Prattling Before the Pratfall

At age 88, my father was in denial about his condition. He acknowledged that he was “slowing down,” but that was as far as it went.

I joined my sister who is an M.D., and my sister who is an R.N., to have the “it’s time” talk with our father. It was time for him to move to an assisted living facility, which he angrily refused to even consider. A month later he suffered a massive stroke, instantly turning my life inside out. Ten months later he was gone.

One of my father’s neighbors told me there had been an incident months before Dad’s stroke. He saw Dad sitting in his car in the middle of the street, so he went outside to check on him. Dad was disoriented, failing to acknowledge the neighbor by name, and he couldn’t remember which house was his. The neighbor pointed to the house, and Dad recovered enough to get the car into the garage. My father had a Mitch Moment, probably due to a mini-stroke, according to my sisters.

My guess is that McConnell forgot where he was. After recovering from whatever hit him, McConnell insisted that he was fine, but everyone can see that he isn’t. McConnell needs to be told what no elderly person wants to hear, “It’s time.”

Mitch should resign, effective immediately, as should Dianne Feinstein. Biden’s mental acuity seems mostly okay for now, but he should drop his bid for re-election, and Trump isn’t far behind in age.

The Fed has added another quarter point to the federal funds interest rate, nudging it up towards 5.5%. This is bad news for individuals carrying variable rate debt, and those who are applying for a loan. It’s good news for me, because my retirement money is in local banks that are offering attractive CD interest rates.

This is the upside of inflation for risk-adverse retirees who are feeling the pinch of rising food prices. Finally, the financial sector isn’t skewed 100% in Wall Street’s favor and, whatta ya know, Wall Street is still doing fine.

For almost fifteen years, the easy money policy of the Fed gave Wall Street at least two advantages. First, money could be borrowed for free, tempting brokers to make risky speculative investments of the sort that contributed to the crisis of 2008. Second, there was a massive transfer of money into equities from commercial banks, because regular bank accounts paid nothing. Savings accounts are actually “losing accounts.”

The arrow in the graphic shows the last time I locked in an interest rate for my IRA CD’s. The pre-Covid rate of 2.5 percent wasn’t much, but it was a big bump up from what the rates had been, following the crisis of 2008. If the interest rate had stayed at zero, I would have given up the safety of bank CD’s for index funds. For now I can safely remain a contrarian, and a true financial conservative.