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The destruction of ‘phantom wealth’ via default has always been the only way to clear the financial system of unpayable debt burdens and extremes of rentier / wealth dominance. The notion that the world could always borrow more money as long as interest rates were near-zero was never sustainable.

How unintended can these consequences be? My guess: not very. A great many people got the U.S. dollar trade wrong. The conventional view held that “printing money”, i.e. expanding the supply of money, would automatically devalue the currency.

Is it beyond conception that the core actually strengthens for a length of time before the unraveling reaches it? Let’s start by stipulating the obvious: no one knows the future, and most of the guesses–oops, I mean forecasts –will be wrong.

The irony is that the suppression of dissent is the suppression of competing ideas that generate systemic stability via rapid adaptation. Nations that appear stable may fail once they’re under pressure. What do I mean by “under pressure”?

It would be very irritating to have a rally suck in all the bears salivating for a crash from a bear-market rally peak and then decimate the shorts with a rally that soars rather than collapses to new lows. As a contrarian, I’m always squinting at the consensus and wondering if it is really that easy to be right.

Pick one, America: national security of the essential material foundation of everything, the industrial base, or “global markets,” maximizing greed / corporate profits. Sorry about the clickbait title. We all know there isn’t “one solution” to anything as complex as a socio-economic-cultural-political system.

What is “money”? “Money” is a claim on the essentials of life. Ration cards are claims on essentials. Many people expect “money” will soon be tied to commodities. Agreed. It’s called a ration card that grants the holder the right to buy a specific quantity of essential goods at a specified price.

Putting this all together, it’s clear that the source of the current housing bubble is the explosion of financial speculation fueled by central bank policies. Those benefiting from speculative bubbles have powerful incentives to deny the bubble can bust.

It’s very difficult to find common ground that supports cooperation in the disintegrative stage of scarcities, rising prices, catastrophically centralized power and social discord.

The mercantilist dependence on exports for growth, a winner for the past 70 years, has reached diminishing returns. Rather than be a source of growth, it’s a source of stagnation. Conventional wisdom holds that geopolitical power is inevitably shifting from West to East. It isn’t quite this simple.

It’s time to reprogram the conditions of the economy to serve the many rather than the few. Star Trek’s Kobayashi Maru training exercise tests officer candidates’ response to a no-win scenario: any attempt to rescue the crippled ship’s crew results in the destruction of the candidate’s ship, while standing by and taking no action results in the loss of the Kobayashi Maru’s crew.

Every forecast or guess has one refreshing quality: one will be right and the rest will be wrong. What’s the difference between a forecast< and a guess? On one level, the answer is "none": the future is unknown and even the most informed forecast is still a guess.