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America’s financial system and state are themselves the problems, yet neither system is capable of recognizing this or unwinding their fatal synergies. why do some systems/states emerge from crises stronger while similar systems/states collapse?

Nobody thinks a euphoric rally could ever go bidless, but as Greenspan belatedly admitted, liquidity is not guaranteed. The current market melt-up is taken as nearly risk-free because the Fed has our back, i.e. the Federal Reserve will intervene long before any market decline does any damage.

OK, now I get it. Take a couple tabs of Euphorestra and Hopium, and stick to talking about making money in the market. Greed won’t offend anyone. So I started to tell my buddy about my new screenplay idea: “There’s a global pandemic, and when they rush a bunch of vaccines to market, then….”

The Fed’s casino isn’t just rigged; it’s criminally unstable. The decay of America’s middle class has been well documented and many commentators have explored the causal factors. The bottom line is that this decay isn’t random; the income of the middle class isn’t going to suddenly increase at 15 times the growth rate of the income of the top 0.1%. (see chart below)

All the risks generated by gambling with trillions of borrowed and leveraged dollars didn’t actually vanish; they were transferred by the Fed to the entire system. The Federal Reserve is the nation’s Helicopter Parent, saving everyone from the consequences of their actions.

The lesson of China’s Cultural Revolution in my view is that once the lid blows off, everything that was linear (predictable) goes non-linear (unpredictable). There is a whiff of unease in the air as beneath the cheery veneer of free money for almost everyone, inequality and polarization are rapidly consuming what’s left of common ground in America.

All of which sounds very pretty indeed, but it does raise a question: can risk really be destroyed, or can it only be transferred? And if it can only be transferred, then what’s it been transferred to? What a remarkable moment in time: every asset is lofting higher, with no limits in sight.

Inequality is America’s Monster Id, and we’re continuing to fuel its future rampage daily. What’s changed and what hasn’t in the past year?

Perhaps the aliens’ keen interest in Earth’s central bank magic and its potential for destruction results from a wager. You’ve probably noticed the recent uptick in UFO sightings and video recordings from aircraft of the extraordinary flight paths of these unidentified objects. Perhaps it’s not coincidence that UFO sightings are soaring at the same time as central banks pursue unprecedented monetary policies.

Buyers know there will always be a greater fool willing to pay more for an over-valued asset because the Fed has promised us it will always be the greater fool. I realize nobody wants to hear that most of their “wealth” is nothing more than wispy Cloud Castles in the Sky that will dissipate in the faintest zephyr, but there it is: that which was conjured out of thin air will return to thin air.

As the level of Fed smack and crack needed to maintain the high increases, system fragility increases geometrically. You know the plot point in the horror film where the highway is blocked and a detour sign directs the car full of naive teens off onto a rutted track into the wilderness?

If health is wealth, and it most certainly is the highest form of wealth, then we would be well-served to take charge of our health-wealth in terms of what behaviors we can sustainably modify. Longtime correspondent J.F. (MD) recently shared a fascinating graphic ranking the leading causes of death in the U.S. (2016 data, pre-pandemic) compared to searches on Google and what the media reports.

Borrowing a quarter of the nation’s entire economic output every year to prop up an ineffective, corrupt status quo is putting a Band-Aid over a tumor. If we misdiagnose the disease, our treatment won’t work. We’re all familiar with medical misdiagnoses, which lead to procedures and prescriptions that can’t possibly fix the patient’s illness because the source has been missed or misinterpreted.

If you think this scale of stimulus is sustainable and consequence-free, you must be mainlining. Wall Street’s euphoria knows no bounds, so how can this be the Winter of Our Discontent?

Perhaps we have collectively “lost our mind.” Perhaps what we need is not a new technology but a new way of living that uses existing technologies to echo “old ways” that worked rather well on much lower energy consumption. The Great Reset is much in the news–the proposed top-down plan for combating climate change designed by the global elites, who then as now will be jetting around in private aircraft while dictating exactly how the rest of us will reduce our carbon footprints.