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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.

Central bank gaming of Finance is the source of instability. The era of all-powerful central banks is over for a simple reason: they failed: they failed their citizens, their nations, and they failed the world. Their policies have pushed wealth and income inequality to extremes that have destabilized the planet’s social, political, economic and environmental spheres.

What’s different now? Quite a few fundamentals are consequentially different. The closest thing to a guarantee in finance is the truism that recessions always follow Treasury bond yield inversions, where short-term bond yields exceed longer-duration bond yields.

Liberation in the real world is the result of self-reliance and investing in our own well-being. Liberation has many contexts. It can mean being freed from imprisonment or servitude, freedom from gnawing want or oppression, or being liberated from prisons of the mind.

Everyone caught by surprise that the infinite road actually has an end will face a bewildering transition. The End of the “Growth” Road is upon us, though the consensus continues to hold fast to the endearing fantasy of infinite expansion of consumption.

So-called “cosmetic work” can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Now that housing is finally rolling over due to rising mortgage rates and bubble valuations, many of those who have been priced out of the market are hoping to take advantage of lower prices.

What nobody yet knows (or the few insiders who do know are keeping to themselves) is what will matter. Being a doom-and-gloom Bear stops being fun when the Bear Bar gets crowded.

Trying to restore a system that is spiraling away from equilibrium with new extremes of obsolete, misguided policies only accelerates the swings from apparent stability to cascading chaos. The conventional view of the market is there are two sides to every trade and one is right and the other is wrong.

Everything’s fixed except what’s no longer profitable to plunder. Underfunded, ignored, mismanaged by incompetents, it breaks. Everything’s fixed–except what’s broken. Hmm. Maybe we need to read that again.

Echoing Sun Tzu (“All warfare is based on deception”), successful central banking is based on deception masked by a torrent of transparency. One classic form of manipulation is to set up a false either / or choice, as if there are no other choices.

The unraveling of hyper-Globalization and hyper-Financialization will generate consequences few conventional analysts and pundits anticipate.

Plunder is fun until everything has been plundered. Nothing is infinite except greed and credulity. Unfortunately, neither greed nor credulity can build a sustainable, productive economy. We blew it: rather than investing in a sustainable mix of energy and in increasing the productivity of labor and industrial processes, we squandered irreplaceable oceans of capital and credit in oh-so profitable skims and scams such as $10 trillion in stock buybacks and completely unproductive speculative absurdities.

If those on the opposite side of the trade are viewed as threats rather than friends, it’s time to revise the analysis. Of the many self-generated dangers investors face, few are more dangerous than confirmation bias, the comfort we experience seeking out views that confirm our own positions and our resistance to studying opposing views.

Self-reliance in the 21st century is uniquely challenging because we’ve become overly dependent on globalization and financialization. As things unravel, the one surefire strategy is to chart a course for greater self-reliance. Improving self-reliance has no downside, only upside, and everyone can increase their self-reliance incrementally in small ways.

The momentum of franchise success and centralization of power are fatal. Loonshots are like moonshots, only crazier and trickier to commercialize.

Some decades are easy and expansive, others are painful but necessary to lay the foundations for future progress. Many people reject the idea of historical cycles due to their imprecision. I understand the appeal of this objection, but it is nonetheless striking that transformative decades tend to manifest in cycles rather than evenly over time.

Looks like we need another $500 billion or so. Hum baby! Predictions are hard, especially about the future, but two predictions are easy: 1) governments that do not yet impose wealth taxes will do so within the next five years and 2) governments will impose windfall taxes on all outsized unearned gains, from any source, anywhere on the planet.

We can only choose one: open, dynamic stability (evolution) or autocracy (instability and collapse). When the fundamentals of life change, every organism must evolve or die. This is equally true of human organizations, societies and economies. Evolution requires conserving what still works and experimenting until something comes along that works better.