Of Two Minds

Once assets are revealed as worth far less than claimed, insolvency is the inevitable result. If you haven’t plowed through dozens of post-collapse commentaries on FTX, I’m saving you the trouble: here’s a distillation of what matters going forward.

You want to fix the world with finance? Then fix this: wages’ share of a financialized, globalized, speculative-bubble dependent economy have been falling for decades. Fix this and you really will change the world. Anything less changes nothing.

When bubbles pop, it’s natural selection at its most unforgiving: “adapt or die,” and those who ignore or discount consequential asymmetries will have a very difficult time navigating the triage.

It’s certainly possible to be disgusted, but being disabused of the fantasy that the system is self-correcting is the healthier perspective. I used to be disgusted, now I’m disabused: beneath all the self-serving narratives, fad-memes and over-simplifications regurgitated as serious analysis, these are the core dynamics I see: 1. Imperial corruption of democracy and open markets.

But in the meantime, enjoy the political theatrics down on the sand-strewn floor of the Coliseum. While the much-touted differences between America’s political parties get obsessive, hysterical attention, the sameness of Imperial corruption, waste and squalor regardless of who’s in power gets little notice.

Decades of central bank distortions and regulatory / market-share capture by cartels and monopolies have completely gutted “markets,” destroying their self-correcting dynamics. Unintended consequences introduce unexpected problems that may not have easy solutions.