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My One Prediction for 2023
My One Prediction for 2023
The question that should be on our minds is: how are my household’s buffers holding up?
Lists of predictions for the new year are reliably popular. Here’s 10 predictions, there’s 17 predictions, over here we have 23 and a half… let’s strip it all down to one prediction: everyone’s predictions will be wrong because 2023 isn’t going to follow anyone’s script.
There are several reasons for this. One is that the vast majority of predictions are based on historical comparisons to previous eras. If the current era is unique in its combination of dynamics and instability, previous pathways are not going to accurately predict what happens next.
Recency bias leads us astray. The past 50 years of relatively mild weather, the past 40 years of Bull Markets, the past 30 years of financialization and the supremacy of monetary policy–all of these offer a warm and fuzzy confidence that the future will be comfortingly similar to the recent past. This assumption works pretty well in stable eras but fails dismally in destabilizing, transitional eras.
Stability and instability are not evenly distributed, so every cherry-picked bias can be supported. You predict slow sales? Here’s an empty shopping mall. See, I’m right! You predict a return to the good old days? Here’s a crowded street fair. See, I’m right!
Those who happen to be living inside an island of coherence are inside a bubble that they mistakenly think encompasses the entire world. This is especially prevalent in the top 5% who shape the narratives that influence the rest of us. If real estate is sinking in their little corner of the world, they predict real estate will crash everywhere.
If everything’s rosy in their protected enclave, they predict a mild recession and steady growth, blah blah blah.
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A Tale Of Two Graphs——Why Bubble Finance Will Fail
A Tale Of Two Graphs——Why Bubble Finance Will Fail
On Friday the BLS reported, among other things, that full-time employment in April had dropped by 252,000 from the prior month and that the weekly earnings of production workers had risen by the grand sum of 67 cents (0.1%) before inflation and taxes. But why should still another confirmation that the main street job market is dead in the water stop the robo-traders from another romp higher?
In fact, this incongruous spectacle of dead wages and soaring financial assets has been going on for several decades now——a transparently obvious trend obfuscated by the unrelenting recency bias of the MSM and the authorized Wall Street/Washington narrative. So let Friday’s incongruous stock market rip serve as a portal into the ugly interior history of how central bank bubble finance has fostered an existential crisis in what remains of American capitalism.
On the main street side, this isn’t a matter of sluggish recovery from a mysterious financial crisis that arrived, apparently, on a comet from deep space in September 2008. Alas, for three decades running now, the constant dollar weekly wages of full-time workers have been flat as a pancake.
And let’s be clear. We are not talking here about after school jobs held by quasi-perpetual students, the meager pay of moonlighting moms or the episodic work gigs of society’s tens of million of loosely attached drifters.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
