Of Two Minds

The post-bubble-crash phase is already being prepared: ‘no one could have seen this coming’–except anyone who paid attention to anything other than self-interested shills. It’s really pretty simple to identify a speculative bubble of epic proportions in stocks: if Wall Street says it’s not a bubble, it’s a bubble.

A drought-stricken forest choked with dry brush and deadfall is an apt analogy. While a stock market crash that stairsteps lower for months or years is generally about as welcome as a trip to the guillotine in Revolutionary France, there is some major upside to a crash.

Is that the scent of smoke? What’s that red glare? Must be nothing. Why are the wheels coming off the American Project?Afghanistan is front and center in the news flow for obvious reasons, but since I have no expertise on that nation or America’s role there, I am stipulating these are general comments from a systemic perspective.

Generations of punters have learned the hard way that their unwary greed is the tool the ‘Smart Money’ uses to separate them from their cash and capital. The game is as old as the stock market: the Smart Money recognizes the top is in, and in order to sell all their shares, they need to recruit bagholders to buy their shares and hold them all the way down.

Global supply chain logjams and global credit/financial crises aren’t bugs, they’re intrinsic features of Neoliberalism’s fully financialized global economy. To understand why the global economy is unraveling, we have to look past the headlines to the primary dynamic of globalization: Neoliberalism, the ideological orthodoxy which holds that introducing market dynamics to sectors that were closed to global markets generates prosperity for all.

Demand isn’t the problem, supply is the problem, and it can’t be resolved by printing more currency or lowering interest rates or cranking up inflation. To the degree that we inhabit an economic order dominated by Keynes and “demand,” then any discussion of inflation has to circle round to Keynes and his magic solution to all economic ills: “demand”, otherwise known as money burning a hole in your pocket.