Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Re-Opening the Economy Won't Fix What's Broken

Re-opening a fragile, brittle, bankrupt, hopelessly perverse and corrupt "normal" won't fix what's broken.
The stock market is in a frenzy of euphoria at the re-opening of the economy. Too bad the re-opening won't fix what's broken. As I've been noting recently, the real problem is the systemic fragility of the U.S. economy, which has lurched from one new extreme to the next to maintain a thin, brittle veneer of normalcy.
Fragile economies cannot survive any impact with reality that disrupts the distortions that are keeping the illusion of "growth" from shattering. For the past two decades, every collision with reality cracked the illusion, and the "fix" was to duct-tape the pieces together with new extremes of money-creation, debt, risk and speculative excess.
While the stock market has soared, the real world falls apart. If your region needs a new bridge built, count on about 20 years to get all the "stakeholders" to agree and get the thing actually built. Count on the cost quintupling from $500 million to $2.5 billion. Count on corners being cut as costs skyrocket, so those cheap steel bolts from China that are already rusting before the bridge is even finished? Oops. Replacing them will add millions to the already bloated budget.
Want to add a passenger stop on an existing railroad line? Count on 20 years to get it done. The complexity thicket of every regulatory agency with the power to say "no" basically guarantees the project will never get approved, because every one of these bureaucracies justifies its existence by saying "no." Sorry, you need another study, another environmental review, and so on.
Need a new landfill? I hope you started the process 15 years ago, so you'll get approval in only five more years. Every agency with the power to say "no" will stretch out the approval, so they have guaranteed "work" for another decade or two.
Did your subway fares double? Was the excuse repairing a crumbling system? Did the work get done on budget and on time? You must be joking, right? All the fare increase did was cover the costs of skyrocketing salaries, pensions and administrative costs. Repairs to the tracks and cars-- that's extra. Let's float a $1 billion bond so nobody have to tighten their belts, and have riders pay for it indirectly, through higher taxes to pay the exorbitant costs of 20 years of interest on the bond.
Have you been thrown off your bicycle by the giant potholes in the city's "bike lanes"? The city reluctantly admits that these streets that haven't been maintained for decades--yes, decades. The city once paid for street maintenance out of its general budget, but alas, that's been eaten up by skyrocketing salaries, pensions and administrative costs, so now we need to float $100 million bond to fund filling potholes. If all goes according to plan (ha-ha), we should be able to re-pave the streets that have been crumbling for 20 years in... the next 20 years.
These real-world examples are just four of thousands of manifestations of a broken system. Rather than make tough choices that drain power and wealth from vested interests, we simply borrow more money, in ever increasing amounts, to keep the entrenched interests and elites happy.
There are two "solutions" in the status quo: dump the debt on taxpayers or on powerless debt-serfs--for example, college students. (See chart below of the $1.6 trillion that's stripmining student debt-serfs.) Who benefits from selling all the municipal bonds, bundled student loans, etc. to investors starving for a yield above 0.1%? Wall Street, of course.
The problem is that while debt has soared, productivity and earned income have stagnated. The statistical narrative has been ruthlessly gamed to hide the erosion of living standards, but even with the bogus "low inflation" of official statistics, wages for the bottom 95% have stagnated for decades.
Measures of productivity have also been gamed to mask the ugly reality that the vast majority of the U.S. economy is stagnating under the weight of interest payments on debt, mal-investments in speculative gambles, higher junk fees and taxes, crushing regulatory compliance, high costs imposed by monopolies and cartels and a well-cloaked decline in the quality of just about everything the bottom 95% uses or owns.
What little productivity gains have been made have been skimmed by the top 5%. Coupled with the Federal Reserve's single-minded goosing of the one signaling device it controls, the stock market, the top 0.1% in America own more wealth than the bottom 80%.
If productivity stagnates and winners take all, the wages of the bottom 95% cannot rise. Real wealth is only created by increases in the productivity of labor and capital; everything else is phantom wealth.
The only way stagnant incomes can support more debt is if interest rates decline. Presto, the Fed dropped interest rates to near-zero a decade ago. Of course you and I can't actually borrow millions for 0.1%; that privilege is reserved for financiers and other financial parasites and predators.
Debt-serfs were able to refinance their crushing mortgages to save a few bucks, and so they can afford to 1) take on more debt and 2) pay higher taxes to fund the ballooning public debt.
Every one of these extremes has increased the systemic fragility of the American economy. This fragility is reflected in the impoverishment of the bottom 95%, the thin line between solvency and bankruptcy, the decay of public trust in institutions run for the benefit of entrenched interests, and the quickening erosion of America's social contract.
Re-opening a fragile, brittle, bankrupt, hopelessly perverse and corrupt "normal" won't fix what's broken.
Money and Work Unchained $6.95 (Kindle), $15 (print) Read the first section for free (PDF).


If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.
NOTE: Contributions/subscriptions are acknowledged in the order received. Your name and email remain confidential and will not be given to any other individual, company or agency.
Thank you, Tim B. ($100), for your outrageously generous contribution to this site -- I am greatly honored by your steadfast support and readership.
 
Thank you, Benjamin M. ($50), for your marvelously generous contribution to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Read more...
Posted by Charles Hugh Smith at 8:50 PM

Monday, May 25, 2020

An Economy That Cannot Allow Stocks to Decline Is Too Fragile To Survive

The fragile ice shelf of speculative bets and debt clinging to the mountainside is making strange creaking sounds-- will you listen or will you ignore it because 'the Fed has our back'?
Feast your eyes on the chart below of the Nasdaq 100 stock market Index, which is dominated by the six FAAMNG (rhymes with "famine") stocks: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix and Google which now account for over 20% of the entire U.S. stock market's capitalization.
Notice that despite the global economy sliding into a debt-bust depression, the NDX is within kissing distance of new all-time highs. You're joking, right? Sales and profits won't slide as the depression steps on the neck of hundreds of millions of households?
As you've probably heard by now, sales don't matter, profits don't matter, costs don't matter, and indeed, nothing matters but the Fed has our back so buy stocks, never mind the valuations. In other words, the U.S. stock market has reached the spiritual level where the corporeal tangible world no longer matters: in a word, Nirvana, or Heaven if you prefer.
If we set aside the satire and the absurd justifications of the financial punditry ( "we see a V-shaped recovery of profits in 2023, or was it in 2032? Never mind, doesn't matter..."), we discern a reality that should worry us: America's economy and financial system cannot allow the stock market to decline because any sustained drop will pop the debt-bubble and bring the entire rickety, rotten, corrupt structure down.
Erecting $100 trillion of phantom capital on speculative bets and disconnected-from-reality valuations was always doomed: piling one layer of debt and speculative excess on top of another while the actual collateral supporting the first layer of debt didn't actually change steadily increases the fragility of the entire pyramid.
Now the system is too fragile and brittle to survive even a modest drop in the stock market. Since the Federal Reserve and other tools of the financial-political elites can't increase the productivity of the underlying collateral of the economy, they're forced to manipulate the one signaling device they can control, which is the stock market.
And since they can't actually improve the productivity or prospects of several thousand companies, they've poured their conjured trillions in six mega-stocks to drag the entire market higher. The more money they pour into the Big Tech Six, the greater the market capitalization of these companies and therefore the greater their influence in the stock indices: the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq / Nasdaq 100.
It's a self-reinforcing set-up: dump another trillion in the six mega-cap stocks and this pushes the entire market higher. The influence of the real world has been reduced to zero. Nirvana indeed.
The problem is that any system this fragile and brittle cannot survive the slightest contact with reality. The system's stability is an elaborate illusion maintained by the Big Con of the Federal Reserve: we can create as many trillions as we need to prop up the stock market.
This is the hubris and arrogance of mortals claiming god-like powers. As the Fed and other central banks buy every over-valued financial asset in sight to prop up over-valued markets, eventually they will own the majority of the markets (as per the Japanese bond market). At some point there won't be any assets left for private capital to own that actually earn a return. With interest rates at zero or lower, private capital has no way to earn a return--an outcome that collapses the entire rickety, rotten, corrupt structure anyway.
Extreme concentrations of wealth and power, extreme speculative risk, extreme over-valuation, extreme central bank manipulation--all increase fragility and brittleness. America's financial system is the classic tightly bound system with all the lines of dominoes intersecting each other: any one domino will take down the entire system because it's all tightly connected and dependent on extremes of risk, speculation, debt and manipulation (stock buybacks being Exhibit #1).
The Gods of Finance are chuckling as the Fed's trillions push the system ever closer to collapse. No matter what the Fed does, no matter how many billions Apple borrows and throws into the putrid sewage of its endless stock buybacks, the market, the financial system and the economy that has become dependent on those speculative pyramids of debt are doomed to collapse for profoundly systemic reasons.
The fragile ice shelf of speculative bets and debt clinging to the mountainside is making strange creaking sounds-- will you listen or will you ignore it because the Fed has our back? The avalanche will catch everyone by surprise when it finally breaks, and the consequences will be non-linear and therefore disruptive in ways few anticipate.
But in the meantime, please enjoy the cosmic joke of the Nasdaq 100 and Jay Powell's deadpan comedy routine. But be careful that the joke doesn't end up on you: an economy that cannot allow stocks to decline is too fragile to survive.
Of related interest:
Why Assets Will Crash May 4, 2020
Money and Work Unchained $6.95 (Kindle), $15 (print) Read the first section for free (PDF).


If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.
NOTE: Contributions/subscriptions are acknowledged in the order received. Your name and email remain confidential and will not be given to any other individual, company or agency.
Thank you, Sariel R. ($5/month), for your superbly generous pledge to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.
 
Thank you, James O. ($5/month), for your marvelously generous pledge to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Read more...
Posted by Charles Hugh Smith at 10:26 PM

Sunday, May 24, 2020

TINA's Orgy: Anything Goes, Winners Take All

What nobody dares whisper is 'there is no alternative to collapse' because the system is now too fragile and brittle to survive.
TINA--there is no alternative--is throwing an orgy of money-creation, and it's one for the ages: The Federal Reserve has created over $3 trillion out of thin air in a few months and invited all the usual parasites, predators and speculators to the orgy.
You and I, mere taxpayers? We get to watch as our "betters" feast on the Fed's limitless bounty of free money for financiers and other parasites and predators. Of course we don't get a clear view of the proceedings; the orgy is all behind closed doors.
What we see is the threadbare comedy of Fed Chair Jay Powell coming out of the orgy to assure us that the orgy is all for the good of the country--ha-ha-ha. Those gorging on the Fed feast inside are in danger of laughing so hard at Powell's comedy routine they might choke.
Your share of the orgy is a bowl of thin gruel: $1,200. That wasn't distributed out of kindness or generosity; like all federal giveaways, it's real purpose is to give you enough cash to make your loan payments so all the parasites and predators in the Fed's orgy won't experience the terrible suffering caused by debt-serfs defaulting.
The excuse for the orgy is always the same: there is no alternative. We have to bail out the greedy corporations that borrowed billions to buy back their own stocks, the corporations that sold junk debt to finance their bonuses and dividends, the financiers who bought the risky debt, the speculators who front-run the Fed's purchases of assets and on and on in an endless parade of fraud and corruption--because if we don't bail out the speculators and other parasites, the whole financial system will implode and that would be terrible.
Terrible for who? To answer the question, we need to ponder the fundamental nature of the Fed and our financial system, which can be summarized in one line: anything goes, and winners take all.
Anything goes, because money buys political influence and so what was once illegal--buying back your own stock, advertising medications directly to consumers, etc.-- are not just made legal but normalized by constant propaganda in the corporate media that these forms of legalized looting are good for the nation because... well, that doesn't matter, just take our word for it.
When anything goes, the winners take all. This is how we've ended up with a unstable, fragile economy dominated by a handful of corporations in each sector whose sole purpose is to maximize profits by any means available, and it just so happens the most profitable arrangements are monopoly and cartels, and so that's what we have: an economy of high costs, enormous profits, low-quality goods and services for the bottom 95% and an extreme concentration of wealth and income in the hands of the winners.
This dynamic also characterizes the public sector, where anything goes if you can get away with it has generated a few winners-- employees of small school districts getting salaries of $350,000 and pensions to match, and so on--and a multitude of losers as actual services for the public decay even as costs soar. Naturally, questions about this are dismissed with TINA: there is no alternative.
The fragility of such a system is so extreme that the winners' only hope to hold onto their booty is to persuade us that the simulations of open markets and democracy they conjure up are "real" in the sense that we can't really see the Emperor's fine clothing but we accept that this must be a flaw in our own sight, rather than what it really is: self-serving institutionalized delusion: believe us when we assure you that there is no alternative.
So as the greediest and most parasitic few gorge on TINA's orgy, try not to bust a gut laughing at Jay Powell's comedy act justifying the orgy because really, there is no alternative other than a collapse of what deserves to collapse and what will collapse despite (or as a result of) the Fed's manic money-printing.
What nobody dares whisper is there is no alternative to collapse because the system is now too fragile and brittle to survive. TINA may get the last laugh after all.
Money and Work Unchained $6.95 (Kindle), $15 (print) Read the first section for free (PDF).


If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.
NOTE: Contributions/subscriptions are acknowledged in the order received. Your name and email remain confidential and will not be given to any other individual, company or agency.
Thank you, Benjamin W. ($50), for your superbly generous contribution to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.
 
Thank you, Farzin A. ($25), for your marvelously generous contribution to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Read more...
Posted by Charles Hugh Smith at 6:58 PM

Friday, May 22, 2020

Opting Out, American Style

Virtually nothing in America's top-down financial and political realms is actually transparent, accountable, authentic or honest.
Opting out will increasingly be the best (or only) choice for tens of millions of people globally. Opting out means leaving the complicated, costly and now unaffordable / unbearable life you've been living for a new way of life that is radically less complex, less costly and less deranging.
Opting out is as diverse as the individuals who choose to opt out. For many people in China, for example, the obvious choice when you've lost your job and can no longer afford expensive urban life is to return to your ancestral village, where you're likely to have grandparents, parents or aunts / uncles with a house and a patch of agricultural land.
Since urbanization has been a feature of American society for generations, this is not an option for most Americans, who are by and large rootless cosmopolitans who rarely even know their neighbors, as they move around the country out of necessity or ambition.
Just as "capitalism is no longer attractive to capitalists," (per Wallerstein), urban living has lost its luster in ways few dare even discuss. Urban centers on the Left and Right Coasts have been magnets for jobs and capital, drawing in hundreds of thousands of new residents seeking higher paying employment. This vast influx pushed rents and housing valuations to nosebleed heights, and as a result all the local governments reckoned tax revenues would skyrocket every year like clockwork and all the developers building tens of thousands of over-priced rental units also assumed the trend would continue forever.
Too bad they didn't read Laozi and learn that The Way of the Tao Is Reversal: whether you call it the Tao or merely reversion to the mean, demanding $3,000 a month for cramped apartments and $1 million for decaying bungalows were extremes that begged for a reversal.
The federal unemployment payments and bailouts make it easier to extend the delusion and denial for a few more months, but eventually the gravity of reality will overpower magical thinking and everyone counting on overvalued assets and overpriced rent, healthcare, childcare, college tuition, etc. remaining at pre-pandemic levels will have to start dealing with deep, permanent declines in sales, employment, income, asset valuations, tax revenues, etc.
The higher the costs and taxes, the greater the sacrifices that will be needed to slash and burn budgets and spending. For high-cost, high-tax urban areas, it's unlikely the political leadership will be able to force such sacrifices on self-serving insiders and government clerisies. The only real force for evolution / adaptation will be collapse and bankruptcy, which are already baked in as the end-game for every high-cost, high-tax urban region.
The Axis of Easy Triumvirate (Mark, Jesse and I) discuss opting out of urban decay in our new salon / podcast: Will "The Great Opt-Out" be able to scale? As Jesse noted, a necessary part of the solution is to make robust broadband Internet connections a predictable feature of rural living, as reliable bandwidth is a necessity for those working remotely in rural areas-- an attractive opt-out option I've covered for years: Degrowth Solutions: Half-Farmer, Half-X (July 19, 2014), in which X is remote online work.
Lacking any rooted family place to return to, Americans will have to do what they do best when there's no other option: re-invent themselves, and in pursuing this, they will re-invent small town and rural living as a by-product of opting out of what's no longer affordable or bearable.
In my view, the author who best understood the American process of re-invention is Herman Melville. Though famous for his sprawling novel of the sea and whaling, Moby-Dick, my favorite novel of Melville's is his under-appreciated classic, The Confidence-Man, a book I discussed in Do We Actually Want To Be Conned? All Too Often: Yes (September 3, 2008).
Every con depends on trust, and as trust and confidence are lost, cons become more difficult. Part of the process of re-invention is to find places, people and processes you can trust because they continually demonstrate their authenticity via transparency, accountability, reliability and honesty.
Virtually nothing in America's top-down financial and political realms is actually transparent, accountable, authentic or honest. Everything in these realms is a simulated, completely self-serving projection intended to fool us--The Big Con.
In re-inventing themselves via opting out, Americans will have to learn to contribute productively to small, localized beach-heads of trust, transparency and accountability that function on the local level in an anti-fragile fashion, meaning that they actually improve and get stronger as the top-down Big Con collapses under the weight of its own lies, frauds and corruption.
The Savior State's promises to maintain your private status quo regardless of reality are false promises, delusions based on the Big Con that we can create trillions of dollars out of thin air and give them to the top .01%, and this will magically prompt an unsustainable system to keep issuing false signals of stability.
The promises are on permanent back-order, along with trust, transparency and accountability. The choice isn't whether to opt out or continue hoping delusions and denial will work some sort of magic, but to choose whatever form of opting out works best for you and your household.
Money and Work Unchained $6.95 (Kindle), $15 (print) Read the first section for free (PDF).


If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.
NOTE: Contributions/subscriptions are acknowledged in the order received. Your name and email remain confidential and will not be given to any other individual, company or agency.
Thank you, Sundar N. ($100), for your outrageously generous contribution to this site -- I am greatly honored by your steadfast support and readership.
 
Thank you, Daniel B. ($50), for your marvelously generous contribution to this site -- I am greatly honored by your steadfast support and readership.

Read more...
Posted by Charles Hugh Smith at 1:52 PM
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)

Terms of Service

All content on this blog is provided by Trewe LLC for informational purposes only. The owner of this blog makes no representations as to the accuracy or completeness of any information on this site or found by following any link on this site. The owner will not be liable for any errors or omissions in this information nor for the availability of this information. The owner will not be liable for any losses, injuries, or damages from the display or use of this information. These terms and conditions of use are subject to change at anytime and without notice.

Our Privacy Policy:

Correspondents' email is strictly confidential. This site does not collect digital data from visitors or distribute cookies. Advertisements served by third-party advertising networks such as Adsense and Investing Channel may use cookies or collect information from visitors for the purpose of Interest-Based Advertising; if you wish to opt out of Interest-Based Advertising, please go to Opt out of interest-based advertising (The Network Advertising Initiative)
If you have other privacy concerns relating to advertisements, please contact advertisers directly. Websites and blog links on the site's blog roll are posted at my discretion.

Our Commission Policy:

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. I also earn a commission on purchases of precious metals via BullionVault. I receive no fees or compensation for any other non-advertising links or content posted
on my site.

  © Blogger templates Newspaper III by Ourblogtemplates.com 2008

Back to TOP