Headlines good? Reality bad? | ZFS 91

Headlines good? Reality bad? | ZFS 91

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2508075/fan_mail/new] The White House posted a graph this week saying prices are falling. I need to be very clear about something. Prices are not falling. Inflation came in at 3.5% for June which means everything you buy is 3.5% more expensive than it was this time last year. That is not deflation. That is not prices coming down. That is propaganda posted at a convenient moment before the war started back up again. I walk through every major headline hitting the economy right now and tell you what it actually means. The Strait of Hormuz is back down to 3 to 5 ships per day after briefly opening. Trump is threatening to bomb Iranian power plants and bridges next week if they do not come to the table. Oil is sitting at $78 and economists are already calling for a dramatic spike if he follows through. Our Strategic Petroleum Reserve is sitting at 319.5 million barrels, only 19.5 million above the minimum operating level, the lowest since 1983. Food is up 26% over five years. India is hitting 9.87% wholesale inflation because of this war. Farmers are dealing with tariffs, drought, and urea costs all at once. And the AI bubble is being called out by Jeremy Grantham and Bill Gurley, two of the most credible voices in investment, who are both saying the same thing. This is the dot com bubble and it is going to pop. Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2508075/support]

What Made Housing so EXPENSIVE? | ZFS 90

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2508075/fan_mail/new] Before Covid I got sandwich makers into homes. Deli workers. Campus security guards. Single airmen fresh out of basic training. Sub thousand dollar mortgages every week here in Delaware. That world is completely gone and I want to walk you through exactly why. In this episode Sean, Joe and I break down the real causes of the housing crisis from the ground up. Median home prices. Rental increases since 2015. The $4 trillion the Federal Reserve printed in 2020 and where that money actually went. The Cantillon effect and why banks, governments and asset holders always win when money gets printed. And the one graph that shows a first time home buyer today needs to make $93,000 a year just to qualify. We also read the actual Dallas Federal Reserve document that went viral this week. Not the New York Post headline. Not Caroline Leavitt's tweet. The actual document. And what it says is very different from what went viral. Immigration can explain about 30% of the total growth in home prices in metro areas. Not 30% of home prices. 30% of the increase. Which works out to roughly 6.8% of total home price growth. That is a very different number and nobody is telling you that. We close with a real conversation about what Gen Z is supposed to do in this economy and what a silver lining actually looks like when the system is this stacked against you. Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2508075/support]

House Bill Breakdown and Inflation Update | ZFS 89

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2508075/fan_mail/new] Three things on the table today. The Road to Housing Act, the jobs numbers, and Trump enriching himself from office. I walk through the housing bill section by section and give you my honest take on what is actually good, what is a grant nobody will fund, and what is missing entirely. The corporate ownership cap has no divestment clause. That is a problem. The manufactured home chassis requirement removal is one of the best ideas in the whole bill. I break it all down. On jobs, they expected 110,000 new jobs this month. We got closer to 50,000. April and May were revised down again. Gen Z graduates are entering the worst entry level job market in four decades. One in three junior roles has already been replaced by AI. And Caroline Levitt went on Fox News and said it is because they do not love America enough. Then we get into Trump's crypto holdings, his meme coin dinner with top holders, and Nancy Pelosi's trading record. And we close on the most viral tweet of 2026 so far, Eric Adams telling New Yorkers to set their AC to 78 degrees and Dave Portnoy calling it communism. Ads, as always, are off for the first 24 hrs.  Finance & Corruption tied together with Current Events Source List: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DZ5WmQihV9H/ https://x.com/factpostnews/status/2071699320512942201 https://x.com/factpostnews/status/2071681457542541763 https://www.nar.realtor/sites/default/files/2026-05/hai-q1-2026-first-time-homebuyer-affordability-2026-05-05.pdf https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/6644?__cf_chl_f_tk=R7NQczEjxcLoyBC19eo608.IG8H2GfFWlPQZ.bhLJ38-1783087824-1.0.1.1-Stc02gJFfgm3JljonZqHMOw98LwQUz.H76AfGS4kHqE https://bipartisanpolicy.org/issue-brief/inside-the-deal-whats-in-the-final-21st-century-road-to-housing-act/ https://finance.yahoo.com/personal-finance/mortgages/article/median-home-price-by-state-151223005.html? https://jbrec.com/insights/charting-a-22-year-roller-coaster-of-investor-activity/ https://assets.informz.net/cmbs/data/images/CREFC_HR6644_Sec1001_Member_Summary%20(06.16.26).pdf https://www.instagram.com/p/DEVbYZrykZy/ https://x.com/ZacharyLoft/status/2073035689499709702 https://memeburn.com/gen-z-faces-the-toughest-entry-level-job-market-in-decades-in-2026/ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12032194 https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.a.htm# https://x.com/byHeatherLong/status/2072660940663697690/photo/1 https://x.com/atrupar/status/2072795363090567172 https://x.com/i/trending/2073034950178210209 https://www.quiverquant.com/congresstrading/politician/Nancy%20Pelosi-P000197 https://x.com/TheMaineWonk/status/2072380124649988486/photo/1 https://x.com/factpostnews/status/2072708969479450878 https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.t01.htm https://x.com/nycmayor/status/2072411003170472359?s=46 Short Form Stuff: tiktok.com/@zacharyloft instagram.com/zachary.loft Support our mission:                                 zachary-loft-shop.fourthwall.com patreon.com/cw/ZacharyFoust?utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2508075/support]

Are they selling America for parts? | ZFS 88

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2508075/fan_mail/new] I just finished laying 204 feet of fencing. No producer, no notes, no script. Just me in the basement with something on my mind that I cannot shake. I think the tech bros are winning. And I do not mean that as a compliment. I spent two hours in Afghanistan in 2013 working alongside an intel contractor who had a blimp camera 400 yards in the air that could read a name tag from two miles away in 10K resolution. That was 2013. Now Flock cameras are going up in Milford Delaware reading your license plate, your dents, your face. Digital IDs are being voted on. CBDCs have no ban. Sam Altman has said publicly he thinks AI could be the end of humankind and he is still building it. Peter Thiel cannot answer why Palantir is being used to target and kill people in the Middle East. And Anthropic executives are quitting to go write poetry in Europe because they believe they have built something that could end the world. I walk through how we got here. The flip phone to the iPhone. The algorithm arriving in 2015. Operation Condor and 96% of American history being spent in active war. Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon as the world's most profitable independent security contractors. The military industrial complex not as a conspiracy theory but as a line item on a balance sheet. And then I get to the thing that is keeping me up at night. I think they are selling America for parts right in front of us while we watch, get angry, do a boycott for a week, and then go back to filling our Amazon carts. What would it actually take to do something? I have a number. It is 10 million people. And I walk through what that would look like. This is a long one. Make yourself comfortable. Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2508075/support]

Would GEN Z survive the 2010 economy? | ZFS 87

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2508075/fan_mail/new] The government says cumulative inflation since 2010 is 52.72%. I think that number is a lie and I have the receipts. I spent time building out what I am calling the Real Inflation Tracker. I took real items that real 25 to 34 year olds buy every single week and I looked at what they cost in 2010 versus what they cost today. A McDonald's meal that was $5.29 in 2010 is now $16.79. That is not 52%. That is over 200%. A pack of bacon, ground beef, dish soap, car insurance, health insurance, rent on a one bedroom apartment, a college education, a new construction home. Every single one of them has gone up more than 100%. Most of them more than double the official number. I also walk through what has gone up the least since 2010. Video games, smart TVs, streaming devices, hotel rooms, cell phone plans, Bud Light. Nothing you actually need. Just the things that keep you distracted and comfortable enough not to notice what is happening to everything else. I break down Kevin Warsh's statement on price stability versus persistently high prices and why those two things are not the same sentence. I walk through the Dodge versus Ford 1919 court case that legally locked corporations into choosing shareholders over workers and why repealing it would do more for American wages than any tariff ever could. And I close with five things that would actually fix this system if anyone in Washington had the spine to do them. They are lying about the economy on purpose. I am going to keep building the data to prove it. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OAbihkG-bQ70pCUPknM1Gzw-IpR1iPqcEZXnAubdNfM/edit?gid=0#gid=0 Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2508075/support]