If weirdness persists long enough, it starts to look normal. There’s been so much weirdness since the turn of the century, we’ve become accustomed to it. However, Charles Hugh Smith calls it what it is: abnormal and dangerous. From Smith at oftwominds.com:
Is there anyone on the planet who’s actually stupid enough to believe these New Normal charts are healthy and sustainable?
Anyone questioning the sustainability and rightness of The New Normal is immediately attacked by the mainstream-media defenders of the crumbling status quo. Not only is everything that broke in 2008 fixed, everything’s going great globally, and anyone who dares question this narrative in a tin-foil hat conspiracy nut or simply an annoyingly doom-and-gloomer who recalcitrantly refuses to accept the positive glories of official statistics: low unemployment, rising valuations of stock market Unicorns, etc.
But the New Normal is anything but normal; all the readings of artificial life-support and manipulation are off the charts. If the New Normal were indeed a return to normalcy, we’d see a rapid and sustained decline in official life-support of the economy.
Instead, we see official life-support efforts rising to new and dangerous levels.The only reason stocks are at nose-bleed valuations globally is massive, sustained intervention on multiple levels.
We also see increasing dependence on debt to sustain increasingly weak growth. The New Normal is all about diminishing returns on additional debt.
The New Normal is also about the loss of institutional credibility. The Federal Reserve denies it makes policy decisions based on the stock market, but as soon as stocks start tumbling, the Fed’s leadership hits the airwaves with a media blitzkrieg, frantically assuring the world that the Fed will do “whatever it takes” to keep stocks at absurdly overvalued levels forever.
It once cost the equivalent of a new auto to attend a highly regarded public university. Now they cost the equivalent of a new house–and a mansion at that. In the pre-New Normal world of academia, the highest paid employees were senior professors (other than the university president).
Now under-assistant deans are paid $250,000 each while new tenured professors scrape by on $75,000, and most of the teaching (the actual purpose of the university, ahem) is done by academic serfs paid $35,000 to $45,000 a year, with few benefits and no pensions. (A fancy title masks the serfdom: adjunct professors.)
Meanwhile, the quality and value of the education has reached such low levels, a large percentage of student debt-serfs gain no real knowledge and many don’t even graduate.
Here’s how all those billions of dollars in administrative salaries get paid: with debt enabled by the federal government. If this looks remotely sustainable or healthy to you, please get your eyes checked immediately:
To continue reading: Eight “New Normal” Charts That Are Insanely Abnormal–and Dangerous
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