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This wholesale transfer of risk from elites to the workers is finally becoming consequential as wealth / income / security inequality is reaching extremes that are destabilizing society and the economy. One of the most consequential financial trends of the past 50 years has been ignored to the point of invisibility.

The global economy may have finally run up against hard limits of “infinite substitution” and “infinite expansion” funded by central-bank free money. We are in an interesting, Hall of Mirrors moment: prices are rising, yet we’re assured by the Federal Reserve that this inflation is “transitory,” and other voices are insisting the primary forces of the economy (globalization, debt and automation) are all profoundly deflationary, meaning prices of everything will eventually plummet as supply will outstrip demand.

The truth is America has lost its way if commoners pay a rate of 40% but its billionaires pay next to nothing. As with everything else in polarized America, billionaires proclaiming space tourism is the next for humanity neatly divides opinion into two camps: those who laud the initiative, hard work and innovations of the billionaires as examples of the American Can-Do Dream, and those who wished the billionaire space tourists had taken a one-way flight to a distant orbit of blissful silence.

The ideal bagholder is one who adds more on every downturn (buy the dip) and who refuses to sell (diamond hands), holding on for the inevitable Fed-fueled rally to new highs. Old hands on Wall Street have been wary of being bearish for one reason, and no, it’s not the Federal Reserve: the old hands have been waiting for retail–the individual investor– to go all-in stocks.

If America somehow managed to educate millions of college students without burdening them with $2 trillion in debt in 1993, why is it now “impossible” to do so, even as America’s wealth and gross national product (GDP) have both rocketed higher over the past 27 years?

Corporate America sacrificed national interests in service of greed, and so did the U.S. government. As we all know, the source of Corporate America’s unprecedented explosion in profits in the 21st century is the offshoring of manufacturing to China.

Perhaps we should update Marie Antoinette’s famous quip of cluelessness to: “Let them eat space tourism.” As billionaires squander immense resources on self-glorifying space flights, the corporate media is nothing short of worshipful.

So go ahead and say whatever you want around all your networked devices, but don’t be surprised if bad things start happening. I received another “Our Terms Have Changed” email from a Big Tech quasi-monopoly, and for a change I actually read this one. It was a revelation on multiple fronts.

Maintaining the illusion of confidence, permanence and stability serves the interests of those benefiting from the bubbles and those who prefer the safety of the herd, even as the herd thunders toward the precipice. The misconception that collapse is an all or nothing phenomenon is common:

As the chart below on ‘how systems collapse’ illustrates, the loss of stabilizing buffers goes unnoticed until the entire structure collapses under its own weight. Disruptive extremes of weather: check Rising geopolitical tensions with no diplomatic resolution: check Multiplying scarcities in essential commodities: check Domestic disorder accelerates as extreme positions harden into irreconcilable conflicts: check

Great swaths of the American workforce are already on strike or slipping away from the dead-end treadmill. America’s labor shortage is complex and doesn’t lend itself to the simplistic expectations favored by media talking heads. The Wall Street cheerleaders extol the virtues of “getting America back to work” which is Wall-Street-speak for getting back to exploiting workers to maximize corporate profits.