Of Two Minds

Santa is generally a jolly fellow, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t take pleasure in meting our well-deserved punishment to the greedy. Nothing is more predictable than a stock market rally starting in early November and running into mid-January–Santa’s rally. And since it’s so predictable, why not front-run the rally by loading up on stocks in October?

While Corporate America is focusing on preserving its precious profits, its customers and workforce are rebelling by walking away. We all see shrinkflation on a daily basis: the 16 ounce container is now 13 ounces, the breakfast cereal box is now so narrow it topples over, and so on.

That’s how we’ve become a nation of imposters: our imposter stock market hits a new high and the imposters cheer because it proves the scam is still working. You’ve read the warnings about the proliferating imposter scams: scammers posing as “officials”, representatives of utilities or “a close friend of a family member” all exploit the fast-draining reservoir of trust in America to extract financial information out of the unwary marks.

I hope everyone here is hungry because the banquet of consequences is being served. I’ve coined a new portmanteau word to describe America’s descent: kleptocrapocracy, a union of kleptocracy (a nation ruled by kleptocrats) and crapocracy, a nation drowning in a moral sewer of rampant self-interest in which the focus is cloaking all the skims, scams, rackets and bezzles in some virtuous-sounding garb, a nation choking on low-quality junk ceaselessly hawked by robocalls, spam, phishing and Big Tech manipulation.

As for all those automated systems we have to navigate–do any of them work so well that those profiting from them actually use them? Of course not. In Marc Andreessen’s memorable phrase, “software is eating the world.” Unfortunately, it now has indigestion.

Unbeknownst to the giddy participants, they’re not just betting on the omnipotence of the Fed Politburo, they’re also making a max-leverage bet that “the madness of crowds” will never end. Imagine an economy so dominated by its central bank that all markets hang on every word of its priesthood as life or death.