Dear America: you can’t have an economy based on narcissism, good intentions, marketing, catering to rich bored people, really excellent webpages, and selling underpants on the internet. I’m afraid you’ll have to make something of value… I may as well prepare my emigration papers to Singapore, stat. Perhaps I can get a job for their Sovereign Wealth Fund. My job would be simple: buy stocks in nations which make stuff using paper money you get from nations whose main exports are Ivy League educated swindlers trying to sell baloney as a service.
Scott Locklin: “In which I stomp on some of our glorious “green shoots” (brilliant and insightful as always)
Interesting combination of news headline and banner ad.
Today we still have the same amount of debt, but it belongs to governments. Normally debt would get destroyed and turn to air. Debt is a mistake between lender and borrower, and both should suffer. But the government is socializing all these losses by transforming them into liabilities for your children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. What is the effect? The doctor has shown up and relieved the patient’s symptoms – and transformed the tumour into a metastatic tumour. We still have the same disease. We still have too much debt, too many big banks, too much state sponsorship of risk-taking. And now we have six million more Americans who are unemployed – a lot more than that if you count hidden unemployment.
Nassim Taleb, “We still have the same disease”
