{"id":48645,"date":"2019-09-25T07:55:55","date_gmt":"2019-09-25T12:55:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=48645"},"modified":"2019-09-25T07:56:03","modified_gmt":"2019-09-25T12:56:03","slug":"financial-storm-clouds-gather","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=48645","title":{"rendered":"Financial Storm Clouds Gather"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Financial Storm Clouds Gather<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The price of this “solution”–the undermining of the financial system–will eventually be paid in full.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The financial storm clouds are gathering, and no, I’m not talking about impeachment or the Fed and repo troubles<\/strong>–I’m talking about much more serious structural issues,\u00a0issues that cannot possibly be fixed within the existing financial system.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes, I’m talking about the\u00a0cost structure<\/em>\u00a0of our society<\/strong>: earned income has stagnated while costs have soared, and households have filled the widening gap with debt they cannot afford to service once the long-delayed recession grabs the economy by the throat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everywhere we look, we find households, enterprises and local governments barely able to keep their heads above water–in the longest expansion in recent history.<\/strong>\u00a0This is as good as it gets, and we’re only able to pay our bills by borrowing more, draining rainy-day funds or playing accounting tricks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what happens when earned income and tax revenues sag?<\/strong>\u00a0Households, enterprises and local governments will be unable to pay their bills, and borrowing more will become difficult as the financial markets awaken to the re-emergence of risk: as shocking as it may be in the era of Central Bank Omnipotence, borrowers can still default and lenders can be destroyed by the resulting losses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The era of Central Bank Omnipotence has been characterized by two things:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. A disconnect between risk and return.<\/strong>\u00a0Since “central banks have our backs,” risk has been vanquished, and since central banks\u00a0socialize losses by bailing out corporations and banks who gambled and lost<\/em>, then the financial Oligarchs have been free to ignore risk since the Federal Reserve has implicitly guaranteed returns will always be secured by Fed backstops, market interventions, etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 \u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Financial Storm Clouds Gather The price of this “solution”–the undermining of the financial system–will eventually be paid in full. The financial storm clouds are gathering, and no, I’m not talking about impeachment or the Fed and repo troubles–I’m talking about much more serious structural issues,\u00a0issues that cannot possibly be fixed within the existing financial system. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[127,317,9695,3650],"class_list":["post-48645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-charles-hugh-smith","tag-financial-system","tag-social-structure","tag-us-federal-reserve"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=48645"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48645\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48647,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48645\/revisions\/48647"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}