Of Two Minds

Dear Corporate America: maybe you remember the old Johnny Paycheck tune? Let me refresh your memory: take this job and shove it.Put yourself in the shoes of a single parent waiting tables in a working-class cafe with lousy tips, a worker stuck with hig…

Demand based on debt, unfulfilled promises and unaffordable habits is burning down.The first-order effect of the lockdown was demand destruction as shelter-in-place orders and business closures restricted consumers’ ability to spend.The secon…

A Covid-19 vaccine, or lack thereof, will have zero effect in terms of reversing these cycles. Call it Fate, call it karma, call it what you will, but the cycles have aligned and nothing can stop the unraveling of all that was foolishly presumed to be …

Any economy that concentrates its wealth and income in the top tier is a fragile economy.There are two structural reasons why consumer spending will not rebound, no matter how “open” the economy may be. Virtually everyone who glances at headlines …

Financialization was never sustainable, and neither was the destructive globalization it enabled.All the happy-story analogies to past pandemics being mere bumps in the road miss the mark. A popular claim is that the 1918-1919 flu pandemic killed …

The core problem is the U.S. economy has been fully financialized, and so costs are unaffordable.To understand the long-term consequences of the pandemic on Main Street and local tax revenues, we need to consider first and second order effects. Th…