Home » Posts tagged 'zombie economy'

Tag Archives: zombie economy

Olduvai
Click on image to purchase

Olduvai III: Catacylsm
Click on image to purchase

Post categories

Post Archives by Category

America’s Economy Cannot Survive Another Lockdown, And The Cult Of The Reset Knows It

The U.S. economy has been on the verge of collapse for at least a decade, ever since the crash of 2008 and the subsequent explosion in fiat stimulus from the Federal Reserve. While the mainstream media has always claimed that central bankers “saved” us from another Great Depression, what they actually did was set us up for a far worse scenario — a stagflationary implosion of our society.

Here is the primary problem: By injecting trillions of bailout dollars into the system, the Federal Reserve prevented the economy from going through its natural purging cycle. This cycle would have been painful for many, but survivable, and it would have removed large amounts of excess debt, parasitic corporations that produce little or nothing of use, as well as numerous toxic assets with no legitimate value. For a real free market to function, weak or corrupt elements must be allowed to fail and die. Instead, central banks around the world and most prominently the Fed kept all of those destructive elements on life support.

This has created what amounts to a “zombie economy:” a system that needs constant outside support (stimulus) in order to continue moving forward. In the process of keeping zombie corporations and other parts of the body alive, healthy parts of the economy, like the small business sector, get devoured.

The zombie economy is, however, highly fragile. All it takes is one or two major shocks to bring it down, and the moment this happens the whole facade will disintegrate, leaving the public in panic and disarray. This is what is happening right now in 2020, and it will get much worse in 2021.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Japanification of the World

The Japanification of the World

Zombification / Japanification is not success; it is only the last desperate defense of a failing, brittle status quo by doing more of what’s failed.

A recent theme in the financial media is the Japanification of Europe.Japanification refers to a set of economic and financial conditions that have come to characterize Japan’s economy over the past 28 years: persistent stagnation and deflation, a low-growth and low-inflation economy, very loose monetary policy, a central bank that is actively monetizing debt, i.e. creating currency out of thin air to buy government debt and a government which funds “bridges to nowhere” and other stimulus spending to keep the economy from crashing into outright contraction.

The parallels with Europe are obvious, but they don’t stop there: the entire world is veering into a zombified financial, economic, social and political status quo that is the core of Japanification.

While most commentators focus on the economic characteristics of Japanification, social and political stagnation are equally consequential. If we only measure economic/financial stagnation, it appears as if Japan and Europe are holding their own, i.e.maintaining the status quo via near-zero growth and near-zero interest rates.

But if we measure social and political decay, the erosion is undeniable. Here’s one example. Few Americans have access to or watch Japanese TV, so they are unaware of the emergence of the homeless as a permanent feature of urban Japan. The central state propaganda media is focused on encouraging tourism, a rare bright spot in Japan’s moribund economy, and so you won’t find much media coverage of homelessness or other systemic signs of social breakdown.

If you watch Japanese detective / police procedural dramas, however, you’ll find constant references to homeless people and homeless encampments: detectives seek witnesses to a crime in the nearby homeless encampment; a homeless man living in an abandoned warehouse is found murdered, etc.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Beyond the Zombie Economy

Beyond the Zombie Economy 

Flickr/S
J Pinkney. Some rights reserved.

Economic metaphors are important to illustrate the distinct features of specific economic systems that exist at particular times. The Great Depression, for instance, uses a psychological framing of ‘depression’ to depict the dynamics of an economic system incapable of recovering from financial collapse. The present day metaphor is the ‘Zombie’ economy depicting the economic system as an unthinking monster in relentless pursuit of a single objective – here, short-term profits are synonymous with human brains. This builds on from the well-used ‘Zombie Banks’ metaphor made popular in the 2000s to describe the Japanese financial system, in which endless public subsidies to banks resulted in systemic erosion of economic vitality – the lesson was feeding the Zombie only breeds more.

There are, of course, other metaphors used to describe contemporary capitalism; like the ‘Vampire Squid’ used to illustrate the role of financial institutions in sucking the life out of the global economy. Sanguineous metaphors are very popular historically for depicting the role of finance within the economy as ‘bleeding it dry’; the Vampire, like the Zombie, is a monster with a singular rational objective ‘to feed’ and the humans are always its prey. Of course, Keynes preferred the ‘animal spirits’ metaphor to explain the same inhumane aspects of markets that must be controlled to sustain a market civilization.

Two books in particular articulate different aspects of the Zombie economy metaphor. The fist is John Quiggin’s Zombie Economics: how dead ideas still walk among us, which systematically unpicks how defunct economic theories are clung to by policy makers and politicians.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
Click on image to read excerpts

Olduvai II: Exodus
Click on image to purchase

Click on image to purchase @ FriesenPress