What was that Golden Age?
I would say economically at least it was about 1950 to 1970 until the Arab Oil Embargo. Why?
Because the average white male could make enough money as a carpenter or garbage man to support about 5 people by himself, by a house and buy a car by age 17 years old even without a High School Diploma.
So, my description of the "Golden Age" was caused actually by World war II and the U.S. helping other nations get back on their feet and making them loans and the economic prosperity that came to the U.S. in the form of "buying power" that the poor and the middle Class had (especially white men did in the 1950s to the 1970s.
What ended this buying power?
The Arab Oil embargo ended the prosperity of the middle Class and poor and it has gotten worse every since.
For example, I could make at age 16 working part time 3 dollars an hour which was 3 times the minimum Wage and buy myself my first car one month after I turned 16 years old. Then since Gasoline was only 17 cents a Gallon some places I could afford to drive my 1956 Ford StationWagon up to 400 miles a weekend and explore the mountains, deserts and beaches of southern California especially. Can young people do this now?
Not like then. And I was raised mostly middle Class and bought my car and gas with my own money from working part time from age 12 through 18 when I went to college. and then by 19 or 20 I could afford to buy a new 1968 Camaro (as long as I lived at home with my parents so I could afford the car payments and insurance).
So, economically at least, 1950 to 1970 was a boom time for the middle Class and poor in the U.S. in this sense and ended forever because Gasoline went from 17 cents a gallon to 1 Dollar a gallon within a few years.
Some members of Gen Z are feeling so pessimistic about the future of the country and modern technology that they want to hop in a time machine.
Nearly half (47%) of adults ages 18-29 said if they had the option, they’d choose to live in the past, according to a new NBC News Decision Desk Poll powered by SurveyMonkey. One-third said they’d pick a time period less than 50 years in the past, while another 14% said they’d choose more than 50 years in the past.
Meanwhile, 38% of Gen Zers said they’d prefer to live in the present, 10% said they’d go less than 50 years in the future, and 5% chose more than 50 years in the future.
The results were largely consistent across gender lines and partisan divides, though young Black adults were less likely to say they’d prefer to live in the past (33%) than young white adults (52%) or young Hispanic adults (47%).
The broader sentiment underscores the negative outlook many young Americans feel about their future prospects and the state of the country. The poll found that 62% of Gen Z respondents said they expect life will be worse for them compared to previous generations, compared to 25% who said it will be better and 13% who said it would be about the same.
And 80% of Gen Z adults said the United States is on the wrong track, the highest share of any age group in the survey.
In interviews with NBC News, young adults said the desire to live in the past is shaped by their relationship with technology and a growing discomfort with being connected to the internet at all times. Nostalgia for a previous era can bring a sense of community and comfort to Gen Zers who are anxious about an uncertain technological and geopolitical future, they said.
The desire to live in the recent past is part of a growing trend among young adults interested in the culture, fashion and technology of the 1980s, ’90s and early 2000s.
Just look at the growing resurgence of claw clips, baggy jeans and strappy tops among young women. Or the flourishing markets for cassette tapes and iPods and the recent social media obsession with ’90s figures like John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette, prompted in part by the FX TV series “Love Story.”
Some members of Gen Z, born in 1997 or later, wish to live in an era “right before social media and computers mediated life,” nostalgia researcher and existential psychologist Clay Routledge said in an interview.
If you yearn for a time too far before the ’90s, he said, “you don’t have some of the advantages of societal progress.”
Several members of Gen Z who participated in the latest Decision Desk poll agreed with Routledge’s hypothesis.
Ben Isaacs, a 20-year-old student in Colorado, said he selected “less than 50 years in the past” in the poll as the period he’d live in if he could choose.
Isaacs specifically pointed to the 1990s as a time with “a lack of phones, more personal experience, but also still some of the ease of modern technology.”
A smartphone, Isaacs said, “draws away from people’s ability to just look at each other, have a conversation, and exist outside of the realm of the phone and what happens on your phone.”
Skyler Barnett, a 28-year-old construction worker in Missouri, also cited the internet and smartphones as one reason he didn’t select the present as the ideal time to live in.
“There’s so, so much internet nowadays and so much just bullcrap that goes along with, you know, internet,” he told NBC News. “And these kids today, they got so much stuff going through their heads that’s just not relevant to the outside world.”
Some of Gen Z’s interest in the recent past, Routledge said, can be explained by the phenomenon of cultural nostalgia.
“When there’s a lot of disruptions — political divisiveness, or, you know, worries about AI or other kinds of societal, technological or social, cultural changes — people tend to become more nostalgic for the past to help them with the things that they’re worried about,” he said.
Looking back at the 1990s, Routledge said, offers Gen Z a version of the world before everyone was tied to the internet, which can be attractive and comforting.
“If there’s this fear that it’s going in a direction that’s unhealthy or that they can’t control or they don’t understand, then you could imagine it being like, ‘Well, instead of jumping in that hypothetical future … I’d rather take the time machine to the time before it got to that place,” he said. “It’s almost a little bit like a reboot.”
Routledge also said that an increasing share of Gen Z has begun to recognize certain detrimental mental and cultural effects of modern technology and have taken more “agency” in the push to have a more healthy relationship with it.
“They’re the ones driving … many of these consumer retro trends that, again, aren’t throwing the smartphones away, but they’re saying the smartphones can’t, shouldn’t control us,” he said.
Alex Abernathy, a 25-year-old part-time student in Michigan, said in an interview that she’s “about the iPods.”
“I think it’s important to get back to technology being made for one thing at a time, and not people having, you know, a supercomputer that you walk around with,” she added.
In the poll, Abernathy said she’d prefer to live in a time period less than 50 years into the future, mostly because she’d like to see more social and political progress. But she added that what excites her about the future is finding more opportunities to gather with offline communities and spend less time on her phone.
“I use social media as a way to find other people and find events and find community,” Abernathy said, adding: “I think that community, like, real community — showing up for each other when we’re tired or when the other person doesn’t have the energy or the resources ... I think that that’s going to be the biggest part moving forward, because we’ve all been so divided and told how we should treat each other.”
She added that she’d recently connected with a 67-year-old woman at a political protest who shared similar values and interests.
“We get this put into our heads where it’s like, ‘Oh no, the older people don’t care. It’s all up to us,’” Abernathy said. “And it’s really, there’s so many people in different age groups and different walks of life that actually think the same way.”
The NBC News Decision Desk Poll powered by SurveyMonkey surveyed 32,433 adults, including 3,009 adults ages 18-29, online from March 30 to April 13. The full sample of all adults has a margin of error of plus or minus 1.8 percentage points. The subgroup of adults ages 18-29 (Gen Z) has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.4 percentage points.
“By denying Iran its oil-related revenue, traders may be thinking that the economic war may be more effective in getting concessions from Iran’s regime than was the kinetic war only, and that this will end the war sooner, rather than later,” according to Thierry Wizman, a strategist at Macquarie Group.
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How Wall Street is setting records even with the Iran war still going on
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How Wall Street is setting records even with the Iran war still going on
It seems so illogical. How can the U.S. stock market be setting records when gasoline prices are still expensive, U.S. households are feeling less confident about the economy and the war with Iran is still going?
But for Wall Street, everything eventually comes back to a different, basic question: How much money are companies making? And at the moment, they’re earning so much that investors are willing to pay higher prices than ever for a piece of ownership of U.S. companies.
It’s been a jarring ride for investors, many of whom may have felt the urge to dump their stock investments last month when the S&P 500 fell nearly 10% below its prior record. But as it has every time so far in its history, the index at the heart of many 401(k) accounts rewarded investors who remained patient by not only recovering all its losses but also forging to new heights. On Wednesday, the index closed at a record 7,137.90.
Here’s a look at what’s been behind the market’s surprising strength:
Stock prices flitter up and down every second for myriad reasons, many of which no one can explain. But at its heart, and over the long term, a stock’s price depends on two things: how much money a company is making and how much an investor is willing to pay for each $1 of that.
The latter part of that formula tends to swing up and down with interest rates and how much greed investors are feeling versus fear.
When fear prevailed in the early days of the war, stock prices dove. The worry was that a long-term surge for oil prices because of the war could send a debilitating wave of inflation crashing into the global economy.
Interest rates also rose, further undercutting stock prices, as investors worried the threat of high inflation would prevent the Federal Reserve and other central banks worldwide from cutting the short-term interest rates they control. While lower interest rates can give the economy a boost, they can also worsen inflation.
Since late March, expectations have built that the United States and Iran will avoid a worst-case scenario for the global economy. It would be in both countries’ economic interests to do so, and for Iran’s leadership, an end to the war would also likely mean survival.
The ceasefire that the two sides agreed to earlier this month is still holding, though it’s tenuous.
The market’s shift away from abject fear has also shown itself in oil prices. The price for a barrel of Brent crude oil, the international standard, went from roughly $70 before the war to $119 when worries reached their heights. It has since pulled back and was bouncing around $100 on Wednesday.
Much of the focus has been on the Strait of Hormuz, which oil tankers use to exit the Persian Gulf. If Iran keeps the strait closed, and if the U.S. Navy continues to blockade Iranian ships, everyone will get hurt. Customers worldwide will not get oil, and Iran will not get revenue from selling its own crude.
“By denying Iran its oil-related revenue, traders may be thinking that the economic war may be more effective in getting concessions from Iran’s regime than was the kinetic war only, and that this will end the war sooner, rather than later,” according to Thierry Wizman, a strategist at Macquarie Group.
Traders on Wall Street are also betting again on a chance that the Fed could resume its cuts to interest rates later this year. They see a much lower probability than they did before the war, according to data from CME Group. But they’re no longer worried about the possibility of hikes to rates.
As fear has eased, investors have been able to turn their focus more to the first part of the equation making up stock prices: profits. And those have been coming in strong.
A little more than 15% of S&P 500 companies have already reported how much profit they made during the first three months of 2026, and the vast majority have topped analysts’ expectations. That includes everyone from Citigroup to J.B. Hunt Transport Services to UnitedHealth Group.
If the rest of the companies in the index just match analysts’ estimates, earnings for S&P 500 companies will end up being roughly 14% higher than a year earlier, according to FactSet.
Those results include a month of wartime, and while companies say they’re still wary about potential risks because of the fighting, they’re not showing many signs of it hurting their earnings.
Bank of America’s chief executive officer, Brian Moynihan, said last week that “we saw healthy client activity, including solid consumer spending and stable asset quality, indicating a resilient American economy.”
That’s even though many U.S. households are feeling nervous about more expensive gasoline and higher prices broadly due to tariffs, as shown in recent surveys.
Analysts have actually raised their expectations for upcoming profits for S&P 500 companies since the war began. They’re forecasting growth for S&P 500 profits to accelerate to 20% in the second quarter, and companies aren’t giving them many reasons to reconsider.
Delta Air Lines said earlier this month that it’s seeing strong demand from people flying both for business and for vacations. PepsiCo last week stuck by its forecast for profit over 2026, which it initially gave before the Iran war began, and CEO Ramon Laguarta said he’s encouraged by how resilient its international business has been. GE Vernova on Wednesday said demand is soaring for power from AI data centers, and it raised its revenue forecast for the year.
Of course, the U.S. stock market can easily return to falling. Wall Street’s mood could swing quickly back to fear if U.S.-Iran talks break down and the oil market looks to be facing shortages.
And if oil prices stay high for long enough, it would erode some of those profits for companies. Not only would it raise costs for businesses, it would also weaken the spending power for U.S. households and other customers.
As I see the problem as someone who grew up in the 1950s is that people always needed to be very bored as children to grow up normal. why?
Because you have to look up at the sky and be bored and see all sorts of things in the clouds. You have to be bored enough to watch the birds and animals around you cavorting around in their world that we share with them. You have to be bored enough to go walking on the beach and walking in the mountains or wherever you are to explore What is there.
Without all these things you just do not grow up normal like we were for thousands of years before now, instead you become a product sort of like Dial Soap that is manufactured by whatever pictures and thoughts get shoved down your throat that are NOT your own thoughts and dreams but come from either people trying to make money on you or from people trying to harm you in some way.
So, you never grow up understanding what is good and real really at all in your life and you become vulnerable to all the awful things in the world that we all try to avoid when we grow up bored and listen to our elders of their experiences so we don't have to repeat their mistakes over and over again.
In my generation of Baby Boomers we were taught NOT to create another World war II or Great Depression.
Well. Look around you! it now looks like the Great Depression worldwide and World War II all over again doesn't it?
And where are the young people? Watching Tic Tok from China being programmed to think like "I don't know what?"
There are really only two ways to think and one is as a slave thinks and one is as a free person thinks.
And Video Games and Social Media for children doesn't tend to create people who are not Slaves. Why?
Because you have to be very observant what is going on around you and inside of you not to wind up a slave like most people are on earth.
For Free people they would rather be Dead than Be a Slave!
As in "Give me Liberty or Give me Death!" one of the mottos of the founding fathers of America!
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Pope Leo vents about failure to end Iran war
ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE — Pope Leo expressed frustration Thursday that U.S. and Iranian leaders have not been able to get the diplomatic efforts to end the war back on track.
“One day Iran says 'yes,' the United States says 'no,' and vice versa,” Leo told reporters on the flight back to the Vatican after an 11-day pastoral visit to Africa. “We don’t know where this is going to lead, which has created again this chaotic situation, critical for the world economy.”
Leo spoke out as the fragile ceasefire that has been in place since April 8 was being tested anew by the standoff over the strategic Strait of Hormuz.
The narrow waterway between Iran and Oman, through which up to 20% of the world’s oil supply is shipped, was effectively shut down in early March after Iran imposed a blockade on the waterway, and then the U.S. imposed its own by barring ships from entering or exiting Iranian ports.
President Donald Trump declared Thursday on Truth Social that “Iran is having a very hard time figuring out who their leader is” and insisted that the U.S. has “total control over the Strait of Hormuz.”
But Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi later posted on X that the country's leadership is unified. "Iran's state institutions continue to act with unity, purpose, and discipline," he wrote.
In the meantime, Leo told reporters on the papal plane, “there is also the entire population of Iran, of innocent people who are suffering because of this war.”
Asked about reports that the hard-line Iranian regime was executing political opponents, Leo said he condemns capital punishment and “the taking of people’s lives.”
“So when a regime, when a country, takes decisions which takes away the lives of other people unjustly then obviously that is something that should be condemned,” the pope said.
Leo has drawn Trump’s ire by forcefully advocating for an end to the war with Iran. That public spat has overshadowed his pontifical tour of four African countries, which ended Thursday with a Mass for thousands of people in Malabo, the former capital of Equatorial Guinea.
The Chicago-born pontiff has appeared to be trying to dial down the tension with Trump, saying last week that it was “not in my interest at all” to debate the U.S. president.
And when asked by reporters Thursday about the contentious issue of immigration, Leo made a statement that Trump would likely agree with.
“I personally think a state has the right to implement rules for their borders and I do not say that everyone should enter without order, creating situations which can sometimes be even more unjust in the places they are arriving to then from where they just left,” the pope said.
Leo, however, laid the responsibility for easing the immigration crisis on wealthy countries rather than on desperate migrants trying to escape poverty in their home countries.
“I ask what do we do in the richer countries to change the situation in the poorer countries,” Leo said. “Why can we not find help from states for investments also in large, rich, multinational companies, to change the situations in countries like those we have traveled to during this trip?”
Migrants, the pope added, “are human beings and we must treat human beings in a humanitarian way and not treat oftentimes them worse than pets or animals.”
Leo began his tour of Africa on April 13 with a stop in Algeria, making him the first leader of the Roman Catholic church to visit the mostly Muslim country.
There, Leo walked in the footsteps St. Augustine, one of Christianity's greatest thinkers and the inspiration for the religious order to which he belongs, by making a pilgrimage to the ruins of the ancient Roman city where Augustine lived and worked in the fifth century A.D.
From there, Leo flew to Cameroon, a country in central Africa where he presided over a Mass attended by more than 100,000 people.
There, Leo openly criticized corruption in the presence of Cameroon's President Paul Biya. The 93-year-old president has clung to power since 1982, in a country where 43% of the population lives in poverty.
The next stop for Leo was Angola, where he criticized the unequal distribution of wealth in the mineral-rich country.
Leo declared that many people in the world were being “exploited by authoritarians and defrauded by the rich."
Throughout his African journey, Leo made several trips from his seat at the front of the papal plane to the back of the jet to speak with reporters — and make news. Like on the flight from the Vatican to Algeria, when the pope hit back at Trump's broadside that Leo was “WEAK on crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy.”
"I have no fear of the Trump administration, or speaking out loudly of the message of the gospel, which is what I believe I am here to do, what the church is here to do," the pope said.
If you just read the previous article you can see the writing on the wall with so many things we import from other nations just going away one by one now. This then creates a chain reaction among nations because nations since World War II have all become "INTERDEPENDENT" on each other in many different ways.
Of course, there are countries like China and the U.S. (few others) that can be entirely self sufficient. But, China is not Self Sufficient in Oil or Gas or Diesel so unless they move quickly to alternative sources of energy they too are in trouble with Trump doing this.
However, I can see China fighting back against Trump and Netanyahu in various passive aggressive ways that people like Trump might not fully understand or want to accept. They are a 6000 year old civilization after all and not born yesterday. It is also True that Iran and the Persian Empire also goes back 4000 years at least too so they weren't born yesterday either much to Trump's dismay!
So, is another Great Depression starting now because of Trump?
I would have to say: "Yes. This is what is happening right now!"
Why?
Because Trump is an oil profiteer and he might see this as a way of Collapsing the Chinese Economy too.which I think is a terrible idea on many fronts. IN the process he is collapsing ALL economies on earth including our own because of U.S. interdependence with ALL countries now since World war II on many different levels.
So, what Trump is actually doing is DESTROYING THE ENTIRE WORLD ECONOMY nation by nation around the world by ALL his Actions.
Does he have a game plan to fix things?
NO!
Trump never fixes things he ONLY DESTROYS things!
Trump is only loyal to himself and his finances and no other thing!
So, don't ever expect him to fix this at all!
It isn't who Trump is or ever Was!
Gas stations are rationing fuel. Hospitals are running out of medical supplies. People are hoarding plastic bags, and factories face packaging shortages.
That’s all happening in Asia now.
That could become a problem for the United States: About half the stuff Americans buy comes from Asia.
If Asian factories are dealing with a lack of supplies, should Americans expect shortages, too?
Possibly – but not just yet. At least not in any widespread or severe manner. But the longer the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, the harder it will become for the United States to avoid the problems piling up elsewhere.
Certainly, the red flags are waving.
War with Iran has threatened the world’s supplies of aluminum, plastics and rubber in particular. The Middle East ships about 25% of the world’s polypropylene and 20% of polyethylene, two of the most-used plastics. It also accounts for a quarter of the world’s sulphur and 15% of its fertilizer.
“You hear a lot about crude oil and the impacts to diesel and gasoline – but feedstocks and petrochemicals are in short supply, too,” said Angie Gildea, KPMG global head of oil and gas.
Several major petrochemical producers, including South Korea’s Yeochun and PCS in Singapore, have declared “force majeure,” noted Stephen Brown, chief North American economist at Capital Economics. That means they’re unable to fulfil their commitments to customers.
Other companies say they’re running out of plastic packaging for their products. A condom maker said Tuesday that prices would surge because it can’t access manufacturing materials.
The S&P 500’s global supply shortages indicator, a key measure of major companies’ reports of supply constraints, has shot higher in recent weeks, creeping above its long-term average for the first time in three years.
“We’re [the United States] more exposed than we realize,” said Ross Mayfield, an investment strategist at Baird.
Unlike tariffs, which Trump telegraphed months in advance, the war surprised many companies and gave them little time to prepare – particularly businesses heavily reliant on Asian goods.
“Tariffs were levied by the administration and could be pulled back by the administration,” noted Mayfield. “It’s much harder to extricate America from this cleanly.”
Repeated fits and starts with negotiations between the United States and Iran suggest no end in sight to the closure of the strait. Kpler forecasts oil supply losses from the strait closure will total 700 million barrels by the end of April.
Those oil shortages could lead to US goods shortages down the road, Gildea said.
For example, fuel shortages in Asia could hinder factory employees from getting to work, Gildea said, potentially slowing export production.
Supply shortages probably won’t approach pandemic levels, Brown said. But time is not our friend. The oil and gas industry expects widespread shortages across multiple categories of goods if the strait remains closed heading into the summer, Gildea said.
“The length of this is everything now,” said Mayfield.
The US economy is feeling pressure from the war in the Middle East – mainly through higher oil and gas prices. But only a tiny fraction (roughly 7%) of US energy imports ship through the Strait of Hormuz, according to the US Energy Information Administration. The US produces the bulk of its energy at home.
“Thus the story for the US is mainly about prices rather than availability,” noted Nathan Sheets, global chief economist at Citigroup.
The last shipments of energy products from the Middle East from before the war just arrived in Asia, so it will take time for shortages to grow severe enough that factories need to make major adjustments to their production.
It’s hard to put a precise timeframe on how long the disruption in the strait would need to last to trigger supply shortages in the United States, Brown noted. Plastics and especially aluminum aren’t warehoused in large supplies.
Still, Brown predicted it could take three months for plastic shortages to spread around the world and four months until automakers need to cut production because of aluminum shortages.
Companies hardened and diversified their supply chains following the pandemic and during Trump’s recent tariff campaign, insulating US importers from some of the disruptions they’d otherwise have faced sooner.
And world trade was in good shape just ahead of the war: US tariffs fell after the Supreme Court knocked down the bulk of Trump’s import taxes. Global exports gained a bit in February, and early March data seems solid so far – even out of Asia, although that could be because demand for Chinese electric vehicles grew.
That could change.
“Clearly a lot that could go wrong if the strait isn’t properly re-opened,” Brown noted.
