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Who believed that central banks’ financial perpetual motion machine was anything more than trickery designed to generate phantom wealth ?

Greed is a powerful motivation to be an ardent believer in the central banking cult. The ideal cult convinces its followers that it isn’t a cult, it’s simply the natural order of things.

It’s not just the price of oil that matters: how much disposable income consumers have left to buy more goods and services matters, too. The Oil Curse (a.k.a. The Resource Curse) refers to the compelling ease of those blessed with an abundance of oil/resources to depend on that gift for the majority of state/national revenues.

Few seem alive to the potentially consequential financial risks arising from uncertainties evolving in China. One thing we know rather definitively is that markets don’t like uncertainty: uncertainty is Kryptonite to markets.

What all the entrenched insiders in America’s parasitic, predatory elites and institutions don’t dare admit is that to protect themselves from consequence, we’ve had to sacrifice everything else.

When these are no longer valued as essentials for the common good, society is lost. I’m thankful for the eight things to aspire to listed at the bottom of the right-hand column of the main blog page:

As workforces shrink and opting out becomes increasingly attractive, Global Growth implodes on both the production and consumption sides. A funny thing happened on the way to permanent global growth.

Only when speculative sizzle attracts no buyers / marks will the bottom be in. There hasn’t been a truly organic bottom in stocks in decades. Fifteen years of relentless central bank manipulation since the 2008-09 Global Financial Meltdown has persuaded punters that central banks will always save us should the market turn down because relentless central bank suppression of interest rates and expansion of liquidity a.k.a. free money for financiers are now necessary and thus predictably permanent.

Once assets are revealed as worth far less than claimed, insolvency is the inevitable result. If you haven’t plowed through dozens of post-collapse commentaries on FTX, I’m saving you the trouble: here’s a distillation of what matters going forward.

You want to fix the world with finance? Then fix this: wages’ share of a financialized, globalized, speculative-bubble dependent economy have been falling for decades. Fix this and you really will change the world. Anything less changes nothing.

When bubbles pop, it’s natural selection at its most unforgiving: “adapt or die,” and those who ignore or discount consequential asymmetries will have a very difficult time navigating the triage.

It’s certainly possible to be disgusted, but being disabused of the fantasy that the system is self-correcting is the healthier perspective. I used to be disgusted, now I’m disabused: beneath all the self-serving narratives, fad-memes and over-simplifications regurgitated as serious analysis, these are the core dynamics I see: 1. Imperial corruption of democracy and open markets.

But in the meantime, enjoy the political theatrics down on the sand-strewn floor of the Coliseum. While the much-touted differences between America’s political parties get obsessive, hysterical attention, the sameness of Imperial corruption, waste and squalor regardless of who’s in power gets little notice.

Decades of central bank distortions and regulatory / market-share capture by cartels and monopolies have completely gutted “markets,” destroying their self-correcting dynamics. Unintended consequences introduce unexpected problems that may not have easy solutions.