by Gordon and I discuss these topics in this 37-minute video: The collateral supporting the global mountain of debt is crumbling as speculative bubbles deflate. A great many freebies are being tossed in the Helicopter Money basket. That households experiencing declines in income need immediate support is obvious, as is the need to throw credit lifelines to small businesses. But beyond those essentials, the open-ended nature of Helicopter Money has unleashed a frenzy of political favors and giveaways that have little to do with helping households and everything to do with rewarding favored cronies, cartels and interest groups. As Gordon Long and I explain, the short-term “pain relief” of Helicopter Money won’t cure the economy’s financial disease; rather, it will act
Topics:
Charles Hugh Smith considers the following as important: 5) Global Macro, 5.) Charles Hugh Smith, Featured, newsletter
This could be interesting, too:
Michael Njoku writes Totalitarianism Begins With A Denial of Economics
Nachrichten Ticker - www.finanzen.ch writes US-Wahl treibt Bitcoin über 90’000 US-Dollar – wie Anleger vom neuen Krypto-Hype profitieren können
Jim Fedako writes Subjectivity and Demonstrated Preference: A Possible Paradox
Connor O'Keeffe writes The Context Behind Donald Trump’s “Takeover” of the American Right
| Gordon and I discuss these topics in this 37-minute video:
The collateral supporting the global mountain of debt is crumbling as speculative bubbles deflate. A great many freebies are being tossed in the Helicopter Money basket. That households experiencing declines in income need immediate support is obvious, as is the need to throw credit lifelines to small businesses. But beyond those essentials, the open-ended nature of Helicopter Money has unleashed a frenzy of political favors and giveaways that have little to do with helping households and everything to do with rewarding favored cronies, cartels and interest groups. As Gordon Long and I explain, the short-term “pain relief” of Helicopter Money won’t cure the economy’s financial disease; rather, it will act as a catalyst for longer-term disruption and decline. |
None of the giveaways being discussed address the core causes of our systemic financial disease:
- Erosion of real-world collateral supporting the ever-growing mountains of debt and leverage
- Diminishing returns on monetary stimulus (Federal Reserve financial cocaine no longer generates euphoria)
- Domino-like disruption of global supply chains and global demand
- Stagnating purchasing power of labor
- The use of debt to keep up with the soaring costs of essentials (rent, healthcare. childcare) and aspirational goods (iPhones) and services (vacations)
- Repricing of risk and risk assets
The stability of the entire system is increasingly fragile and brittle. The abuse of money-printing–creating currency to benefit bloated, inefficient, parasitic, predatory institutions, cartels and monopolies–is further eroding already-decaying confidence in monetary and fiscal authorities and policies.
The collateral supporting the global mountain of debt is crumbling as speculative bubbles deflate. What happens to margin debt when the $300 stock falls to $100? What happens to the $1 million mortgage when the decaying bungalow’s value falls from $1.2 million to $400,000?
The inevitable result of creating currency is excess of the creation of goods and services is a decline in purchasing power which we experience as inflation / shrinkflation (getting lower quality and less quantity even though the price has remained the same).
This loss of putchasing power has been masked by bogus statistical tricks and shrinkflation, but as the Helicopter Money trillions flood through the economy and global supply chain disruptions cause prices to rise, the usual bag of tricks will no longer be enough to hide the higher costs and declining purchasing power.
Then there’s the psychological impact of the reverse wealth effect as households and enterprises see their net worth and income dropping. The confident euphoria required to borrow and spend freely has evaporated and will not be returning, regardless of how much currency is created and distributed.
You Might Also Like
And Then Came the Lawsuits: Pandemic in a Litigious Society
This is the upside of hyper-litigiousness: prevention is prioritized as the most effective means of limiting future liability. Never mind prevention or vaccines; the big question is “who can we sue after this blows over to rake in millions of dollars?” Yes, this is pathetic, tragic, perverse and evil, but that’s reality in a hyper-litigious society like the U.S.
Goodbye to All That: The Demise of Globalization and Imperial Pretensions
The decline phase of the S-Curve is just beginning. Globalization and Imperial Pretensions have been decaying for years; now the tide has turned definitively against them. The Covid-19 pandemic didn’t cause the demise of globalization and Imperial Pretensions; it merely pushed the rickety structures over the edge.
The Covid-19 Dominoes Fall: The World Is Insolvent
Subtract their immense debts and they have negative net worth, and therefore the market value of their stock is zero. To understand why the financial dominoes toppled by the Covid-19 pandemic lead to global insolvency, let’s start with a household example. The point of this exercise is to distinguish between the market value of assets and net worth, which is what’s left after debts are subtracted from the market value of assets.
Covid-19 Helicopter Money: Go Big Now or Go Home
This is why it’s imperative to go big now, and make plans to sustain the most vulnerable households and small employers not for two weeks but for six months–or however long proves necessary. That governments around the world will be forced to distribute “helicopter money” to keep their people fed and housed and their economies from imploding is already a given.
The Global Repricing of Assets Can’t Be Stopped
All bubbles pop, period. The financial elites are pushing a narrative that asset prices, sales and profits will all return to January 2020 levels as soon as the Covid-19 pandemic fades. Get real, baby. Nothing is going back to January 2020 levels. Rather than the "V-shaped recovery" expected by Goldman Sachs et al., the crash in asset prices will eventually gather momentum.
The System Will Not Return to “Normal,” and That’s Good; We Can Do Better
Essential home lockdown reading. The pandemic is revealing to all what many of us have known for a long time: the status quo was designed to fail and so its failure was not just predictable but inevitable. We’ve propped up a dysfunctional, wasteful and unsustainable system by pouring trillions of dollars in borrowed money down a multitude of ratholes to avoid a reckoning and a re-set.
We Can Only Choose One: Our National Economy or Globalization
The servitude of society to a globalized economy is generating extremes of insecurity, powerlessness and inequality. Does our economy serve our society, or does our society serve our economy, and by extension, those few who extract most of the economic benefits? It’s a question worth asking, as beneath the political churn around the globe, the issues raised by this question are driving the frustration and anger that’s manifesting in social and political disorder.
The Limits of Force: A Bayonet in the Back Will Not Restore China’s Economy
Force cannot restore legitimacy, trust or confidence, nor can it magically erase the consequences of a still-unfolding national trauma. The Chinese authorities threatening to punish workers who refuse to return to work are getting a lesson in the limits of force in an unprecedented national trauma: a bayonet in the back will not restore the legitimacy and confidence that have been lost.
Tags: Featured,newsletter