The New Permanent Plateau Of Moral Hazard

What follows are my philosophical musings on this new permanent plateau of moral hazard.

I begin at the macro-level by repeating that globalized corporatism has failed humanity, and it has failed this planet. The fact that neither side will acknowledge this reality is now the locus of political dysfunction.

At this current juncture it's easy for conservatives to point to urban "hellholes" and claim that all Democrat-run cities are shambolic. Conveniently, the largest cities in the U.S. are all Democratic, so we don't know what a well run large conservative city looks like. In addition, I assert that traditionally conservative macro-economic policies of free trade and mass immigration are the locus of today's rampant underemployment. By underemployment I mean the circumstance of training for a given occupation only to find oneself permanently redundant mid-life and forced to abandon one's chosen occupation in order to make ends meet - forced downsizing to a lesser occupation of lower standard of living. Underemployment is rampant as was predicted over 50 years ago by the book Future Shock. The useful lifespan of a given occupation in today's corporate economy is far less than a human lifespan. What's ironic is that politically, liberals are now defending the other source of working class displacement which is mass immigration - far more than conservatives, even though the benefits accrue primarily to the ultra-wealthy. Trump is anti free trade with China which is a reversal of the free trade movement that began under Reagan. During Trump's first term his Reaganite economic advisor Larry Kudlow admitted he had been a lifelong free trader but that he supported the trade war with China. When China acceded to the WTO in the year 2000 Larry Kudlow was one of the biggest proponents. Regardless of today's posturing, the damage was done many years ago at the outsourcing rate of 17 factories a day on average in the decade 2000-2012 that followed. A trade war now is merely closing the barn door after the horses are out.

Therefore, the politics of this failed system have become very confusing indeed because it's impossible to tell where the structural underemployment generated by the global corporate system ends and where the failures of our newfound pseudo-socialist system begin. To what extent has the disposability of humanity made our welfare programs necessary merely to obfuscate the inexorable displacement of the middle class with outsourcing, automation, mass immigration, and Artificial Intelligence, which has sucked in trillions of dollars of capital during this past year on the promise that it will accelerate the redundancy of millions of white collar workers. No one questioning if it's a good idea economically or not.

This is why I'm not overly committed to one side of the political aisle or the other. Because both sides lack the critical ingredient to change - which is the acknowledgement of failure.

So, what does this have to do with markets?

What this all means is that we cannot measure the "success" of this system based solely upon 401k balances alone. And yet, that is exactly what we find this society doing at this parlous juncture. It was inevitable after 15 years of serial post GFC monetary bailouts that investors would more and more come to believe that a collapsing economy is the source of all monetary-inflated artificial wealth and the stock market would become negatively correlated to the economy. To such an extent that at the brink of global depression investors would crowd into a "Magnificent Seven" massively overvalued AI Tech stocks on the premise that those companies would finish off the middle class once and for all.

All predicated upon the belief that everyone else was going under the bus.

Until the day arrives when there is no one else.