"Then they elected a known con man to make them great again, because no one else was up to the task"
COVID exploded the lies of the Globalized Ponzi economy. For several weeks even central banks were on their back foot. The crisis accelerated the wealth inequality that has been growing inexorably since the Global Financial Crisis. However because the distribution of deleterious impacts were the same as always, the warning was ignored. Millions of marginally attached wage slaves entered Third World status in order to further enrich a handful of wealthy billionaires and their Outer Party managerial class.
Instead of heeding the warning, COVID was used as the excuse to rinse and repeat the exact same mistakes of the past. The generally accepted global assumption going into 2021 is that the economy was doing fine up until the pandemic, and once it passes it will be shits and giggles all over again.
Hendry's Iron Law of Disney markets must now be updated from the relatively benign post-2008 version:
"The worse the reality of the economy becomes, the more we take on the reflexive belief in further and dramatic monetary expansion and the more attractive the stock market looks"
To the new post-apocalyptic reality:
"The more people who go under the bus and enter Third World marginal subsistence, the wealthier the oligarchs and their corporate stooges become"
When a bailout goes on too long - over a decade of non-stop monetary bailout in this case - it becomes no longer an act of benevolence, it becomes an act of economic exploitation, which is the juncture we have now reached. Our policy-makers and the establishment who abide this Ponzi model are the sole beneficiaries of this "system". Which is now conveniently guarded by a brainwashed mob of useful idiots in the Republican party - who are convinced that this is the model that made America great in the first place. Too busy watching hot rods and aliens on the History channel to know the difference.
For their part, the economics establishment, which is a colossal human failure on a biblical scale, is no longer capable of acknowledging their role in this disaster. By giving their imprimatur to this human disaster, they have forfeited all future credibility. No surprise, these people are among the prime beneficiaries of this Madoff-inspired economic model.
The reason that 2021 economic predictions are so far off base from reality, is because these people don't acknowledge that the "economy" is now completely broken and hence fully dependent upon continuing fiscal and monetary stimulus eight ball.
Their failed economic models are deflationary. Their lagged economic data is deflationary, their overly-optimistic projections are deflationary, and their stock portfolios will be the prime beneficiaries of their continuous failure. So why change now?
This is the problem with the U.S. economy in a nutshell:
Over the past several decades, Globalization, immigration and outsourcing have collapsed U.S. capacity utilization (see chart below). Underemployment is the greatest crisis of our age, and yet you never hear about it:
"People of post-industrial society change their profession and their workplace often. People have to change professions because professions quickly become outdated. People of post-industrial society thus have many careers in a lifetime. The knowledge of an engineer becomes outdated in ten years. People look more and more for temporary jobs."
Temporary, low-paying, marginally attached gig jobs with non-existent benefits. Sound familiar?
Now, looking at this chart, does anyone really believe that "reflation" is the most likely scenario for 2021?
Not the bond market, that's for sure. Although as we see T-bond shorts have never been more confident:
The worst part of this Third World exploitation scheme is that the sheeple still believe in the American Dream. They still believe that if you work hard and plough your money into stocks, then the dream will become reality. The Japanese learned a long time ago, that a gerontocracy is just one massive inter-generational lie.
The biggest mistake all newbie stock market investors make is trusting facile headlines:
Some think it's "unpatriotic" to bet against the stock market. That being bearish is un-American. I happen to believe that markets that benefit from mass poverty are the real problem.
History will not be kind to those who believe in this Madoff-inspired exploitation scheme.
And no, Mother Nature will not be denied her due by the hairless monkeys doubled down in Trump Casino. She has them right where she wants them.