Of Two Minds

What the political class and the Financial Nobility don’t yet grasp is that ALICE will never go back to her insecure, low-wage job, ever. Meet ALICE: Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed, at least she was employed until the pandemic presented impossible choices between taking care of her children and their education, and her aging parents, and keeping her demanding, low-wage job.

For all these reasons, the risks of systemic collapse are much higher than commonly anticipated. There’s an irony in discussing since we all have an instinctive reaction to visible risk, we think we understand it. But alas, we don’t, especially when the risk is invisible and systemic.

Don’t expect healthcare or any other hollowed-out, heavily optimized system to function as it once did. A great many Americans will be shocked when our healthcare systems start failing because they believed the PR that “we have the finest healthcare system in the world.”

The belief that central banks printing currency can “buy/fix” everything that’s broken, lost or scarce is the ultimate in denial, fantasy and magical thinking. Let’s revisit the pandemic projection chart I prepared on February 2, 2020, nine days after authorities publicly acknowledged the Covid virus outbreak in China.

Masking the rot and fragility is not the same thing as strength or permanence. The great irony of the past 75 years of expanding consumption is the belief that all these decades of success prove the system is rock-solid and future success is thus guaranteed.

All the staging is a means to an end, and everyone in America is nothing more than a means to an end: close the sale so the few can continue exploiting the many.