Happy Friday, everyone.  As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve been accepting a lot more podcast requests of late, especially after the Tucker Carlson piece.

My mission is to help as many people as possible prepare for the shocks to come by insight.  Pain is the dominant route of change for most people.  But, insight can work too.

And the main insight that’s missing from the discussion is the degree to which our economy depends on energy to function.  Once you grasp that connection, it’s a short hop over to the insight that our financial system is completely dependent on perpetual debt expansion.

What happens when debt expansion slows down?  GDP contracts.  The economist Steve Keen has the math proving that point.  But what happens if debt actually contracts?

The only time that has happened in the data series I have (which goes back to 1950) we called it the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) it practically broke the entire system of banking and finance.

Recall: money is a claim on things today, but debt is a claim on future money.  An ever-growing pile of debt that is expanding at 2x the rate of the actual economy carries with it an implicit assumption that the future economy is going to be bigger.  A lot bigger.

Otherwise, there’s no hope of those debts being paid back, an insight which causes lenders not to lend, and then the whole GFC destruction pathway gets opened up again.

So, with a massive amount of energy now missing from the global landscape, and the future economy seemingly destined to be smaller, the risk of another GFC-like existential financial crisis is both large and growing.

With every passing day