An economy of rackets designed to enrich the few at the expense of the many is brittle because self-serving rackets snuff out competition, accountability and transparency.What’s remarkable about the lockdown isn’t the hue and cry about the economic dam…
Recall that the initial deaths and related costs are only the first-order effects; policy makers have to consider the second-order effects.Everyone who reckons that the lockdown is needless and more destructive than the pandemic that triggered it has t…
Everyone with any position in today’s market will be able to say they lived through a real Bear Market. In the echo chamber of a Bull Market, there’s always a reason to get bullish: the consumer is spending, housing is strong, the Fed has our back,…
Central bank free money doesn’t create collateral or creditworthy borrowers, and without those foundations, the decayed, rotted shack will collapse.In terms of consequential trends, the pandemic is not a cause, it’s an accelerant.
We can anticipate a federal bailout of pension funds and one-time aid to state and local governments, but bailouts won’t repair the eroding foundations of tax revenues.As we all know, the federal government can “print” money but state, county and city …
There are only two ways to survive a decline in income and net worth: slash expenses or default on debt.In post-World War II America, the cultural zeitgeist viewed frugality as a choice: permanent economic growth and federal anti-po…
The collateral supporting the global mountain of debt is crumbling as speculative bubbles deflate.A great many freebies are being tossed in the Helicopter Money basket. That households experiencing declines in income need immediate support is obvious, …
Essential home lockdown reading.The pandemic is revealing to all what many of us have known for a long time: the status quo was designed to fail and so its failure was not just predictable but inevitable.We’ve propped up a dysfunctional, wast…
Subtract their immense debts and they have negative net worth, and therefore the market value of their stock is zero.To understand why the financial dominoes toppled by the Covid-19 pandemic lead to global insolvency, let’s start with a household examp…
This is the upside of hyper-litigiousness: prevention is prioritized as the most effective means of limiting future liability.Never mind prevention or vaccines; the big question is “who can we sue after this blows over to rake in millions of dollars?”&…
