W.J. ASTORE Unless you’re working for Raytheon or some other weapons contractor, you’re being robbed whenever our government spends excessively on the military, which is always. $54 billion of your money was stolen from you and sent to Ukraine, with much of it going to Raytheon and similar merchants of death. More than $813 billion […]
If there was only one causal factor nudging the economy into recession, it might be a mild, brief recession. But with all five conditions in confluence, this recession will be unlike any other. Recessions reliably arise from the confluence of these conditions. Note that any one condition can trigger a recession, but no one condition […]
Every individual and entity seeking to maximize their private gain by prostituting themselves to the government is, well, prostituting themselves to the government. The free-money PPP “loan” obtained by a prostitute frequented by Hunter Biden offers a vividly teachable insight into American capitalism: you don’t maximize your private gains by offering a product or service […]
Workers are voting with their feet, and that’s difficult to control. When values and expectations change, everything else eventually changes, too. What happens when the workforce no longer wants to work? We’re about to find out. As with all cultural sea changes, macro statistics don’t tell the full story. The sea change is better illuminated […]
So sorry, but “you’ll own nothing and be miserable–oops, we mean happy, yes, deliriously happy” doesn’t count as a solution. The global economy is perched on the edge of an abyss, and averting our gaze doesn’t actually lessen the risk, it increases it because problems which aren’t faced directly and addressed directly fester and rot […]
Nothing unravels quite as dramatically as systems which are presumed to be rock-solid and forever. Here’s the default Bullish case for stocks and the economy: let’s call it Plan Zero. 1. The economy and equities can grow forever (a.k.a. infinite growth on a finite planet in a waste-is-growth Landfill Economy) 2. Higher energy costs have […]
Most people would be horrified by a 40% decline in their “investments.” When bubbles pop, speculative assets don’t drop 40%, they drop 90% or even 98%. The irony of the sudden panic about real-world inflation generated by rising wages is two-fold: 1. The status quo never mentions the rampant inflation in assets, because the already-wealthy […]
When the system can’t borrow more and distribute the insolvency, it implodes I started writing about debt saturation back in 2011. The basic idea is we can continue to borrow and spend as long as one of two conditions hold: 1) real (inflation-adjusted) income is rising, so there’s more income to service additional debt, or […]
Let’s ask “cui bono” of the $33 trillion in added debt and the $9 trillion added to GDP: to whose benefit? I’ve been thinking about how hard it is to get our heads around big numbers. Technical analyst Sven Henrich (@NorthmanTrader) recently provided one method to grasp the immense wealth of Elon Musk: How to […]
Zelensky and his handlers want the whole of Europe to drive over the abyss. But the talented Mr Zelensky is pushing the script beyond acceptable limits when he starts slapping Berlin around. Team Zelensky has been playing a deft, if cloyingly confected, game up to now. The Ukrainian president has found time in his busy […]
