Page 2 - Final Fall News Today

So go ahead and say whatever you want around all your networked devices, but don’t be surprised if bad things start happening. I received another “Our Terms Have Changed” email from a Big Tech quasi-monopoly, and for a change I actually read this one. It was a revelation on multiple fronts. I’m reprinting it here for your reading pleasure: We wanted to let you know that we recently updated our Conditions of Use. What hasn’t changed: Your use constitutes your agreement to our Conditio...

Great swaths of the American workforce are already on strike or slipping away from the dead-end treadmill. America’s labor shortage is complex and doesn’t lend itself to the simplistic expectations favored by media talking heads. The Wall Street cheerleaders extol the virtues of “getting America back to work” which is Wall-Street-speak for  getting back to exploiting workers to maximize corporate profits. Long-term demographics have combined with cultural changes and Covid-Lockdown ep...

As I often note here, when you push the pendulum to an extreme of wealth and income inequality, it will swing to the opposite extreme minus a tiny bit of friction. The depth of America’s indoctrination can be measured by the unquestioned assumption that Capital should earn 15% every year, rain or shine, while workers are fated to lose ground every year, rain or shine. And if wages should ever start ticking upward even slightly, then the Billionaires’ Apologists are unleashed to shout that ...

All debt-fueled speculative bubbles pop, even as cheerleaders claim otherwise. The expansion of Housing Bubble #2 is clearly visible in these two charts of house valuations, courtesy of the St. Louis Federal Reserve database (FRED). The first is the Case-Shiller Index, which as you recall tracks the price of homes on an “apples to apples” basis, i.e. it tracks price movements for the same house over time. Note that this is an index chart where the index is set at 100 as of January 2000. It...

The unraveling of social cohesion has consequences. Once social cohesion unravels, the nation unravels. My recent posts have focused on the systemic financial risks created by Federal Reserve policies that have elevated moral hazard (risks can be taken without consequence) and speculation to levels so extreme that they threaten the stability of the entire financial system. These risks are well known, though largely ignored in the current speculative frenzy. But there is another systemic risk w...

Democracy is fundamentally about advocacy: the people are free to  advocate for their interests and form groups to represent their shared interests. In the broadest scope, the people are free to advocate for what they hold as the  common good, policies and programs that benefit the entire populace rather than one special-interest group. Since the state (all levels of government) concentrates wealth and power via taxation and a monopoly on force, groups advocate/lobby the state to recognize ...

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 skimming a couple hundred...

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 answer lies in what author ...

This heavily managed ‘market structure’ is far from equilibrium and extremely prone to instability. The relentless melt-up in stocks offers ample evidence that the market is rock-solid and that any decline is an enormous opportunity to  buy the dip. That this has worked splendidly for the past 13 years cannot be denied. This doesn’t necessarily guarantee the next 13 years will merely be an extension of the same trend. The market’s sources of fragility and brittleness are well cloaked...

Extremes get more extreme until risk breaks out; then the reversal will be as extreme as the bubble expansion. What would happen if the Federal Reserve ceased to exist? We all know the answer: global markets would instantly collapse and the global financial system, now entirely dependent on Fed stimulus, intervention, manipulation,  free money for financiers and endless printing of trillions of dollars out of thin air, would crash, leaving nothing but a steaming, fetid pile of corruption inf...