The extent of lies bought and believed right now are both pathetic and lethal. There is an entire media industry built around propagating the fantasy of perpetual financial bailout...
And while that is NOT happening, we are not imagining things - the gunfire IS getting closer. Two thirds of the largest mass shootings in U.S. history took place since 2007.
What do we expect this time when the sheeple realize they've been conned all over again by the same psychopaths as last time?
A society in latent moral collapse has no clue it's in moral collapse. What used to be illegal is now common place. Pump and dump schemes used to be prosecuted by the SEC. Now they're deemed "social investing". The only question regulators had about the Gamestop debacle was why did brokers prevent people from fully participating. Social media has weaponized financial Ponzi schemes against newbie bagholders. Stock buybacks used to be illegal, now they're used to facilitate insider selling on an industrial scale. Buybacks hide collapsing revenues at the end of the cycle by shrinking share count to give the illusion of rising profit. Stock buybacks have weaponized passive indexing against retirement bagholders. Record buybacks did nothing to prevent the worst first half for stocks in 60 years.
The U.S. deficit is now fully considered "GDP". 2022 growth is so far negative while the deficit is almost 5% of GDP. In any other time that would be considered a deep recession.
We've now seen the exact same profiteering take place across EVERY major industry since the pandemic. In each case, temporary supply chain interruptions deplete inventories and lead to a spike in demand. Followed by higher prices and expanded profit margins. And then it all collapses. No one says anything. Economists fear a wage-price spiral when what they should really fear is the wholesale collapse of the middle class. Buried by profiteering in every direction.
Home prices rose the most during the past two years in U.S. history. Auto prices have sky-rocketed 30% in two years. Retail inventories are already piling up and it's only a matter of time before the glut is everywhere.
Like now:
"A gauge of New York state manufacturing activity plunged by the second-most in data back to 2001, with sharp declines in orders and shipments that indicate an abrupt downturn in demand"
"The survey likely shows “that industries extrapolated orders from the Covid period and they ordered too much stuff”
We should fully expect that economic data will "surprise" to the downside from this point forward. Today's pundits have a lethal bias towards optimistic predictions and their audience wouldn't have it any other way. This current belief that the Fed won't over-tighten is a sheer fantasy. The Fed already HAS overtightened. The NAHB states that housing affordability is the worst since 2008. The combination of price increases and rate hikes has caused the financing costs of a new home to TRIPLE since 2020.
Still, for now the lying flows like a river in between collapsing data points. Over on Zerohedge, yet another pundit fears the imminent debasement of the currency. What these fools should really fear is the debasement of humanity into Third World squalor while the dollar is sky-rocketing. To believe in the hyper-inflation argument one must first ignore the past 40 years of deflationary debasement at the hands of Supply Side Ponzinomics. This so-called "model" has imported far too much poverty to lead to inflation. We can be fairly certain that the true MMT experiment won't lead to the largest rise in global billionaire wealth on record.
This continual false optimism is what will make this burial even more lethal. Since the Fed began raising rates in .75% increments, financial conditions have eased as investor complacency has increased. It's the law of too many bailouts.
