» Of Two Minds

The essence of debt serfdom is debt rises to compensate for stagnant wages. I often speak of debt serfdom; here it is, captured in a single chart. The basic dynamics are all here, if you read between the lines: 1. Financialization of the U.S. and global economies diverts income to capital and those...

Dissent, feedback, innovation and adaptation are the only sustainable sources of stability, prosperity and well-being. Reader Michael K. recently asked one of the key questions of the next 20 years: I would very much like to learn your thoughts on what careers may be viable for our children. With th...

Debt, risk and employment are in a death-spiral of malinvestment and debt-based consumption. Standard-issue financial pundits (SIFPs) and economists look at debt, risk and the job market as separate issues. No wonder they can’t make sense of our “jobless recovery”: the three are in...

Employment, wages, income and consumption are all in long-term downtrends, and the policy of grandiose stimulus funded by debt has failed spectacularly to reverse these secular trends. Courtesy of frequent contributor Chartist Friend from Pittsburgh, here are four charts of wages, income and consum...

What if housing valuations are in a structural, multi-decade decline? A strong case can be made that the fundamental supports of the housing market– demographics, employment, creditworthiness and income–will not recover for a generation. It can even be argued that housing has lost its s...

The dwindling middle class, squeezed by higher taxes and costs, is losing its political voice. The middle class is doomed by some very basic dynamics. Economic historian David Hackett Fischer laid out the fundamental dynamic in his book The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History. ...

By a number of measures the housing market has not recovered. I asked frequent contributor Chartist Friend from Pittsburgh to apply his technical insights to the housing market. His charts and observations are illuminating: I’ve looked at the charts a little further, and the pattern that em...

If the stock market can never crash again due to the Bernanke Put, then why have all the crash test dummies been ordered up? I know, I know: the stock market will never go down because Ben Bernanke and the other central bankers won’t let it. It’s funny how the “Bernanke/European C...

Depending on debt to fuel nominal growth leads to an economic death spiral. Sometimes one chart says it all. Here is a chart of the S&P 500 (a broadly based measure of the U.S. stock market) in a ratio with total consumer credit, courtesy of frequent contributor Chartist Friend from Pittsburgh...

In a previous report, Headwinds for Housing, I examined structural reasons why the much-anticipated recovery in housing valuations and sales has failed to materialize. InSearching for the Bottom in Home Prices, I addressed the Washington and Federal Reserve policies that have attempted to boost the...

Crony capitalism uses its wealth to impose government regulations designed to hinder, cripple and destroy small business competitors. In the U.S. we now have the perfection of cloaked crony capitalism: corporate cartels use their vast concentrations of capital and revenue to buy the political lever...

Has the centralized nation-state model of global capitalism finally reached its autumn? Predicting the end of Capitalism has been a popular pastime since the term was coined. The reason why this particular parlor game is so fruitless is that Capitalism is not monolithic or static–and neither ...