No country can produce less of lower quality, and squander more on considerably greedy and corrupt elites, all funded by providing trillions of brand-new units of currency, and think of that this asymmetry will never ever have effects.
As I have frequently kept in mind, historian Michael Grant recognized profound political disunity in the gentility as a key cause of the dissolution of the Roman Empire. Grant described this dynamic in his exceptional account The Fall of the Roman Empire, a book I have actually been suggesting since 2009.
I’ve been blogging about the fractures in America’s ruling elites for several years, as well as the erosion of the structures of society that lead to systemic collapse, for example, Collapse, Part 2: The 9 Characteristics of Decay (June 2015), Fighting with the Political Elite You Have (Might 14, 2007) and The Conflict within the Deep State Simply Got Into Open Warfare (March 10, 2017)
America’s elites are fracturing along multiple tectonic cracks: while the standard media focuses on the ginned-up bread and circuses of Red and Blue political games (i.e., The Purple Empire), the genuine conflicts are within the camps running the Red and Blue games, the Imperial Job of international hegemony (a.k.a. The Deep State), the New Nobility of Big Tech trying to topple the Old Nobility, the Nationalists versus the Globalists and the Financial Gamesters versus The New Structure.
These are my informal acronyms, obviously, however the disputes are genuine and heightening as extreme policies reach new extremes and the threats of breakdown boost.
The most unsafe elites are the ones clinging to the perverse but engaging faith that the Federal Reserve and Treasury can conjure limitless trillions of U.S. dollars without any consequence besides continued worldwide hegemony, the faith that the Federal Reserve has god-like powers to tweak the dials so that 1) the U.S. dollar remains the pre-eminent reserve currency 2) but not so strong that it sinks the emerging market economies and 3) magical enough that there are no limitations on how many can be soaked up by worldwide stock, bond, debt, threat and product markets and 4) stays the primary technique of limiting the global financial leverage of geopolitical competitors. Uh, sure. No issue, the Fed is all-powerful, right?
The essential problem for the Imperial Job is the dollar should serve both the domestic elites making money from Federal Reserve growth of possession bubbles and the international markets that count on a stable dollar for reserves, credit and transactional liquidity. While America’s billionaires are cheering the Fed’s endless largesse to the already wealthy, those charged with keeping hegemony are looking ahead and seeing the debauchery of the U.S. dollar as the Fed and Treasury spew trillions, really little of which is really flowing into productive investments, i.e. the ultimate foundation of hegemony.
It’s useful to observe the institutional proportions between the Federal Reserve and its elite backers and the Soviet companies which oversaw Chernobyl, a history illuminated in Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe.
It seems the only agency with a detailed grasp of the Soviet nuclear power market was the KGB, which had sources within every nook and cranny of the state, economy and society. State tricks were secured to the point that even political elites did not have access to the potential for failure and the effects of failure.
Simply as in the final throes of Imperial collapse in the Soviet Union, nobody seems to be in charge in the U.S. It’s tough to inform if incompetence is now the default setting everywhere in the American State or if there are a couple of competing chess video games being played behind the drape. When failure is so absolute, incompetence alone does not seem quite as much as the job. Possibly failure received a nudge. After all, the cliff edge is already falling apart and it does not take much to help a competing lose their footing.
As I have argued just recently, inflation is not transitory; the patterns have actually reversed and inflation is now embedded by means of 2 essential dynamics: the endless trillions being developed out of thin air by the Fed and Treasury are not increasing the productivity or durability of the U.S. economy; rather they are fatally compromising the economy and society by institutionalizing soaring wealth-income-power inequality, and 2) globalization’s increase of global materials and optimization of international supply chains has reversed; scarcities can no longer be filled by exploiting another developing-economy by means of neocolonial-neoliberal pillage. That oh-so-profitable video game is over, but few think it’s possible: isn’t there constantly another location and people to pillage?
The warring elites will need to choose an economic side quickly: either opt for the Fed’s prepare for an ever-more unequal future America in which inflation stripmines the bottom 90% while the technocrat class and its billionaire owners end up being ever-wealthier and the world loses confidence in the predictability of the U.S. dollar’s worth, or the debt and phantom capital of the Fed’s sand castles are cleaned away and the dollar is re-anchored to the country’s financial structures of improving efficiency by means of newly implemented competitors, transparency and accountability and the strength of a reshored commercial base.
Hopefully America’s equivalents of the KGB have an equivalently sound grasp of simply how susceptible to failure America’s financial dream has ended up being. No empire can survive the debauchery of its currency, for the empire’s power streams not from difficult power (armed force) or soft power (cultural influence) but from the currency that funds both difficult and soft power.
There is no win-win at this late date: one elite will lose, and America will itself be lost if those debauching the dollar are enabled to win. The justifications are as absurd and extreme as the policies: as long as the trillions circulation into the properties owned by billionaires, there can’t be any inflation, and so on, an unlimited spew of reasons by those making money from the debauchery of the dollar.
No country can produce less of lower quality, and squander more on definitely greedy and corrupt elites, all funded by providing trillions of new systems of currency, and picture that this asymmetry will never have repercussions.
It’s not yet clear that there is any leadership left in America. What’s using stage are warring camps of self-interested elites battling to secure their power even as the structures crumble below their feet.
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