Home

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.

What’s truly valuable has no price and cannot be bought. If all investments are being cast into Treacherous Waters, our investment strategy must adapt accordingly.

Should bubble symmetry play out in the S&P 500, we can anticipate a steep 45% drop to pre-bubble levels, followed by another leg down as the speculative frenzy is slowly extinguished.

So here we are: the global credit-asset bubbles are popping, and the illusory “prosperity” generated by the bubbles is about to tumble off a cliff. There are two kinds of prosperity, one fake, one real.

Heresy evolves, orthodoxy cannot. Plan accordingly. Orthodoxies offer the comforting illusion of solidarity. But in what lies ahead, we’re on our own. In today’s world, the key orthodoxies are secular rather than religious: they are economic, ideological, political. Religious orthodoxy is in the spiritual realm.

When competence, transparency and accountability are all punished, the Race to the Bottom accelerates. Race to the Bottom describes the process of competitive devaluation, where value is gutted to remain competitive with those who are grabbing market share by stripping out quality, value, durability, transparency, accountability and competence.

One of the great fictions about money is that it is neutral. It isn’t. It’s either designed for the elites or for the citizenry. Many proclaim a desire for “sound money,” but “backed by X” currencies are not “sound money” unless they can be converted directly into X.

If we don’t bother measuring national well-being, the health of the nation’s commons and resources and advances in the public’s interests, then we foolishly call a decade of tremendous advancement “stagflation.”

Rather than cheer the concept of a new currency, we’re better served to look at the velocity of that currency and the cycles of investing that currency in assets denominated in that currency for a low-risk return.

Should the wealth effect reverse as assets fall, capital gains evaporate and investment income declines, the top 10% will no longer have the means or appetite to spend so freely. Soaring wealth-income inequality has all sorts of consequences.

We need a new iteration of economics that advances beyond the obsolete, misleading statistical measurements of bygone eras. Let’s focus on a largely forgotten history, one within living memory of everyone born in the 1950s, a history of signal importance to our understanding of the forces that will dominate the next decade.

The second essential step is to recognize how the spectacles of “news” and entertainment distract our attention from this erosion of basic rights. Hierarchical power structures like city-states arose as problem-solving solutions<, not just for the elites who benefited from the concentration of wealth and power but for the citizenry.