All the “fixes” have fatally weakened the real economy, and created a dangerous illusion of “wealth,” “growth” and solvency.
The “fix” of the last eight years worked, right? This was the status quo’s “fix”:
1. Massive expansion of debt: sovereign, household and corporate, all in service of a) bringing consumer demand forward b) fiscal stimulus funded by debt c) corporate stock buybacks to boost stock valuations d) asset bubbles in real estate, bonds, stocks, bat guano futures, etc.
2. Monetary stimulus, i.e. creating and distributing money at the top of the wealth/power pyramid so corporations and the super-wealthy could buy more assets with free money for financiers issued by central banks.
3. Gaming statistics such as unemployment and metrics such as stock indices to generate the illusion of “growth,” “stability” and “wealth.”
4. Saying all the right things: the “recovery” is creating millions of jobs, inflation is low, virtue-signaling is more important than actual increases in inflation-adjusted wages, etc.
As Dave of the X22 Report and I discuss in Central Banks Weakened The Economy To The Point Of No Return, Day Of Reckoning Has Arrived (42 min. podcast), this “fix” has fatally weakened the real economy. The cost of maintaining the illusions of “growth,” “stability,” “wealth” and solvency is extremely high, and hidden from view: systemic fragility has increased to the point of brittleness.
What is fragility? Fragility is the result of an erosion of resilience, redundancy, adaptability, accountability, honesty, feedback and willingness to sacrifice today’s consumption for tomorrow’s productivity and systemic stability.
The status quo “fix” has gutted resilience, redundancy, adaptability, accountability, honesty, feedback and willingness to sacrifice today’s consumption for tomorrow’s productivity. Can anyone who isn’t a lackey on the payroll of the Powers That Be provide any credible evidence that the U.S. economy is more resilient after eight years of debt-dependent “recovery”?
Sadly, we suffer from an oversupply of well-paid lackeys, factotums, apparatchiks, flunkies, media mouth-pieces and PR hacks and a severe scarcity of unbaised, unspun data points. What little data we do have tells us that the inflation-adjusted wages for the bottom 95% have declined during the “recovery” that made the wealthy much, much wealthier.
As for redundancy–redundancy reduces profits, as it increases costs, so redundancies have been as ruthlessly eliminated as human labor. The slightest disruption in global supply chains means production and transport of essentials collapses in a heap.
And how have the dominant state-protected cartels improved adaptability? They’ve stifled it at every turn. Higher education has jacked up prices for its overpriced marginal-utility “product,” ditto the healthcare/Big Pharma cartels, the military-industrial cartel (hello overpriced, under-performing F-35 and LCS), the banking cartel (love those $35 fees and .01% interest paid on deposits), and all the other cartels that dominate our pay-to-play “democracy.”
State-protected cartels and monopolies are the death of competition, transparency and adaptability–all essential dynamics in real solutions.
