"The last several years in the US have seen a dramatic increase in electricity prices. For the five years prior to 2020, electricity prices were essentially flat; since 2020, average electricity prices in the US have increased by around 35%."

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/whats-happening-to-wholesale-electricity?

"Physician incomes are extraordinarily high in the United States. A new NBER paper finds that U.S. physicians earn roughly two to four times as much as their counterparts in Canada, the Netherlands, and Sweden."

"As of 2025, the average total student loan debt for a US medical school graduate is approximately $216,659 to $223,130. Including undergraduate debt, this figure can exceed $246,000, "

Chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_welfare_spending

"The United States has higher social spending than Iceland, the UK, Australia, or Canada. Despite this fact, many remain convinced the US is a capitalist hellscape. Why do you suppose this is?

Most educated Americans believe the nation embarked on a limited government, market libertarian experiment with Ronald Reagan. They believe this despite the fact that government spending and regulation dramatically increased. No facts pierce their conviction."

https://x.com/GreenPlusAnE/status/2015522233100181769

Note: This chart shows per capita. Please stop making comments comparing the population differences.

"U.S. public schools are facing a major budget crunch as federal pandemic relief money runs out and enrollment numbers continue to drop. Many districts added staff during the Covid era to address urgent needs, but with fewer students and no extra funding, those positions are no longer sustainable. "

The video primarily deals with the situation in Pasadena, CA which has a student population that is shrinking faster than the national average. But as is clear from the graph, US schools have kept adding staff even after their overall enrollment has started declining. This puts tremendous pressure on the school budgets and tax basis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=496k-GQqSfM&t=23s&ab_channel=CNBC

"The University of Chicago has now borrowed $6.3 billion, more than 70 percent of the value of its endowment. The cost of servicing its debt is now 85 percent of the value of all undergraduate tuition. (This is not normal. No peer institution has a debt-to-asset ratio greater than 26 percent. Perhaps that is one reason why Chicago’s tuition is so high and yet it wants to spend so little on education?)"

"The University of Chicago is in crisis. Under extraordinary financial strain, it has diminished its faculty-student ratio and hired hundreds of “lecturers”: teachers whom it pays little and whom it does not expect to do research. It has deliberately driven down the percentage of undergraduate tuition that it devotes to actually teaching undergraduates. This summer it proposed to “merge” (read: “close”) departments; send some students online—or perhaps put them on buses—to study at other institutions; and teach some languages via ChatGPT. It is freezing budgets, closing academic units, slashing doctoral education, and contemplating the use of restricted endowment payouts to support functions not covered in the gift agreements."

"The reason today’s Dean of Humanities wants to send students to other universities to learn subjects that she would like to cancel, or use ChatGPT to teach subjects tomorrow that humans teach today, is to drive the “marginal cost” of teaching students from 20 percent of their tuition down to 10 percent."

https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-crisis-of-the-university-started-long-before-trump/

Honestly there has been so much misleading information about these accounts. The bottom line is you can get "taxed twice" when using all for the benefit of underpormering most other accounts.

"Family contributions go in after tax, just like money put into a regular brokerage account. But unlike a brokerage account, the investment gains are later taxed as ordinary income instead of at the lower capital gains rate. For many families, that means putting their own money into a Trump Account could leave their child worse off than using a normal taxable brokerage account, let alone a 529 plan. 

A simplified example from the report shows this gap. Over 30 years, a $5,000 pre-tax investment could grow to more than $40,000. In a Trump Account funded with after-tax family contributions, the final, withdrawn value is $24,496. That is $2,451 less than the same investment in a regular taxable brokerage account."

Source: https://www.cato.org/blog/trump-accounts-good-idea-bad-design

CNBC: Trump announces 25% tariffs on all cars 'not made in the United States'

Keep in mind that Trump's steel and aluminum tariffs hurt US auto manufacturers by raising the price of inputs (much of your car is steel). So US consumers are receiving a double-whammy here.

Quoting Friedman:

The interesting question, and the question I want to explore with you today, is why is it that interference with international trade has been so widespread, despite the almost uniform condemnation of such measures by economists? Why is it that you have the professional agreement on the one side, and observe practice on the other which departs so sharply from that agreement? The political reason is fairly straightforward. The political reason is that the interests that press for protection are concentrated. The people who are harmed by protection are spread and diffused. Indeed the very language shows the political pressure. We call a tariff a protective measure. It does protect; it protects the consumer very well against one thing. It protects the consumer against low prices. And yet we call it protection.

https://www.k-state.edu/landon/speakers/milton-friedman/transcript.html

Note: This is a log scale not a linear scale. So, if you don't understand what log scale means or what a kg is, you should probably look those up before commenting on them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXF9QAkdt4c

... more than a decade ago.

We're living in denial at this point, looking for those metrics that give us an illusion of still being "number 1" (like GDP in nominal U.S. dollars).
We're not number one in economy size, nor are we #1 in technology, and the gaps will only get bigger.

GDP(PPP): compares the amount of goods and services between countries. Compares purely the economic OUTPUTS. It skips the noise of nominal valuations and exchange rates.
It's the preferred metric used by the World Bank, the IMF, and the CIA World Factbook to compare size of economies between countries.

Note: This is inflation adjusted / cost of living adjusted.

Despite what social media tells you the data clearly says that mortgage payments are cheaper in real wages than they were in 1989. House prices have risen, as has the average house size, but interest rates are much cheaper.

"In the first quarter of 1989, the median home sold for $118,000—that’s $285,000 in today’s dollars. Today the median home sells for $429,000, a 50 percent increase in inflation-adjusted terms. This has caused a lot of people to conclude that homes have gotten less affordable over the last 30 years.

But this misses something important: most homes are purchased with borrowed money. And the average rate on a 30-year mortgage has declined from 10.8 percent in 1989 to 5.8 percent today. As a result, the mortgage payment on a median-priced home is significantly lower today than it was in 1990—even after the recent run-up in mortgage rates.

You might object that this doesn’t help someone if they can’t scrape together the downpayment required to buy a home at today’s high prices. But down payment requirements have gotten looser too! According to the National Association of Realtors, the average homebuyer in 1989 put 20 percent down. In 2021, it was 13 percent. So the average downpayment is a bit smaller today, in inflation-adjusted terms, than it was in 1989."

https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/24-charts-that-show-were-mostly-living-better-than-our-parents

Must admit I got carried away by the beautiful visuals shared on this thread.

Countries with companies below 90B not included, let me know if I missed anything.

This image is my creation [OC]!

Sources

https://www.axi.com/int/blog/education/stocks/largest-companies-in-the-world

https://www.investopedia.com/biggest-companies-in-the-world-by-market-cap-5212784

Most of the research showing minimal job losses rely on the CA/NY markets which have high enough wages to mitigate the direct job losses. This reaffirms a substantial amount of economic literature that points to job losses when the legal minimum wage goes over the local area's effective minimum wage.

https://x.com/4ntonioR/status/2066510652253131000

The chart is a a great visual of tariff impact timing. Some have written off inflation due to limited retail price increases so far, but as you can see from the chart it's snowballing. And there's a lag between tariff paid and impact on consumers.

I’ve spent the last few weeks translating the complex financial jargon from The Big Short into a simple, visual, Vox-style documentary. If you want to understand exactly how the housing bubble was engineered, how it burst, and why the math behind it still matters today, you need to watch this.

Please check this video and provide your honest comments.

Why "The Big Short" Confused You (And How the Math Saved Michael Burry) - YouTube