Tag Archives: 5) Global Macro

So hey there Corporate America, the Fed and your neofeudal cronies: take this job and shove it. This time it really is different, but not in the way the Wall Street shucksters are claiming. Conventional economists, politicos and pundits are completely clueless about the unraveling that’s gathering momentum beneath the superficial surface of “reflation” because they don’t yet grasp we’re entering an unprecedented new type of recession: a ‘Take This Job and Shove...

But weirdly, and irrationally, bubbles pop anyway. At long last, the moment you’ve been hoping for has arrived: you’re pitching your screenplay to a producer. Your agent is cautious but you’re confident nobody else has concocted a story as outlandish as yours. Your agent gives you the nod and you’re off and running: Writer: Two guys start a cryptocurrency as a joke to parody the crypto craze, and they name it KittyCoin. It goes nowhere but then the greatest...

Despite their hollow bleatings about ‘doing all we can to achieve full employment’, the Fed’s policies has been Kryptonite to employment, labor and the bottom 90%–and most especially to the bottom 50%, the working poor that one might imagine most deserve a leg up. As wealth and income inequality soar to new heights thanks to the Federal Reserve’s policies of zero interest rates, money-printing and financial stimulus, the Fed says its goal is to create more jobs....

The takeaway here is obvious: earn as little money as possible and invest your surplus labor in assets that can’t be expropriated. Expropriation: dispossessing the populace of property and property rights, via the legal and financial over-reach of monetary and political authorities. All expropriations are pernicious, but the most destructive is the expropriation of labor’s value while the excessive gains of unproductive speculation accrue to the elite that owns...

It’s all so pathetic, isn’t it? The only way left to get ahead in America is to leverage up the riskiest gambles. It’s painfully obvious that the only way left to get ahead in America is crazy-risky speculation, but nobody seems to even notice this stark and stunning reality. Why are people piling into crazy-risky bets on speculative vehicles like Gamestop and Dogecoin? The obvious answer is because others have reaped a decade or two of wages in a few weeks, and...

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. It’s assumed the Fed or its proxies, i.e. the Plunge Protection Team, will be the buyer in any freefall sell-off: no matter how many punters are selling, the PPT will keep...

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? Put another way: take two very similar political-social-economic systems/nation-states and two very similar crises, and why does one system not just survive but emerge better adapted while the other system/state fails? The...

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….” “Stop right there–even talking about vaccines will get you renditioned to a hellhole in one of the ‘stans.” “But it’s just fiction.” “You can argue with your guard in the...

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) The income of the top 0.1% grew 15 times faster than the incomes of the bottom 90% because that’s...

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. We all know what happens when over-protective Helicopter Parents save their precious offspring from any opportunity to learn from mistakes and failures: they cripple their child’s ability to...