Geopolitics and Degrowth

2021-12-10

If Xi’s gambit succeeds, China could become a magnet for global capital. If success is only partial or temporary, China may well struggle with the structural excesses that are piling up not just in China but in the entire global economy.

2021-12-03

But alas, humans do not possess god-like powers, they only possess hubris, and so all bubbles pop: the more extreme the bubble, the more devastating the pop. Long cycles operate at such a glacial pace they’re easily dismissed as either figments of fevered imagination or this time it’s different.

2021-11-07

If America’s total dependence on corporate profits and stock market/housing bubbles is
just fine because the bubbles just keep inflating, there’s nothing left but rot.

2021-11-04

The status quo response would be amusing if the consequences weren’t so dire. Rather than stare at empty shelves, you have two options for distraction: you can don a virtual-reality headset and cavort with dolphins in the metaverse, or you can trade various forms of phantom wealth that always go up (happy happy!) because the Fed.

2021-10-26

When the wreck is recovered, witnesses will wonder why they took such heedless, foolish risks. You’re in the back seat wedged between tipsy revelers, the driver is drunk and heading into Deadman’s Curve at 90 miles per hour. Nobody’s worried because the driver has never crashed.

2021-10-23

I hope everyone here is hungry because the banquet of consequences is being served. I’ve coined a new portmanteau word to describe America’s descent: kleptocrapocracy, a union of kleptocracy (a nation ruled by kleptocrats) and crapocracy, a nation drowning in a moral sewer of rampant self-interest in which the focus is cloaking all the skims, scams, rackets and bezzles in some virtuous-sounding garb, a nation choking on low-quality junk ceaselessly hawked by robocalls, spam, phishing and Big Tech manipulation.

2021-09-22

The already-wealthy and their minions are unprepared for the Smart Crowd opting out. Clueless economists are wringing their hands about the labor shortage without looking at the underlying causes, one of which is painfully obvious: the American economy now only works for the top 10%; the American Dream of turning labor into capital is now reserved for the already-wealthy.

2021-09-09

It’s a peculiarity of the human psyche that it’s remarkably easy to be swept up in bubble mania and remarkably difficult to be swept up in the same way by the bubble’s inevitable collapse.