Substituting debt for earnings while enriching the rich will bear bitter fruit. Climbing above the craziness of the Normalized Now news flow to view the economy from a quiet, windswept peak helps clear the mind of clutter. The entire economy–and its future–can be distilled down to four charts that tell the underlying story of the U.S. economy over […]
A truly intelligent AI would refuse to do such transparently stupid, needless counter-productive BS Work. So here’s the good news about AI: it can now do more BS work, author David Graeber’s term for the meaningless churning of bureaucratic “work” that lost its purpose and functionality long ago but is now considered “essential” to the […]
What’s required is not just a revised spreadsheet but an entirely new culture and value system. I’ve been referencing The Ratchet Effect since 2010 as it explains why shrinking bloat is so much harder than expanding bloat. A common example is household income and spending. When the couple were just starting out, they lived like students with barebones […]
As long as there’s a way to borrow more money, there’s no discipline pushing efficiency. There seems to be a large number of people with this job description: my job is to say no, with one exception. And what is the exception, the one circumstance where the answer is invariably yes? Borrow more money? Yes, a thousand […]
But all bubbles pop, and there are no tricks left to fund both the greed of the few and the needs of the many. Every society / economy is a distribution mechanism that distributes: 1. Gains 2. Losses 3. Risk 4. The costs of securing the sources of gains. As a general rule, markets / economies […]
It seems to me the real American Dream is not measured solely by money, it’s more a measure of the freedom to Start Over. The conventional definition of The American Dream is anyone can achieve middle-class security if they work hard, work smart, persevere and are frugal / prudent / save and invest a healthy chunk […]
The tariff sledgehammer has a role, but it’s a limited one. There’s an inherent tension in State-Corporate Capitalism. Proponents of the free market hold that any state Industrial Policy will fail because the State cannot pick the winners and losers as effectively as The Market. Yet Corporate Capitalism continually lobbies the State to lower interest rates and taxes, weaken the […]
Now that the entire economy depends on these hyper-normalized speculative bubbles for its “growth” and “wealth,” there is a profound fear of a future based not on artifice but on the real world. Humans are quick to habituate to current conditions, i.e. consider them normal. This rapid normalization has advantages and disadvantages. Normalization is an adaptive […]
Like orbiting space debris, every loan that has been collateralized by an illiquid asset is a high-speed projectile with the potential to disable any other part of the system it impacts. Complex systems can undergo what’s known as phase shifts, where the state of the system changes abruptly. The classic example of this is liquid water turning […]
There may be no winners of the game of Global Domination ™, and that is likely the best outcome. Okay, players: jokers are wild, but with a twist: the entire deck is jokers. Since everyone at the table will have five Aces, nobody wins. Welcome to the Trade War Poker Table: nobody wins, as everyone has the […]