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Just because nobody talks about financial serfdom doesn’t mean it’s not real.
Ours is a neofeudal economy of financial serfs in servitude to a Financial Aristocracy.

How often do you see acknowledgements that social defeat and social depression are rampant in America? If you do a search for social defeat, you find hundreds of links to studies of rodents.

By this terminal stage, the competent have been driven out, quit or burned out.
What happens with the competent retire, burn out or opt out?

Now that the US economy is totally dependent on trillions of dollars in stimulus and speculative gains reaped from the stimulus, there is no Real Economy left to pick up the pieces when the credit-stimulus-speculation bubbles all pop.

The net result of these dynamics is official unemployment can soar but employers will still be scrambling to find qualified, willing employees. The labor market is viewed as a sea of fluid workers.

Your bogus economic dogma of “growth via the wealth effect” created the demographic karma that will bring down the status quo. What happens when you bleed your workforce while enriching those who already own assets with one bubble after another, all in the name of “fostering growth”?

Blowback has its own dynamics, as we’ll learn in the decade ahead.
One of the most durable expectations in the financial sphere is that inflation will drop sharply in a recession and the Federal Reserve will lower interest rates back to near-zero.

In a real recession, what seemed safe and rock-solid melts into air.
We haven’t had a real recession in forty years (1981-82) and so only those who were in the workforce back then have any experience of how far and how fast things we think are solid can unravel.

So what’s changed? Everything, but mostly beneath the surface churn of circus and theater.
2023 is echoing 1973 in potentially consequential ways.

Everything’s abstract until it happens to us.
Dominoes falling are abstractions until one falls on you. Lines of dominoes toppling are an apt analogy to highly centralized systems that are tightly bound, that is, all the transactions that flow through the centralized hubs are interconnected, so when one domino falls, it topples chains of dominoes that then topple other chains.

In the real-world, the costs are all we know for sure and profits remain elusive and contingent.
No one knows how the flood of AI products will play out, but we do know it’s unleashed a corporate frenzy to “get our own AI up and running.”

One Deep State is bad enough, but a renegade, predatory private-sector Deep State is intolerable. In 2007, well before the term Deep State entered the common lexicon, I sketched the interconnected public-private pieces of the Deep State, which I termed the elite maintaining and extending global dominance.

We can all pretend to be fantastic until the floor collapses beneath us. At that point, complacency / denial gives way to panic, but it’s too late to effect any realistic reversal of fortune.

Now that the overlapping crises are upon us and the banquet of consequences is being served, we’ll see just who our elites and leadership really are. The erosion of trust doesn’t require intent, it only requires the blind pursuit of self-interest above all else.

The Fed has trained the trading-rats all too well, and there is no way to avoid the unintended consequences of the Fed’s large-scale human behavioral experiment.

When this bubble bursts, there will be no fourth or fifth bubble, there will only be rubble.
The US economy and its financial system operate under the implicit belief that the Federal Reserve controls the direction of the economy and finance.

As long as we mint millions from a Never-Ending Bull Market, we’ll always stay one step ahead of the Debt Monster.

When we lose small businesses, we lose More than tax revenues.
Small businesses receive plenty of lip service but very little appreciation–until they’re gone. By then it’s too late to do anything but mutter, “you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.”

Nobody seems to be wondering what happens should the real world no longer respond to the Perpetual Motion Finance Machine.
Scrape away the hand-wringing about interest rates and we find a bedrock of complacency.