$1 million dollar house prices? $40 billion dollar CEOs? It's all because money is too cheap.

In 1995, I bought my first house, a sprinkle ranch style tract home with a backyard in the San Francisco Bay Area. The house was a bit of a fixer, but the previous owner died in the house, so they had a nice price. I paid $219,000.<br><br>25 years later, I couldn't afford that house - it's selling for a cool $1 million US dollars. <br><br>This seems crazy. Actually it *is* crazy. But the reason this happened is because of cheap money, which is a result of the global economy. You see, the global economy is a completely different beast from the US economy, and it means that the US economy doesn't need to be self-sufficient. It's part of a global supply chain.<br><br>But the global economy means that money can be cheap. And cheap money means that asset prices go up. You see, prices are just the supply and demand of assets. And assets compete for the global supply of money. When there's more money, asset prices go up.<br><br>Cheap money, in other words, prints CEOs. It's the driver of high asset prices, including CEO pay, stock prices, and houses. It's the reason why Elon Musk is worth $230 billion. As of 2023, there are 1,148 billionaires in the world. In 1995, there were 220 globally.<br><br>Of course, the global economy makes the rest of us richer too. We have more stuff. We have better stuff. <br><br>But it also means that we have to live with global asset prices. It's the price we pay for the global economy.