Bob Dylan as Economic Prophet
Change is the defining feature of our modern age, from science to business to politics, both in its extraordinary speed and magnitude. But you would never know it when surveying today’s financial market landscape. We are also living in the age of government-mandated financial repression—which has created a forced, false financial stability. These exist like two contradictory, parallel universes.
Thanks to almost a decade of unprecedented market interventions by global central banks (which have collectively acquired assets totaling over $20 trillion), everywhere you look there is repression of yields, repression of market volatility, and their side effects of exploding asset valuations (to heights not seen since shortly before past historic crashes), financial-engineered debt, leverage, stock-buybacks, cryptocurrency-insanity, “short volatility” and all manner of reckless yield-chasing investment schemes. This is an age of massive artificial economic imbalances and systemic risks.
Such powerful interventions hurt the weakest and benefit the strongest (the holders of assets) as they create unsustainable, destructive distortions that ultimately lead to catastrophe. This is a universal historical theme, perhaps nowhere better chronicled than by Bob Dylan starting back in the early 1960s. And underlying Dylan’s theme has been a prophetic message, one that speaks uncannily to today’s incoherently changeless and riskless market climate: Change is irrepressible, whether we accept it or (especially) even if we do not; “the times they are a-changin’.”
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