Nihilism Embodied: Our Lawless Financial System
Not only have the billionaire class made money, they have tightened their monopolistic grip on the levers of money supply and distribution, turning a global rigged casino into a global company town.
Editor's note: This is a guest post by my friend and colleague Zeus Yiamouyiannis, Ph.D., who has contributed essays to Of Two Minds since 2009.
I wrote this predictive observation in the January 28, 2011 Of Two Minds post entitled, Abused Fundamentals and Fake Markets: How They Play Out (later published and updated in 2013 in my book: Transforming Economy: From Corrupted Capitalism to Connected Communities):
So we have a lawless system. What does this mean for citizens and investors? In the near term it means that the fundamentals will not apply. Anything that maintains or augments elite wealth and increases elite options will be supported, and anything that consumes or converts common people's wealth and labor and restricts their choices will be pursued.
Anything that reinforces accountability, rational response, or cause and effect will be actively suppressed. Forget reversion to the mean. One only has to observe where the respective value/wealth of each party resides and where it gets channeled to know what the market will do and where policy will go. When the stock market should crash, it won't… until some time frame far longer than even the most generous fundamentals would dictate…
Analyses that try to predict near term market moves based on Laffer curves, Elliot Waves, and historical cycles will almost definitely fail. We don't have a 'new era', but we definitely have unprecedented coordinated global intervention dedicated almost solely to the fortunes of the top 1%. That is the new rule that will govern until there is a serious breakdown.
The chickens are now coming home to roost, and proving to a greater and greater degree that markets are no longer markets at all, or even casinos. They are clearinghouses for transfers of wealth from the many to the few. Period. No credible argument can be made otherwise. Therefore, we must first and foremost understand the rigged system to inform active resistance and effective alternatives. In so doing, we must also transform ignorance into awareness, obedience into civil disobedience, and fearful attachment into creative interdependence.
In brief, here is how I believe this latest round of audaciously escalating fraud will play out. Given that "too big to fail, too big to jail" is now established worldwide policy, the logical next move for the billionaire class will be buy up everything of hard value with unlimited free unbacked money and massive debt. Think private equity firms, but on a colossal scale: Extract and savage this wealth from every known stored value, and leave the mess for someone to clean up. This is a project now supported by every major central bank and it involves monopoly ownership of every avenue of value assignment and measurement by a handful of people and companies.
What proof do I have that there no longer exists a "market" at all in terms of fundamentals?
Exhibit A: Why are the dollar, stocks, gold, oil, and even Bitcoin all moving in the same direction, when, according to fundamentals, they should move in opposite directions?
Most financial news media give technical definitions. Jeff deGraaf in Marketwatch explains "As real yields turn negative, opportunity costs for holding non-yielding assets essentially vanish, particularly when viewed through the historical lens of fiat currencies and their purchasing power."
Gold, and I would add the U.S. dollar, create a convenient floor at the zero to positive level, to potential black swans that might sweep the more "risky" fake markets (and cause them to fall before they are rescued again upward).
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