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Imagine an institution whose ratchet was set to relentlessly reduce budget, staffing and processes while focusing on increasing output / results.

The key takeaway here is: don’t count on a simplistic ideology or reform or a “supreme leader” to save the status quo from internal failure.

“It’s all because of our low cost of living that I can feel relatively secure.”

Can a couple of hardworking people live well in America on $30,000 a year in earnings? Yes, if they’re willing to do what’s needed to make it happen.

That monkey on your back comes in many forms.

Perhaps the most apt metaphor to describe the decade ahead is that investors, consumers and taxpayers will all be rafting whitewater rapids with ever-briefer stretches of calm.

I think it’s more productive to go with Plan B: set aside our emotions and reluctance and start doing the hard work of dealing with polycrisis.

Your toxicity will fall to manageable levels as long as you keep spending money.

We’re told to stop being so darn negative even as the tsunami of inequality washes away the beach chairs of the bottom 90%.

What the cheerleaders are actually claiming is the process of adding zeroes to “money” is limitless, but there are limits on the utility of devaluing currency, too.

And that’s how democracy and a free economy die.

There are no more “saves” available for the next market meltdown.

The timing of finally embracing risk and sacrifice as the only option left is exquisitely sensitive: finally caving in a moment too late leads to the system collapsing beyond recovery.

Absent demand from tens of millions of wealthy, high-income buyers, asset valuations will fall as Boomers sell off assets to fund their retirement.

Following the conventional path is a deadend. It isn’t easy to carve a path outside the well-worn pathways of debt servitude, but it is possible.

AI is for the peons, access to humans is reserved for the wealthy.

If this is what passes for competence while we cheerlead “the Roaring 20s”, then our delusion has reached “what looks like a permanently high plateau.”

The best thing that could happen to America would be the destruction of its credit card and a deep, prolonged recession that emptied the punch bowl of phantom bubble wealth and the illusion of endless credit.