Missive #63

Read Will Rogers column 88 years ago: April 21, 1935

A riveting exposé of a permanent financial dystopia, its causes, and real-world consequences

It is abundantly clear that our world is divided into two very different economies. The real one, for the average worker, is based on productivity and results. It behaves according to traditional rules of money and economics. The other doesn’t. It is the product of years of loose money, poured by central banks into a system dominated by financial titans. It is powerful enough to send stock markets higher even in the face of a global pandemic and threats of nuclear war.

If you have been keeping up with the economic News as presented by the MainStream Media there is little to be gained by reading this book. The author has VERY liberally quoted from many of those same sources that you have been reading.The author is very much against central banks but generally follows Western government narrative. Seems to think crypos are going to become the new ‘money’. This parting from reality has its roots in an emergency response to the financial crisis of 2008. “Quantitative Easing” injected a vast amount of cash into the economy—especially if you were a major Wall Street bank. What began as a short-term dependency became a habit, then a compulsion, and finally an addiction.    

Nomi Prins relentlessly exposes a world fractured by policies crafted by the largest financial institutions, led by the Federal Reserve, that have supercharged the financial system while selling out regular citizens and leading to social and political reckonings. She uncovers a newly polarized world of the mega rich versus the never rich, the winners and losers of an unprecedented distortion that can never return to “normal.” — Book promo @ goodreads.com

The stock market is not the economy. Most of the population has relatively little or nothing invested in stocks. When the market rises, it does not impact the wallets of the majority. Main Street and smaller local businesses, including local banks, get hurt when large banks decide to restrict access to funding or loans because of market turbulence. From Harding’s “normalcy” campaign through to Trump’s MAGA rallies, it is clear that Main Street trails Wall Street on the way up, but precedes it on the way down. The biggest banks and wealthiest individuals benefit in economic and market boom times, while also strategically benefiting in times of turbulence. — Permanent Distortion

The closing paragraph to a good blog posting by Greer. A lot of other quotable paragraphs with a lot to give you thought.

We are dancing, we Americans, on the brink of a long slippery slope into an unwelcome new reality. I’d encourage my readers in this country and its close allies to brace themselves for a couple of decades of wrenching economic, social, and political turmoil.  Those elsewhere will have an easier time of it, but it’s still going to be a wild ride before the rubble stops bouncing, and new social, economic, and political arrangements get patched together out of the wreckage. — Dancing on the Brink by John Michael Greer