The global economy is ill, and everyone who is not mired in denial or a paid shill knows it. Saying it’s healthy doesn’t make it so.
Is is possible to usefully generalize the illness and outline a cure in a few points?Maybe not, but let’s try anyway.
1. Creating and selling credit and leverage became far more profitable than generating goods and services. Financialization–expanding highly profitable credit by leveraging assets and income to the hilt–began in earnest in the early 1980s.
Creating credit is equally easy in fractional reserve systems like the U.S. and command economies like China. Creating leveraged instruments is as easy as writing and selling derivatives, which not coincidentally have risen (in notional value) 700% since the mid-1990s.
Read More By Charles Hugh Smith .
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