It's that time of year when we are updated on how many synthetic billionaires were minted by central banks in the past year. We are informed that the best way to solve exploding global mass poverty is to inflate the wealth of the ultra wealthy.
You have to be a chimpanzee to believe it.
"A record 493 people joined Forbes’ World’s Billionaires list this year—meaning the world on average gained a new billionaire every 17 hours"
"Jackpot"
One thing all of Wall Street's financial "innovations" have in common is that the insider owners of financial assets benefit at the expense of the general public. Whether we are talking about stock buyback cashouts, over-priced IPOs, or fraudulent SPACs - this era's stock market version of subprime mortgages. Wall Street couldn't survive if they couldn't sell packaged crap into public markets.
And for that to work, they need mass deception. When corporations eliminated company pensions they adopted the do-it-yourself retirement plan. Whereas previously professional money managers managed pension money, now everyone regardless of their financial education manages their own retirement. It's a con man's paradise. And at the center of it is the insider cash out scheme known as the stock market.
Over the past decades the stock market has eclipsed the shriveled economy in terms of the public's perception of national prosperity. Since 2008, that trend has gone into overdrive as the moribund economy was stuck in low gear and the only perceived "upside" came from financial markets. The fact that stocks were benefiting at the expense of the economy never came into question. Instant gratification became more important than sustainable long-term wealth.
We can blame central banks, billionaires, and all of the other "elites" for this mass deception. But make no mistake, the aging public is fully bought into this delusion now. The elderly take their income primarily from capital markets and for this super bubble to end now and expose the underlying economic fraud would be quite devastating. This is PEAK Baby Boomer retirement, hence it must also be peak delusion.
So it is that under the rules of Japanification, today's failed economists and failed policy-makers can kick the can down the road over and over again without any perceived consequence.
The price that is paid however is in the fact that each recovery becomes weaker and weaker. Which means the divergence between asset prices and the economy grows larger and larger. Today's Madoff-acolyte central bankers can only "save" the bubble by making it bigger.
On the credit side it gets even riskier. As global debt explodes, absent deleveraging, the economic speed limit must go lower and lower. What only a decade ago was considered a crisis level floor for interest rates is now considered a crisis-level ceiling for interest rates. Therefore, it's very useful that today's financial con artists have trained the chimpanzee public to believe that the slightest increase in "prices" aka. wages, portends instant hyperinflation. We are slaves to the bond market now, and the entire financial class questions none of it.
If all of this sounds desperately stupid, it's because it is.
Make no mistake every single economist and policy-maker who does not question this level of deception now, will have ZERO credibility in the near future. Especially when the sheeple realize today's "experts" specialize in getting us into poverty, not out of it.
And then we will learn that there are no developed economies anymore, there are only developing economies now.
