Home

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.

Global food production rests on soil and rain. Robots don’t change that. Of all the modern-day miracles, the least appreciated is the incredible abundance of low cost food in the U.S. and other developed countries. The era of cheap food is ending, for a variety of mutually reinforcing reasons.

The cycles of The Fourth Turning, Fischer and Turchin are all in alignment at this point in history…

All of these are structural dynamics that won’t go away in a few months or years. Let’s explore what’s different now compared to recessions of the past 60 years.

The EU’s crisis isn’t limited to energy. It is a manifestation of the global breakdown of Neocolonialism, Financialization and Globalization. The European Union (EU) was seen as the culmination of a centuries-long process of integration that would finally put an end to the ceaseless conflicts that had led to disastrous wars in the 20th century that had knocked Europe from global preeminence.

Any city whose lifeblood ultimately depends on hyper-globalization and hyper-financialization will no longer be viable. The human migration from the countryside to cities has been an enduring feature of civilization.

If we insist on doing the transition the hard, slow, costly way rather than the easy, fast, cheap way, it’s going to be a needlessly arduous, soul-crushing slog. Let’s cover a few common-sense points and ask a few questions about the Global Energy Crunch.

As the word suggests, cannibalism won’t end well for those consumed by the infinitely insatiable few. Cannibalize is an interesting word. It is a remarkably graphic way to describe the self-inflicted destruction of a system by stripping previously functional subsystems to sustain the illusion of system functionality.