Of Two Minds

Buyers know there will always be a greater fool willing to pay more for an over-valued asset because the Fed has promised us it will always be the greater fool. I realize nobody wants to hear that most of their “wealth” is nothing more than wispy Cloud Castles in the Sky that will dissipate in the faintest zephyr, but there it is: that which was conjured out of thin air will return to thin air.

As the level of Fed smack and crack needed to maintain the high increases, system fragility increases geometrically. You know the plot point in the horror film where the highway is blocked and a detour sign directs the car full of naive teens off onto a rutted track into the wilderness?

If health is wealth, and it most certainly is the highest form of wealth, then we would be well-served to take charge of our health-wealth in terms of what behaviors we can sustainably modify. Longtime correspondent J.F. (MD) recently shared a fascinating graphic ranking the leading causes of death in the U.S. (2016 data, pre-pandemic) compared to searches on Google and what the media reports.

Borrowing a quarter of the nation’s entire economic output every year to prop up an ineffective, corrupt status quo is putting a Band-Aid over a tumor. If we misdiagnose the disease, our treatment won’t work. We’re all familiar with medical misdiagnoses, which lead to procedures and prescriptions that can’t possibly fix the patient’s illness because the source has been missed or misinterpreted.

If you think this scale of stimulus is sustainable and consequence-free, you must be mainlining. Wall Street’s euphoria knows no bounds, so how can this be the Winter of Our Discontent?

Perhaps we have collectively “lost our mind.” Perhaps what we need is not a new technology but a new way of living that uses existing technologies to echo “old ways” that worked rather well on much lower energy consumption. The Great Reset is much in the news–the proposed top-down plan for combating climate change designed by the global elites, who then as now will be jetting around in private aircraft while dictating exactly how the rest of us will reduce our carbon footprints.