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Risk has not been extinguished, it is expanding geometrically beneath the false stability of a monstrously manipulated market. One of the most under-appreciated investment insights is courtesy of Mike Tyson: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” At this moment in history, the plan of most market participants is to place their full faith and trust in the status quo’s ability to keep asset prices lofting ever higher, essentially forever.

What if everyone in the market realizes it’s now the moment to front-run the crash? We have a fine-sounding word for running with the herd: momentum. When the herd is running, those who buy what the herd is buying and sell what the herd is selling are trading momentum, which sounds so much more professional and high-brow than the noisy, dusty image of large mammals (and their trading machines) mindlessly running with the herd.

The only dynamic that’s even faintly “capitalist” about America’s Crony-Socialism is the price of political corruption is still a “market.” The supposed “choice” between “capitalism” and “socialism” is a useful fabrication masking the worst of all possible worlds we inhabit: Capitalism for the powerless and Crony-Socialism for the powerful.

Is inflation “transitory” in your household budget? Really? Where? The Federal Reserve has been bleating that inflation is “transitory”–but what about the real world that we live in, as opposed to the abstract funhouse of rigged statistics? Here’s a simple test to help you decide if inflation is “transitory” in the real world.

Nobody seems to notice the ‘diminishing returns’ on Fed manipulation, oops, I mean ‘intervention’. Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that everything that will eventually matter is ignored until it does matter–but by then it’s too late.

The Fed’s god-like powers will be revealed for what they really are: artifice and illusion. The Fed will be proven catastrophically wrong about inflation for the simple reason that inflation isn’t transitory, it’s sticky: when prices rise due to real-world scarcities and higher costs, they stay high and then move higher as expectations catch up with reality.

We’re getting a real-world economics lesson in rip-your-face-off increases in prices, and the tuition is about to go up–way up. Inflation will be transitory, blah-blah-blah–I beg to differ, for these reasons. There are numerous structural sources of inflation, which I define as prices rise while the quality and quantity of goods and services remain the same or diminish.

People caught on that the returns on the frenzied hamster wheel of “normal” have been diminishing for decades, but everyone was too busy to notice. The superficial “return to normal” narrative focuses solely on first order effects now that people can dispense with masks and social distancing, they are resuming their pre-pandemic spending orgy with a vengeance, which augurs great profits for Corporate America and higher tax revenues.

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.