Of Two Minds

Our reliance on the endless expansion of credit, leverage and credit-asset bubbles will have its own high cost. The Great Moderation of low inflation and soaring assets has ended. Welcome to the death by a thousand cuts of stagflation.

What’s truly valuable has no price and cannot be bought. If all investments are being cast into Treacherous Waters, our investment strategy must adapt accordingly.

Should bubble symmetry play out in the S&P 500, we can anticipate a steep 45% drop to pre-bubble levels, followed by another leg down as the speculative frenzy is slowly extinguished.

So here we are: the global credit-asset bubbles are popping, and the illusory “prosperity” generated by the bubbles is about to tumble off a cliff. There are two kinds of prosperity, one fake, one real.

Heresy evolves, orthodoxy cannot. Plan accordingly. Orthodoxies offer the comforting illusion of solidarity. But in what lies ahead, we’re on our own. In today’s world, the key orthodoxies are secular rather than religious: they are economic, ideological, political. Religious orthodoxy is in the spiritual realm.

When competence, transparency and accountability are all punished, the Race to the Bottom accelerates. Race to the Bottom describes the process of competitive devaluation, where value is gutted to remain competitive with those who are grabbing market share by stripping out quality, value, durability, transparency, accountability and competence.