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The American Economy in Four Words: Neofeudal, Extortion, Decline, Collapse
The American Economy in Four Words: Neofeudal, Extortion, Decline, Collapse
Our society has a legal structure of self-rule and ownership of capital, but in reality it is a Neofeudal Oligarchy.
Now that the pandemic is over and the economy is roaring again–so the stock market says–we’re heading straight back up into the good old days of 2019. Nothing to worry about, we’ve recovered the trajectory of higher and higher, better every day in every way.
Everything’s great except the fatal rot at the heart of the U.S. economy hasn’t even been acknowledged, much less addressed: every sector of the economy is nothing but one form of neofeudal extortion or another.
Let’s spin the time machine back to the late Middle Ages, at the height of feudalism, and imagine we’re trying to get a boatload of goods to the nearest city to sell. As we drift down the river, we’re constantly being stopped and charged a fee for transiting one small fiefdom after another. When we finally reach the city, there’s an entry fee for bringing our goods to market.
Note that none of these fees were payments for improvements to transport or for services rendered; they were simply extortion. This was the economic structure of feudalism: petty fiefdoms levied extortionate fees that funded the lifestyles of nobility.
This is why I have long called America’s economy neofeudal: we pay ever higher fees for services that are degrading, not improving. This is the essence of extortion: we don’t get any improvement in goods and services for the extra money we’re forced to pay.
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How We Got Here: the Global Economy’s 75-Year Stumble to the Precipice
How We Got Here: the Global Economy’s 75-Year Stumble to the Precipice
Not only will there not be a recovery, but there can’t be a recovery, as those brittle extremes have been lost for good.
How did the global economy end up teetering on a precarious financial precipice? To formulate a cogent answer, let’s take a whirlwind tour of the history of the global economy 1946-2020.
Before we start the tour, I want to return briefly to my first Musings of the year, which was posted on January 4, 2020, before Covid-19 was officially announced on January 23, 2020. (The Musings Reports are sent weekly to patrons and subscribers at the $5/month or higher level.)
Instability Rising: Why 2020 Will Be Different:
“Economically, the 11 years since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09 have been one relatively coherent era of modest growth, rising wealth/income inequality and coordinated central bank stimulus every time a crisis threatened to disrupt the domestic or global economy.This era will draw to a close in 2020 and a new era of destabilization and uncertainty begins.”
The long-term trends set up a row of dominoes that the pandemic has toppled. But any puff of air that toppled the first domino would have toppled all the dominoes of fragility, instability and unsustainable extremes that characterize the global economy.
The whirlwind tour of the global economy’s history must include these essential dynamics: energy, currencies, globalization, debt and financialization, which broadly speaking refers to everything that renders finance (borrowing, leverage, speculation) more profitable than actually generating goods and services.
The “glorious thirty” (Les Trente Glorieuses) years from 1946 to 1975 were decades of rising prosperity in the developed world (Europe, Japan, North America) and rapid development in the first tier of developing countries in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. (Decolonized nations and China struggled with political, social and economic turmoil.)
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The New Normal: Extremes of Neofeudalism, Incompetence, Authoritarianism and Relocalization
The New Normal: Extremes of Neofeudalism, Incompetence, Authoritarianism and Relocalization
The pendulum swung to an extreme of globalization, financialization, centralization and monopoly, all of which created extreme systemic fragility.
Here’s what to expect in the rapidly evolving New Normal: extremes become even more extreme as the status quo attempts to force compliance with its last-ditch schemes to preserve what was always unsustainable while painting a happy face on the stock market, the one thing they can push higher as the global economy unravels.
Mark, Jesse and I discuss this dynamic in Salon #10: Remember when Maximum Pessimism and Irrational Exuberance were mutually exclusive? (54 minutes): realistic pessimism is lashed to the mast with the irrational exuberance of stock market soothsayers, central bank cheerleaders and the organs of propaganda (Wall Street) and control of the narratives (social media and search monopolies).
Cognitive dissonance? Yes. Schizophrenia? Sure. Crazy-making? Undoubtedly. So the default “solution” is petty Authoritarianism to ensure we only see approved narratives, that we focus on the happy-happy signal of the glorious stock market (best rally ever!), that we pay higher taxes without complaint, and so on.And of course, buy, buy, buy and borrow, borrow, borrow, lest the flimsy house of cards collapse.
As I explain in my book Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform, the only possible output of central bank monetary stimulus is financialization, and the only possible output of financialization is unprecedented wealth and income inequality.
As Max Keiser, Stacy Herbert and I discuss in Fractals of Incompetence (15:30), the problem with pushing extremes is the system is incompetent at every level, from school boards to the Federal Reserve. Rather than solve problems, our institutions have devolved into mechanisms to protect clerisy / insiders from transparency and accountability.In the New Normal, systemic incompetence isn’t going to magically transform into competence, it’s going to reach new extremes of incompetence and self-serving hubris.
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Is Data Our New False Religion?
Is Data Our New False Religion?
In the false religion of data, heresy is asking for data that is not being collected because it might reveal unpalatably unprofitable realities.
Here’s how every modern con starts: let’s look at the data. Every modern con starts with an earnest appeal to look at the data because the con artist has assembled the data to grease the slides of the con.
We have been indoctrinated into a new and false religion, the faith of data. We’ve been relentlessly indoctrinated with the quasi-religious belief that “data doesn’t lie,” when the reality is that data consistently misleads us because that is the intent.
Nobody in the False Religion of Data ever looks at what we don’t measure because that would uncover disruptive truths. My latest book Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World looks at everything consequential that we don’t measure, and since we don’t measure it, we assume it doesn’t exist. That’s the end-game of the False Religion of Data: what’s actually important isn’t measured and therefore it doesn’t exist, while what is measured is artfully packaged to support a narrative that enriches those behind the screen of “objective data-based science.”
The data-based con can be constructed in any number of ways. A few data points can be cleverly extrapolated to “prove” some self-serving claim, a bit of data can be conjured into a model that just so happens to support the most profitable policy option, inconvenient data points can be covertly deleted via “filtering out the outliers,” statistical trickery can be invoked (with a wave of this magic wand…) to declare semi-random data “statistically significant,” and so on, in an almost endless stream of tricks.
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Our Wile E. Coyote Economy: Nothing But Financial Engineering
Our Wile E. Coyote Economy: Nothing But Financial Engineering
Ours is a Wile E. Coyote economy, and now we’re hanging in mid-air, realizing there is nothing solid beneath our feet.
The story we’re told about how our “capitalist” economy works is outdated. The story goes like this: companies produce goods and services for a competitive marketplace and earn a profit from this production. These profits are income streams for investors, who buy companies’ stocks based on these profits. As profits rise, so do stock valuations.
It’s all win-win: consumers get competitively priced goods and services, workers have jobs producing goods and services and investors earn a return on their capital.
Sadly, this is a fairy tale that no longer aligns with the reality that the U.S. economy is now a decaying billboard of “producing goods and services” behind which the real money is made in financial engineering, a.k.a. legalized fraud. Take everyone’s favorite stock, Apple. The fairy tale is that Apple is in the business of making mobile phones and providing services to this customer base.
According to the fairy tale, Apple’s rise in value from $400 billion to $1.4 trillion is based on higher operating earnings, i.e. profits. But if we look at Apple’s operating earnings (see chart below), we see that they’ve been flat for years. So why is Apple worth $1 trillion more than it was a few years ago if profits haven’t risen, much less tripled?
The answer is financial engineering: Apple sells bonds that pay a paltry rate of return and then uses the proceeds from this debt (and most of its actual profits) to buy back its own shares–an astounding $338 billion over the past 7 years.
But look at the return on this legalized fraud: $338 billion added $1 trillion in “value” which can be sold by insiders to greater fools who believe the fairy tale.
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Unstoppable: The Greatest Depression and the Reverse Wealth Effect
Unstoppable: The Greatest Depression and the Reverse Wealth Effect
We are entering The Greatest Depression because there is no exit.
I’ve endeavored to explain why The Greatest Depression is unstoppable in recent posts:
The Covid-19 Dominoes Fall: The World Is Insolvent March 16, 2020
Pandemic Pandemonium: The Tides of Globalization and Financialization Reverse March 31, 2020
Here’s Why the Economy Won’t Recover–and No, It’s Not Covid-19 or the Lockdown April 23, 2020
What’s Collapsing Can’t Be Saved: Our Fraudulent Economy April 22, 2020
Why Assets Will Crash May 4, 2020
Our Inevitable Collapse: We Can’t Save a Fragile Economy With Bailouts That Increase Fragility May 1, 2020
Globalization and Financialization Are Dead, and so Is Everything That Depended on Them May 15, 2020
Our Fate Is Sealed, Vaccines Won’t Matter: Four Long Cycles Align May 19, 2020
Consumer Spending Will Not Rebound–Here’s Why May 18, 2020
This Is How Systems Collapse May 30, 2020
I’ll try to summarize all this as simply as possible:
1. The global economy’s cost structure has been fatally distorted by central bank policies of inflating asset bubbles and reducing interest rates to near-zero.
2. Earnings from labor have stagnated or eroded since the era of globalization / financialization took off around 2000.
3. Everything costs too much, i.e. is no longer affordable from earnings alone, so the only way to maintain the current costly lifestyle is to borrow money and use it to pay current expenses. This is true for every sector: household, corporate and government.
4. As a result, everyone now needs every dollar of income just to pay their expenses, including interest and principal on their rising debts. There is no slack (buffers) in the system at all.
5. This can be visualized as a row of dominoes. Once the first domino falls, every domino will be toppled.
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First the Deflationary Deluge of Assets Crashing, Then the Tsunami of Inflation
First the Deflationary Deluge of Assets Crashing, Then the Tsunami of Inflation
Once the pool of greater fools dries up, stocks crash regardless of what the Fed does or bleats.
The conventional view is the Federal Reserve creating trillions of dollars out of thin air will trigger inflation. Not so fast. Yes, creating trillions of dollars out of thin air will eventually devalue the purchasing power of each dollar–what we call inflation–but first all the unprecedented asset bubbles will pop and valuations will crash.
Let’s call this a deflationary deluge as unsustainable asset prices are eroded by a hard rain of reality. To understand the enormity of the current bubbles, please glance at the charts below. The first chart depicts recent stock market bubbles; note the extreme height of the current bubble.
The next chart shows the S&P 500, and the extraordinary amplification of the bubble that reached its apex in February 2020. Note that each ramp higher takes less time to reach its peak. The most recent snapback rally gained about 870 points in a mere two months–a move that took roughly 5 years in the early 2000s.
Real estate and other assets have also soared in unprecedented bubbles. Old bungalows that sold for $150,000 less than 20 years ago are now supposedly worth over $1 million.
What made this possible? An equivalent bubble in debt. Every sector–household, corporate and government–has borrowed astronomical sums of money to keep the bubble economy glued together. In this rising tide of currency and capital, whatever had scarcity value–real estate, art, stocks–was purchased with the borrowed money as a store of value and / or as a source of income in a world starved of low-risk yields by central banks that dropped interest rates to near zero.
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This Sucker’s Going Down: The Destruction of Demand
This Sucker’s Going Down: The Destruction of Demand
Demand based on debt, unfulfilled promises and unaffordable habits is burning down.
The first-order effect of the lockdown was demand destruction as shelter-in-place orders and business closures restricted consumers’ ability to spend.
The second-order effect will be the permanent destruction of demand because people will realize they’re better off reducing their consumption of high-cost, questionable-value goods and services. Let’s start with the resurgence of savings, the most basic form of security you actually control and the most basic form of hedging against promises of a return to wonderfulness failing to arrive in the real world.
Comically, security you actually control, i.e. savings, are viewed by the status quo as a mortal threat to the economy: how dare you keep some of your own money rather than squander all of it! Notice how this bit of twisted CNN humor labels savings “hoarding,” as if retaining a bit of your hard-earned wages is evil “hoarding” rather than prudent self-sufficiency.
New threat to the economy: Americans are saving like it’s the 1980s
For those who weren’t alive to experience the 1980s, it was a boom era of widespread prosperity. In a functional economy, savings are understood as one of the foundations of prosperity. In today’s insanely dysfunctional neofeudal economy, savings are a despicable evil because they take the bread right out of the bankers’ and corporate elites’ mouths. How dare you rob poor Jamie Dimon and Jeff Bezos with your awful, horrible, cruel savings of money that you actually control, money that protects you and gives you some security!
In other words: how dare you serve your own needs and interests rather than our monomaniacal obsession with increasing our profits at your expense.
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Our Fate Is Sealed, Vaccines Won’t Matter: Four Long Cycles Align
Our Fate Is Sealed, Vaccines Won’t Matter: Four Long Cycles Align
A Covid-19 vaccine, or lack thereof, will have zero effect in terms of reversing these cycles. Call it Fate, call it karma, call it what you will, but the cycles have aligned and nothing can stop the unraveling of all that was foolishly presumed to be permanent.
We like to think we’re in charge and that technology conquers all, but history moves in cycles that are larger than any person, corporation, elite or (gasp) technology. My first version of the chart below was drawn in 2008, when the Global Financial Meltdown revealed the cracks in the happy-story facade of permanent wonderfulness based on the amazing magic of borrowing / printing ever greater sums of currency, a.k.a. “money.”
Longtime correspondent Cheryl A. suggested I revisit the alignment of long-wave cycles, and so let’s start by what the study of cycles is not: it is predictive in terms of trends and turning points, not precise time or amplitude targets. In effect, the study of cycles is the study of human nature as it plays out in long-term social, political and economic dynamics.
Sir John Glubb’s succinct and deeply informed 1978 essay The Fate of Empires lists these stages of social development and decay that manifest as the rise and decline of empires:
The Age of Pioneers (outburst or Boost Phase)
The Age of Conquests
The Age of Commerce
The Age of Affluence
The Age of Intellect
The Age of Decadence
The slippery slope to collapse–decadence–is characterized by greed, corruption, irreconcilable internal political rifts, moral decay, frivolity, materialism–hmm, sound familiar?
The global status quo sped through The Age of Intellect (postmodernism) with little to show for the vast expenditure of resources, and is now firmly in the final terminal stage of decadence and collapse.
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Globalization and Financialization Are Dead, and so Is Everything That Depended on Them
Globalization and Financialization Are Dead, and so Is Everything That Depended on Them
Financialization was never sustainable, and neither was the destructive globalization it enabled.
All the happy-story analogies to past pandemics being mere bumps in the road miss the mark. A popular claim is that the 1918-1919 flu pandemic killed millions but no biggie, the Roaring 20s started the following year. It’s onward and upward, baby, once we toss the masks.
Wrong. Completely, totally, dead wrong. The drivers of the past 75 years of growth– globalization and financialization–are dead, and so is everything that depended on them for “growth”. (Growth is in quotes because once external costs and currency arbitrage are factored in, most of what’s been glorified as “growth” is nothing but losses covered by accounting trickery.)
Here’s what’s poorly understood: globalization and financialization die when they stop expanding. Just as a shark dies if it stops swimming forward, globalization and financialization die once they stop expanding, because their viability depends on expansion.
Globalization and financialization have been losing momentum for years. Under the guise of “opening markets,” globalization has stripmined every economy that can’t print a reserve currency and hollowed out economies globally as only globally competitive sectors survive globalization. The net result is that once vibrant, diversified economies have been reduced to fragile monocultures completely dependent on global flows of capital and spending for their survival.
Tourism is a prime example: every region that has seen its local economy crushed by global arbitrage and corporate hegemonies, leaving global tourism as its sole surviving sector, has been devastated by the drop in tourism, which was always contingent on disposable income and credit expanding forever.
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The Collapse of Main Street and Local Tax Revenues Cannot Be Reversed
The Collapse of Main Street and Local Tax Revenues Cannot Be Reversed
The core problem is the U.S. economy has been fully financialized, and so costs are unaffordable.
To understand the long-term consequences of the pandemic on Main Street and local tax revenues, we need to consider first and second order effects. The immediate consequences of lockdowns and changes in consumer behavior are first-order effects: closures of Main Street, job losses, massive Federal Reserve bailouts of the top 0.1%, loan programs for small businesses, stimulus checks to households that earned less than $200,000 last year, and so on.
The second-order effects cannot be bailed out or controlled by central authorities. Second-order effects are the result of consequences have their own consequences.
Gordon Long and I look at two highly correlated second-order effects: the collapse of Main Street and local tax revenues.
The first-order effects of the pandemic on Main Street are painfully obvious: small businesses that have barely kept their heads above water as costs have soared have laid off employees as they’ve closed their doors.
The second-order effects are still spooling out: how many businesses will close for good because the owners don’t want to risk losing everything by chancing re-opening? How many will give it the old college try and close a few weeks later as they conclude they can’t survive on 60% of their previous revenues? How many enjoy a brief spurt of business as everyone rushes back, but then reality kicks in and business starts sliding after the initial burst wears off?
How many will be unable to hire back everyone who was laid off?
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The Way of the Tao Is Reversal
The Way of the Tao Is Reversal
As Jackson Browne put it: Don’t think it won’t happen just because it hasn’t happened yet.
We can summarize all that will unfold in the next few years in one line: The way of the Tao is reversal. This is the opening line of Chapter 40 of Lao Tzu’s 5,000-character commentary on the Tao, The Tao Te Ching. There are many translations of this slim volume, and for a variety of reasons I favor the 1975 translation by my old professor at the University of Hawaii, Chang Chung-yuan (1907-1988), whom I would occasionally see doing Tai Chi late at night on his front yard in Manoa Valley.Professor Chang–who would often write Chinese characters on the blackboard with great energy to make a point–rendered this line in English as Reverse is the movement of Tao. Others have translated it as Reversal is the movement of Tao.Given the obscurity and ambiguity of Taoist concepts, this line has many interpretations. I prefer the way of the Tao is reversal because the Tao is fundamentally about virtue, power and what we might call authenticity. Thus all that is presented as permanent will be revealed as impermanent, all that is presented as true will be revealed as false and all that is presented as virtuous will be revealed as fraud.
In the present era, we can discern these potential reversals:
1. The all-powerful Federal Reserve will lose control and its power will dissipate into thin air.
2. Rather than linger at zero or negative rates as expected, interest rates will reverse and start moving inexorably higher.
3. What was presented as permanent–the value of national currencies and assets–will be revealed as impermanent.
4. What was presented as the power to force compliance will be revealed as powerlessness.
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This Isn’t Just Another Crash
This Isn’t Just Another Crash
Like addicts who cannot control their cravings, financial analysts cannot stop themselves from seeking some analog situation in the past which will clarify the swirling chaos in their crystal balls.
So we’ve been swamped with charts overlaying recent stock market action over 1929, 1987,2000 and 2008 — though the closest analogy is actually the Oil Shock of 1973, an exogenous shock to a weakening, fragile economy.
But the reality is there is no analogous situation in the past to the present, and so all the predictions based on past performance will be misleading. The chartists and analysts claim that all markets act on the same patterns, which are reflections of human nature, and so seeking correlations of volatility and valuation that “worked” in the past will work in 2020.
Does anyone really believe the correlations of the past decade or two are high-probability predictors of the future as the entire brittle construct of fictional capital and extremes of globalization and financialization all unravel at once?
Here are a few of the many consequential differences between all previous recessions and the current situation:
1. Households have never been so dependent on debt as a substitute for stagnating wages.
2. Real earnings (adjusted for inflation) have never been so stagnant for the bottom 90% for so long.
3. Corporations have never been so dependent on debt (selling bonds or taking on loans) to fund money-losing operations (see Netflix) or stock buybacks designed to saddle the company with debt service expenses to enrich insiders.
4. The stock market has never been so dependent on what amounts to fraud — stock buybacks — to push valuations higher.
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Bailouts Can’t Save This Fragile System
Bailouts Can’t Save This Fragile System
It’s obvious the global economy is painfully fragile. What is less obvious is the bailouts intended to “save” the fragile economy actually increase its fragility, setting up an inevitable collapse of the entire precarious system.
Systems that are highly centralized, i.e., dependent on a handful of nodes that are each points of failure — are intrinsically fragile and prone to collapse.
Put another way, systems in which all the critical nodes are tightly bound are prone to domino-like cascades of failure as any one point of failure quickly disrupts every other critical node that is bound to it.
Ours is an economy in which capital, wealth, power and control are concentrated in a few nodes of the network we call “the economy.”
A handful of corporations own the vast majority of the media; a handful of banks control most of the lending and capital; a handful of hospital chains, pharmaceutical companies and insurers control health care; and so on.
Control of digital technologies is even more concentrated, in virtual monopolies: Google for search and YouTube for video. Facebook/Instagram and Twitter for social media. Microsoft and Apple for operating systems and services.
The vast majority of participants in the economy are tightly bound to these concentrated nodes of capital and power, and these top-down, hierarchical dependencies generate fragility.
When unexpectedly severe volatility occurs, the disruption of a few nodes brings down the entire system. Thus the disruption of the subprime mortgage subsystem — a relatively small part of the total mortgage market and a tiny slice of the global financial system — nearly brought down the entire global financial system in 2008 because it is a tightly bound system of centralized concentrations of capital, power and control.
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