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Losses will be taken and sacrifices enforced on those who don’t understand the Chinese state will no longer absorb the losses of speculative excess. Let’s start by stipulating that no one outside President Xi’s inner circle really knows what’s going on in China, and so my comments here are systemic observations, not claims of insider knowledge.

This complete capture of all avenues of regulation and governance can only end one way, a kind of hyper-stagflation. Zeus Y. and I go way back, and he has always had a knack for summarizing just how insane, disconnected from reality, manipulative and exploitive the status quo narrative has become.

The already-wealthy and their minions are unprepared for the Smart Crowd opting out. Clueless economists are wringing their hands about the labor shortage without looking at the underlying causes, one of which is painfully obvious: the American economy now only works for the top 10%; the American Dream of turning labor into capital is now reserved for the already-wealthy.

Now that every financial game in America has been rigged to benefit the few at the expense of the many, trust and credibility has evaporated like an ice cube on a summer day in Death Valley. Here is America in a nutshell: we no longer solve problems, we manipulate the narrative and then declare the problem has been solved.

By incentivizing speculation and corruption, reducing the rewards for productive work and sucking wages dry with inflation, America has greased the skids to collapse. Of all the mass delusions running rampant in the culture, none is more spectacularly delusional than the conviction that we can all get fabulously rich from speculation while producing nothing.

A great many essential components in America are on ‘indefinite back order’, including the lifestyle of endless globally sourced goodies at low, low prices. Setting aside the “transitory inflation” parlor game for a moment, let’s look at what happens when critical parts are unavailable for whatever reason, for example, they’re on back order or indefinite back order, i.e. the supplier has no visibility on when the parts will be available.

The financialized American economy and State are now totally dependent on a steady flow of lies and propaganda for their very survival. Were the truth told, the status quo would collapse in a putrid heap. Go ahead and be evil, because everyone else is evil, too, because being evil serves everyone’s interests far better than maintaining integrity, for integrity will cost you more than you can afford.

We know you’re all just poor corrupt officials, but bleating excuses won’t save you from the karmic payoff. The Federal Reserve can be summed up in two famous lines from the classic film Casablanca in which the corrupt police official Renault is ordered to close Rick’s cafe. Renault: I’m shocked! Shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.

It’s a peculiarity of the human psyche that it’s remarkably easy to be swept up in bubble mania and remarkably difficult to be swept up in the same way by the bubble’s inevitable collapse. Allow me to summarize the dominant zeitgeist in America at this juncture of history: Grab yourself a big gooey hunk of happiness by turning a few thousand bucks into millions–anyone can do it as long as they visualize abundance and join the crowd minting millions.

Can extremes become too extreme to continue higher? We’re about to find out. Is anyone willing to call the top of the Everything bubble? The short answer is no. Anyone earning money managing other people’s money cannot afford to be wrong, and so everyone in the herd prevaricates on timing.

Beneath the illusory stability of rising GDP, the extremes of debt, leverage, stimulus and speculative frenzy required to keep the ‘phantom wealth bubble’ from imploding are all rising parabolically. Imagine being at a party celebrating the vast wealth generated in the last ten months in stocks, cryptocurrencies, real estate and just about every other asset class.

The incentives must change from “waste is growth” to hyper-efficiency, conservation, right to repair and manufactured objects engineered to last a generation or longer and be recyclable at scale. Humans like novelty but don’t like change. It’s easy to confuse the two.

No nation can produce less of lesser quality, and squander more on infinitely greedy and corrupt elites, all funded by issuing trillions of new units of currency, and imagine that this asymmetry will never have consequences. As I have often noted, historian Michael Grant identified profound political disunity in the ruling class as a key cause of the dissolution of the Roman Empire.

Necessity is a magnet, and perhaps as what’s essential in our lives changes, social capital will start sprouting, even in the most unlikely places. “Desert” has become a favored metaphor: food deserts describe neighborhoods with few places to buy fresh fruits and vegetables, democracy deserts describe political regions rigged by gerrymandering, and so on.

One phrase describes the Fed’s pillaging of the nation to benefit the few at the expense of the many: abuse of power. To confess that the fate of the entire global economy now rests on the mumblings of a fossilized Politburo fanatically devoted to making the rich richer is to 1) state the obvious and 2) admit the extreme fragility of the global financial system.

The post-bubble-crash phase is already being prepared: ‘no one could have seen this coming’–except anyone who paid attention to anything other than self-interested shills. It’s really pretty simple to identify a speculative bubble of epic proportions in stocks: if Wall Street says it’s not a bubble, it’s a bubble.

A drought-stricken forest choked with dry brush and deadfall is an apt analogy. While a stock market crash that stairsteps lower for months or years is generally about as welcome as a trip to the guillotine in Revolutionary France, there is some major upside to a crash.

Is that the scent of smoke? What’s that red glare? Must be nothing. Why are the wheels coming off the American Project?Afghanistan is front and center in the news flow for obvious reasons, but since I have no expertise on that nation or America’s role there, I am stipulating these are general comments from a systemic perspective.

Generations of punters have learned the hard way that their unwary greed is the tool the ‘Smart Money’ uses to separate them from their cash and capital. The game is as old as the stock market: the Smart Money recognizes the top is in, and in order to sell all their shares, they need to recruit bagholders to buy their shares and hold them all the way down.

Global supply chain logjams and global credit/financial crises aren’t bugs, they’re intrinsic features of Neoliberalism’s fully financialized global economy. To understand why the global economy is unraveling, we have to look past the headlines to the primary dynamic of globalization: Neoliberalism, the ideological orthodoxy which holds that introducing market dynamics to sectors that were closed to global markets generates prosperity for all.