Doom Loops Are Multiplying

We can all pretend to be fantastic until the floor collapses beneath us. At that point, complacency / denial gives way to panic, but it's too late to effect any realistic reversal of fortune.

Doom Loops have been in the lexicon a long time. The basic idea is the decline of one of the inputs holding up the status quo weakens the other inputs. This weakness feeds back on itself, accelerating the decline until a critical support level breaks and the system collapses.

Doom Loops are being used to describe big-city downtowns gutted by remote work, the closure of small businesses and the rise of property crime and chronic homelessness. Once the workforce commuting to downtown fell sharply, the businesses catering to this workforce no longer had a customer base large enough to support them all and so many close.

This mass closure makes the district less vibrant, further weakening commerce.

At the same time, politicians and district attorneys have mandated non-prosecution of non-violent property crimes such as auto break-ins, shoplifting, etc., giving the green light to the criminal class that specializes in property crimes. This increase in property crime forces the closure of flagship retail outlets stripmined by blatant shoplifting.

This shift in enforcement did little to stem the flood of fentanyl and other addictive narcotics into city centers, where the chronic homeless have congregated in sprawling encampments.

While mayors promote declines in violent crimes, they don't mention the impact of human waste, drug-addled homeless and property crimes, many of which are not even reported as small business owners fear reporting losses due to break-ins might result in their insurance policies being cancelled.

Break-ins set Oakland Chinatown businesses back: 'Things were slowly getting better, then all of a sudden the doom arrived.'

The closures of downtown businesses cause tax revenues to plummet, leaving less for policing and other essential services. Criminals quickly catch on and so break-ins occur when police patrols are absent.

Meanwhile, the decline in commuters has crushed transit agencies' revenues, creating giant holes in billion-dollar budgets with few realistic solutions.

The solution being touted is to convert empty office buildings into residences, to replace commuting office workers with residents. This sounds feasible in the abstract, but these conversions are extremely costly, and the attractiveness of decaying downtowns to upscale residents is a question few entertain, for the answer is painfully obvious: who wants to live in a neighborhood of human waste, degradation, rampant property crimes and drugs, all of which have rendered local businesses unviable?

You can be sure the politicians and DAs whose policies exacerbated the decay won't live downtown. Like the people who elected them, they live in wealthy enclaves that are so far protected from the consequences of doom loops.

Once the downtown has been stripped of targets, do you reckon the criminals who specialize in property crimes will retire? Or will they move into the enclaves where the protected class lives?

Another doom loop is gutting rural villages and towns globally. You've probably seen media reports of houses in Italian or Japanese villages that can be had for $1 or some nominal sum, for example: Why Japan is Giving Away 8 Million Free Houses (13 min) (via J.F.). Note: the 8-million number is click-bait.

Left out of these chirpy accounts of $1 houses in charming villages are all the realities that generated the doom loop that hollowed out the villages in the first place: their remoteness, absence of jobs, the dominance of an aging populace of pensioners, decaying, outdated housing requiring costly renovations, the depreciating value of such properties, and so on.

Once the post office closes due to a decline in the populace and the elementary school closes due to a decline in enrollment, the village is doomed. Families with children move away, further reducing the populace, pushing it below the thresholds needed to support a local temple/church priest, a local cafe, etc.

Doom Loops are difficult to reverse. The current zeitgeist, which seems to only have two poles, complacency / denial and panic, is not conducive to practical, realistic appraisals or plans of action, all of which require painful sacrifices and reductions in unsustainable spending to align with reduced revenues and prospects.

This zeitgeist encourages "positive optics" and happy stories disconnected from the realities of the doom loops already in play. Yes, we can all pretend to be fantastic until the floor collapses beneath us. At that point, complacency / denial gives way to panic, but it's too late to effect any realistic reversal of fortune.




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When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $18 print, $8.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $9.95, print $24, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook $17.46) 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).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $4.95 Kindle, $10.95 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

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


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Once Trust Has Been Lost, There's No Going Back

Now that the overlapping crises are upon us and the banquet of consequences is being served, we'll see just who our elites and leadership really are.

The erosion of trust doesn't require intent, it only requires the blind pursuit of self-interest above all else. Trust is fundamentally reciprocity and honesty: to build trust, we must each perform our agreed-upon responsibilities and be truthful about our performance and actions.

Lies, obfuscation, misdirection and the sins of omission are all Kryptonite to trust. Those who put the pursuit of self-interest above all else like to think they can finesse their greed by omitting the truth rather than presenting a fabrication / lie. But being social animals whose survival ultimately rests on trust, humans are keenly sensitive to the difference between the truth / honesty and self-serving prevarications such as the sins of omission.

America's elites and those living large in protected fiefdoms have persuaded themselves that their relentless pursuit of self-interest has no cost or consequence. Conveniently ignoring Adam Smith's volume on the moral foundations needed to support capitalism, they think "the invisible hand" of the market is nothing more than a feeding frenzy of self-serving greed, and so their relentless pursuit of self-interest will somehow magically transform their looting and free-riding into a stable economy and society.

This is why trust has been lost in America. Everyone with any hold on power uses that power solely to benefit themselves and their cronies, under the tissue-thin guise of "serving the public" (or even more egregiously, "doing God's work"--please hand me a barf-bag...).

When everyone is issuing an endless spew of BS to cover their own self-enrichment, trust is eroded and then lost. When everyone with any shred of power is scrambling to free-ride the system to serve their private interests above all else, the system itself can no longer be trusted.

This is why institutions have lost public trust. Those happily ensconced in a politically powerful fiefdom can increase their private gains at the expense of the public interest without any worries that the public can ever make it through the complexity thickets they've erected to ring-fence their fiefdom.

The elites rig the system behind flimsy legal screens and declare the system one of "endless opportunity" without mentioning some are more equal than others. Markets are rigged, politics is theater and those in the know gloat as their personal fortunes expand like clockwork.

All of this is betrayal of the public trust and the public interest, and betrayal has a cost and consequence: trust is lost. Betrayal hurts because we believed the pretenses and promises of the lying, cheating prevaricator. Once the truth seeps out, we're done with the liar / free-rider / self-serving BSer.

This is where we are: trust has been lost and there's no going back. As the chart below illustrates, social trust--our willingness to trust strangers--has declined for decades. There are many threads in this decline, but one is that everyone has transmogrified into a scammer or grifter, trying to extract something from us while giving us nothing in return except empty promises, phony gratitude or the pretense of reciprocity.

What exactly is the difference between the beggar with a phony story, a politician "explaining" a new junk fee or a private-sector elite rigging the system to benefit their enterprise? There is no difference. All are masking their pursuit of self-interest behind a phony story. The beggar's story of needing $10 for gas is obviously threadbare; so too are the stories of pickpocketing "leaders" and SillyCon Valley monopolists.

As the chart below shows, the middle class that once trusted markets, institutions and civic leaders has seen its share of the national wealth decline as the top 1%'s share increased. Wealth wasn't "grown," it was transferred. Eventually "investors" finally accept they're nothing but marks for the financial elite to skim and scam and so they exit the fake 3-card-monte "market." The skimmers and scammers, bereft of marks, whine and beg for a return to the good old days when they could exploit all the trusting marks.

Those who have looted the public trust for their own private gain now decry the loss of trust. Their tears are as fake as all their other stories. What they mourn is the marks awakening to their endless skims and scams, and the opting out of those who've finally had enough.

Everything's gone so well that those with wealth and power have been able to pretend to be fantastic. But now that the overlapping crises are upon us and the banquet of consequences is being served, we'll see just who our elites and leadership really are. Pretending will no longer work, and all the self-serving prevarications in the world will no longer shield us from the consequences of a society stripped of public trust.

Once trust has been destroyed, there's no going back.














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The Asian Heroine Who Seduced Me (Novel) print $10.95, Kindle $6.95 Read an excerpt for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $18 print, $8.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $9.95, print $24, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook $17.46) 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).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $4.95 Kindle, $10.95 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

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


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Front-Running the Fed Pivot Might Not Work Next Time

The Fed has trained the trading-rats all too well, and there is no way to avoid the unintended consequences of the Fed's large-scale human behavioral experiment.

The Federal Reserve has been running a large-scale human behavioral experiment since 2008. The results are now in. Let's start by stipulating that trading-bots are programmed to trade on human behavioral flows, i.e. trends and reactions to policy announcements and other "news" (earnings beats. etc.). As a result, the robot-trading-rats are responding to the same stimuli as the human-trading-rats in the Fed's experiment.

Here's the experiment set-up. When the trading rats hit the red button, the stock market swoons, and the Fed leaps into action to "save the market" by injecting trillions of dollars in stimulus and liquidity through various programs such as buying Treasury bonds. The trading-rats who "buy the dip" are rewarded with hefty gains as the market soars once the Fed "pivots" from "hawkish" to "dovish."

Trading-rats are smart and so they realized they didn't need to wait for the Fed to act to reap big gains. Since everyone playing the trading game knows the Fed will pivot dovish once the market swoons, then the trading-rats started front-running the Fed's pivot, buying every swoon based on their supreme confidence that the Fed would soon "save the market" from crashing.

The Fed is now trapped by the success of its mass-scale behavioral experiment. The trading-rats have such total confidence in the Fed Put, i.e. the Fed "saving the market" once it swoons, because every time they've hit the red button the Fed has leaped into action and released a tsunami of stimulus and liquidity that reverses the swoon and pushes risk assets to new highs.

As a result of this feedback, the market never swoons enough to trigger a Fed reaction because every dip is bought by front-running trading-rats. This can be seen as a success, as the Fed no longer has to do anything at all to keep the market elevated, as the front-running trading-rats leap into action to buy every dip. The expectation of a Fed "save" is enough to keep the market in a comfortably elevated trading range.

The problem is the trading-rats' confidence in the Fed Put incentivizes a near-infinite expansion of moral hazard as the trading-rats can expand debt and leverage without any limit because the consequences (potentially devastating losses) have been taken off the table by the Fed's "guaranteed" reversal of any swoon in risk assets.

Each trading-rat is focused on its own debt and leverage, but there is no incentive to measure the systemic risk piled up by the Fed-generated moral hazard. The Fed's "guaranteed" reversal of any swoon has thus created a perverse incentive to take on insane levels of risk to increase gains--a rise in risk that now threatens the stability of the entire financial system.

No one believes a crash is possible because the Fed will reverse the swoon once the trading-rats hit the red button. But the Fed is not omnipotent, and the confidence in its omnipotence has morphed into hubris.

The only way the Fed can break this incentive to increase risky bets is to deliver a shock when the trading-rats hit the red button. Instead of guaranteed gains, the trading-rats receive a shock--massive losses. To re-train the trading-rats behaviorally, the Fed will have to deliver repeated shocks because the trading-rats have been trained to expect Fed goodies every time they hit the red button.

The first time they receive a shock instead of a treat, the trading-rats will be confused but will go ahead and hit the red button again. They will continue to hit the red button and get shocked until they realize the rules of the experiment have changed.

Should the Fed randomly deliver treats and shocks, the trading-rats will enter a catatonic-schizoid state of nervous breakdown. The trading-rats will no longer know what to do, and so they won't buy every dip to front-run the Fed, and they will no longer be confident the Fed will reverse the ensuing crash.

For the Fed's part, if they keep rewarding the trading-rats for piling on risk, then the system will become increasingly vulnerable to a cascading collapse due to insane levels of risk that have been incentivized by the Fed's "guarantee."

If they stop reversing every swoon, the market is vulnerable to a cascading crash as the trading-rats are no longer sure the Fed will bail out their insanely risky bets.

Either way, the swoon turns into an uncontrolled crash. The Fed has trained the trading-rats all too well, and there is no way to avoid the unintended consequences of the Fed's large-scale human behavioral experiment.

Maybe the Fed can ask ChatAI to resolve the unresolvable dilemma, but that will reveal the limits not just of Fed policy but of ChatAI.






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My new book is now available at a 10% discount ($8.95 ebook, $18 print): Self-Reliance in the 21st Century.

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Podcast with Richard Bonugli: Self Reliance in the 21st Century (43 min)


My recent books:

The Asian Heroine Who Seduced Me (Novel) print $10.95, Kindle $6.95 Read an excerpt for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $18 print, $8.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $9.95, print $24, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook $17.46) 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).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $4.95 Kindle, $10.95 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

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


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What If the Fed Has Lost Control?

When this bubble bursts, there will be no fourth or fifth bubble, there will only be rubble.

The US economy and its financial system operate under the implicit belief that the Federal Reserve controls the direction of the economy and finance. This belief isn't in Fed influence, it's in Fed control: the Fed can reverse a stock market decline on a dime, it can reverse a recession, it can do "whatever it takes" to keep markets stable and expansive.

The history of the past 30 years seems to support this belief. Every time a financial crisis has manifested, the Fed has "saved the day" with some new policy extreme, changing the rules, jacking up its balance sheet 10-fold, and so on.

The flaw in this confidence in Fed control is the three speculative bubbles that have inflated and burst in the era of Fed Control, 1995 to the present. These bubbles could not have inflated without a "dovish" Fed pushing interest rates down and juicing the financial system with liquidity / credit. Since all speculative bubbles eventually burst, the Fed is forced into "rescue mode" which requires ever more extreme manipulation, oops, I mean intervention, to stabilize the bubble bursting and inflate the next bubble.

What few entertain as a possibility is the Fed is losing control of the economy and finance for systemic reasons that have nothing to do with Fed Policy per se. In other words, it's not a "Fed policy error" that brings the system down, it's much larger forces: diminishing returns and second order effects.

The immediate effect of new Fed policy extremes is strong, much like a new drug has an immediate effect. But as the drug is injected again and again, it loses its efficacy. In medicine this is a biological process; in finance, it's a psychological process as participants habituate to every new Fed policy extreme and count on its 1) permanence and 2) continued efficacy.

For example, the Fed's trick of lowering bond yields / interest rates. Participants can confidently increase their exposure to risk to insane levels and dispense with hedges because they're confident the Fed will drop interest rates back to zero if the stock market falters.

This confidence in the efficacy of Fed policies can be understood as a buffer, providing resilience and a backstop ("the Fed Put") to any financial / economic instability. Participants stop panicking the moment the Fed announces a new dovish policy, even if the policy has limited effect on real-world conditions. The decline of real-world efficacy is masked by the instant euphoria of participants, who have come to count on the Fed'a actions resolving crises literally overnight.

The decay of diminishing returns occurs under the radar. Few understand all the Fed's actions (reverse repos, etc.) or the scale of these operations, or their efficacy in terms of correcting dis-equilibrium / instabilities in the real-world economy and markets.

While participants continue to believe these buffers will always protect the system from hazard, the buffers have eroded. The next Fed "save" fails, revealing the buffers have collapsed. Put another way, the Fed has lost control.

Every new Fed policy extreme generates second order effects which unleash unintended consequences. The prime example is moral hazard, the belief that risk can be taken on to boost speculative gains without suffering any consequences of that risk blowing up.

Since participants believe the Fed will slash interest rates back to zero as soon as markets swoon, they increase their gambles based on that confidence. Any debt taken on today can be rolled over into lower rates in the future, so there's no limit on risk or credit expansion. The riskiest possible expansions of credit--to fund stock buybacks, acquisitions of competitors, etc.--are greenlighted based on the confidence that the Fed will always push interest rates back toward zero as soon as conditions wobble.

This confidence sets up a feedback loop in which Fed policies push participants to extremes of risk and debt that guarantee speculative bubbles inflate and then burst, demanding fresh Fed policy extremes. In other words, the Fed has created a doom-loop in which the most insane risk is transformed into a "safe bet" based on the expectation of a Fed "save."

But what if the Fed is unable to push policies to new extremes due to systemic constraints? What if policies that worked like magic before no longer work this time around due to diminishing returns / collapse of buffers?

What if the Fed cannot reverse the doom-loop of second order effects its previous policy extremes have generated? These outcomes don't seem farfetched to anyone who studies systems dynamics. Rather, they seem inevitable and predictable.

What if the Fed has already lost control but nobody dares question the confidence in Fed omnipotence? It's not the Fed policy extremes that work the magic, after all; it's the confidence of participants that resolves the bubble bursting crisis.

Those who look at systems dynamics have solid reasons for seeing this third massive Everything Bubble as the last bubble. When this bubble bursts, there will be no fourth or fifth bubble, there will only be rubble.






New Podcast: Its a Waterfall - Risk, Collateral & Productivity (48 min)

My new book is now available at a 10% discount ($8.95 ebook, $18 print): Self-Reliance in the 21st Century.

Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

Read excerpts of all three chapters

Podcast with Richard Bonugli: Self Reliance in the 21st Century (43 min)


My recent books:

The Asian Heroine Who Seduced Me (Novel) print $10.95, Kindle $6.95 Read an excerpt for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $18 print, $8.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $9.95, print $24, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook $17.46) 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).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $4.95 Kindle, $10.95 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

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


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

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Crystal Balls, Soothsayers and AI, Oh My!

As long as we mint millions from a Never-Ending Bull Market, we'll always stay one step ahead of the Debt Monster. AI! .

Of the many astounding developments of the current era (AI!), none is more remarkable than the proliferation of soothsayers peering into crystal balls to predict The Most Important Trend In The Universe--a Bull or Bear stock market. The computing power and wealth thrown at conjuring up charts, statistics and forecasts is astounding in and of itself, but the proliferation of crystal balls and soothsayers is even more astounding.

After reviewing hundreds of charts, statistics and forecasts on the most arcane correlations and the deepest data-dives (AI!), I've reached soothsayer satori: the secret to insuring a Never-Ending Bull Market in which monumental wealth will be piled up by all those entities (software and wetware alike--AI!) who buy every tiny dip and continuously roll over their zero-expiration-day-call-options is this:

Say "AI" 300 times with fervent enthusiasm and then click your heels three times. You will then be transported to a magical paradise where stocks only go down for a few moments to enable dip-buyers the immense satisfaction of buying more stocks at a discount.

Did I forget to say AI? I'm on number 199, and I'm trying not to lose count. AI!

Setting aside the thousands, or perhaps millions, of charts, statistics and forecasts, let's just ponder one: TCMDO, Debt Securities and Loans, courtesy of the Federal Reserve System.

AI, 200, AI, 201--AI! The first thing we notice is the total debt has been following a parabolic curve since that spot of bother (recession) in 1981-82, increasing 15.5-fold since Q1 1983, 40 years ago, from $6 trillion to $94 trillion.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP), more or less a measure of the real economy, increased from $3.5 trillion in 1983 to $26.5 trillion in 2023, a 7.5-fold increase, a considerably less stupendous rise than debt.

This chart raises two questions:

1. How long will it take to add the next $40 trillion in debt?

2. Precisely how will AI change the trajectory of debt, or the eventual banquet of consequences of parabolic increases in debt?

One interesting thing that isn't communicated by the chart is that Americans haven't experienced a real recession for 40 years. A real recession lasts a long time and grinds down debt via a rising tide of bankruptcies, defaults and writedowns. Thanks to Federal Reserve hocus-pocus, no recession since 1982 has lasted more than a few brief months or been more than a shallow dip.

Only people 60 years of age and older have any experience as working adults of a real recession. For everyone younger, we might as well be talking about the Panic of 1873 or even that spot of bother in Rome circa 14 AD.

Despite poring over hundreds of charts, statistics and forecasts issued by soothsayers peering into digital crystal balls (AI!), not one reflected the possibility that the US was overdue for a real recession that wiped out $40 trillion in debt rather than another Bull Market run that added another $40 trillion in debt.

Never mind, as long as we mint millions from a Never-Ending Bull Market, we'll always stay one step ahead of the Debt Monster. AI! Crystal Balls, Soothsayers and AI, Oh My...AI, 202, AI, 203...




New Podcast: Its a Waterfall - Risk, Collateral & Productivity (48 min)

My new book is now available at a 10% discount ($8.95 ebook, $18 print): Self-Reliance in the 21st Century.

Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

Read excerpts of all three chapters

Podcast with Richard Bonugli: Self Reliance in the 21st Century (43 min)


My recent books:

The Asian Heroine Who Seduced Me (Novel) print $10.95, Kindle $6.95 Read an excerpt for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $18 print, $8.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $9.95, print $24, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook $17.46) 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).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $4.95 Kindle, $10.95 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

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


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

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Thank you, Christopher K. ($5), for your much-appreciated generous contribution to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

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