Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
Basing one’s decisions on analogs from the past is entering a fool’s paradise of folly.
Like addicts who cannot control their cravings, financial analysts cannot stop themselves from seeking some analog situation in the past which will clarify the swirling chaos in their crystal balls. So we’ve been swamped with charts overlaying recent stock market action over 1929, 1987, 2000 and 2008–though the closest analogy is actually the Oil Shock of 1973, an exogenous shock to a weakening, fragile economy.
But the reality is there is no analogous situation in the past to the present, and so all the predictions based on past performance will be misleading. The chartists and analysts claim that all markets act on the same patterns, which are reflections of human nature, and so seeking correlations of volatility and valuation that “worked” in the past will work in 2020.
Does anyone really believe the correlations of the past decade or two are high-probability predictors of the future as the entire brittle construct of fictional capital and extremes of globalization and financialization all unravel at once?
Here are a few of the many consequential differences between all previous recessions and the current situation:
1. Households have never been so dependent on debt as a substitute for stagnating wages.
2. Real earnings (adjusted for inflation) have nevet been so stagnant for the bottom 90% for so long.
3. Corporations have never been so dependent on debt (selling bonds or taking on loans) to fund money-losing operations (see Netflix) or stock buybacks designed to saddle the company with debt service expenses to enrich insiders.
4. The stock market has never been so dependent on what amounts to fraud–stock buybacks–to push valuations higher.
5. The economy has never been so dependent on absurdly overvalued stock valuations to prop up pension funds and the spending of the top 10% who own 85% of all stocks, i.e. “the wealth effect.”
6. The economy and the stock market have never been so dependent on central bank free money for financiers and corporations, money creation for the few at the expense of the many, what amounts to an embezzlement scheme.
7. Federal statistics have never been so gamed, rigged or distorted to support a neofeudal agenda of claiming a level of wide-spread prosperity that is entirely fictitious.
8. Major sectors of the economy have never been such rackets, i.e. cartels and quasi-monopolies that use obscure pricing and manipulation of government mandates to maximize profits while the quality and quantity of the goods and services they produce declines.
9. The economy has never been in such thrall to sociopaths who have mastered the exploitation of the letter of the law while completely overturning the spirit of the law.
10. Households and companies have never been so dependent on “free money” gained from asset appreciation based on speculation, not an actual increase in productivity or value.
11. The ascendancy of self-interest as the one organizing directive in politics and finance has never been so complete, and the resulting moral rot never more pervasive.
12. The dependence on fictitious capital masquerading as “wealth” has never been greater.
13. The dependence on simulacra, simulations and false fronts to hide the decay of trust, credibility, transparency and accountability has never been so pervasive and complete.
14. The corrupt linkage of political power, media ownership, “national security” agencies and corporate power has never been so widely accepted as “normal” and “unavoidable.”
15. Primary institutions such as higher education, healthcare and national defense have never been so dysfunctional, ineffective, sclerotic, resistant to reform or costly.
16. The economy has never been so dependent on constant central bank manipulation of the stock and housing markets.
17. The economy has never been so fragile or brittle, and so dependent on convenient fictions to stave off a crash in asset valuations.
18. Never before in U.S. history have the most valuable corporations all been engaged in selling goods and services that actively reduce productivity and human happiness.
This is only a selection of a much longer list, but you get the idea. Basing one’s decisions on analogs from the past is entering a fool’s paradise of folly.
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I’m just going to come out and say it. The real root cause of all the current problems is that there are just too many damn people. This isn’t so much as an environmental consequence position, but one of political sociology because as the population grows and grows and everyone on the planet is crowded together more densely then the ease at which the population can be controlled by totalitarian means increases. In the end, it is impossible to have a “free” society with ever increasing population. To regain basic freedoms and liberties, a population has to DECREASE, thus increasing the space between the citizens and those who aspire to “lead” them.
In my assessment, any true liberty movement should first and foremost be a mass depopulation movement. The fewer people there are, the fewer the ranks of potential petty dictators and the harder it is to get to those potential subjects. The main questions then becomes, “Who gets depopulated?” and “Who decides who gets depopulated?” The alternative is ever increasing totalitarian control of an expanding population and that control is required to keep the population in check as it becomes more and more dissatisfied with its declining quality of life (environment, economy, mental health etc).
Also, decreasing a population would also decrease the social complexity and remove much of the bullshit we have built up in the last 50 years – fiat fraud, government fraud, the parasitic nature of all our social institutions. So any return to “freedom” can really only come about from mass depopulation and a multiple order of magnitude decrease in societal complexity.
When one thinks about it, the golden age of Man was about 7,000 years ago. Technology was advanced enough to give us some comforts and leisure which we still had to work towards, but was not so advanced that it could enslave the population. The strong survived, the weak died off, the cowardly were of no consequence as they lacked the advanced technology that could “equalize” them to the strong. The world was as it was meant to be.
You are wrong. YOU are being brainwashed by the likes of Bill Gates and other supranational types who WANT you to think that YOU ((WE)) are the “problem”.
Those “at the top” get “richer and richer” while “the rest of us” are forced to subsist on less and less. Easy “credit” (actually debt to “those at the top”) ameliorates the “problem” to a degree. However, there comes a point in which “those at the top” see their “ill-gotten gains” diminish, hence the push for “depopulation” disguised as “population control”. Our earth is quite capable of taking care of everyone on it if “those at the top” are “dethroned”.
The world “benchmark” for increasing wages of lower and middle classes occurred around 1970. It was all downhill from there; “those at the top” seeing real material gains while “the rest of us” slid backwards. As I previously stated, the availability of “easy credit” masked and still masks the real state of our economy.
If supranationalists get their way, vaccines will be used as a weapon in which to “cull” the population (that means US). Under the guise of “pandemics” (actually “plandemics”), vaccine poisons will be forced on the population.
A good analogy was in the movie “Elysium” in which the “super rich supranationalists” lived in luxury on a space station, while “everyone else” lived in abject poverty.
I hate Bill Gates. He’s a fucktard that wants to decrease population but keep the societal complexities in place (i.e., technology) that enable tyranny.
How free do you think you can be when there are a billion people in the USA? And as technology breaks down as societal complexity is reduced, the likes of assholes like Bill Gates to dictate anything to anybody disappears.
No, I’m not brain washed. I’m thinking very rationally. The problem points you make are based on extreme societal complexity – like a space station. Come on dude.
Murdering the human population to satisfy the whims of those at the top? Friend, you need mental help.
I didn’t write go murder billions – I wrote one can’t have a huge population and be free of tyranny. So all who decry depopulation also must accept increasing tyranny and decreasing quality of life. You can’t have both freedom and zillions of people as the logistic limit won’t allow it.
So, if you choose Keep on Truckin’ with regards to population growth, you should come to expect less and less civil liberty. These are mutually exclusive.
And again, I hate Bill Gates, George Soros, all .gov etc. I don’t espouse their agenda.
Okay.
You go first.
So if you have 5 lions and 10 gazelles, it would change things if you only had 1 lion and two gazelles? ( I know, I’m not Noah) So maybe the population numbers of the world aren’t the problem.
Getting away from that analogy, It’s been proven that in any system, a hierarchy of command and control will be created. It’s who fills those positions that is the problem. Most people like other people to fill those positions so they can just relax with the knowledge that someone else is doing the hard work and thus have resolved themselves to just going along to get along. And now we see that that doesn’t work out well in the long run. The hard work is for everyone always. But in defense of your theory, at this time manufacturing guillotines instead of ventilators could solve the overpopulation problem you speak of and the other problem. So to make things better, a to give the people more room to breathe, maybe it’s time for the lazy skaters to get back to work. And at this time it’s important for them to get busy and to understand that it’s going to be get back to work right now or else.
5 lions and 5 gazelles down to 1 lion and 1 gazelle – that changes nothing. If you had 7 billion lions and 7 billion gazelles all in the same cage, then well yes that would change things.
Smrt.
Guillotines are a federal make work program and bound to fail. Bullets are cheaper and Stoning cheaper still.
But guillotines take a group effort and also leave a lasting impression. You know, they’re more co-op like and not to be confused with something that could be confused as just personal.
ICE-9, a very thought-provoking look at one of the bad aspects of overpopulation and I agree with you.
More people mean more rules. More rules mean more assholes to enforce the rules. Soon rules and assholes dictate everything.
I think we are there.
It’s the unspeakable solution. And, it must go hand in hand with a technical devolution. The current roster of Philosopher Kings want the depopulation but want to also keep control of all the technological instruments of tyranny as well.
CHS bullet points hit the blood-red center of the target.
The only outcomes from the bizarre set of circumstance that is laid out before us is either the NWO in all of its brutality; pandemonium. or the return of Christ.
Anyway one looks – no more muddle; things are going to get very spicy.
Since 2008-9 banking crisis, I have always been amazed at how doom porn articles always start off with “we are in uncharted territory,” then ends up comparing the current graph with one from 5, 10 or 50 years ago.
Uncharted means there is nothing to compare this current boogaloo to.
Finally someone gets it right.
I think if we, as individuals, took care of #1 the rest would sort themselves out pretty quick. We Americans buy things we cannot afford on credit to impress people we don’t know or don’t like. I am not rich by any means but since my household took care of #1 and our lives have gotten immeasurably better.
Maybe taking care of #1 means lowering one’s expectations. No you don’t “deserve it” if you have to finance it. That takes most of the fake out of the markets in a hurry. But, we’re addicted to easy money even more so than opioids but the end result is always the same for both.
Re-phrased for self improvement #1 becomes “You can’t afford to have debt.” Insert a friend #1.5 “You can’t afford to commute.” Commuting to a better job to pay for the better car you need to get there is a lose-lose.
19. Never has the United States had so many people incapable of being self reliant.
20. Never before have so many people in the USA felt entitled to free shit.
This is going to be much worse than any of the depressions mentioned above. Got guns? Go long lead.
It’s not that there’s some magical number for “too many” (although there is Dunbar’s number which suggests the max. number for effective organization). It’s that (along with all the population-induced pollution and stripping of resources like fisheries) we are facing NET ENERGY DECLINE PER CAPITA. If you have a thousand people or a billion people, declining net energy per capita is going to cause all kinds of pain and disarray.
We need a lot of SURPLUS energy to run civilizations of any size. SURPLUS energy is falling off the proverbial cliff.
On EROEI… this interview with Charles Hall is very good (21 min)
I think it is from 2012.