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The higher they push phantom “assets” based on exponential increases in leverage, the greater the air gap between essential tangibles and fantasy. Inflation is in the news, but there are a couple of things about inflation that don’t get much coverage.

For about 1 in 4, Social Security provides at least 90 percent of their income. How many retired workers are getting less than $1,000 per month in Social Security benefits?

What does it say about our “prosperity” if we can’t even afford to equal the purchasing power of the minimum wage paid 50 years ago? It says the 1% got the mine and the bottom 90% got the shaft. Given the rising prosperity we keep hearing about, shouldn’t we be able to provide minimum wage workers the same purchasing power they enjoyed 50 years ago in 1970?

That the era of stability has ended and a new era of increasingly chaotic volatility has begun is not on anyone’s radar as a possibility. The standard debate about the future of the economy is: which will we get, high inflation or a deflationary collapse of defaults and asset bubbles popping?

Change the incentives, and the outcomes change. Ecologist Howard Odum provided a profound insight into human expansion, stagnation and collapse. He argued that humans are wired to maximize power output (i.e., consumption) rather than maximize efficiency.

If you wanted to design a system guaranteed to collapse in a putrid heap, you’d make moral hazard ubiquitous and you’d make the system 100% dependent on a hubris-soaked faux savior. For the past 22 years, every time the stock market whimpered, wheezed or whined, the Federal Reserve rushed to soothe the spoiled crybaby.

The Fed sees itself as trapped by the incompetence and greed of the other players and by its own policy extremes that were little more than expedient “saves” of a system that is unraveling due to its fragility and brittleness.

We can also posit a general rule that those who inherit wealth and succumb to FOMO are eventually less wealthy while those who are wealthy and take a pass on FOMO / hoarding at the top of the manic frenzy increase their wealth.

Maybe maximizing corporate profits isn’t all that matters. Maybe national security and resilience matter, too, and if they do, then reshoring critical supply chains should be a higher priority than Corporate America’s (mostly tax-free) profits.

We need to change the incentives of the entire system, not just healthcare, but if we don’t start with healthcare, that financial cancer will drag us into national insolvency all by itself. American Healthcare is a growth industry in the same way cancer is a growth industry: both keep growing until they kill the host, which in the case of healthcare is the U.S. economy.

The Fed has created trillions out of thin air to boost the speculative wealth of Wall Street, but it can’t print experienced workers willing to work for low wages. The Federal Reserve is reassuring us daily that inflation is temporary, but allow me to assure you that wage inflation is just getting started and will accelerate rapidly.

So hey there Corporate America, the Fed and your neofeudal cronies: take this job and shove it. This time it really is different, but not in the way the Wall Street shucksters are claiming. Conventional economists, politicos and pundits are completely clueless about the unraveling that’s gathering momentum beneath the superficial surface of “reflation” because they don’t yet grasp we’re entering an unprecedented new type of recession: a ‘Take This Job and Shove It’ recession which is unlike any previous downturn.

But weirdly, and irrationally, bubbles pop anyway. At long last, the moment you’ve been hoping for has arrived: you’re pitching your screenplay to a producer. Your agent is cautious but you’re confident nobody else has concocted a story as outlandish as yours.