Of Two Minds

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.

Central bank gaming of Finance is the source of instability. The era of all-powerful central banks is over for a simple reason: they failed: they failed their citizens, their nations, and they failed the world. Their policies have pushed wealth and income inequality to extremes that have destabilized the planet’s social, political, economic and environmental spheres.

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.