Of Two Minds

Only when speculative sizzle attracts no buyers / marks will the bottom be in. There hasn’t been a truly organic bottom in stocks in decades. Fifteen years of relentless central bank manipulation since the 2008-09 Global Financial Meltdown has persuaded punters that central banks will always save us should the market turn down because relentless central bank suppression of interest rates and expansion of liquidity a.k.a. free money for financiers are now necessary and thus predictably permanent.

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.