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As the level of Fed smack and crack needed to maintain the high increases, system fragility increases geometrically. You know the plot point in the horror film where the highway is blocked and a detour sign directs the car full of naive teens off onto a rutted track into the wilderness?

If health is wealth, and it most certainly is the highest form of wealth, then we would be well-served to take charge of our health-wealth in terms of what behaviors we can sustainably modify. Longtime correspondent J.F. (MD) recently shared a fascinating graphic ranking the leading causes of death in the U.S. (2016 data, pre-pandemic) compared to searches on Google and what the media reports.

Borrowing a quarter of the nation’s entire economic output every year to prop up an ineffective, corrupt status quo is putting a Band-Aid over a tumor. If we misdiagnose the disease, our treatment won’t work. We’re all familiar with medical misdiagnoses, which lead to procedures and prescriptions that can’t possibly fix the patient’s illness because the source has been missed or misinterpreted.

If you think this scale of stimulus is sustainable and consequence-free, you must be mainlining. Wall Street’s euphoria knows no bounds, so how can this be the Winter of Our Discontent?