Of Two Minds

It’s very difficult to find common ground that supports cooperation in the disintegrative stage of scarcities, rising prices, catastrophically centralized power and social discord.

The mercantilist dependence on exports for growth, a winner for the past 70 years, has reached diminishing returns. Rather than be a source of growth, it’s a source of stagnation. Conventional wisdom holds that geopolitical power is inevitably shifting from West to East. It isn’t quite this simple.

It’s time to reprogram the conditions of the economy to serve the many rather than the few. Star Trek’s Kobayashi Maru training exercise tests officer candidates’ response to a no-win scenario: any attempt to rescue the crippled ship’s crew results in the destruction of the candidate’s ship, while standing by and taking no action results in the loss of the Kobayashi Maru’s crew.

Every forecast or guess has one refreshing quality: one will be right and the rest will be wrong. What’s the difference between a forecast< and a guess? On one level, the answer is "none": the future is unknown and even the most informed forecast is still a guess.

The economy has reached an inflection point where everything that is unsustainable finally starts unraveling.Our economy is in a crisis that’s been brewing for decades. The Chinese characters for the English word are famously–and incorrectly–translated as danger and opportunity.

There would be some deliciously karmic justice in the “dumb money” driving a rally that forced the “smart money” to cover their shorts and chase the rally that shouldn’t even be happening. Being cursed with contrarianism, as soon as a trade gets crowded and the consensus is one way, I start looking for whatever is considered so unlikely that it’s essentially “impossible.”