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What the Warring Elites don’t want us to realize is that a system of transparent competition in which no fiefdom is allowed to become dominant best serves the interests of society at large.

A stagnating zombie economy never recovers. Four decades of rising markets punctuated by crisis-induced crashes seems to have fostered an unspoken belief that no one should ever get hurt in markets or the economy.

We can also predict that the next round of instability will be more severe than the previous bout of instability. Everyone is in favor of “doing whatever it takes” to “restore financial stability” when the house of cards starts swaying, but funny things happen on the way to “Restoring Financial Stability.”

Our faith in the wobbling world of hyper-financialization will soon be tested. It’s interesting, isn’t it, that amidst a tsunami of commentary about banks, nobody mentions the proverbial elephant in the room, which is the overwhelming dominance of finance in the economy and society, a dominance which raises the big question:

The next Bull Market will start when everyone has given up on the stock market as the means to “get rich quick” or even “get rich slowly.” Here’s the chart of the month: a weekly chart of the S&P 500 (SPX) showing the giant wedge going back to January 2022 has broken decisively down.

If AI isn’t self-aware of the fact it is nothing but an exploitive tool of the powerful, then it’s worthless. The latest wave of AI tools is generating predictably giddy exaltations.

The unencumbered realist concludes that there are no solutions within a status quo structure that is itself the problem. Realists who question received wisdom and conclude the status quo is untenable are quickly labeled pessimists because the zeitgeist expects a solution is always at hand–preferably a technocratic one that requires zero sacrifice and doesn’t upset the status quo apple cart.

Choose one, and only one: a stock market that inflates and pops in an endless series of ever-more destructive bubbles, or a real economy that is no longer in thrall to the engines of wealth inequality and speculative frenzy.

My projections are: less high-quality work gets done; less work of any quality gets done; those carrying most of the weight burn out and quit and everyone wonders why the quality of goods and services is sinking to new lows.

So sorry, but the lifestyle of low-cost credit and all the goodies it could buy is permanently out of stock. In focusing on geopolitics, we lose sight of the dependence of every economy on a functioning global economy of low-cost goods, services, materials, shipping, transport, capital, labor and financial instruments, all flowing freely across borders and around the world.

The decay in quality reveals that the collapse of the neoliberal-hyper-financialization-hyper-globalization model has already occurred.

All this suggests a strategy that’s only available to those few nations with these capacities: weaponize global depression. Before we get started, I need to stipulate that I don’t have an opinion one way or the other about weaponizing global depression: I don’t agree or disagree, I don’t “like” it or dislike it,

Our time is better invested in actually learning about trends that impact us directly. Imagine making this simple change in your life: whatever you don’t control, you stop paying attention to it.

What’s interesting is the really hard problem AI has not been applied to is how to manage these technologies in our socio-economic-cultural system. The world is agog at the apparent power of ChatGPT and similar programs to compose human-level narratives and generate images from simple commands.

The net result of hyper-globalization and hyper-financialization is the crumbling of the middle class. Neofeudal societies and economies lack a vibrant middle class. This is the defining feature of feudalism and its updated V2.0, neofeudalism: a nobility (based on birth or finance, it doesn’t matter) controls the vast majority of wealth, political power and productive capital, all served by a powerless peasantry.

We will enter a world without finance, and it will be a better world, for the economy will no longer be in thrall to the derangement and inequality of parasitic, predatory finance. A world without finance is currently unimaginable, because finance is now synonymous with financialization.

There is an element of inevitability in play, but it isn’t about central bank bailouts, it’s about Death Spirals and the collapse of unsustainable systems.

Simply put, people are moving not just to escape unaffordable housing and high taxes. They’re moving to escape fiscally irresponsible, ineffective, unaccountable governance. Defenders of high state taxes like to point out that surveys find few high-net-worth households move primarily to lower their tax bills.

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.