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The point is the good times of seemingly endless expansion are never permanent yet human regimes become accustomed to managing only expansion.

The top monkeys are doing very well indeed, while the troop is feeling that the Monkey Gods have signaled their displeasure with the failure of the top monkeys.

Balancing globalized trade and capital flows with domestic self-reliance and control of credit and capital is a positive development for everyone.

Politicians and corporate managers have an enviable record of self-enrichment but very little to show in terms of putting the long-term interests of the citizenry above their own short-term gains.

Because the best protection isn’t a 30-room bunker; it’s having 30 people who care
about you.

Where is the global deflator expansive enough to replace China’s one-off deflation of global inflationary forces? There isn’t one.

No wonder Corporate America added $1.2 trillion in profits to be distributed to the elites of America: everything is diminished, stripped of quality and rendered miserable. Too bad there’s no real competition left in the US economy.

The mainstream holds the Fed is busy planning a return to the glory days of zero interest rates, but ZIRP is on the downside of the S-Curve; it’s done, gone, history.

Are the crowds ready for the curtain of Fed omnipotence to be pulled aside? What will push markets ever higher if the Fed’s alchemy fails?

The tricky part is distinguishing the critical dependencies–those resources the empire literally cannot do without–from longer-term sources of decay and decline.

Maybe we’ll get 1893, 1929, 1968 and 2008 analogs mixed into a heady cocktail of surprises.

Not only does everyone love getting “free money” from the state, they also love hearing the fantasy repeated endlessly that debts are no problem because we will continue to “grow our way out of debt.”

Speculation has its own expiration dynamics, and they don’t depend on us recognizing speculative excess for what it is. They will unravel the excesses regardless of what we think, hope or deny.

Combine all these factors and the result is a potentially volatile mixture awaiting a catalyst.