International Payday
My friends and I quickly fell in love with playing cards for money in high school. By junior and senior year, my friend Ben implemented International Payday as a way to clear all the IOUs.
Ben, Barry, Brad, Dan and I all got to know each other in Cross Country during freshman year of high school. We started playing euchre in the back of the bus on our way to and from cross country meets. It wasn’t long before we were playing for money- $5 a point, $1 a hink (I don’t even know if that’s a word). And what started off as euchre moved to other card games like five and seven card stud poker.
We eventually graduated to all kinds of games. Some of them were real, and I think some of them were made up. Along the way, other friends joined the fun. Phil is related to Barry and Brad, Chad was my best friend on the street and played football with Phil, Micah knew Ben, and on and on.
The betting didn’t stop. In fact, it escalated. And the more exotic games fed bigger pots. We started playing Acey-Duecy where you had to get a card between whichever two cards were dealt first. If the 3rd card wasn’t between the first two, you added to the pot. And if the 3rd card was identical to one of the first two cards, you matched the pot. We played games where we named multiple wild cards - everyone thinks they have a winning hand when there are wild cards flying around! This further fed the pots. And finally, we played a game where anyone with cards of a certain suit had to play. And if you lost that hand, you had to match the pot. “Clubs you’re in.” So, if four people were in, three had to match the pot. Needless to say, the pots kept growing.
Just to be clear, the pots went from a few bucks to $100 or so per pot. It wasn’t like we were betting thousands of dollars. But still, for high school kids, it was a lot of money. It wasn’t long before we weren’t throwing actual cash into the middle. Ben or Dan brought chips, and IOU’s were everywhere.
It got so bad that Ben declared the first Monday of every month to be “International Payday.” The concept was to force everyone to settle up once a month. I don’t remember whether International Payday was declared before or after Ben got called into Mr Merrill’s guidance office. Yeah, people started talking around school and teachers got nervous with all the money changing hands. International payday generally worked, but I think even to this day, with Micah now “Doctor Micah,” he still owes Ben money that was never paid back on International Payday.
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Donald Trump was elected president last week. What has already been a banner year for the market went parabolic. The S&P 500 is now up almost 26% for the year.
Frankly, the gains in the S&P since the election (up 5%) pale in comparison to other parts of the market. The pundits are referring to the “Trump Trade,” stocks which appear likely to benefit from less regulation in areas such as energy (oil & natural gas), a more favorable corporate tax environment, crypto, and tariffs. Here are some examples:
Small caps, which have underperformed since COVID, are up almost 10% in the past 5 days:
Financials are up over 9%:
And maybe the most crazy, bitcoin is up 29% in the past 5 days!!!!:
That’s all good. And there’s probably some accuracy that these investments will benefit in the short, and probably medium term from a Trump presidency. President Trump generally has followed through on his promises, something that his supporters appreciate. And, in his first term, President Trump’s policies stimulated economic growth.
Not unlike those of us who played cards to win, sometimes the fun leads to losses, aka debts. From a financial perspective, some of President Trump’s decisions likely add to the federal debt. Eliminating taxes on tips, overtime pay, and Social Security benefits, along with restoring the state and local tax deduction, are likely to increase the debt. Even though lower taxes likely increase growth, non-partisan economic estimates suggest the growth won’t offset the tax decreases. Said differently, the government is likely to spend more than it takes in via taxes. You can think of it as putting expenses on a credit card and not paying them back every month. Or, as my friends and I did, accumulating IOU’s while betting more and more.
The country has been on a path of increasing its debt for a long time. You can see in the chart below that debt (to GDP) exploded higher in 2009 when the government took extraordinary measures to pull the country out of the great financial crisis of 2008. It spiked further during Covid and debt has leveled off at 120% of GDP, ranking 9th in the world.
How bad is 120%? The Wharton School of Business suggests that a debt to GDP greater than 75% hinders growth, and a ratio near 200% results in a significant slowdown in economic growth. At the current rate, the Congressional Budget Office estimates the US will be between 175 and 200 by the year 2040 or 2045.
And what is the endgame? In the last 100 years, multiple world powers have gotten themselves in trouble by accumulating too much debt. In 1944 and then again in 1971, the major world economic parties came together to hash out how to handle overbearing debt loads.
If the US debt were to get too high, you can bet there will be calls for another international effort to settle up. This time it might include the management of debts, trade imbalances, gold, the role of the dollar, and even a role for bitcoin. One way or the other, it would be the third time in 100 years where the world had a version of International Payday.
Jared
What’s Your Financial Story?
** Wharton School of Business article: https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2023/10/6/when-does-federal-debt-reach-unsustainable-levels
All other YCharts graphs are created by me, Jared Kline.
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