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Stocks don’t vanish when sold; somebody owns the shares all the way to the bottom. These owners who refuse to sell because they have convinced themselves the next dip will be the hoped-for resumption of the bullish trend are called “bagholders.” Trends are tricky.

The solutions will come not from those profiting from inequality and scarcity but from relocalizing “money” and production to create degrowth community economies. We think we understand “money”–we don’t. We think the current versions of “money” are the final versions–they aren’t. Understanding “money” requires some heavy-lifting, but it’s important, so let’s dig in.

Our control is what’s irreplaceable. Wealth, status and the illusory security of dependency chains cannot replace control. What’s our personal strategy for navigating tumultuous times? I’ve long advocated controlling as much as you can. We don’t control the availability of fuel and food from far away, or the government’s policies.

This desire for compliance and consensus dooms the autocracy to failure and collapse because dissent is the essence of evolutionary churn and adaptation..The various flavors of autocracy (theocracy, kleptocracy, dictatorship, etc.) look remarkably successful at first blush but they all share a fatal flaw. To understand the flaw we must start with the dominant dynamic of all organisms, natural selection.

The financialization of healthcare started two generations ago and is now in a run-to-fail feedback loop of insolvency. Long-time readers know I have been critical of U.S. healthcare for over a decade.When I use the term sickcare this is not a reflection on the hard work of frontline caregivers–it is a reflection of the financialization incentives that have distorted the system’s priorities and put it on a path to insolvency.

All this decay is so incremental that nobody thinks it possible that it could ever accumulate into a risk that threatens the entire system.The funny thing about risk is the risk that everyone sees isn’t the risk that blows up the system.

Eventually the “flock of timid and industrious animals” changes their minds about how much exploitation by the few is acceptable. You may have noticed the news flow beyond the hot war in Ukraine is largely focused on capital financial capital (markets, liquidity, interest rates, commodities, central bank tightening, etc.) and political capital (geopolitical maneuvering, sanctions, revising energy and defense policies, etc.)

Totalitarian imposed inequality is the only possible path of centralized Degrowth: 10,000 for me, one for you, unless you disobey, and then you get zero. The fantasy is that everything will soon be super-abundant and cheap again because creating money out of thin air creates demand out of thin air and supply will always magically appear if there is demand.

Unbeknownst to those trembling in fear of a crushing recession, the crushing recession they fear is the only curative for a fatally distorted system which has lost touch with reality. Everyone looking at the inevitability of recession with alarm is forgetting the many upsides of recession, especially one that crushes all attempts to reverse it with the usual tricks.

Making your entire economy a Landfill Economy dependent on the fantasy of infinite replacements and substitutions is the height of hubris and folly. Very few people ask: what if it breaks? It’s a question we can ask of a great many things: touchscreens, motherboards, tools, vehicles, supply chains and entire systems: what if it breaks?

It is entirely accurate to say that the U.S. is addicted to waste and distant sources of essentials. The downside of dependency is in the air. The U.S. has allowed itself to become dependent on other nations for essentials, a policy that I view as an insanity fueled by greed.

Initial victories do not guarantee the war will be won. Rather, they arouse the most dangerous enemy: the fatal hubris of over-confidence. War tops the long list of human folly for a basic reason: it rarely achieves the initial goals of launching the war.

When the crash can no longer be denied, the drop is widely recognized as having been obvious and inevitable…The last chance to exit is well-known in stock trading circles, but the concept can be applied much more broadly. The basic dynamic at work is a mismatch between the fundamentals (i.e. the real world) which are deteriorating due to structural changes and the psychology of participants which continues to be confident and upbeat.

The Geopolitics of Degrowth holds that real power flows not from waste, centralization and coercion but from decentralization, relocalization and the free flow of value. Conventional geopolitics is all about: more military power, more sanctions, more coercion, more influence.

Let’s call this financial system what it really is: the MetaPerverse, a conjured world of self-serving cons. We live in a peculiar juncture of history in which truth has been banished as a threat to the maximization of private gain, i.e. the hyper-pursuit of self-interest. Evidence that supports a causal chain has been replaced by cherry-picked data that supports a self-serving narrative: both the evidence and narrative are manufactured to serve the interests of the few at the expense of the many.

The unprecedented credit-fueled bubbles in stocks, bonds and real estate are popping, and America’s corrupt leaders can only stammer and spew excuses and empty promises. Unbeknownst to most people, America’s leadership made a pact with the Devil: rather than face the constraints and injustices of our economic-financial system directly, a reckoning that would require difficult choices and some sacrifice by the ruling financial-political elites, our leaders chose the Devil’s Pact: substitute the creation of asset-bubble “wealth” in the hands of the few for widespread prosperity.

Meanwhile, back in the wintry real world, everyone facing a dime in higher costs is jacking up their price by a dollar. We’re constantly assured everything’s on the mend but this trying-too-hard marketing has the opposite effect: it confirms everything’s unraveling.

So when the gambler ends up juggling lit sticks of dynamite, he’s confident nothing bad can happen because nothing bad has ever happened, no matter how much risk he takes on. The problem with constantly being saved from the consequences of our actions is this fatally distorts our sense of risk.