inflation and the social decay, what are property taxes like there in that part of Uruguay. And I know you often spend time in Buenos Aires Argentina as well. If you can talk to us in terms of the percent of the value of the property that you pay in property tax each year, which tends to be one to one and a quarter percent on an average in the United States.
Doug Casey 9:13
that's right. And I think in some states like Illinois, it can go up to about 2% if I'm not mistaken, which means that you really don't own your property. If you don't pay your real estate taxes for for a year or two, you'll find out who really owns it, right? But taxes are high in South America, but generally, not too bad on real estate per se, certainly not on farmland, but farmland everywhere in the world doesn't pay much in the way of real estate taxes, and that's certainly the case here in Uruguay, and the same in Argentina, which might be worth more discussion, because Argentina is doing something that's actually unique in world history right now. And I.hope it's a story that ends well, because they're going in the right direction. But to answer your question, if you buy a condo or a house in a city in Uruguay or Argentina or most of these countries down here, you're going to pay real estate taxes, but it's less than in the US typically, like a half a percent, when they get you in South America is value added taxes, or anything you buy, including labor. In most places, you have to pay the government someplace in between 18 or 20 or 22% depending it's like a huge extra sales tax that's hidden in the cost of the item. And of course, they have income taxes down here, just as what they do in the US, approximately American levels. But on the bright side, not that I know about these things from a firsthand point of view, but these Latin American countries are kind of corrupt and not as completely grasping as the US is they're not as competent in going after you, and don't have a worldwide reach, which the US does.
Keith Weinhold 11:07
Yeah. Oh, well, that's an interesting comparison there. And yeah, Doug, a lot of Latin American nations have had high rates of inflation in both the recent past and now in a piece that you recently wrote is titled, inflation and social decay, rising prices and falling values. And here in the United States, whether it's at the grocery store or the mall or restaurants or airports or anywhere you turn, people really are finding inferior goods and services yet at higher prices. I mean, everyone sees that now. And Doug, I know that you've maintained that living standards have taken a big step, not forward, but backward, and are trending even worse. So tell us about it.
Doug Casey 11:49
Well, the way that you become wealthy is by producing more than you consume and saving the difference. That's the basic formula. Produce more than you consume and save the difference. But when the government inflates the currency, and the government's entirely at fault with it, they have the printing presses. They control the currency. It makes it very, very hard to save, and you can't get ahead. You can't build capital which you need in order to invest and become a capitalist. So inflation is the enemy of the average man, and it's the enemy of society as a whole, but some people do very well because of inflation. Why? Because in the US, it's the people in basically New York and Washington and other big cities that stand very close to the fire hydrant of money that comes out of the government, and they get to drink deeply before something trickles down to the plebs below inflation will destroy a country, and that's why in Latin America in particular, you've got very rich people who are usually connected to the government, who get that money first, and a lot of poor peasants who don't get it, and I'm afraid that the US has been going in that direction for some years.
Keith Weinhold 13:08
Well, I'm so glad Doug that you gave us the reminder that the government is the source of inflation. That's where it all begins, because people often blame the landlord for higher rents, but they blame the grocer for the higher beef prices, but the landlord in the grocer, they're only the messenger, not the source. You're absolutely right. It's a question of very bad economic education throughout the school system, all the way up to college and post grad work the butcher and the baker and the oil maker produce real goods that make your standard of living higher. They're the heroes in this scenario. The government, which prints up money through its deficits that it runs, is the villain in this and I never cease to be amazed and shocked how people look at politicians to be their saviors, right? They're heroes. They're not. They're the villains in this piece. They serve no useful purpose. And the same goes for most of these agencies that they set up, which once again, make things easier for the guys on top, that have capital, that have political connections, that can hire the lawyers, hire the accountants to twist things in their favor, makes it very hard for the little guy who can't jump over the hurdles that are put up by regulation as well as taxes as well as inflation.
Tell us about how inflation erodes ethical standards.
Doug Casey 14:38
Well, that's a problem too, because if you can't trust money, the validity of contracts becomes questionable if you borrow. It's terrible in a country like Argentina, if you borrowed 100 pesos from me and only gave it back to me next year, it'd be worth half as much. But you say, Hey, here's your 100 pesos, but you're subtly cheating the person that you borrowed the money from, right? And it erodes trust. Not only that, but inflation tends to make the banking system unsound for a number of reasons. If you can't trust your bank, you really can't trust any financial institutions. So money is the lifeblood of a society. It represents everything that you want to do and want to provide for other people in the future. And if the government destroys your money, it's destroying your future life. And that erodes trust. It makes people think in terms of, I want it all, and I want it now. I'm not willing to wait, because in the future, I don't know what anything is going to be worth. So it leads to an unstable society. And in an unstable society, you don't trust anything.
Keith Weinhold 15:57
right? Well, first, I love your example of the 100 peso loan. I mean, how would one know how much interest to charge in a runaway inflationary environment? Because some people don't realize that high inflation also means more volatile levels of inflation, and banking and lending really break down. You know, Doug, I've got my own example or two about how inflation introduces unethical behavior when the big wave of inflation started to hit in 2021 and 2022 in the United States, you know my favorite cold brew bottled coffee, which I drank because it had good ingredients in it, rather than raising the price on that with inflation, they replaced their higher quality sweeteners in my cold brew coffee, like stevia and monk fruit extract with a junky sucralose sweetener, they could keep their price the same that way. They sure didn't point out that they substituted a junkier sweetener. And really this is another form of inflation called skimplation That was pretty sneaky behavior here.
Doug Casey 17:00
you're absolutely correct, Keith, and this further breaks down the bonds of trust in society, because you no longer really trust that manufacturer, and that's just your one particular coffee manufacturer, but it's happening across the board with all manufacturers, so no wonder people start saying, Hey, I hate these companies. They're trying to rip me off. Well, they're not trying to rip you off. They're just trying to survive the consequences of the government debasing the currency. So we have to assign blame where it belongs. That's a very good example that you just gave. I think.
Keith Weinhold 17:35
yeah. And I think another way that inflation introduces unethical behavior is say that there are two different manufacturers of wine, and they're selling their bottle of wine for $20 then the currency supply doubles. Okay, well, one manufacturer can go ahead and keep selling their $20 wine with inferior ingredients. Well over here, the honest guy, the other company, they double their price to $40 and they continue to use good quality ingredients. But what do consumers notice? They notice the price more than the ingredients. So therefore the unethical one that waters down their wine ingredients but keeps their price low actually gets rewarded and will get more business.
Doug Casey 18:15
You're right, certainly in the short run, but in the long run, inflation is going to destroy both of them, but for different reasons, inflation really destroys the basis of society itself, because it makes it so much harder to produce and you don't have any savings to consume. So money is the basis of society. When you destroy the money you're destroying the basis of society itself.
Keith Weinhold 18:43
We're talking with Doug Casey about his recent piece that you can [email protected] it'stitled inflation and social decay, rising prices and falling values. He also hosts the eponymous show, Doug Casey's take more with Doug when we come back, including how inflation leads to a more litigious society and actually creates more lawsuits. That's straight ahead. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold.
oh geez, the national average bank account pays less than 1% on your savings, so your bank is getting rich off of you. You've got to earn way more, or else you're losing your hard earned cash to inflation. Let the liquidity fund help you put your money to work with minimum risk, your cash generates up to a 10% return and compounds year in and year out. Instead of earning less than 1% in your bank account, the minimum investment is just 25k
you keep getting paid until you decide you want your money back. Their decade plus track record proves they've always paid their investors 100% in full and on time. And you know how I'd know, because I'm an investor in this myself, earn 10% like me and GRE listeners are text family to 66866, to learn about freedom, family investments, liquidity fund, on your journey to financial freedom through passive income. Text, family to 66866
Hey, you can get your mortgage loans at the same place where I get mine, at Ridge lending group NMLS, 42056. They provided our listeners with more loans than any provider in the entire nation because they specialize in income properties, they help you build a long term plan for growing your real estate empire with leverage. You can start your pre qualification and chat with President Caeli Ridge personally. Start Now while it's on your mind at Ridge lendinggroup.com That's ridgelendinggroup.com
Richard Duncan 20:53
this is Richard Duncan, publisher and macro watch, listen to get rich Education with Geek Weinhold, and don't quit your Daydream.
Keith Weinhold 21:11
Welcome back to get rich education. We're talking with legendary author Doug Casey. In fact, his classic book strategic investing broke the record for receiving the largest advance ever paid for a financial book at the time. And Doug, I know, in one of your latest pieces, you talked about how inflation actually leads to a more litigious society as well. Tell us about that.
Doug Casey 21:34
The US is actually the most litigious country in the world, and it's because a company may have a hard time meeting its obligations when the currency that its obligations are denominated in turns into a floating abstraction, and if you can't fulfill your obligation, is the way you would righteously on a handshake. Might you may want to call in your lawyers to help you survive. So it percolates through all areas of society.
Keith Weinhold 22:06
Now, on top of inflation, I think there's a problem that's really in one's face today, America has a tip inflation problem where increasingly you are being asked for tips at places where you weren't beforehand. And I think a lot of that really began with COVID. Places like Subway restaurant began asking for tips even though you're standing up to order your food, and it was a way for you to show appreciation that they showed up during the pandemic. But when the pandemic waned, the tip request didn't go away. In fact, I think they've increased. So we have tip inflation on top of inflation. Doug, I recently attended a conference, and the little convenience stores inside the event site hotel, they stated that they are now cashless. Okay, so you're going to be paying with a card, and when you bring your groceries up to the counter, there's a little screen, and they ask you two to three questions. You have to answer two to three prompts if you don't want to leave a tip. This is just at a convenience store. This holds up the line. It's a little frustrating. It wears me out. They say humans can only make 35,000 decisions a day. I just spent three or four of them saying I don't want to leave a tip for this sandwich that I just brought to the counter. And you know what's funny, Doug, I almost consider if this gets annoying after I deny the ridiculous tip request when they didn't provide any additional service. You know what I think about asking Doug, asking that person, oh, okay, well, you asked me to pay more than we agreed to. Where's my discount? Now let me ask you a few questions about my discount now that you ask that I pay more than what we agreed to. So tenations become a problem.
Doug Casey 23:47
Actually, it's worse than that, because now that the world is going to computer money less cash, they give you some choices. I know at Starbucks, this is the case. You want to leave a 10% or a 15% or a 20% tip, those are the things that you can check to make it easy for yourself. But wait a minute, I just wanted a coffee, and what services this person provided for me, other than just drawing a coffee for me and I'm given a choice of it used to be that tips were this is a long time ago, but it's still the way it is in many countries in the world, the tips were just the excess change that you left there. Or the waiter in many countries in the world, like, well, two I can think of off the top of my hand, or Japan, where tipping is is not accepted. In fact, I remember in one Tokyo restaurant, I left some money on the table, and the waitress ran down the street after me to give me my money back. She thought that I inadvertently left it on the table and it was supposed to be a tip. Other countries, like New Zealand, there's no tipping. Certainly out in the country, it's only in the big cities. So yeah, it's become a rather pernicious habit, but I understand, because the average guy doing manual hourly labor like waiting is having a really hard time making it these days, and that's evidenced by the fact that both Trump and Kamala Harris were talking about making tips exempt from income taxes, because you might have to pay the government, well, forget about it. You have to pay them 15% in Social Security taxes, which are non deductible, and then you have to pay income taxes on top of the Social Security taxes. So I I understand why you'd want to do that, but inflation is just another kind of tax, actually, when we get right down to it, that's what it is. It's a subtle tax. It's a tax that you don't see. It's a tax that you blame on the person providing the service of the good, rather than the government, which if they tax you directly. Yeah, you see that, but you don't see that. Inflation is just another form of tax.
Keith Weinhold 25:59
Sure, an income tax or a property tax is sort of front stage inflation really a backstage tax being surreptitious. To your point, well, if the government is so bad and does such a poor job of issuing currency, Doug, what are your thoughts about the government just getting out of the currency issuance business? Whatever that would look like, a gold standard, a Bitcoin standard. Does the government have to be the one that issues the currency?
Doug Casey 26:27
No, it doesn't actually look and we might want to forget about this concept of currency. You've heard that the BRICS, a bunch of third world countries, Russia, India, China, Brazil, many others who want to get out of using the dollar, they don't want to use the dollar because the dollar is turned into a floating abstraction, and they can't trust the US government, as the Russians found, because all dollars clear through New York. So what are they going to do? They don't trust each other's phony baloney currencies. I think that those countries are going to go to gold, not a gold currency, gold, which was money since day one of human history. Actually, I think that's going to happen in the US. And for many, many years, I've suggested that people do their saving in gold, not in dollars. I've been saving in gold for the last 50 years, starting when gold was in the low 40s. And as you do with savings, you put it aside, you forget about it. And the gold that I first saved at $40 an ounce, it's now at 2700 more or less, has treated me very well. I think that people should be saving with something that's not going to lose value the way the dollar does. If the dollar is in a lot of trouble, it could dry up and blow away, quite frankly. So one reason why you want to own real things, commodities, properties, gold, things of that nature, or stocks, if you choose the company well.
Keith Weinhold 27:59
I've helped people that have been hesitant about putting a little bit of money into gold or Bitcoin with the mindset of, don't think about how you are buying gold or Bitcoin. Think of it rather as how you are shifting a portion of your prosperity from dollars, pesos, yen or euros over into gold or Bitcoin. Really, you're just shifting some of your prosperity there. Is the way that I like to think about it. But Doug, as we've been talking about inflation, in this theme of government really having intervention and distortions into free markets, including things like inflation. You know, I've got something that I'm thinking about, and you might help shape or change my thinking about this. We generally champion free markets around here that's typically a good economic system. However, is a free market with some guardrails on it actually helpful? Or do you think that the guardrails shouldn't be there? You mentioned Donald Trump a little bit earlier? One thing, for example, that he says he wants to do Doug is fire the current FTC chair, Lina Khan now the Federal Trade Commission. What their role has really been in the past few years is they spend a lot of their energy cracking down on fraudsters, but Lina Khan wants to bust up mega corporations. So really, what I'm getting at is, can one of the guardrails that's important be that say the FTC make sure there isn't like a an early 1900 style, John D Rockefeller monopoly. What are your thoughts with the government's role in breaking up monopolies? Is that a valid guardrail on the free market?
Doug Casey 29:30
No, I don't think it is. Look, you've got two kinds of monopolies. You've got market monopolies and legal monopolies. A market monopoly is one where the company provides the good or service so cheaply at such a high quality that nobody can compete with them. It's not worth it. Well, leave it alone. And if they start pricing their product too high, or the quality falls enough in a free market, Competitors will come in. That's one type of monopoly. nothing wrong with that kind of monopoly. The other kind of monopoly is a legal monopoly where the government says you have a franchise to do this, you and only you can do it like, well, like almost anything today, where you have to, you have to get government approval in order to provide the good or service. Like railroads, for instance, you couldn't start a new railroad today if you wanted to. So if it's a legal monopoly, you're fighting the law. If it's a market monopoly, you just have to provide a service or good, cheaper or better. So no, I don't think the FTC or any of these three Leader Letter agencies serve a useful purpose. All they do is add to costs and slow down competition and employ people that stick their nose into your business and tell you what you can or can't do both as a producer and a consumer. Look, the government is force. It's coercion. It should only do three things in a civilized society, we want to limit coercion. That means protect you from coercion outside the country with the military inside the country, with the police force, and allow you to adjudicate disputes peacefully without resorting to coercion through a court system. Everything else can be solved through market processes. Believe it or not, I know that shocks most people to hear they're so used to thinking that big brother is watching over a man is going to save my bank and protect me from bad people out there. I wish there are plenty, but it's not the best way to do it. Frankly.
Keith Weinhold 31:33
you've done a good job of drawing a distinct line as to what you think government should stay out of but what about this monopoly power? What if, even with AI inroads, Google still owns more than 90% of the search markets, so therefore they can charge exorbitant prices. Shouldn't something like Google be broken up in an antitrust lawsuit?
Doug Casey 31:51
No, no, it shouldn't, because there are other companies out there that provide people are just used to using Google. I use it myself, but there are at least a half a dozen, and I'm not a computer jock, so I think there are more than that, other services out there that you can use instead of Google, and believe me, I don't like these big companies. I mean, they act like semi governments onto themselves. No, you don't want the government to step in, because the government is a far greater danger than Google is. Google can't break down your door at three in the morning with cops and haul you off to jail. Google can just charge you more than you'd want and do other things like that. But you have other alternatives to Google. It's not an active over weeding physical danger the way the government does. And I'm not saying I like Google either. I don't. Let's admit it, they provide us a tremendous service at basically zero cost, and if you can find ways to get around them, I think that's great. Like I said, it's wonderful what they do. But that doesn't mean I'm a fan of them because of the way that, like any big organization, sure, they try to take advantage around the edges. Unfortunately, that's a negative part of human nature. But the government is not the solution to the problem.
Keith Weinhold 33:13
And of course, this doesn't mean I'm a pro regulation person. Some states and jurisdictions landlord and tenant act can be overbearing.For example, the FDA is not doing a good job with what is allowed to be put into our food, either. So the size of the regulation probably is too big.
Doug Casey 33:31
My old friend Dirk Pearson, who wrote a book called Life Extension, a practical scientific approach, was a huge bestseller some years ago, and Derek always liked to say the FDA it kills more people every year than the Defense Department does decade. And he's right.
Keith Weinhold 33:51
Yeah, that is a pretty sad indictment on the state of things there. But do you have given us quite a few things to think about with how inflation is actually an unethical source, and some more thoughts about free markets. If our audience wants to connect with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Doug Casey 34:07
Well, go to internationalman.com I write an article there every week, but every day we have great articles by great people. So go to internationalman.com that's one thing on YouTube. Doug Casey's take, where I have a conversation on these and many, many other subjects with Matt Smith every week. And the last thing is, since you can say some things in the form of fiction that you dare not, or better not say in the form of non fiction, right, I have three novels, speculator, drug lord and assassin that I think are excellent reads, so go on Amazon and pick them up too.
Keith Weinhold 34:47
Yeah, Casey, it's been insightful as usual. Thanks for coming back onto the show today.
Doug Casey 34:52
Appreciate it, Keith, it's been a pleasure.
Keith Weinhold 35:00
Yeah, good insight from Doug. As always, tipflation has become awfully intrusive. I recently made a donation on my nephew's behalf for his soccer team or something like that on the donation platform, okay, they called that donation my pledge. Okay, sure, but before I finaled out my pledge on the site, they next asked me if I would like to leave a tip on top of my pledge. Sheesh. Well, do you blame the donation platform for trying to up charge me after I'm just trying to be giving or instead, after listening to today's episode, do you blame the government for inflation in spending? Is this all just a result of that? And now we have listeners that when they find this show, they want to go back and listen to all currently, 500 plus episodes. Well, if you're listening to this five or 10 years from now, you might find my tipflation stories unusual because the practice could be so common and embedded into society by then. Right now, it's still pretty novel here in the mid 2020s there's a rapid rate of change on the tip flation front. And the next time that you are asked for an out of bounds tip, are you next going to ask the merchant where your discount is and make them answer three questions about it.
And by the way, the cold brew coffee that I mentioned with Doug is not the erstwhile la Columbia brand that I talked about two weeks ago. My favorite and real go tos are the Slate and O, W, Y, N brands. That way you get 20 grams of protein with your coffee and no cheap sweeteners in those two. Now, when it comes to the anti trust stuff, breaking up monopolies and duopolies, see real estate is super fractured with who owns it. I mean, even with more institutional buying of real estate, like we've seen this past decade on a national basis, these huge groups that own 1000 homes or more. All those groups, they only own about 710, of 1%of the US single family housing stock. So real estate investing is free market and it is fractured. It is not at all consolidated.
And now let me give you something outside of real estate, an example from another segment of business, supermarkets. There is no need for you to frantically hoard Annie's mac and cheese. It's not good for you anyway. But two courts rejected the Kroger Albertsons merger earlier this month, and that effectively broke up the deal that would have brought together two of the largest grocery store chains in America, the decision that really gave a sweet victory to FTC chair Lena Khan, like I mentioned there in the interview, but her time at the agency's Helm, that's going to end in a few weeks with the beginning of a new presidential administration. But see, in my opinion, and going after antitrust cases, she was pro free market and pro competition, which I see as a good thing. That way you have more companies vying for your business with better quality and lower prices. But I do like to listen to the other side, because, like I said in the interview, I'm still forming an opinion on this. That's why I wanted Doug Casey's take. And in this case, the two grocery companies, they had argued that creating a larger entity merging them both that would allow it to compete with Walmart and offer higher wages and lower prices. That is their side of it. Now Andrew Ferguson, he is the apparent new FTC chair. He has promised to reverse what he called Khan's anti business agenda, so we're not going to see as much antitrust crackdown from the looks of things. And note that there is also an antitrust division at the DOJ, so their influence weighs in as well. This really hasn't been much of a problem for real estate, one of the most highly fractured major markets around and now you do have though adjacent industry, like the home builder space, where there is a home building giant like Lennar, but even the home builder space isn't nearly as consolidated and anti competitive as say, the online search industry or the airline industry. I would like to wish you a happy new year. As always, we are back next week with more great content coming up on the show. We go in depth on some real estate asset classes and also how you can really, accionably and seriously reduce your tax burden next year with vehicles like bonus depreciation and cost segregation, simplifying those things for you, these are exactly the types of tools about how the rich get ahead by knowing how the tax laws benefit them, and pretty soon you will too.
If you like what you hear here each week, please go ahead and tell a friend about the show. I would really appreciate it. Until then, I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, don't quit your Daydream.
Speaker 2 40:15
Nothing on this show should be considered specific personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of get rich Education LLC, exclusively.
Keith Weinhold 40:43
The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth, building, get rich, education.com
