Jeremiah Babe, PM 11/20/21:
“Seizing Your House; Spending Trillions Like A Game;
Don’t Underestimate Inflation; Greed vs Fear”
So, we rise from the rubble...
Saturday, November 20, 2021
Musical Interlude: Josh Groban, "You Are Loved (Don't Give Up)"
Full screen recommended.
Josh Groban, "You Are Loved (Don't Give Up)"
"A Look to the Heavens"
"One of the brightest galaxies in planet Earth's sky is similar in size to our Milky Way Galaxy: big, beautiful Messier 81. Also known as NGC 3031 or Bode's galaxy for its 18th century discoverer, this grand spiral can be found toward the northern constellation of Ursa Major, the Great Bear. The sharp, detailed telescopic view reveals M81's bright yellow nucleus, blue spiral arms, pinkish starforming regions, and sweeping cosmic dust lanes.
Some dust lanes actually run through the galactic disk (left of center), contrary to other prominent spiral features though. The errant dust lanes may be the lingering result of a close encounter between M81 and the nearby galaxy M82 lurking outside of this frame. M81's faint, dwarf irregular satellite galaxy, Holmberg IX, can be seen just below the large spiral. Scrutiny of variable stars in M81 has yielded a well-determined distance for an external galaxy - 11.8 million light-years."
"Complexity Theory: the Avalanche and the Snowflake"
"Complexity Theory: the Avalanche and the Snowflake"
by James Rickards
"One of my favorites is what I call ‘the avalanche and the snowflake’. It’s a metaphor for the way the science actually works, but I should be clear: it’s not just a metaphor. The science, the mathematics and the dynamics are actually the same as those that exist in financial markets.
Imagine you’re on a mountainside. You can see a snowpack building up on the ridgeline while it continues snowing. You can tell just by looking at the scene that there’s danger of an avalanche. It’s windswept… it’s unstable… and if you’re an expert, you know it’s going to collapse and kill skiers and wipe out the village below. You see a snowflake fall from the sky onto the snowpack. It disturbs a few other snowflakes that lie there. Then, the snow starts to spread… then it starts to slide… then it gains momentum until, finally, it comes loose and the whole mountain comes down and buries the village.
Question: What do you blame? Do you blame the snowflake, or do you blame the unstable pack of snow? I say the snowflake’s irrelevant. If it wasn’t the one snowflake that caused the avalanche, it could have been the one before, or the one after, or the one tomorrow. The instability of the system as a whole was the problem. So when I think about the risks in the financial system, I don’t focus on the ‘snowflake’ that will cause problems. The trigger doesn’t matter.
A snowflake that falls harmlessly – the vast majority of all snowflakes - technically fails to start a chain reaction. Once a chain reaction begins, it expands exponentially, can ‘go critical’ (as in an atomic bomb) and release enough energy to destroy a city. However, most neutrons do not start nuclear chain reactions, just as most snowflakes do not start avalanches.
In the end, it’s not about the snowflakes or neutrons. It’s about the initial critical state conditions that allow the possibiity of a chain reaction or an avalanche. These can be hypothesized and observed at large scale, but the exact moment the chain reaction begins cannot be observed. That’s because it happens on a minute scale relative to the system. This is why some people refer to these snowflakes as ‘black swans’, because they are unexpected and come by surprise. But they’re actually not a surprise if you understand the system’s dynamics and can estimate the system scale.
It’s a metaphor, but really the mathematics behind it are the same. Financial markets today are huge, unstable mountains of snow waiting to collapse. You see it in the gross notional value of derivatives. There is $700 trillion worth of swaps. ($2.5 Quadrillion by other reputable estimates. - CP) These are derivatives off balance sheet, hidden liabilities in the banking system of the world. These numbers are not made up. Just go to the IS annual report and it’s right there in the footnote.
Well, how do you put $700 trillion into perspective? It’s ten times global GDP. Take all the goods and services in the entire world for an entire year. That’s about $70 trillion when you add it all up. Well, take ten times that, and that’s how big the snow pile is. And that’s the avalanche that’s waiting to come down."
"The Majority Of Us..."
"The majority of us lead quiet, unheralded lives as we pass through this world. There will most likely be no ticker-tape parades for us, no monuments created in our honor. But that does not lessen our possible impact, for there are scores of people waiting for someone just like us to come along; people who will appreciate our compassion, our unique talents. Someone who will live a happier life merely because we took the time to share what we had to give. Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have a potential to turn a life around. It’s overwhelming to consider the continuous opportunities there are to make our love felt."
- Leo Buscaglia
Chet Raymo, “Moments of Being”
“Moments of Being”
by Chet Raymo
“A passage from the "Pensees" of Teilhard de Chardin: "Though the phenomena of the lower world remain the same- the material determinisms, the vicissitudes of chance, the laws of labor, the agitations of men, the footfalls of death- he who dares to believe reaches a sphere of created reality in which things, while retaining their habitual texture, seem to be made out of a different substance. Everything remains the same so far as phenomena are concerned, but at the same time everything become luminous, animated, loving..."
Whatever we think of Teilhard's Christocentric phenomenology, however much we are baffled by his vague and gushy prose, it is clear from his writing that he was a man who was in love with the world and experienced it as luminous, animated, and loving. Certainly, the experience he describes is not restricted to "he who dares to believe," by which Teilhard means a specifically Christian faith, or at least a faith which for him involved an image of the "cosmic Christ." No, I would suggest that the interior experience of the world he describes- as luminous, animated, and loving- is an predisposition of the human condition, part of our evolutionary makeup. It finds expression in religion, certainly, but also in art, music, poetry, scientific discovery, and in even in the quiet contemplation of a single flower or grain of sand.
It is an experience we all consciously or unconsciously seek, with varying degrees of success. For certain people- an artist like Kandinsky or a mystic like Teilhard- the interior rhapsodic state seems more or less permanent. For most of us, its achievement is a struggle against the humdrum and superficial, the "habitual texture" of things.
The challenge is not to abjure the world of immediate sensation, but to experience the world as fully as our present knowledge allows- not just earthworms and nematodes, wind and weather, Sun, Moon and stars, but also the ineffable flow of atoms, the ceaseless dance of the DNA, the whirling of the myriad galaxies, the infinite and the infinitesimal- to see in the mind's eye and feel in the mind's heart the fire and the flow that animates all things. We may not experience the universe as "loving," but we might certainly find it lovable.
"The whole universe is aflame," wrote Teilhard. His vision was partly informed by his science and partly by his religious faith. And partly, surely, because he was born with a particularly acute sensitivity to the ineluctable wholeness of things. Those of us of a less sensitive nature will settle for the occasional moments when the gates of our senses unaccountably fling themselves open to the unspeakable and unspoken mystery of the world."
Whatever we think of Teilhard's Christocentric phenomenology, however much we are baffled by his vague and gushy prose, it is clear from his writing that he was a man who was in love with the world and experienced it as luminous, animated, and loving. Certainly, the experience he describes is not restricted to "he who dares to believe," by which Teilhard means a specifically Christian faith, or at least a faith which for him involved an image of the "cosmic Christ." No, I would suggest that the interior experience of the world he describes- as luminous, animated, and loving- is an predisposition of the human condition, part of our evolutionary makeup. It finds expression in religion, certainly, but also in art, music, poetry, scientific discovery, and in even in the quiet contemplation of a single flower or grain of sand.
It is an experience we all consciously or unconsciously seek, with varying degrees of success. For certain people- an artist like Kandinsky or a mystic like Teilhard- the interior rhapsodic state seems more or less permanent. For most of us, its achievement is a struggle against the humdrum and superficial, the "habitual texture" of things.
The challenge is not to abjure the world of immediate sensation, but to experience the world as fully as our present knowledge allows- not just earthworms and nematodes, wind and weather, Sun, Moon and stars, but also the ineffable flow of atoms, the ceaseless dance of the DNA, the whirling of the myriad galaxies, the infinite and the infinitesimal- to see in the mind's eye and feel in the mind's heart the fire and the flow that animates all things. We may not experience the universe as "loving," but we might certainly find it lovable.
"The whole universe is aflame," wrote Teilhard. His vision was partly informed by his science and partly by his religious faith. And partly, surely, because he was born with a particularly acute sensitivity to the ineluctable wholeness of things. Those of us of a less sensitive nature will settle for the occasional moments when the gates of our senses unaccountably fling themselves open to the unspeakable and unspoken mystery of the world."
"I Remember..."
"I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more, the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort, to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires,and expires, too soon, too soon, before life itself."
- Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924, English writer
The Poet: James Broughton, "Quit Your Addiction"
"Quit Your Addiction"
"Quit your addiction
to sneer and complaint.
Try a little flaunt,
Call for comrades
who bolster your vim
and offer you risk.
Corral the crones,
Goose the nice nellies,
Hunt the bear that hugs
and the raven that quoths.
Stay up all night
to devise a new dawn...
- James Broughton,
"Little Sermons of the Big Joy"
"That's Where It All Begins..."
"That's where it all begins. That's where we all get screwed big time as we grow up. They tell us to think, but they don't really mean it. They only want us to think within the boundaries they define. The moment you start thinking for yourself- really thinking- so many things stop making any sense. And if you keep thinking, the whole world just falls apart. Nothing makes sense anymore. All rules, traditions, expectations - they all start looking so fake, so made up. You want to just get rid of all this stuff and make things right. But the moment you say it, they tell you to shut up and be respectful. And eventually you understand that nobody wants you to really think for yourself.
- Ray N. Kuili
"Dazed Lemmings Can't Bridge The Reality Gap"
"Dazed Lemmings Can't Bridge The Reality Gap"
by Zen Gardner
"Ever wonder why people can't make the leap to real awareness of what's going on? Why do so few people seem to care about the dangers of the unreported Fukushima radiation levels and toxic debris washing across the pacific? As the Orwellian American police state sweeps into place, the economy crumbles, Americans celebrated their entry into a brave new 2020 with minimal awareness of the true dangers already dissolving their health, wealth and chances for survival in an engineered conflagration of mythic proportions that is already descending on their heads.
As the gap between reality and manipulated public perception grows, it may just be too big a leap for many at this point. Having been dumbed-down and unresponsive for so long, it's too much for them to take in. Sad, but again, that's reality. Hey, why wake up when everything's such a bummer? That's the underlying mentality. The thing is, this is a conditioned response. Overload and recoil. And it's been going on a long, long time.
Why? Like the dumbing down effect of fluoride and chemtrails and adulterated food, it eventually suppresses natural responses. When the real alert presents itself, the subject will not be able to react and protect himself. Why all the dramatic end of the world sci-fi movies? Why the emphasis on violence and horror movies and graphic, destructive wars? Why does the news major on the bad events of the day? Why the combative gladiator sports, emphasis on technology instead of humanity, and mind-numbing crass consumerism and sexualization of society? This is deliberate social engineering, and that's the biggie. It's all engineered..and that's the last thing most people want to realize. And it usually is.
The Power of Cognitive Dissonance: The world has become essentially schizophrenic in outlook. Being told one thing while the exact opposite is happening before their eyes for so long, the "dissonance" created by this conflict causes humanity to shut down. America is the perfect example. Ostensibly fighting for "freedom and liberty" we commit genocide and destroy nation after nation. To protect our liberties the government has overturned the Bill of Rights and made the Constitution a mockery. Yet the populace sits and takes it. Why? Too big of a leap. If it turned out they've been completely conned by a massive manipulated agenda they may just completely break down. And subconsciously the horror of that reality is therefore a "no". Even if it were true they're at the point they'd rather not know.
I'll Take Conscious Reality. "Why all the negativity?" is what you'll hear a lot of the time when you bring these things up. The answer, as David Icke often says, is that ignorance is negative. Truth is empowering, no matter how awful it may be sometimes. And at this point in history the more you learn the more negative it may seem, with the Controllers' agenda in full final-phase swing. But so what. Things haven't changed all that much. The purpose of life is to rediscover who you truly are, and that wonderful awakening makes everything else pale in comparison. Our mission then becomes to inform and empower, share and encourage. The same one it always has been. That it's taking this kind of extreme compression to awaken the slumbering masses is really no surprise, and ultimately a gift from the Universe to help people back into the real world....that of conscious loving awareness."
"Awaken from slumber, one and all..."
A Must Read: "We Are Killing Our Kids. Does Anyone Care?"
"We Are Killing Our Kids. Does Anyone Care?"
by Steve Kirsch
"Kids that would have never died from COVID are now dying after getting the vaccine. Will it ever end? Recently, Dr. Toby Rogers did a risk-benefit analysis showing we’ll kill 117 kids for every kid we save from COVID with the vaccines aged 5 to 11. The ratio doesn’t really change if they change the dose, e.g., to a third of the adult dose. It means fewer kids saved and fewer kids killed, but Toby estimates the ratio would be about the same. Whether it is 117 or 10, it doesn’t matter. We will kill a lot more kids than we will ever save with these vaccines.
What Toby predicted is now coming true. We can’t show it is 117 to 1, but we can show for sure we are killing more kids than we are saving because kids that would have never died before are now dying. With COVID, only children with pretty severe health problems would die: we don’t know of a single kid, 5 to 11, who died from COVID who didn’t have some pretty serious health issues before they got COVID.
Those days are now gone. We’re now killing the healthy kids. The vaccines rolled out for kids 5 to 11 starting on November 7. It is now just 12 days later and we are now killing perfectly healthy kids.
That’s hardly an isolated incident."
Please view this complete, critically important article here:
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Essential:
Friday, November 19, 2021
"Onward Into Darkness"
"Onward Into Darkness"
by Jim Kunstler
"Tripping over the doorsill into “Joe Biden’s” dark winter, what do you see out in the gathering gloom? That old Shining City on a Hill is looking more like Detroit in a sleet-storm, with dumpster fires sputtering here and there in the broken streets. The darkness descending is something more ominous than any ordinary night. In the shadows, an insectile legion seems to be stealing away with what remains of your country.
Was it reassuring to see Dr. Anthony Fauci declare on MSNBC: “What we’re starting to see now is an uptick in hospitalizations among people who have been fully vaccinated but not boosted”? And the moral of that story? Get more of the same thing that’s not working — and if you don’t volunteer to get it, maybe we can find a way to force you.
How does this lying prick get to remain as America’s chief public health officer? Has he not done enough damage? In case you can’t put it together, that “uptick” is happening because Dr. Fauci’s vaccines undermine immune systems, making the vaxxed more susceptible to disease, and not just the illness called Covid-19, but to disease generally, including cancer, and to all kinds of mischief and mayhem around the organs as well. Now, in the gathering darkness of winter, we’ll see how far this “uptick” goes and whether public opinion will flip over the dastardly trick that’s been played on it.
Everything your government tells you these days is a lie — the old epigram goes — including “and” and “the”. The chief victim of that inexhaustible deceit is America’s rule-of-law. Case in point, the shenanigans in the DC District federal court last week in the action known as Page v. Comey et al. (basically the whole FBI and DOJ). This is Carter Page’s lawsuit over the phony FISA court warrants sworn against him in the attempt to use the “three-hop rule” to surveil everybody in the 2016 Trump campaign, and defame Mr. Page in the process.
A judge named Rudolph (“Rudy”) Contreras, who happens to be the current Presiding Judge of the FISA court, also happens to be the DC District’s Chair of the Calendar and Case Management Committee, meaning he gets to pick which DC District judge will sit for Page v. Comey. Rudy picked Judge James Boasberg. Judge Boasberg sat on the very FISA court that approved the RussiaGate warrants. He also presided over the trial of FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, convicted of altering documents to conceal Carter Page’s prior service to the CIA. Say, what…? Boasberg is supposed to adjudicate matters around the very proceedings he was involved in?
Rudy Contreras was the judge who accepted General Michael Flynn’s 2017 guilty plea (for speaking with the Russian Ambassador in his capacity as designated National Security Advisor to the President-elect) after Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe threatened criminal referrals against General Flynn’s son on a confabulated FARA (Foreign Agents Registration Act) rap. Rudy Contreras also happened to be a boon companion of FBI officer Peter Strzok, who headed the phony-baloney Crossfire-Hurricane counter-intel operation, based on the Hillary Clinton-sponsored Steele Dossier. Judge Contreras coordinated FISA court filings with Mr. Strzok — making him party to a seditious conspiracy to disable the chief executive, a matter currently being reviewed by Special Counsel John Durham.
Notice how all these people are still in office, and still involved in nefarious cases they played roles in. Anyway, Judge Contreras’s appointment of Boasberg sent up such an odium that he had to rescind it, replacing him with DC District Judge Timothy Kelly, who recused himself hours later, with the case then booted again to DC District Judge Dabney Friedrich, a Trump appointee. The lingering question: where is Chief Justice John Roberts in this farce? Justice Roberts is supposed to be the ultimate supervisor of the federal court system, and especially these parts of it: the DC District and the FISC. Does he really want it to look this bad? Like a poor imitation of the Soviet Russian courts in the 1930s?
Attorney General Merrick Garland apparently wants to go full Soviet at his end of the justice system. Earlier this month, he told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the DOJ would not use counter-terrorism statutes to target disgruntled parents in school board meetings as domestic terrorists. Then a DOJ whistleblower produced internal department emails showing that the DOJ and the FBI did exactly that. Where’s the contempt citation against AG Garland?
Next was the FBI’s invasion of Project Veritas chief James O’Keefe’s home in a case involving “Joe Biden’s” daughter Ashley Biden’s personal diary, which Project Veritas was alleged to be holding, and which supposedly contained some entries about sketchy father-and-daughter showers together. Bad optics for a floundering president already suspected of being a bit free with his touch, shall we say, around the little ones (not to mention the florid pornographic exploits self-documented by son Hunter).
Instead of defending Mr. O’Keefe’s first amendment rights, the legacy news media piled on him as “not a real journalist.” More to the point, though, within hours of the FBI confiscating Mr. O’Keefe’s cell phones and other devices, Mr. O’Keefe’s private communications with his attorneys turned up in the hands of The New York Times, which published some of the material. Of course, James O’Keefe is in the middle of a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times. And wasn’t it a fortuitous coincidence that the newspaper came into possession of their adversary’s privileged information? The thing is (of course), that the info could have only been provided to The Times by one possible source: the FBI, investigative arm of the DOJ. Days later, Judge Analisa Torres from the Southern District of New York ordered the FBI to stop extracting data from the phones — as if they hadn’t already downloaded every last shred and made a zillion copies. Where is the DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz? Where is the DOJ’s ethics office? Why has the leaker not been outed and arraigned?
Why? Because we are ever deeper into the age of Anything Goes and Nothing Matters. Every institution in American life is failing. The people are finally starting to see how this works at the same time that they see how the vaccines work. It did not have to be, but we allowed it to get this far, and now so many things are broken that there is barely any honorable and effective authority left. As the long night falls over the land, we survey the terrain and see fiery eruptions on the horizon. Is that the flashing of chaos in the distance? In the darkness it’s hard to tell how close it may be."
"Insiders Just Exposed That A Terrifying Stock Market Crash Forecast Is About To Come True"
Full screen recommended.
"Insiders Just Exposed That A Terrifying Stock
Market Crash Forecast Is About To Come True"
by Epic Economist
"The stock market is doing some really crazy things. Over the past 18 months, we have seen major swings in both directions. Now, it looks like we're at the peak of the frenzy, which probably will be short-lived as interest rates start to rise in the coming weeks. If nothing else emerges to bursts this bubble first, an aggressive hike in rates will definitely calm down this madness. In fact, as valuations reach the highest levels in history, the worst stock market forecast of all time is about to come true. Market watchers have been saying that the tech bubble could lead the whole market to tank in the blink of an eye, which makes the situation particularly precarious.
At the current stage, it's not just technology stocks that are in bubble territory. Communication services, consumer discretionary, property, and cryptocurrencies are in a huge bubble just as well. And the fact that all the other areas of the market are affected by these stocks shows that every single asset class has also been sucked into this bubble that is now about to burst. That's what one of Wall Street's most experienced investors has recently warned.
Alasdair Nairn, a historian and professional investor, predicted both the dot.com and sub-prime collapses. Now, he is telling us that we are on the brink of something even bigger. In his new book, titled ‘The End of the Everything Bubble,’ he warns that we are living in “a period of deadly excess” and a financial catastrophe is closer than most people think."Markets may appear to be going up and up, but they have got perilously ahead of themselves," Nairn highlights. “Danger lies in every single investable asset class. What some have called the ‘Everything Bubble’ has inflated to unprecedented proportions.”
The truth is that the recent rally is more problematic than ever before. Stock prices aren't growing because of improving fundamentals but because of investors' additional risk-taking. That leaves the current market growth on very suspicious and fragile ground. Given that the growth rate for earnings next year is dropping and has been steadily falling, the NASDAQ gains are unlikely to hold. About a week ago, the electric vehicle manufacturer Rivian, went public and rapidly became the second-highest valued automaker in the US and the third-most valuable automaker in the world, having accumulated more than $100m by the end of its first day of trading.
However, when the company started to burn billions of dollars in cash to ramp up manufacturing capacity to meet its target of making 1 million vehicles a year, investors started to question what Rivian's profit margins would look like after the company begins to deliver vehicles to customers. That tiny shred of mistrust led Rivian's shares to crash on Wednesday, blowing some air out of the tech bubble.
Rivian's collapse exposes how fast a downturn can occur. With so much uncertainty, investors must brace for a wild ride in the coming days. Even the investor made famous by The Big Short has sounded the alarm about a looming stock market crash sparked by the tech sector. In a recent tweetstorm, Michael Burry warned this week that Tesla CEO Elon Musk is likely selling the company's stocks to cover personal debts and warned that the automaker can lose up to 90 percent of its value in the coming stock market crash, just as happened to many firms during the burst of the dot-com bubble.
Burry outlined that stock market speculation is at levels not seen since before the 1929 crash, and assets today are far more overvalued than before the dot-com bubble burst. On the same theme, the legendary investor Jeremy Grantham stressed in a new Bloomberg interview released this week that although Tesla is at the top of the tech bubble, the company has zero chance of meeting its shareholders' massive expectations, and when they realize that, it's game over. The investor also sounded the inflation alarm, slamming the Federal Reserve for fueling the bubble, and reiterated his warning that the worst market crash in US history is right at the corner: "When the decline comes, it will perhaps be bigger and better than anything previously in US history," he said.
The nation’s easy money policies are set to expire in a few short weeks, and if a black swan event doesn't emerge to catalyze an unexpected meltdown, that alone will be enough to deleverage stocks and set off an 80, or even 90 percent drop, from today's heights. The current rally will rapidly burn and stockholders will find themselves dealing with a rug-pulling flash stock market crash before year's end. The more the bubble inflates, the higher the risks get. And, at this point, you cannot say you haven't been warned."
Gregory Mannarino, "Expect Orwellian Control, New Lockdowns, Blistering Inflation, And Worsening Market Distortions"
Gregory Mannarino, PM 11/19/21:
"Expect Orwellian Control, New Lockdowns,
Blistering Inflation, And Worsening Market Distortions"
Musical Interlude: 2002, "Chrysalis"
Full screen recommended.
2002, "Chrysalis"
“Oceans of strings and choirs, flutes and keyboards lift us
out of the trials and tribulations of our daily lives as though
we were on a ship with gossamer sails, sailing on the moonlight.”
– Steve Ryals
"A Look to the Heavens"
“In visible light the stars have been removed from this narrow-band image of NGC 281, a star forming region some 10,000 light-years away toward the constellation Cassiopeia. Stars were digitally added back to the resulting starless image though. But instead of using visible light image data, the stars were added with X-ray data (in purple) from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and infrared data (in red) from the Spitzer Space Telescope.
The merged multiwavelength view reveals a multitude of stars in the region's embedded star cluster IC 1590. The young stars are normally hidden in visible light images by the natal cloud's gas and obscuring dust. Also known to backyard astro-imagers as the Pacman Nebula for its overall appearance in visible light, NGC 281 is about 80 light-years across.”
"Who Could Have Seen That Coming?"
"Who Could Have Seen That Coming?"
by Bill Bonner
"Fish gotta swim,
Birds gotta fly,
Rain gotta fall,
And it’s gotta go somewhere..."
– Bill Bonner, with apologies to the writers of "Showboat"
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND – "When you see someone setting fire to a federal building, shouldn’t you say something? And what if the matches and gas can are in your own hands? The Federal Reserve printed up nearly 5 trillion brand-spanking-new dollars between August 2019 and today. Surely, there must have been at least one alert economist among the 1,000 Ph.D.s on the Fed’s payroll who noticed that they were about to cause the whole economy to go up in flames.
But what was he thinking? Was he thinking at all? This was classic monetary inflation on an unprecedented scale. Never before had any government “printed” so much money in such a short period of time. But nowhere in the history of the economics profession is there an instance where such prodigious effort on the part of the money-printers led to genuine prosperity. Instead, many centuries of history show us that monetary inflation leads to price inflation… which then leads to bubbles and busts… confusion… and finger-pointing. And if it’s not stopped, it can lead to hyperinflation, depression, hunger, poverty, riots, and revolution.
Obvious Question: The finger-pointing was on display on the front page of The Wall Street Journal yesterday: "President Calls for Inquiry Into Price of Gas." Biden, in letter, alleges wrongdoing by energy firms. There will be a lot more finger-pointing… as the real culprits try to divert attention from themselves. But… our aforementioned Ph.D… Shouldn’t he have asked the obvious question back when it started?
“Uh… Chairman Powell… I hate to be a Debbie Downer… but we’re, like, pumping $5 trillion into the economy. That’s, like, nearly a quarter of annual GDP. Uh… What is supposed to happen? I mean, isn’t it likely to cause some… well… distortions?”
Fish gotta swim. And dollars gotta buy something. And therein hangs the answer to the one question Fed economists should have asked… along with another they should be asking now.
Obvious Outcome: Supply chain disruptions were relatively unknown back in March 2020, when the spree of money-printing began in earnest. Now, they’re as common as strip malls. How came they to be?
When the offices, restaurants, and bars closed, people turned to their home computers… found that they had stimmy money from the feds in their accounts… and determined to spend it. Some ordered consumer goods. But since America doesn’t make much anymore, these had to be shipped from the other side of the world. And in a few months, the ships were backing up in the harbors… docks were stacked with containers… and trucks labored night and day to deliver them to every Middlesex, village, and town in the country. Hence, the “supply chain disruptions.” It seems so obvious, now. Shouldn’t our man at the Fed have seen it coming?
Deadly Combination: Then, shipping rates soared. Trucking costs, too. And so did prices on some items that were in short supply… as well as on other items that were plentiful. Milk, eggs, bacon… gasoline… houses. The supply of houses doesn’t change much, month to month. But by September of this year, new house prices in the U.S. were up 18% over the year before. And as prices bubble up… so do mortgage rates, a deadly combination for new homeowners.
Prices for investment assets also caught a bid. Zombie companies, meme stocks, NFTs, cryptos, options – people who didn’t know an option from a hole in the ground a year ago are now seasoned “day traders.” Tesla (TSLA) has doubled since this time last year. Grant’s Interest Rate Observer tells us that on November 5, the price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of the S&P 500 went over 40 for the first time in 21 years. And at the beginning of the month, Grant’s reported that there were some 528 special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) with blank checks, looking for acquisitions. Wasn’t that, too, completely predictable? After all, the money had to go somewhere. Shouldn’t our man at the Fed have said something?
Big Quit: Perhaps less foreseeable… but with so much liquidity weeping from the clouds, many people just decided to stay home permanently. In what came to be known as the Great Resignation, some 4.4 million workers went AWOL, in September alone. And then businesses, eager to meet the increased demand, found they had to pay higher wages and benefits to keep their workers happy. Our friend David Stockman tells us that the latest Employment Cost Index figures show labor costs rising at a 6% annualized rate.
Compensating workers is the number one expense of U.S. industry. So, any rise in labor costs is important… and must be passed along. It is also the most “sticky” of cost increases. Prices for raw materials may go up and down, but once an employee gets a raise, it is hard to take it back; there’s nothing “transitory” about it.
Benefit of Hindsight: And thus it was that prices rose… not for any mysterious reason, but for an obvious one – people were buying stuff. But not with real money that they earned (which would have increased the supply of goods and services as well as the demand for them). They were spending fake money delivered unto them by the Fed.
It would have taken years of advanced study… and perhaps at least a master’s degree in economics… not to see it coming. And so, we’ll prompt our Ph.D. friend at the Fed. Here’s a question to put to your comrades now: “Well, what did you expect?”
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