Summary
➡ Rising pension costs and borrowing are leading to economic strain, with the potential of a 10% cut leaving some in poverty. Investments in sectors like real estate failed to yield expected returns, and new challenges are arising with apartment buildings losing value and struggling to refinance due to increased interest rates, resulting in potential foreclosures. Increases in insurance costs, particularly in North Carolina, and unnecessary government spending add to the issues, as borrowing only exacerbates the debt problem. Finally, concerns about job security, inflation in food and labor costs and rising street crime underscore a bleak outlook for the economy in 2024.
➡ A Los Angeles bakery, Ruben’s, was vandalized by a group of 100 hooligans who stole everything and caused major destruction; however, no prosecutions have taken place, frustrating the owner and upsetting observers who believe the culprits must face legal repercussions.
Transcript
And what that means is the numbers that they told us originally are now much less than they originally were given to us. Okay? Now think about this. For ten of the eleven months reported, ten of the eleven months reported in 2023, they were all revised lower. Not one was. Hey, we added $5,000, 5000, 5000 more jobs here. Nothing. They were all revised lower. And think about this. It was a staggering amount.
443,000 jobs were exaggerated. Okay? So again, everything’s great. Everything’s great. Everything’s great, but it’s not great. It’s an absolute disaster. An absolute disaster. So think about this. Everything is off. If you didn’t have government hiring, okay, you would be negative right now with jobs. Oh, is that bad? Yeah, it’s depressionary, guys. It’s depressionary. It’s absolutely awful. Now, again, not in the realistic know. Everybody, either they love Elon musk one day or they’re bagging on him one day.
But Tesla just issued something that is wild and that is they are telling people that if you have a Tesla already ordered, you have to agree that they overstated the miles. Right now, buy about 20 miles per car per charge, and you have to sign off on this. You have to agree to it because what they don’t want to have happen is you to take possession of your new Tesla and then come back and go, oh, I’m going to sue you guys because I’m getting 20 miles less per charge.
Okay? That’s what they’re doing. There are blogs that all they do is talk. Know, we love Elon. They’re Elon fanboy sites. Well, these Elon fanboy sites are even saying, hey, this is something that is kind of surprising that they’re doing this. So they’re making people sign off on this and all these articles. New York Post, the TEsla Rottie site. But think about this. There are lawsuits now, and there have been live stories that people have sent me where people use the TEsLa.
They charge these cars, drive them under non extreme conditions, highway conditions, straight ahead, and they get less miles per charge. And when you hear stories like the Duke energy story from yesterday that I did that was disturbing because they’re saying, don’t charge your cars. Okay, well, imagine if they said, don’t put gas in your car. You can’t go to work. What do you do? If you have an electric car, what do you do? And you’re going to see these problems are going to get, only going to get magnified in the course of the next few months.
So let me know what you think about this. And again, job numbers down. It’s staggering. Do you guys believe any of this stuff? Because I just don’t. I’m living this, and we’re being told that it’s the greatest job market ever, and there’s all these jobs and nobody wants to work. No, companies are not hiring people like they did in the past. You have to get realistic with this.
These electric cars are incredibly expensive. They’re incredibly expensive to maintain. The other thing that nobody’s told us about, sorry about the glare in the background that nobody’s told us about is the depreciation. The electric cars depreciate faster than a combustible gas car. Nobody told me that. Yeah. So you’re going to spend 80 grand on this car. That’s going to be worth 40 the day you drive it off the lot.
Oh, they didn’t tell me that. So the resale for a lot of these cars are in the tank right now, and they’re going down. But the other thing is, from talking to the insurance people and all you people that have reached out about this, everybody has said the same thing about the insurance. It is a fortune to get insurance for these electric vehicles. Why is that? The maintenance.
If a battery goes bad, if you get into a fender bender, you could completely disable the car. It’s not like I’ve got dents. No, I damaged the. You know, you’ve heard the know story ever since you were a gosh. You know, Glenda got into an accident and her frame is bent in the car and they have to total the car. Oh, wow. She got t bone on the side.
You’re seeing accidents that are not severe, where people have to give up the car because the car is now worth nothing. Because you have to put a 40 and 50 and $60,000 battery to replace it in. What would that cost to insure? That’s what people don’t want to deal with. But the labor numbers. This is just disturbing, guys, because as we enter an election year, you’ve got to rely on what’s good right now.
What is good? Tell me what’s good? Take the time, guys. Write down in the comments below and tell me what’s going good in the economy right now. Not everybody’s broke. Not everybody is living with their mom or having to move out or having to get rid of their house or their apartment. Some people are doing well. Let me know who’s doing well and how you’re doing it. Let’s talk about our sponsor, ageless multicolagen.
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One of the world’s largest pensions is Calster’s. It is the California retired Teachers pension program. They have a real problem because to meet liquidity demand, to pay the premiums, to pay you people that are retired, they have to borrow $30 billion right now, $30 billion to get through this. This is an absolute disaster. And instead of selling assets that they have, they’re concerned if they sell the assets, it would bring on a fire sale.
Read the story below. But this is a problem because there’s so many people that have pensions right now that are relying on this money and they’re saying that, listen, commercial real estate over the course of the last couple of years has gone down about 20%. Again, another lie, because we’ve heard that commercial real estate has gone down as much as 40% right now, if not more. The majority of their portfolio is wrapped up in commercial real estate and they’re concerned about this.
Well, guys, this is going to get real very quickly because you’re going to have people. What happens if they can’t pay your pension payment? Oh, Dan, that’s crazy. I have a friend of mine who worked for the county and now makes $10,000 a month walking his dog every day. That’s what he does. Okay, nice dog. But our county tax dollars at work, okay? And this guy worked 30 years of his life to get that pension.
And it’s crazy. Here’s the thing that’s wild about this. They take your most successful year. So what they do is, hey, you’re going to retire next year. Work overtime, work Saturdays, work all these extra hours so you can punch up your salary, and then that’s what they base it off of, 90% of that. So, making a ton of money right now sitting at home, but the commercial real estate is completely upside down.
And again, the lie, the lie, the lie. The lie of what we were told is that, hey, it’s only gone down 20%. All we’ve talked about is how these office buildings are being given back to the banks and the office buildings are completely upside down. There’s no tenants, nobody wants to sit in an office right now. And they don’t know what they’re going to do with this. But you’ll like this.
Calster’s read the article, says that they have only 4% leverage, and it’s not true. They have a lot more than that, but they’ve got to. Just to maintain. Just to maintain the premiums and what they’ve got to pay out. They have to borrow $30 billion against this. You’re going to see pensions go out of business. We talked about pensions in different states two years ago, having these problems coming up, and in Mississippi and different smaller municipalities where people were getting a haircut, what happens if someone’s on a pension and they say, hey, listen, effective immediately, you’re going to get a 10% pay cut.
Now, not everybody’s my friend who’s got his wife working at a hospital and he gets to live this great life. Some people spend every cent of that money that they get in the pension. If you remember, a year ago, we did a story about the people in the UK that had their pension cut by 10%. And it was devastating because it put people into poverty just by losing 10% of their pension.
So again, what we’re being told is one thing and what’s realistic is a completely another thing. So share your thoughts on this stuff so far. The retired teachers, they made a sweetheart deal, guys. We all know that they did. But now it’s time to pay up, guys, because the things that they relied on didn’t work. Kevin O’Leary, Mr. Wonderful, talked about this a couple of years ago about how, how these pensions, instead of just trying to get the 6%, they went to the moon and leveraged all this money with different things like real estate and different things that they had no business being part of.
So let me know what you think about this, guys. I’m walking through the tropical gardens in Huntington beach. Okay, let me know, guys. Bye. I’m walking amongst the leaves. That’s what the crunchy crunch crunch is. A few things. We are seeing real problems with apartment buildings and the valuations and the owners not being able to refinance them. And the reason for that is apartment buildings are dropping in value and they cannot get new financing right now.
That is a huge problem that nobody wants to look at. And they just want to say, it’s okay. These people are rich. They own apartment buildings. No, it’s upside down. It’s the same problem that they’re having with the office buildings right now. And nobody wants to admit this. And you have smaller landlords that can’t afford the refinancing because interest rates doubled during this time. It is incredibly expensive.
It is credit expensive to do maintenance. It’s incredibly expensive for energy. So water, power, gas, everything that they have to pay. And the tenants don’t pay for everything, guys. They’ve got to maintain the public areas. They’ve got to have water for certain areas, lighting for certain areas, things like that, that people just don’t want to put pen to paper to and say, oh, yeah, that does cost a landlord a little bit of money.
And they’re losing money and they’re going to lose these buildings. One thing that my friends in the foreclosure business have told me is they’re starting to foreclose on smaller strip centers, smaller office centers where there are six businesses in there. And imagine you’re the nail salon paying your rent, and you find out that the guy you pay rent to is not paying the mortgage payment and you could potentially be evicted.
And here in California, there’s laws to protect people for a few more months and things like that, but you’re going to see this become a reality in 2024. We talk about the insurance here and everybody says, oh, that’s a California problem. North Carolina. Great story below. Just talked about how they want to have, through the North Carolina Insurance Commission, they want to have a 44. 2% price increase for everybody in North Carolina, regardless of where you live.
Oh, wow. That’s a lot. 44%. Well, guess what, guys? If you go on the beach, they want it to be 99. 2%. 99. 2%. And people are freaking out over this. But hey, if you live in the beach, you’re going to pay double on your insurance. It’s that simple. So the worst thing about this is that, hey, I’ve had no claims, Dan. My house is secure. I clear my brush.
I do all the things I’m supposed to do here to be a good customer of the insurance company, and they just don’t care, guys. They just don’t care. But this is going to get very real for a lot of people very soon. So let me know what you guys think about this. Nothing is right. Nothing is the way that it’s supposed to be. Nothing. Our government just agreed to a spending gap where they agreed to this great program where it’s $1.
6 trillion of new spending so that the government doesn’t get shut down. Now, the good thing is veterans get their money. People that have doctors care are going to get their money. Food and social programs will have funding for it. But it’s a disaster, guys. Right now. It really is. And again, refinance $1. 6 trillion of this and kick it down the road. Wow. Doesn’t that seem crazy to you? Because it’s nuts to me.
You can’t borrow yourself out of debt. You just can’t. I’ll just borrow more money. Don’t worry. We’ll figure it out later. I know a guy that’s trying to buy a business right now, and the guy he’s buying the business from keeps borrowing more money. And I’m like, well, this guy is just a money junkie, is what I’ve told everybody. Get away from this guy. Let him drown in his debt.
Our federal government would do the same thing. But the poorest people and the veterans and the people that we’re supposed to care about the most are going to get shafted, okay? So get ready. You know that lake that we’ve walked by the last few months that have had all the covering on it? Look, it’s clear again. Isn’t that cool? It gets that covering of all. When the pollen blows and all the needles blow off everything and covers the lake and gives it that green cover.
No, it’s clear again. It’s really cool. So share your thoughts on this stuff so far, guys. But again, what’s real out there? What is real right now? When you sit there and you go, oh, yeah, everything’s great. What is it? What is accurate right now? Because I’m dying to find something that’s accurate. The jobs numbers get revised down, hey, everything’s good. Our GDP is right. If our jobs numbers are like this, how about this? We’re spending less on energy.
Hey, we’re producing more oil than ever, okay? The manufacturer’s up. The electricity usage for all these factories are down. How are they manufacturing everything in the dark? Come on. Okay. Origami Dan is how they make things now. You know what? Come on, guys. You have to look at this in a realistic manner. You, I’m going to finish this video with these last few stories. And the first thing is there’s a great article about how, hey, let’s face it, 2024 is going to be a bumpy year for the economy.
We barely avoided recession in 2023. And as I’m reading this, read the article. But as I was reading this, I’m like, did we really avoid recession? Is that what we did? Do you guys really think that we avoided recession? We skated through this. If that was not a recession that we just went through, what do you think we’re heading into? Guys, get real. I have friends, multiple friends now that have reached out and said, I’m worried about my job.
I’m worried about my age, being in my mid fifty? S and losing my job with this company. What do you suggest I do? And again, what do you know? Get a side hustle. Write a book. Do something. My friend Drayton nay went out and wrote a book that’s, I don’t think it’s 25 pages. I bought the thing, too. Okay. Sells it for $12 apiece, but sold over $60,000 worth of this book on how to wholesale property.
Hello. Okay. What do you know about, what do you know about that you could go make money on? You’re going to see more and more businesses go out of business right now that you never, you know, whenever I go and travel, hey, I’m going to go to Arizona. I’m going to go to Vegas. I’m going to go here. I’m going to go to Florida. Hey, try this barbecue place.
Try this brush fire barbecue in the Tucson area. Down for the count. Been in business 15 years now. The problem with this restaurant, never eaten there. But this story was sent to me. The problem with this is food costs have gone through the roof, labor costs have gone through the roof. And so it’s incredibly expensive. And I don’t know what their prices were, but I go to barbecue places that people recommend and to get a two item combo, ribs and brisket, your beans, a side salad, a drink, $40.
Guys, it’s crazy. Who can afford that? Who can afford doing that? It’s too much right now. And the final, final thing is crime. We have to do something about street crime. And there’s a story out of the New York Post. Let’s think about this. I didn’t get this from LA Times. I got this from the New York Post about a bakery in Los Angeles that was overtaken, ha, by a hundred hooligans.
Ruben’s bakery just ransacked the place, went in there, stole everything, ha, cleaned the place out. They’re destroyed. Okay, but nobody’s getting prosecuted for this. And read the article because that’s what the owner says. Like, wait a second. No one gets punished for this. No one pays the price for this. When you grew up and you did a prank or you did something, oh, wow. We didn’t get caught.
You know what I mean? It never involved ransacking a business and stealing and doing theft. Like, never, ever. So these kids have no concept of anything good in the world. What is that? What is that? Okay. And again, it’s not real. None of this is real. So they need to be prosecuted. But for the New York Post to write about an LA bakery is insane. Okay? So share your thoughts on this stuff.
Please don’t forget to hit the like button. Please don’t forget to subscribe to this channel. Join our email list. It’s the first link below. And so much is happening this week. We got a great week for you guys of a bunch of cool stuff. And onward and upward, guys. I’ll see you guys very soon. I appreciate each and every one of you guys, but, but man, oh, man, nothing’s real right now.
Remember that, okay? You heard it from me first. I’ll see you guys very soon. .
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