"The Need For Roots"
by Addison Wiggin
“Wow, baby, you got problems,” Jeffrey Tucker quipped to the young waitress in Miami who was serving him chocolate pancakes. He tells the story with a coy smile and a glint in his eye in this week’s Wiggin Session. “A whole generation was raised with this idea that it’s all just gibberish,” Tucker explains. “That there’s powerful people. They give you money if they want. They take it away when they want, and it has nothing to do with me. And a whole generation believes this…”
Tucker, further: "I was talking to the waitress and I said, “Well, how’s business?” and that sort of thing. And she said, “Well, it’s pretty good. Some people tip a lot. Some people tip a little bit. But I’ve realized something. It’s all nonsense! There’s infinite amounts of money. It’s just a matter of playing your cards right. Then you can grab it.” I said, “What do you mean, infinite amounts of money?” “Oh, yeah. They just print. They just print what they need. All this, it’s fake. Everything is fake. The whole world’s fake!”
We see this anecdote as part of a generational “sea change” - one that scares the proverbial crap out of us. It scared us 15, nay 20 years ago when we started our campaign to understand what “the mother’s milk” of artificial money printing was doing to the purchasing power of the American dollar. Putting all the pieces together and how that leads to the national debt and all that.
It seems that our current conception of money is as if there’s some magic prosperity machine that’s just running all the time. Nobody believes anymore that there is a connection between what you do and the money you make. Our labor doesn’t translate into the economic position we find ourselves in anymore.
During the interview, we were reminded of an essay our friend and mentor Bill Bonner wrote in the early aughts - all those years ago - on the concept of “deracination.” Parsing the Latin, the word means you lose your roots. You lose your connection to the land, more specifically. You lose connection to what is real. Bill expounds: "We are all deracinated, cut off from direct knowledge of the things that really matter to us. We don’t know what’s in the food we eat…nor how it is prepared. We don’t know who writes our software programs, nor do we have any idea how they actually do it. Mass investors don’t know what the companies they buy actually do, and have way of measuring the value of the stocks, except for recent price trends.
We are intrigued by this metaphor because it articulates a difficult to understand critique of Wall Street. They are just flipping paper contracts back and forth. $117 trillion out there in options on any given trading day? And those are just paper contracts that are traded back and forth. There’s no production value behind that."
That’s a whole rabbit hole in and of itself, but that’s what we see in Tucker’s anecdote about the Miami waitress who says, “Yeah, whatever. Give me a tip or don’t, it doesn’t matter to me. This is just the way life is anymore.” Bill continues: "And now wealth exists purely in digital form - nothing but long strands of 1’s and 0’s that convey the necessary information and have no tangible or individual embodiment of any sort. You cannot see it, touch it, feel it, eat it, weigh it or even use it to light a cigar. But it seems to do the job."
Is this deracinated wealth any less real, or less reliable, than analog wealth? Everything’s fake and it doesn’t matter. What a scary, nihilistic idea. We can trace a lot of this sentiment to the Great Financial Crisis of ’08-’09. Bernanke’s zero interest rate policies massively distorted the production structure, causing an explosion of investment in media and Big Tech.
Large corporations had unlimited access to capital at very cheap rates, and there was no limit to the amount of people they could hire. If you show up with the right credentials, you got a quarter million dollars even though you did absolutely nothing. And there was no check on the growth of these companies because money was so cheap.
Powell was left trying to unravel this mess. Then lockdowns happened, interest rates were slammed back to zero, and these same people making a quarter million dollars are suddenly sitting at home for 12 months doing absolutely nothing. Tack on stimulus payments to their already bloated salaries… and you’ve got one helluva inflationary bubble. You can’t do that to a whole generation and have them think logically anymore. So it goes..."
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