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How unintended can these consequences be? My guess: not very. A great many people got the U.S. dollar trade wrong. The conventional view held that “printing money”, i.e. expanding the supply of money, would automatically devalue the currency.

Is it beyond conception that the core actually strengthens for a length of time before the unraveling reaches it? Let’s start by stipulating the obvious: no one knows the future, and most of the guesses–oops, I mean forecasts –will be wrong.

The irony is that the suppression of dissent is the suppression of competing ideas that generate systemic stability via rapid adaptation. Nations that appear stable may fail once they’re under pressure. What do I mean by “under pressure”?

It would be very irritating to have a rally suck in all the bears salivating for a crash from a bear-market rally peak and then decimate the shorts with a rally that soars rather than collapses to new lows. As a contrarian, I’m always squinting at the consensus and wondering if it is really that easy to be right.