Methinks he underestimates their influence . . .

 First, the fiat age has enabled economies large and small, countries near and far, to paper over their problems with cash. . . .

Second, everyone—and I mean everyone—is doing it.  The only systems in existence today that are not expanding their money supply are those that have consciously chosen to forego economic growth in favor of price stability. . . .

But it is China, where monetary expansion is the standard operating procedure for everything, that has truly broken the bank.  Since 2007—the year everyone started talking about the Chinese taking over the planet—the supply of yuan has increased by more than eight hundred percent. . . .The Chinese economy, even by the boasts of the most ultranationalist of Chinese, is still significantly smaller than the American economy, and yet the Chinese money supply has been larger than America's for a decade—often twice as big.  So of course the yuan is a store of value for no one.  Capital flight out of China to the U. S. dollar network regularly tops $1 trillion annually.

     China's financial system, paired with its terminal demographics, condemns it to not being consumption-led, or even export-led, but lending-led.  That makes China vulnerable to any development anywhere in the world that might impinge raw material supply, energy supply, or export routes—developments Beijing cannot influence, much less control.  China has been on this path to destruction for nearly a half century.  This is not the sort of iceberg-on-the-horizon disaster that any tightly controlled, forward-thinking, competently led government should fall prey to.

-Peter Zeihan, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

Profligacy............

 Don't think for a moment that such profligacy in the United States is limited to finance, real estate, and energy.  The last American president to even pretend to care about fiscal prudence was Bill Clinton, a dude not known for . . . prudence.  On his watch, the U. S. government did indeed balance the federal budget.  Then along came George W, Bush, who ran some the  largest deficits since World War II.  His successor, Barack Obama, doubled those deficits.  The next guy, Donald Trump, doubled them again.  At the time of this writing, in early 2022, the next dude in line, Joe Biden, bet his political life on multiple spending plans that if enacted would double those deficits again.

-Peter Zeihan, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning:  Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

Bagehot gets one wrong......................

 In the fall of 1862, he penned this for the Economist:

that the independence of the Southern Confederacy is a certain fact if not a fait accompli; that Jefferson Davis and his coadjutors have made the Confederacy a nation; that there is not the slightest prospect of their subjugation or forcible re-annexation; and that both by the resolution they have shown, the strength of they have put forth, and the victories they have won, they have shown that they can earn, if they have not yet fully earned the right to be admitted into the society of the world as a substantive and sovereign state.

-James Grant, Bagehot, The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian

How good friends discuss politics................

This one has really aged well. James Spader and William Shatner calmly discuss presidential politics, all without reloading:

 

a wider horizon...............

      In Ecclesiastes we read, "He hath made every thing beautiful in his time; also he hath set the world in their heart" (3:11).  The Revised Standard Version says, ". . . he has put eternity into man's mind."  These words give us a valuable message in these days of stress and strain, of rush and turmoil, when part of the difficulty is that the horizon seems so near to us.  However, a horizon is only the limit of our sight.  This little phrase from Ecclesiastes is like a  hill which we may climb so that we may see a wider horizon.

-Leslie Weatherhead, Steady in an Unsteady World

The gold in green....................

 The ruling classes of a fading West are determined to save the planet by immiserating their fellow citizens. Their agenda is expected to cost the world $6 trillion per year for the next 30 years. Meanwhile, they will get to harvest massive green subsidies and live like Renaissance potentates.

-Joel Kotkin, as cut-and-pasted from here

be careful what you wish for...........

. . . the very government programs that purported to “address” inequality, through higher taxes and constantly expanding regulation have throttled the increases in prosperity . . .

-Michael Munger, from here

learned a new word today.............

 The concept of iatrogenesis, native to medicine, describes misfortunes that would not occur but for one’s interaction with medicine itself. For example, the case of COVID you catch in the doctor’s waiting room or the elective surgery that impinges on a vein, which throws a clot, causing a stroke. Shockingly, medical iatrogenesis is the fifth leading cause of death worldwide.

Journalism’s iatrogenic damage may be less dramatic, but it is surely more pervasive because there is no escape from exposure. Avoid consuming news and you still will be passively subject to the media’s effect on your environment.

-Steve Salerno, as culled from this post

one of the great achievements.........

      During the early years of the automobile industry, the immediate goal of the engineers and inventors was simply reliability—to get a car to go somewhere and come back under its own power.  Many bright automotive ideas ended with a horse, a towline, and laughter.  Although progress was expensive, American motorists cheerfully paid the bills for it.  In their enthusiasm for individual transportation, they bought cars, reliable or unreliable, and thus provided the source of a substantial portion of the risk capital for experiment and production.  Not many industries have been so well favored by their customers.  In twenty years the reliability of the motorcar in relation to the street and road conditions of the time was pretty well established.  Individual mechanized transportation, one of the great achievements in the progress of mankind, was a commonplace fact of life, and everyone could enjoy it.

-Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., My Years With General Motors

Challenges......................

 James Franklin did not behave as most colonial printers did.  When he decided to start his own paper, he was definitely not publishing it by authority.  In fact, the New England Courant began by attacking the Boston establishment, in particular the program of inoculating people for smallpox that was being promoted by the Puritan ministers Cotton Mather and his father.  When the inoculation debate died down, the paper turned to satirizing other subjects of Boston interest, including pretended learning and religious hypocrisy, some of which provoked the Mathers into replies.  Eager to try his own hand at satire, young Benjamin in 1722 submitted some essays to his brother's newspaper under the name of Silence Dogood,  a play on Cotton Mather's Essays to Do Good, the name usually given to the minister's Bonifacius, published in 1710.  For a sixteen-year-old boy to assume the persona of a middle-aged woman was a daunting challenge, and young Franklin took "exquisite Pleasure" in fooling his brother and others into thinking that only "Men of some Character among us for Learning and Ingenuity" could have written the newspaper pieces.

-Gordon S. Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin

On the question of questions.....

 The question, “Why don’t you agree with me?” can have infinite answers.

But usually a better question is, “What have you experienced that I haven’t that makes you believe what you do? And would I think about the world like you do if I experienced what you have?”

-Morgan Housel, from here

Big Tech is not our friend.............

Why have IT improvements failed to radiate through the broader economy? There are many possible explanations, but the transformation of once-disruptive tech companies into rent-seeking monopolies is surely an important one. The monopolization of information technology arises from the nature of the technology itself: so-called network effects make it convenient to have one venue on which to post political comments and cat pictures, one provider of office software that everyone uses, one giant internet retail marketplace, and so forth. But the fact that technological monopolies have their origin in network effects rather than in the nefarious manipulation of mar­kets does not eliminate the potential for abuse. . . .

Twenty-five years ago, America’s tech companies took risks and disrupted established business models. Today, they are the new utili­ties, earning monopoly rents by controlling markets. Microsoft chased its challengers out of personal computer software; Amazon crushed most of its internet retailing rivals; Apple created a duopoly of hardware and services with its rival Samsung; Google destroyed the commercial prospects of competing search engines; and Facebook, through targeted investments and acquisitions, dominates social media. . . .

 By allowing its tech companies to turn into monopolistic, unregulated utilities, it has high stock prices—for a handful of stocks—and low productivity. U.S. tech companies still innovate, but only where it suits them. Their monopolies for the most part arise from the logic of the marketplace, rather than nefarious practices, but still do damage, and not only in terms of economics. Facebook and Google capture 70 percent of all digital advertising revenue, for example, crippling America’s independent media, which can’t compete for ad revenue. This in turn strengthens platforms that are increasingly controlling and limiting political speech.

-David P. Goldman, from this essay

But........................

 

via

So noted........................

 It's worth noting that many systems that claim to be socialist in reality are anything but.  The version that most haunts the American Right, for example is the "socialism" of Venezuela.  In Venezuela, socialism is the brand name used by the elite for political cover while they loot everything up to and including things that are literally nailed down, all for their own personal gain.  We should be afraid of it.  But that's not socialism.  That's kleptocracy.  Definitely not a functional -ism.

-Peter Zeihan, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

I knew it........................

 That feeling you have in the pit of your stomach that we're all making up finance as we go?  Listen to that feeling.  It is dead-on.

-Peter Zeihan, The End Of The World Is Just The Beginning: Mapping The Collapse Of Globalization