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Blog postNow that every financial game in America has been rigged to benefit the few at the expense of the many, trust and credibility has evaporated like an ice cube on a summer day in Death Valley.
Here is America in a nutshell: we no longer solve problems, we manipulate the narrative and then declare the problem has been solved. Actually solving problems is difficult and generally requires sacrifices that are proportionate to one's wealth and power. But since America's elite are no longe -
Blog postBy incentivizing speculation and corruption, reducing the rewards for productive work and sucking wages dry with inflation, America has greased the skids to collapse.
Of all the mass delusions running rampant in the culture, none is more spectacularly delusional than the conviction that we can all get fabulously rich from speculation while producing nothing. The key characteristic of speculation is that it produces nothing: it doesn't generate any new goods or services, boost produ -
Blog postA great many essential components in America are on 'indefinite back order', including the lifestyle of endless globally sourced goodies at low, low prices.
Setting aside the "transitory inflation" parlor game for a moment, let's look at what happens when critical parts are unavailable for whatever reason, for example, they're on back orderor indefinite back order, i.e. the supplier has no visibility on when the parts will be available.
If the part that blew -
Blog postThe financialized American economy and State are now totally dependent on a steady flow of lies and propaganda for their very survival. Were the truth told, the status quo would collapse in a putrid heap.
Go ahead and be evil, because everyone else is evil, too, because being evil serves everyone's interests far better than maintaining integrity, for integrity will cost you more than you can afford.
In other words, lying, fraud, embezzlement, misrepresentation of risk -
Blog postWe know you're all just poor corrupt officials, but bleating excuses won't save you from the karmic payoff.
The Federal Reserve can be summed up in two famous lines from the classic film Casablanca in which the corrupt police official Renault is ordered to close Rick's cafe.
Renault: I'm shocked! Shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.
[The croupier hands Renault a wad of cash]: Your winnings, sir.
The Fed is totally, completely, -
Blog postIt's a peculiarity of the human psyche that it's remarkably easy to be swept up in bubble mania and remarkably difficult to be swept up in the same way by the bubble's inevitable collapse.
Allow me to summarize the dominant zeitgeist in America at this juncture of history: Grab yourself a big gooey hunk of happiness by turning a few thousand bucks into millions--anyone can do it as long as they visualize abundance and join the crowd minting millions.
Beneath the brav -
Blog postCan extremes become too extreme to continue higher? We're about to find out.
Is anyone willing to call the top of the Everything bubble? The short answer is no.Anyone earning money managing other people's money cannot afford to be wrong, and so everyone in the herd prevaricates on timing. The herd has seen what happens to those who call the top and then twist in the wind as the market continues rocketing higher.
Money managers live in segments of three months. If you -
Blog postBeneath the illusory stability of rising GDP, the extremes of debt, leverage, stimulus and speculative frenzy required to keep the 'phantom wealth bubble' from imploding are all rising parabolically.
Imagine being at a party celebrating the vast wealth generated in the last ten months in stocks, cryptocurrencies, real estate and just about every other asset class. The lights flicker briefly but the host assures the crowd the generator powering the party is working perfectly.
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Blog postThe incentives must change from "waste is growth" to hyper-efficiency, conservation, right to repair and manufactured objects engineered to last a generation or longer and be recyclable at scale.
Humans like novelty but don't like change. It's easy to confuse the two. When we say, "I need a change," what we mean is "I'd like to be refreshed by some novelty," not "I want all the uncertainty, ambiguity and potential for errors and losses that come -
Blog postNo nation can produce less of lesser quality, and squander more on infinitely greedy and corrupt elites, all funded by issuing trillions of new units of currency, and imagine that this asymmetry will never have consequences.
As I have often noted, historian Michael Grant identified profound political disunity in the ruling class as a key cause of the dissolution of the Roman Empire.Grant described this dynamic in his excellent account The Fall of the Roman Empire, a book I have be
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The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy: The Revolution in Higher Education
Nov 10, 2013
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