Tag Archives: 5) Global Macro

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. It’s becoming a routine story: a whistleblower emerges with copious documentation, revealing the ethical / managerial rot at the very top of Corporate America icons. Recently it was Facebook that was revealed as devoting far more resources to masking corporate guile than to actually improving...

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. Neither distraction actually solves any real-world problems, a reality we can call the Revenge of the Real World We’ve entered a peculiar...

The line of dominoes that is already toppling extends around the entire global economy and financial system. Plan accordingly. That China faces structural problems is well-recognized. The list of articles in the August issue of Foreign Affairs dedicated to China reflects this: Xi’s Gamble: the Race to Consolidate Power and Stave Off Disaster China’s Economic Reckoning: The Price of Failed Reforms The Robber Barons of Beijing: Can China Survive its Gilded Age? Life...

Santa is generally a jolly fellow, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t take pleasure in meting our well-deserved punishment to the greedy. Nothing is more predictable than a stock market rally starting in early November and running into mid-January–Santa’s rally. And since it’s so predictable, why not front-run the rally by loading up on stocks in October? Here’s the problem: Santa doesn’t take kindly to punters front-running his rally. It’s like opening your presents...

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. Before they slid into euphoric incoherence, the other passengers answered your doubts with statistics and pretty charts showing that the driver had never had an accident, so there was nothing...

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...

As for all those automated systems we have to navigate–do any of them work so well that those profiting from them actually use them? Of course not. In Marc Andreessen’s memorable phrase, “software is eating the world.” Unfortunately, it now has indigestion. Software is running into limits that (non-engineer) promoters either deny or downplay. Meanwhile, back in the real world, software has a limited role in filling structural scarcities of physical goods and many...

That the neofeudal lords and their lackeys offer the debt-serfs “choices” of forced labor would be comic if the results weren’t so tragic. We know we’re close to the moment when Everything Solid Melts into Air when extraordinary breakdowns are treated as ordinary and the “news” quickly reverts to gossip. So over 4 million American workers up and quit every month, month after month after month, and the reaction is ho-hum, labor shortage, blah, blah, blah, toy...

One might anticipate that the bottom 50%’s meager share of the nation’s exploding wealth would have increased as smartly as the wealth of the billionaires, but alas, no. America’s economy has changed in ways few of the winners seem to notice, as they’re too busy cheerleading their own brilliance and success. In the view of the winners, who just so happen to occupy all the seats at the media-punditry-Federal Reserve, etc. table–the rising tide of stock, bond and...

The era of abundance was only a short-lived artifact of the initial boost phase of globalization and financialization. Global corporations didn’t go to all the effort to establish quasi-monopolies and cartels for our convenience–they did it to ensure reliably large profits from control and scarcity. Not all scarcities are artificial, i.e. the result of cartels limiting supply to keep prices high; many scarcities are real, and many of these scarcities can be traced...