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The opportunity to lower our exposure to risk is always present in some fashion, but embracing this opportunity becomes critical when precarity and change-points rise like restless seas. The Chinese characters that comprise the equivalent of “crisis” are famously–and incorrectly– translated as “danger” and “opportunity.”

The notion that consequence can be as easily managed as PR is the ultimate artifice and the ultimate delusion. The consequences of the drip-drip-drip of moral decay is difficult to discern in day-to-day life.

I only rattle the begging bowl once a calendar year, and this is it. Beneath the Photoshopped complacency, the level of uncertainty about the future is pegged to 11 (recall that 10 is the conventional max on the guitar amp volume knob). It’s times like this when the crazy-valuable content on Of Two Minds becomes even more crazy-valuable.

If the Fed set out to destroy the financial system, they’re very close to finishing the job. If you set out to destroy markets and the financial system, your most important weapon is moral hazard, the disconnection of risk and consequence. You disconnect risk from consequence by rewarding those making the riskiest bets and bailing out gamblers whose bets went bad.

Given that political power in America is a pay-to-play auction in which the highest bidder wins, how this incomprehensibly lopsided ownership of wealth plays out is an open question. Wealth inequality easily falls into an abstraction unless we contextualize it in meaningful ways.