Of Two Minds

Risk has not been extinguished, it is expanding geometrically beneath the false stability of a monstrously manipulated market. One of the most under-appreciated investment insights is courtesy of Mike Tyson: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” At this moment in history, the plan of most market participants is to place their full faith and trust in the status quo’s ability to keep asset prices lofting ever higher, essentially forever.

What if everyone in the market realizes it’s now the moment to front-run the crash? We have a fine-sounding word for running with the herd: momentum. When the herd is running, those who buy what the herd is buying and sell what the herd is selling are trading momentum, which sounds so much more professional and high-brow than the noisy, dusty image of large mammals (and their trading machines) mindlessly running with the herd.

The only dynamic that’s even faintly “capitalist” about America’s Crony-Socialism is the price of political corruption is still a “market.” The supposed “choice” between “capitalism” and “socialism” is a useful fabrication masking the worst of all possible worlds we inhabit: Capitalism for the powerless and Crony-Socialism for the powerful.

Is inflation “transitory” in your household budget? Really? Where? The Federal Reserve has been bleating that inflation is “transitory”–but what about the real world that we live in, as opposed to the abstract funhouse of rigged statistics? Here’s a simple test to help you decide if inflation is “transitory” in the real world.

Nobody seems to notice the ‘diminishing returns’ on Fed manipulation, oops, I mean ‘intervention’. Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that everything that will eventually matter is ignored until it does matter–but by then it’s too late.

The Fed’s god-like powers will be revealed for what they really are: artifice and illusion. The Fed will be proven catastrophically wrong about inflation for the simple reason that inflation isn’t transitory, it’s sticky: when prices rise due to real-world scarcities and higher costs, they stay high and then move higher as expectations catch up with reality.