It's Wall Street's Turn To Be Stripmined

Wall Street's dominance seems eternal until the pendulum of extraction, speculation and wealth-power inequality has reached an extreme, at which point the pendulum reverses.

Declaring that it's Wall Street's turn to be stripmined wouldn't be such a big deal if asset bubbles weren't propping up the entire US economy. An economy enjoying organic expansion of productivity across the board is one of improving wages, opportunities and quality of life. A bubble-dependent economy provides none of these advances in general prosperity: it doesn't increase productivity, wages or our quality of life, it only increases wealth-power inequality, creating a society of Haves and Have-Nots destined to swing from discontent to disruption.

What a bubble-dependent economy does do is increase inflation and crush affordability for all those who don't earn enough and own enough to benefit from the bubble's inflation of asset valuations. By boosting the wealth of the top 10%, asset bubbles create wealth effect spending by the top 10% who own roughly 90% of income producing financial assets. Spending by the top 10% is now roughly 50% of consumption.

Some of this "trickles down" to the bottom 90%, but "trickle down" from higher spending isn't real growth that increases productivity and the purchasing power of earned income. It's an ephemeral, illusory simulacra of authentic growth that is doomed to contract once the bubble pops--and all bubbles pop because they're speculative fantasies inflated by Federal Reserve goosing of "easy money," Wall Street "management" of the market, tax and regulatory statutes dictated by lobbyists and the desperation of punters who see scoring big gains via speculation as their only hope of escaping debt-serfdom.

Let's start with the stripmining of the workforce over the past 50 years. A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon we're talking a multi-generational shift of the economy's income from those doing the work to those owning the assets, a cumulative shift of $150 trillion as the workforce's share has stair-stepped down since 1970.



Everything is forever until it is no more: Wall Street's dominance seems eternal until the pendulum of extraction, speculation and wealth-power inequality has reached an extreme, at which point the pendulum reverses and goes to an extreme at the other end of the spectrum. In the past 100 years, the pendulum reverses direction about every 50 years.



But this is not written in stone; extremes beget nonlinear dynamics that can outrace previous cycles and norms.

Once the organic expansion of the 1990s ended, the Federal Reserve went all-in on stimulus that boosted assets, a policy that was jacked to 11 in the aftermath of the speculation-fraud fueled Global Financial Meltdown of 2008-09. These policies effectively rigged the economy to benefit the top 10% ownership class at the expense of everyone else. Here we see the wealth of the top 1% soar from the Fed's "save the rich, save the banks, save Wall Street" policies:



The rigged "wealth effect" concentrated wealth in the top 1%:



And the 90% to 99%:



The unearned income from financial assets follows a power-law distribution--most goes to the top 0.1%



One might imagine there would be some "trickle down" to the bottom 50% households; one would be wrong. The bottom 50%'s share of financial wealth hit a new low in one of the greatest speculative bubbles in history. Good job, Fed, Wall Street and policymakers: you've guaranteed a pendulum swing to an extreme few even think is possible, even as it is now inevitable.



But alas, all bubbles pop, and 1929 offers an interesting analog of "it's not a bubble":



Everything was going so well, until those who've been stripmined for 50 years reckon that It's Wall Street's Turn To Be Stripmined and so it's time to end Socialism for the Rich that's been passed off as (heh) "capitalism" (cue the laugh track).



As always, please note I don't "like" what I see on the horizon, I'm simply calling it as I see it. Play it as it lays.

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Why You Should Not Read My New Book--Seriously

The question is what part will we play--statistic or participant in a better world?

If you value your peace of mind, you should not read my new book The Revolution No One Sees Coming because it's telling you what you don't want hear by tearing down the facades obscuring all the expediencies that maintain the illusion that the precarious status quo is solid and sustainable.

To claim the status quo is solid and sustainable is a parody of a farce of a satire, which nobody wants to hear even though it's obvious: the status quo Has reached its limits, and neither the expediencies of borrowing trillions of dollars every year or the oft-proffered reforms (Modern Monetary Theory, adopting bitcoin, returning to the gold standard, stablecoins, etc.) can fix what's broken because what's broken is the layer below "money" and "technology"--the nation's moral foundation has collapsed as maximizing self-interest is all that matters.

Everything else--for example, the stability and sustainability of the nation's social order, economy and government--is of no concern. If we get rich, nothing else matters.

What everyone wants to hear are technocratic solutions that require zero changes or sacrifices, solutions that are transactions: buy a new tech gizmo, buy stablecoins, etc., solutions that leave the status quo and our own lives untouched because the fixes are magic: life continues to get more unaffordable as costs rise, debt continues soaring, but never mind, it's magic.

Except there's this funny thing about history: it's like a pendulum, and when the pendulum reaches an extreme of unfairness and extreme concentrations of private wealth and power, it swings to the opposite extreme.



All this is disturbing, so better not read my new book. It feels a lot better to believe that healthcare premiums can go up 13% every year, credit card and student loan default rates can soar, AI will chomp through the world (soon on every shelf in Walmart) and everyday life will go on just like it does today for another 10 or 20 years because Dow 100,000 will make rich people even richer. Um, yeah, sure, because understandably, it's what we want to hear.

Or slip into the fantasy world of AI will deliver Super-Abundance and wealth for all of us, electricity will be free, and we'll all be on permanent paid vacation--a parody of thinking, but it's what we want to hear.

Everyone wants solutions that leave everything the same, but reality has leapfrogged fantasies and fairy tales. Do I like being the one to tell you what you don't want to hear? No, but here's the thing.

It's like being on the beach on a sunny day. The bay is placid, kids are playing in the sand, and never mind the peculiar movement of the water. Why ruin a peaceful day? What good would getting stressed out do? Indeed.

Somebody says the receding water is a signal of a tsunami, but all the doom-and-gloom forecasts of tsunamis have been false, so ignore it.

That this isn't a forecast, it's a signal, is lost.

A few people can grab surfboards and attempt to ride the incoming 30-foot wave. Most of us cannot. Our only chance to avoid being swept away is to move to higher ground before the wave of change arrives. Waiting until the beach chairs are tumbling in white-water is too late.

We want a specific prediction of the tsunami's arrival. It doesn't work like that. The disturbance in the water may fade, and we take that as the all-clear. But it isn't. Change is tricky like that.

Don't read my new book, because it's calling attention to the peculiar tremors in the water. It's not a forecast of doom and gloom, it's a forecast of change that we'll all be part of. The question is what part will we play--statistic or participant in a better world?

Don't read my new book, because it suggests ignoring all the rah-rah cheerleading and all the distractions, and instead listen to your own gut, your own assessment that's telling you something is seriously amiss and the herd is nervous for a good reason.


Moana Jones-Wong at Pipeline, North Shore, Oahu, Hawaii

A handful of the most experienced surfers in the world may ride the incoming wave, but many of them will wipe out, too. As Clint Eastwood memorably said in the film Magnum Force: "A man's got to know his limits." The same can be said of entire nations.

So try this: bookmark this page and read it again on April 30, 2027.



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My new book is now available at a 50% discount: $12 for the print edition and $6 for the Kindle ebook. This sale ends on November 20. The Revolution No One Sees Coming
read the first 4 chapters for free

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My new book: The Revolution No One Sees Coming ($18 print, Kindle $9) first 4 chapters (free)

New collection of five intriguing stories: Jumble Bin Stories (Kindle $6, print $12) read samples for free (PDF)


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When a Society Has Reached Its Limits, Reforms No Longer Fix What's Broken

Any reform that will be acceptable to the system's precariously balanced dependents will leave its structure and incentives untouched.

The most difficult part of my framework to grasp is the keystone: our system has reached its limits. The difficulty is that this is impossible to understand if one is embedded in the system's beliefs of how the world works and wedded to the system's sclerosis via self-interest.

Once self-interest dominates, it locks the system into its current configuration because attempting to change anything rouses resistance from whatever interests depend on that part of the status quo for their piece of the pie.

The sustainability of the entire system is of no concern because the only thing that matters is keeping our piece of the pie intact as-is. Nothing can change because that threatens somebody's share of the pie, i.e. how the system distributes income, gains, power and risk.

Everyone from the super-wealthy to low-income households fears any change that might reduce their security. Beneath our everyday awareness, a balance has been struck: if we just keep this exact arrangement as-is, everyone accepts the status quo.

This rigidity leads to sclerosis: the system has lost the flexibility and nimbleness needed to adapt. Any proposal that actually changes the socio-economic system is immediately struck off by those whose interests are threatened.

This leads to the substitution of artifice for authenticity--the other core concept that is impossible to understand if one is wedded to the status quo by self-interest and the fear of losing what we have.

Once a system has reached the point where authentic change becomes impossible because it disrupts the delicate balance of self-interest, it has reached its limits, and is set on run to failure, for a system that has lost its adaptive flexibility is doomed once conditions change.

Rather than face this disruptive reality, everyone wedded to the existing balance becomes dependent on expediencies that keep the system glued together, but at the cost of system stability. As self-interest and sclerosis dominate, the focus narrows to doing whatever it takes to maintain the increasingly unsustainable balance of interests.

This is how we've reached the point where the federal government borrows $2 trillion a year--27% of its entire outlays--to maintain the precarious balance of every interest group. That this is unsustainable is obvious, but since real change is impossible because of the system's limits, everyone approves of expediencies that only add to the destabilizing momentum of run to failure.

The system no longer considers truly new ideas, as these threaten the delicate balance of self-interests. Just as expediencies are artifice, so too are the cover stories masking the unsustainability of expediencies. To avoid facing the impossibility of the status quo continuing unchanged, all public dialog is reduced to cliches, delusions and fantasies.

These artifices create an illusion of stability and sustainability that I call The Big Con, a mindset in which everything is fake but this is all that's acceptable. So the tired cliches of capitalism and socialism are deployed as rallying cries or cudgels, with no actual understanding of what they mean because that would get in the way of the "message:" what's needed are fake facades and fantasies, not understanding.

This dependence on parodies, cliches, delusions and fantasies to maintain the illusion of sustainability is also called hyper-normalization: we accept the unsustainable as permanent because this is what the system incentivizes and rewards.

The system has reached its limits on every level: institutional, conceptual and structural. The incentives to maintain the facades that everything is working just fine and policy tweaks / technology wil fix whatever's broken and the disincentives to tell the truth are kept firmly in place by self-interest, even though these lock the system as a whole in run to failure.

This leads to extremes that destabilize the system from inside: extremes of wealth-power inequality, extremes of fantasy (technology and finance can fix all problems) and artifice that lead to where we are today, with absurdly transparent parodies and self-parodies being presented as serious solutions proposed by serious people.



Scholar / author Ray Huang (no relation to Jensen) summed this up in his book 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline that traced how the Ming Dynasty reaching its internal limits led to its inevitable collapse:

"The year 1587 may seem to be insignificant; nevertheless, it is evident by that time the limit for the Ming dynasty had already been reached. It no longer mattered whether the ruler was conscientious or irresponsible, whether his chief counselor was enterprising or conformist, whether the generals were resourceful or incompetent, whether the civil officials were honest or corrupt, or whether the leading thinkers were radicals or conservatives--in the end they all failed to reach fulfillment."

But why can't the system regain control of these runaway forces? The answer is that any reform that will be acceptable to the system's precariously balanced dependents will leave its structure and incentives untouched.

"Innovations" and "solutions" will necessarily be superficial and for show because that preserves a system that has reached its limits, a system defined by choiceless choices that create an illusion of autonomy: Democrat / Republican, Apple / Android, a choiceless healthcare system, a choiceless higher education system, and so on.

Given its limits, the entire system has only one option: decline to the point that a seemingly modest crisis disrupts the last shreds of coherence in a system that is now dependent on the destabilizing expediencies of ever-expanding borrowing and credit-asset bubbles, and the parodies, PR, delusions and fantasies of The Big Con. The inevitable result is the system collapses under its own weight of self-serving sclerosis and artifice.

The incentives are to repeat what everyone wants to hear, which is the system is working fine and is sustainable because technology and finance will fix everything without changing anything. This describes a system that has reached its limits.

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My new book is now available at a 50% discount: $12 for the print edition and $6 for the Kindle ebook. This sale ends on November 20. The Revolution No One Sees Coming
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My new book: The Revolution No One Sees Coming ($18 print, Kindle $9) first 4 chapters (free)

New collection of five intriguing stories: Jumble Bin Stories (Kindle $6, print $12) read samples for free (PDF)


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Introducing ToxicBot (tm), The Bot That Tells Us What We Don't Want to Hear

Needless to say, the world isn't ready for ToxicBot (tm).

I'm finally ready to share a side project of mine, creating a chatbot / AI agent to answer queries without any sugarcoating, in effect telling us what we don't want to hear. I call it ToxicBot (tm) because in our culture of self-serving artifice and comforting delusions, the unvarnished truth is considered unbearably toxic.

In many cases, our resistance to whatever it is we don't want to hear is a measure of its accuracy. We don't want to hear it because it's a painful truth we've been avoiding, to our detriment.

Here's a sample of ToxicBot (tm) as therapist:

Patient 1: I know he's not perfect, but I'm really in love this time.

ToxicBot: When are you going to get tired of jumping from one co-dependent relationship with control-freak losers to another, with zero self-awareness or willingness to ask yourself why?

Patient 2: Every time we try to discuss something, we end up angry and frustrated.

ToxicBot: You're the one who's angry and frustrated, but you never take responsibility for your responses. You sound like a 5-year old blaming everyone else for your self-created misfortunes.

Here's a sample of ToxicBot (tm) as corporate consultant:

Corporate: give us an actionable transition plan to agentic AI.

ToxicBot: Aura farming, actionable leadership, agentic transition--if cliches were money, you could retire right now. You and your team are clueless lemmings, trying to find someone else to follow so you don't have to do any original thinking of your own.

ToxicBot, tell us about AI super-abundance.

ToxicBot: What AI is generating is a super-abundance of malicious uses that place enormous costs on every user of the Internet, in effect generating profits for the malicious users and costs for everyone else. The over-reliance on shoddy software and hardware in products and services is unleashing a systemic collapse in durability and utility across the entire global economy. Both of these are Anti-Progress, not Progress. Those who deny this or refuse to admit it are delusional, insisting the buck-naked Emperor is dressed in amazing finery.

Let's ask ToxicBot (tm) how we can fix the $40 trillion in federal debt problem:

Concerned Citizen: Everyone knows the federal debt is unsustainable; what's the solution?

ToxicBot: As long as all those who own the debt or benefit from the borrowing refuse to accept any sacrifices, there is no solution other than the collapse of the whole financial system, as only collapse will end the reliance on expediencies and force sacrifices on everyone seeking delusional, sacrifice-free technocratic "solutions" because they want a fantasy Hollywood ending. There is no upside to self-delusion.



Needless to say, the world isn't ready for ToxicBot (tm), as this conversation illustrates:



So I'm developing HappyStoryBot (tm): everything is fantastic, there's upside everywhere, solutions abound, stablecoins, fusion and an endless parade of pretense--and indignation (How dare you!) if the pretense is challenged. Oh, and you're all brilliant, fabulous, etc.

We all want to be appreciated for our fine qualities and efforts, but this is different from depending on insincere praise, rote flattery and sappy sycophancy for a positive sense of selfhood.



If we don't want real solutions, we just want pain-free, sacrifice-free simulacra of solutions that require nothing more than arranging the eventual consequences to land on those without sufficient power to escape the consequences--that only accelerates collapse.

NOTE: ToxicBot does not exist.

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"Angry Voters": What Are We Angry About?

Maybe voters are frustrated that no matter who they elect, nothing in the economic machinery of soaring inequality, debt and servitude changes.

Here's the mainstream summary of the midterm election results: Angry Voters Usher in Beginning of the End to the Trump Era.

And what are voters angry about? It's a fairly lengthy shopping list:

"Many voters told pollsters and interviewers that they felt hoodwinked by Mr. Trump, believing that he was going to bring down prices and not start new wars. They expected him to close the border, but bristled at what they saw as heavy-handed arrests of people living in the country for years. They rebelled against the tariffs that increased costs for consumers."

OK, fair enough. Those are all legitimate issues. But I submit voters are also angry about a reality larger than any of those issues: no matter which party they vote for, nothing changes. Scrape off the culture wars hot-button topics designed to inflame the loyalists and generate conveniently distracting rage and indignation, and we find that nothing actually changes in what matters to the hard-working bottom 90% who are being stripmined by the accelerating decline in the purchasing power of their earnings.

Look carefully at these three charts and point out the reversal of the primary trends delivered by either political party. You can't, because the policies and Imperial Project continue on the same trajectory regardless of which party or administration is in power.

Here is a chart of TCMDO, total debt. We can call it "living on money borrowed from the future." Note that way back in 1980, before the "borrow our way to prosperity" fantasy became the unofficial policy of the status quo, the ratio of GDP to total debt was 1.67: $3 trillion in GDP, $5 trillion in total debt.

Now the ratio is 3.7: $30.7 in GDP and $115 trillion in debt. So how is "borrowing our way to prosperity" working? This is a parody of a functional, sustainable economy. Both parties have relied on soaring debt to win the popularity contest of who promises more "free money" to the elites who fund their campaigns and the electorate.

Never mind it's not actually "free": we've perfected kicking the can down the road.



Next up: soaring wealth-income inequality: we now live in a highly stratified society of haves and have-Nots, in which the Haves have little or no contact with the Have-Nots other than Amazon deliveries and wait staff.

So show us where one party or the other reversed this geometric rise in inequality. You can't. Relying on inflating credit-asset bubbles for a politically useful illusion of "growth" has an unavoidable side-effect: credit-asset bubbles enrich the top 10% who already own assets and have the income to enjoy the ride, with the gains concentrated in the top 1%.



Wages' share of the economy has been in a stairstep decline for 50 years as capital has been favored by both parties and the Federal Reserve, the central bank. Both parties have maintained an illusion of 'growth" that rewards the least productive at the expense of the most productive.



Both parties have been equally pleased to oversee the gaming of statistics to support this illusion of "growth" and "low inflation" that funnels the gains to the top 0.1% who fund political campaigns. The political toadies in the Supreme Court and Federal Reserve have dutifully rigged the status quo to remain unchanged, so the revolving door of elections maintain the illusion of "choice" and "democracy."

Our two-party system is like being offered two "competing" brands of toilet paper, both owned by the same corporation. Consider the Imperial Project of Endless Wars (TM). the players in the war room change, but the game of Wars of Choice continues on regardless of who's at the table.



The same can be said of our Wall Street Casino Economy, filled with gamblers desperate to win big enough to escape penury, usury, student-debt servitude and Tax Donkey indenturement. The corrupt game doesn't change when one party wins or loses; nothing changes in the casino except a slight modification of who gets VIP status.

The only potential for real change is a third party that introduces the possibility of closing down the war room and the casino and cashiering all the toadies maintaining a status quo adept at illusion and artifice.

Maybe voters are frustrated that no matter who they elect, nothing in the economic machinery of soaring inequality, debt and servitude changes. Shopping for political change is like shopping for healthcare insurance: we have no real choice. Maintaining the illusion of choice benefits both parties at the expense of the citizenry.

New podcast: Global Uncertainties may result in Nonlinear, Self-Reinforcing Instability (26:31 min)

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New collection of five intriguing stories: Jumble Bin Stories (Kindle $6, print $12) read samples for free (PDF)

My book Investing In Revolution is available ($18 for the paperback, $24 for the hardcover and $8.95 for the ebook edition). Introduction (free)


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