Of Two Minds

What’s different now? Quite a few fundamentals are consequentially different. The closest thing to a guarantee in finance is the truism that recessions always follow Treasury bond yield inversions, where short-term bond yields exceed longer-duration bond yields.

Liberation in the real world is the result of self-reliance and investing in our own well-being. Liberation has many contexts. It can mean being freed from imprisonment or servitude, freedom from gnawing want or oppression, or being liberated from prisons of the mind.

Everyone caught by surprise that the infinite road actually has an end will face a bewildering transition. The End of the “Growth” Road is upon us, though the consensus continues to hold fast to the endearing fantasy of infinite expansion of consumption.

So-called “cosmetic work” can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Now that housing is finally rolling over due to rising mortgage rates and bubble valuations, many of those who have been priced out of the market are hoping to take advantage of lower prices.

What nobody yet knows (or the few insiders who do know are keeping to themselves) is what will matter. Being a doom-and-gloom Bear stops being fun when the Bear Bar gets crowded.

Trying to restore a system that is spiraling away from equilibrium with new extremes of obsolete, misguided policies only accelerates the swings from apparent stability to cascading chaos. The conventional view of the market is there are two sides to every trade and one is right and the other is wrong.