Tag Archives: 5) Global Macro

If the Fed succeeding is a “Black Swan,” bring it on. What if the “Black Swan” of 2023 is the Federal Reserve succeeds? Two stipulations here: 1. “Black Swan” is in quotes because the common usage has widened to include events that don’t match Nassim Taleb’s original criteria / definition of black swan; the term now includes events considered unlikely or that are off the radar screens of both the media and the alt-media. 2. The definition of “Fed success” is not as...

This dynamic–making problems much worse by forcing more of whatever worked in the previous era into a saturated, increasing unstable new era–receives little attention or understanding. Eras may last decades, and only those who’ve lived long enough to recall previous eras have experienced the transition from one era to the next. The era of financialization, globalization and low-cost, abundant oil/natural gas began over 40 years ago in 1981. The era of digital /...

If the consensus of experts misunderstand money, credit and prosperity, how are we going to advance? Describing all the ways experts got it wrong is a thriving cottage industry. Expertise is itself contentious, as conventional expertise legitimized by credentials, prestigious institutional positions, scholarship, prizes, etc. can be wielded to promote the interests of the expert or whomever is funding the expert. Another segment of experts are self-proclaimed,...

The gag reflex kicks in at some point and we walk away because it is no longer worth the price. Everyone has a line in the sand when it comes to inflated prices they refuse to pay. For one Walmart shopper I observed, it was a carton of eggs for close to $10. She announced her line in the sand verbally, with great force and sincerity. What’s your line in the sand, the point at which you simply refuse to pay the asking price? Is it the $25 burger? Or is it the $50 for...

Those who see the madness for what it is have only one escape: go to ground, fade from public view, become self-reliant and weather the coming storm in the nooks and crannies. A great madness sweeps the land. There are no limits on extremes in greed, credulity, convictions, inequality, bombast, recklessness, fraud, corruption, arrogance, hubris, pride, over-reach, self-righteousness and confidence in the rightness of one’s opinions. Extremes only become more extreme...

What’s unfettered in America is “Communism for the Rich” and the normalization of corruption that results from the auctioning of political power to protect monopolies and cartels. The irony of constantly being accused of being a communist is rather rich. When I point out that “free market capitalism” in America is neither a real market nor real capitalism, those who equate any criticism of “capitalism” as proof of communist leanings are triggered. Noting that Marx...

The clueless technocrats are about to discover that unfairness and exploitation can’t be measured like revenues and profits, but that doesn’t mean they’re not real. Economists and financial pundits tend to make a catastrophically flawed assumption. They tend to believe the technocratic myth that all human behavior boils down to financial incentives, data and metrics, as if all people make decisions based on interest rates, tax breaks and greed, the desire to maximize...

That’s how things fall apart: insiders know but keep their mouths shut, outsiders are clueless, and the decay that started slowly gathers momentum as the last of the experienced and competent workforce burns out, quits or retires. Outsiders are shocked when things fall apart. Insiders are amazed the duct-tape held this long.The erosion of critical skills and institutional knowledge is invisible to outsiders, while everyone inside who saw the unstoppable decay...

The only rational response to this reality is to opt out, lay flat and let it rot. In my previous post, The Bubble Economy’s Credit-Asset Death Spiral, I described the self-reinforcing feedback of expanding credit and soaring asset valuations and how the only possible result of this financial perpetual motion machine was a death spiral of collapsing debt service, collateral and credit impulse. But this didn’t exhaust the destructive dynamics of this self-reinforcing...

Who believed that central banks’ financial perpetual motion machine was anything more than trickery designed to generate phantom wealth? Central banks seem to have perfected the ideal financial perpetual motion machine: as credit expands, money pours into risk assets, which shoot higher under the pressure of expanding demand for assets that yield either hefty returns (junk bonds) or hefty capital gains as the soaring assets suck in more capital chasing returns. As...