Pay no attention to the craziness that’s rampant in our society. So we’re told by the oligarchs who are making out nicely during these perilous times. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:
Extremes keep getting more extreme, but for those at the top of the heap, it’s all fine. For everyone else slipping down the ladder, all that FINE adds up to Fragile, Insecure, Nonsensical, Expensive.
Readers occasionally point out I’ve been predicting that unsustainable extremes will eventually unravel for 10+ years, yet everything’s still fine. Yes, everything’s still fine, maybe even peachy, but perhaps we should describe “fine” in light of the policy extremes that keep getting more extreme to keep all that fineness duct-taped together.
How about this for FINE:
Fragile
Insecure
Nonsensical
Expensive
To assess just how extreme things have become beneath the placid surface of peachiness, let’s look at federal debt, the Fed balance sheet and Household Net Worth in relation to inflation and GDP, two standard measures of growth.
All else being equal, most economic-financial metrics will roughly track either inflation or Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the broad measure of the economy’s activity / expansion /contraction.
In other words, one way to identify extremes is to look for metrics that are way out of line with GDP and inflation. Consider federal debt as an example. We can be forgiven for assuming federal borrowing would more or less track the expansion of GDP.
