Welcome to the U.S.S.A.'s Banquet of Consequences

The incontestable incompetence of the USSA's monopolies, institutions and agencies is about to take center stage in 2021.

When I mention that the U.S.A. feels increasingly like the U.S.S.R., a surprising number of people tell me they feel the same way. Welcome to the U.S.S.A.: United Simulacra States of America where everything is an absurdly transparent simulation with little connection to reality and dissent is crushed by an everpresent, ubiquitous narrative police state enforced by the union of Big Tech social media, search and other monopolies and the Savior State: do what we tell you and you'll get a piece of our endlessly spewed trillions.

My colleague Mark Jeftovic recommended an insightful book on the unraveling of the USSR, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation.

It's an academic book so there are the required servings of jargon and references to suitably opaque academic tropes, but beneath the conceptual clutter lies a profound analysis of how humans adapt to and navigate a system that has lost all authenticity and survives entirely on the ceaseless marketing of artifice: in other words, the USA today.

Of particular interest are the book's personal accounts of dutiful Party members going through the motions of obedience as a means of enjoying their private friendships and lives. Joining the Party's machinery was a way to meet friends who you recruited for your committee work. Everyone went through the motions but nobody actually believed any of it: you did homework while "listening" to the endless canned speeches, you went out for coffee while telling the Party functionary that you were on Party business, and you worked on parades and activities that were a bit of fun despite the dreary official purpose which everyone ignored.

Despite the enormous effort put into placing propaganda everywhere, nobody actually saw any of it: it was all background noise. When it changed, nobody noticed.

"Regular" party members avoided the True Believers and the Dissenters as both could get you in trouble--and who wanted trouble? It wasn't worth it. And so a carefully cloaked language of phrases and signs emerged to separate the safe "regular" members from the dangerous True Believers and Dissenters.

Documentarian Adam Curtis called this artifice as reality hyper-normalization, a concept also referred to as super-normalization: "normal life" is stripped of authenticity in favor of a simulacrum "normal" that supports those at the top of the status quo. This "new normal" reaches extremes of artifice, hence hyper-normalization.

As long as everyone thinks there are no alternatives to this hyper-normalized simulacrum, this artificial construct appears to be immutable--everything is forever.

But once the power structure admits, however minimally, that it no longer has the answers to the decay of the social-economic order, then the entire artificial construct collapses in a heap. This is the sociology of collapse: people accept a facade of artifice and propaganda without actually believing any of it, though they do have a limbic loyalty to the founding ideals of the State.

The ideologues (True Believers) are avoided as dangerous brown-nosers, and the Dissenters are avoided because it's not worth being sent to digital Siberia (shadow-banned, deleted, marginalized) just to publicly call attention to the abject failure of status quo institutions and organs of propaganda.

What's real is denial, repression of dissent, group-think, virtue-signaling and a profound loss of competence. What's hyper-normalized artifice is all the media spew about how great everything is going to be once we print and squander another couple trillion dollars to prop up the zombie corporations, institutions and government agencies until the magical vaccine time machine returns us to the glorious debt-dependent overconsumption of 2019.

The USSA has not yet admitted that the decay of its socio-economic order is unstoppable, and so the internal gulag has yet to be breached. But artifice is not a substitute for reality, and what's unsustainable (hyper-normalized artifice) unravels very quickly once the first thread is pulled.

The USSR took 20 years to unravel, but 19 years of the decay were hidden by an increasingly disconnected-from-reality simulacra of "success" and competence: the USSR lost the race to the moon in 1969 and 20 years later two decades of decay led to collapse.

The USSA responded to the dot-com crash of 2000 with artifice and propaganda, an absurdly transparent simulacra of "success" and competence. Twenty years of decay has brought us to the precipice of collapse, and the internal gulag of TINA--there is no alternative-- is fraying.

The incontestable incompetence of the USSA's monopolies, institutions and agencies is about to take center stage in 2021. The sociology of collapse will be followed by a not-be-missed banquet of consequences.



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.

My new book is available! A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet 20% and 15% discounts (Kindle $7, print $17)

Read excerpts of the book for free (PDF).

The Story Behind the Book and the Introduction.


Recent Podcasts:

Charles Hugh Smith on Parallels of the Great Fire of Rome 64 AD to Today (with host Richard Bonugli) (31:40)

AxisOfEasy Salon #33: Ethereum 2.0 could be the scaffolding for the Network States (1:03) with Jesse H. and Mark J.

My COVID-19 Pandemic Posts


My recent books:

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook coming soon) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $5, print $10, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Pathfinding our Destiny: Preventing the Final Fall of Our Democratic Republic ($5 (Kindle), $10 (print), ( audiobook): Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake $1.29 (Kindle), $8.95 (print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 (Kindle), $15 (print) Read the first section for free (PDF).


Become a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

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Covid Is Toppling America's "Points of Failure" Dominoes

Sorry Fed, it's too late. The dominoes are already toppling, and every point of failure is being exploited by the catalyzing effects of Covid.

America's many points of failure--leverage points where a break brings down the entire system--are falling like dominoes, a process catalyzed by Covid. These systemic points of failure have been masked for the past 20 years by the widespread distribution of trillions of dollars, either printed or borrowed.

There's no point of failure that can't be glued together or covered up a bit longer with fountains of cash. That's the American way of solving problems: just throw more money at it.

Unfortunately for America, substituting borrowed trillions for real problem-solving generates its own set of problems, problems that increase the system's vulnerability to collapse. Healthcare / sickcare is a leading example of this: as the corruption, pay-to-play and profiteering deepened, the federal government's endless borrowed trillions boosted healthcare / sickcare from 5% of the nation's economy to roughly 20% today.

Covid Is Revealing the Cancerous Underbelly of U.S. Healthcare.

As I've noted for a decade, this has created an enormous fragility: healthcare is now so immense that it will bankrupt the nation all by itself. (see charts below) Once the corrupt, pay-to-play, profiteering sectors such as healthcare and banking become "too big to fail," then the Federal Reserve and Treasury are obliged to bail them out or continue funding their spiraling-out-of-control demands.

Speaking of "too big to fail," look at the voracious monster the Fed's endless monetary goosing has incentivized--a financial system addicted to Fed "free money," soaring debt, accelerating leverage and near-infinite speculation.

Given that the Fed has effectively promised to backstop all of Wall Street's bets, bail out every major player and never let the stock market falter for longer than three weeks, the Fed has created this incentive structure: there is no risk at all in borrowing billions, leveraging it into tens of billions and then dumping these multiplying billions into the most speculative bets available.

And so that's what every fund manager, hedge funder, punter, gambler and guru has done, and been richly rewarded for doing so.

There's just one tiny little second-order consequence of the Fed's incentivizing debt, leverage and speculation: wealth and income inequality have reached such extremes that they've unraveled the social order. Social cohesion: gone. The social contract: shredded. Social disorder: in the first inning of a very long game.

Now the Fed is backtracking while it laughingly claims its policies didn't have anything to do with America's skyrocketing wealth/income inequality. That the Fed is well aware of the destructive consequences of its endless quantitative easing is evidenced by their recent proposals (FedNow) to start sending "free money" directly to households via a new system of household accounts at the Fed. (Look for an initial rollout by 2022.)

Sorry Fed, it's too late. The dominoes are already toppling, and every point of failure is being exploited by the catalyzing effects of Covid, either first-order or second-order effects. Every weak point--corruption, incompetence, bureaucratic sclerosis, self-serving insiders, counterproductive complexity, regulatory thickets, clinging to the past, and most especially doing more of what's failed spectacularly--will give way, bringing down existing systems with a momentum that will surprise all those who thought every system in America was rock-solid and forever.

Two words will define 2021: acceleration and amplitude. The catalyzing effects will accelerate throughout all the interconnected systems like wildfire and the consequences will move rapidly from linear (predictable) to non-linear (geometric, unpredictable) as each weakness is amplified by the self-reinforcing dynamics unleashed as every point of failure triggers another failure in a connected system.

If you still believe that America's systemic points of failure are endlessly sustainable, please study these four charts and extend the trendlines.









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.

My new book is available! A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet 20% and 15% discounts (Kindle $7, print $17)

Read excerpts of the book for free (PDF).

The Story Behind the Book and the Introduction.


Recent Podcasts:

Charles Hugh Smith on Parallels of the Great Fire of Rome 64 AD to Today (with host Richard Bonugli) (31:40)

AxisOfEasy Salon #33: Ethereum 2.0 could be the scaffolding for the Network States (1:03) with Jesse H. and Mark J.

My COVID-19 Pandemic Posts


My recent books:

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook coming soon) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $5, print $10, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Pathfinding our Destiny: Preventing the Final Fall of Our Democratic Republic ($5 (Kindle), $10 (print), ( audiobook): Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake $1.29 (Kindle), $8.95 (print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 (Kindle), $15 (print) Read the first section for free (PDF).


Become a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

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Covid Is Revealing the Cancerous Underbelly of U.S. Healthcare

If you still believe that America's Sickcare is "the finest in the world" and is endlessly sustainable, please study these three charts and extend the trendlines.

I've long been making the distinction between healthcare and sickcare: healthcare is the service provided by frontline operational caregivers (doctors, nurses, aides, technicians, etc.) and sickcare is the financialized system of Big Hospital Corporations, Big Insurers, Big Pharma, etc. and their lobbyists that keep the federal money spigots wide open.

This financialized sickcare system is being consumed by the cancer of greedy profiteering pursued by self-serving insiders. The delivery of healthcare is secondary to maximizing revenues and profits by any means available.

To believe such a corrupt system is sustainable is magical thinking at its most destructive.

Covid-19 is revealing this cancerous underbelly. Knowledge of the inner workings of corporate administration is not evenly distributed, so every participants' experience of the systemic dysfunction will vary.

Here is one MD's observations of the system's priorities. Others may have different views but the maxim follow the money is clearly the correct place to start any inquiry of how America's financialized sickcare functions in the real world.

From what I'm hearing from the front line, a not insignificant number of admissions are of folks who would not have been admitted in March when there was fear of both the unknown and systemic failure and, not coincidently, when COVID diagnoses didn't pay as much.

Today, the admission criteria for COVID is so much more flexible than for standard diagnoses like CHF, and pays so much better than other diagnoses that our 'healthcare' system is rapidly becoming a 'COVID care' system.

The surge in hospitalizations and subsequent COVID-identified deaths may be driven, in part, to health systems adapting to new COVID revenue streams.

This would seemingly be good news, after all if it's the hospital administrator's desire to fill empty beds that's driving admissions rather than infection rates, then systemic failure can be averted through moderating those admission rates based on system capacity.

If your hospital fills up, just start sending the marginal cases home--inpatient/outpatient; the outcome for the patient will be pretty much the same and you've made as much money as your capacity will allow.

Unfortunately, our healthcare 'system' doesn't work like that.

Health systems are in the business of generating revenue, not value. Recent COVID-related demand destruction has crushed that revenue so they're hungry for more.

Those in health-system operations and those in leadership live in two different worlds. Leadership will push COVID admissions far beyond any operational limits in their quest for short term performance. One cannot overstate their mendacity and drive for lucre.

Hospitals are becoming 'COVID factories' with all other admissions (which pay far less) relegated to second tier status.

Health systems are evolving into an 'all COVID, all the time' format with the emphasis on testing and (soon) vaccination, at the expense of all else.

Not a few systems of my acquaintance are laying off outpatient medical staff because their supporting personnel have quit and are not replaced--those resources are being re-directed to COVID testing and in preparation for mass vaccination.

For the health system in the business of generating revenue, it's an excellent tactic. They save themselves significant overhead by not paying the clinicians and they make up the revenue through high-margin COVID services and government bailout payments.

For patients who actually need healthcare, though, this tactic is deadly.

The perversion is end-stage, the health systems pretend to deliver healthcare and the government pays them to continue the pretense.

There is no long term thinking here, no empathy for the workforce, no thought to the mission beyond window-dressing--just a relentless, risk-adverse financialization machine.

Think of COVID as a new widget for which the customer will pay 2.5 times the going price with no quality control, but only for a limited amount of time. Add in talentless, rent-seeking leadership and all becomes clear.

Of course the real risk is that maxed out hospitals could find themselves in a situation where admissions suddenly become driven by demand rather than the business model, with a true non-linear path to failure laying beyond.

The longer daily national hospital occupancy stays above the approximate pre-COVID capacity of 100k, the more likely you'll see systemic breakdowns--local at first, then regional.

You won't see it in the press, the healthcare cartels have a pretty good lock on the local media. Once news starts getting censored on social media, though, then you know it's happening.

Hold me to that, And call me out in three months if I'm not right.

If you still believe that America's sickcare is "the finest in the world" and is endlessly sustainable, please study these three charts and extend the trendlines.







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.

My new book is available! A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet 20% and 15% discounts (Kindle $7, print $17)

Read excerpts of the book for free (PDF).

The Story Behind the Book and the Introduction.


Recent Podcasts:

Charles Hugh Smith on Parallels of the Great Fire of Rome 64 AD to Today (with host Richard Bonugli) (31:40)

AxisOfEasy Salon #33: Ethereum 2.0 could be the scaffolding for the Network States (1:03) with Jesse H. and Mark J.

My COVID-19 Pandemic Posts


My recent books:

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook coming soon) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $5, print $10, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Pathfinding our Destiny: Preventing the Final Fall of Our Democratic Republic ($5 (Kindle), $10 (print), ( audiobook): Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake $1.29 (Kindle), $8.95 (print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 (Kindle), $15 (print) Read the first section for free (PDF).


Become a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

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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, Judith H. ($5/month), for your marvelously generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

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Read more...

About Those Vaccine ID Cards...

An idea that's simple as an abstraction--vaccine ID cards--turns out to be extremely difficult once real-world operational realities must be dealt with.

Authorities around the world have made it clear that they will do "whatever it takes" to vaccinate their citizenry with one of the first available vaccines. Authoritarian states may mandate universal vaccinations while less authoritarian states will favor a "carrot and stick" approach of offering benefits to the vaccinated and exclusions from employment, education, travel and most of everyday life for those who refuse to be vaccinated.

To identify the vaccinated and unvaccinated, many nations are planning to issue ID cards or "vaccine passports." As an abstraction, this seems straightforward, but if we start digging into the actual operational requirements of this mass ID card issuance and distribution, a number of common-sense issues arise.

Vaccination cards will be issued to everyone getting Covid-19 vaccine, health officials say (CNN)

First and foremost, it's unknown how long the immunity offered by the vaccines will last. It's still early days, so there is conflicting evidence: some claim the vaccines will be longer-lasting than the natural immunity of those who caught the virus and recovered, while other evidence suggests the immunity might decay after six months. Despite claims that natural immunity is long-lasting, a non-trivial number of people who had Covid have been re-infected.

Nobody knows how long either natural or vaccine immunity will last because not enough time has elapsed to collect sufficient data.

Given these intrinsic unknowns, how long will the ID card be valid? It's easy to imagine variations in individual responses such that the vaccines' effectiveness decays more rapidly in 20% of the vaccinated. This variability would introduce tremendous unknowns that no ID card could reflect: is the holder of the card at Month 10 still immune or not?

If the duration of the vaccine's effectiveness is variable, then an ID card could be misleading. In other words, being vaccinated with a variable-duration vaccine tells us nothing about the individual's actual immunity down the road.

Given these unknowns, the vaccinated may need booster shots in the future, and the ID cards would have to be re-issued. The task of keeping track of hundreds of millions of vaccination records, identities and then issuing ID cards is a non-trivial task.

To thwart black-market fake-ID cards, the security measures will have to be equivalent to a driver's license or passport. Have you applied recently for either of these forms of ID? The process is painfully slow. The systems in place to process state drivers' licenses and U.S. passports are already strained, and which agency is prepared to verify the identity of 280 million adult citizens, confirm the validity of their vaccine and then issue ID cards--and then repeat this process in a year?

If the procedures for issuing vaccine ID cards are slapdash due to time constraints--for example, downloading a digital record from the vaccine distributor or a printed card--these will likely be vulnerable to being duplicated or spoofed. Fake vaccine distributors will pop up issuing bogus digital records, hackers might download and sell digital records from trusted sources, and so on.

Then there's the extra burdens being placed on the staff of airlines, cruise lines, etc. to scan these documents and deal with rejected cards. Who will have the legal authority to deal with claims that a rejected card is actually valid? How many smaller establishments simply won't have to staff to do more than glance at the card?

Do authorities have the means to issue hundreds of millions of absolutely secure vaccine ID cards and then monitor all the attempts to find loopholes and weaknesses in the process? If authorities think that strict penalties will limit this activity, they underestimate the difficulty in getting such penalties enforced by overloaded court systems.

In nations with strong traditions of civil liberties, there will be pushback against mandatory vaccinations with essentially untested vaccines and against national databases tying identity to vaccination cards--a situation ripe with potential for abuse.

Authorities don't seem to grasp that many of those hesitating to get vaccinated are not anti-vaxxers; they simply see the vaccine approval process as deeply flawed for common-sense reasons: for example, there is simply not enough data on safety, duration and real-world efficacy.

Authorities are counting on the "carrot" of air travel, cruises and concerts to persuade skeptics to get vaccinated despite their concerns. What authorities don't seem to realize is that a great many people value their health, privacy and agency far more than they crave air travel, cruises or concerts. They will gladly forego all these activities until more reliable data is collected, peer-reviewed and distributed for analysis.

The more draconian the measures designed to pressure people into getting the vaccines, the greater the reluctance of skeptics who see the draconian measures as additional evidence the vaccines are half-measures being forced on the populace as a means of imposing a false assurance that all is well and "normal" will return as soon as the skeptics cave in and get vaccinated.

There's also the possibility that the virus could mutate in ways that moot the vaccines' effectiveness. While this is widely considered unlikely, it's not impossible, either. If a mutated virus arises that evades the vaccine, then what value will the vaccine ID card have?

An idea that's simple as an abstraction--vaccine ID cards--turns out to be extremely difficult once real-world operational realities must be dealt with. The fact is the first vaccines have been rushed to approval with virtually none of the testing demanded of previous vaccines raises common-sense concerns which cannot be dissolved with force or carrots and sticks.



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.

My new book is available! A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet 20% and 15% discounts (Kindle $7, print $17)

Read excerpts of the book for free (PDF).

The Story Behind the Book and the Introduction.


Recent Podcasts:

The Frustrations of Unfairness Are Reaching a Boiling Point

AxisofEasy Salon #31: The Covid Episode (1 hr)

My COVID-19 Pandemic Posts


My recent books:

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook coming soon) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $5, print $10, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Pathfinding our Destiny: Preventing the Final Fall of Our Democratic Republic ($5 (Kindle), $10 (print), ( audiobook): Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake $1.29 (Kindle), $8.95 (print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 (Kindle), $15 (print) Read the first section for free (PDF).


Become a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

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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, Cheryl N. ($50), for your marvelously generous contribution to this site -- I am greatly honored by your steadfast support and readership.

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Do You Really Think the Empire Will Sacrifice the Dollar to Further Enrich Billionaires?

As for stock markets--the devil take the hindmost.

Let's keep it simple: US dollar up, stocks down. US dollar down, stocks up. Stocks up, billionaires get richer. Since that spot of bother in March 2020 when the US dollar (USD) soared and stocks cratered, the USD has been in a free-fall, boosting the wealth of America's Robber Barons and various other skimmers, scammers and other undeserving scoundrels.

Chief among the undeserving scoundrels feasting on the decline of the USD are global stock markets which have soared not because revenues and profits are soaring but because the USD has plummeted.

The Federal Reserve is widely worshiped as the Ultimate Power in the Universe, a kind of financial Death Star. The Fed has seen fit to crush the USD to further boost the wealth of billionaires and save global stock markets from their well-deserved ruin. Saving the world, ho-hum, just another day for the god-like Fed.

But something doesn't quite add up here, for as the all-powerful Fed devalues the US dollar, it destroys the exorbitant privilege of America's reserve currency. What's the exorbitant privilege? Simply this: the owner of a reserve currency can create "money" (USD) out of thin air and trade it for autos, oil, semiconductors--real-world goods that were not created out of thin air. Rather, all these real-world goods required tremendous investment and significant costs to be produced and transported.

The exorbitant privilege is something for nothing--a remarkably good deal. And yet the universal expectation is the Fed is going to throw that privilege in the dumpster by pushing the USD into the ground, first by devaluing it relative other currencies and then by letting hyper-inflation destroy what's left of its purchasing power.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the ability to create "money" out of thin air and trade it for real-world goods is the foundation of America's global power, what I call the Imperial Project. The same can be said for the other reserve currencies, the euro and the yen. (Since China's currency is pegged to the US dollar, it is not a true reserve currency; it is only a derivative of the USD.)

So let me get this straight: the Fed is consciously choosing to undermine and then lay waste to the foundation of American power--just to boost Robber Barons and zombie global stock markets? I don't think so. That the Fed would pursue a suicidal destruction of the purchasing power of the dollar just to boost stock markets and billionaires--that beggars belief.

The Fed is not the Empire, it is the handmaiden of the Empire. The Fed's dual mandate-- for PR purposes, stable employment and prices--is actually balancing the conflicting demands of a global and domestic currency--Triffin's Paradox writ large.

The inherent problem with a reserve currency is that it must meet global economic needs and domestic needs, and these are intrinsically in conflict. America's billionaires and pension funds want the US stock market to loft higher on the back of a declining USD, but that diminishes the global purchasing power of the USD--a trend heading for economic ruin.

The Fed has had numerous reasons to weaken the dollar since March: a desperate need to "save" global stock markets from well-deserved collapse, and an equally desperate need to keep the dollar weak so global debtors with loans denominated in dollars can manage to service their trillions in USD-denominated debts.

But drawing a line extending this short-term necessity all the way to hyper-inflationary oblivion is a grave misreading of the Empire's need for the exorbitant privilege of a strong dollar.

The Fed is about done with its "rescue" of billionaires and global markets and debtors. Against virtually all expectations of seers, pundits, gurus, etc. the USD is about to start serving the Empire in its foundational role. As for stock markets--the devil take the hindmost.



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.

My new book is available! A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet 20% and 15% discounts (Kindle $7, print $17)

Read excerpts of the book for free (PDF).

The Story Behind the Book and the Introduction.


Recent Podcasts:

The Frustrations of Unfairness Are Reaching a Boiling Point

AxisofEasy Salon #31: The Covid Episode (1 hr)

My COVID-19 Pandemic Posts


My recent books:

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook coming soon) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $5, print $10, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Pathfinding our Destiny: Preventing the Final Fall of Our Democratic Republic ($5 (Kindle), $10 (print), ( audiobook): Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake $1.29 (Kindle), $8.95 (print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 (Kindle), $15 (print) Read the first section for free (PDF).


Become a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

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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, Keith B. ($100), for your outrageously generous contribution to this site -- I am greatly honored by your steadfast support and readership.

Thank you, Matt V. ($5/month), for your superbly generous pledge to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Read more...