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• Unthinkable?
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Given the extraordinary failure of both Keynesian stimulus and private-sector credit growth to create a self-sustaining cycle of expansion whose benefits flow to the entire workforce rather than to the top few percent, what can we expect going forward? Can we just keep doubling and tripling the economy’s debt load every few years? What if household incomes continue declining? Are these trends sustainable?

In the near-term, is this Great Reflation running out of steam, or is it poised for yet another leg higher? Which is more likely?

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We are at an important juncture as a global society: either we immediately prioritize a new trajectory focused on creating a positive, functional future or — by continuing the consumptive, extractive, exploitative status quo — we will default into a nasty nightmare.

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One trillion is a big number. In this short video, we try to help you get a sense for just how big; but the reality is simply that the human brain can't really suitably comprehend magnitudes this large.

Which is why we should be concerned that the US' money supply has ballooned to over $12 trillion dollars over the past decade. And that its outstanding debts and liabilities are many multiples that amount.

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At the exponential pace at which the Fed is increasing the money supply, and knowing the huge challenges the Fed – and most other world central banks  – face in trying to stop or even slow down their money printing, the potential for a disruptive global inflationary period is very real.

So what exactly is quantitative easing? 

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David Stockman, former director of the OMB under President Reagan, former US Representative, and veteran financier is an insider's insider. Few people understand the ways in which both Washington DC and Wall Street work and intersect better than he does.

In his upcoming book, The Great Deformation, Stockman lays out how we have devolved from a free market economy into a managed one that operates for the benefit of a privileged few. And when trouble arises, these few are bailed out at the expense of the public good.

By manipulating the price of money through sustained and historically low interest rates, Greenspan and Bernanke created an era of asset mis-pricing that inevitably would need to correct.  And when market forces attempted to do so in 2008, Paulsen et al hoodwinked the world into believing the repercussions would be so calamitous for all that the institutions responsible for the bad actions that instigated the problem needed to be rescued — in full — at all costs. 

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On a long solo car trip this past weekend, I downloaded several podcasts to listen to as the miles passed. One was a classic: The Invention of Money, originally released by NPR's Planet Money team back in January of 2011. I highly recommend listening (or re-listening) to it in full.

The podcast is a great reminder of how any currency in a monetary system is a fabricated construct. A simpler way to explain this is to say it has value simply because we believe it does.

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In business school I had to take an introductory class in statistics that we colloquially called "D&D." The official course name was Data & Decision-making.

In retrospect, it was a truly valuable class (one of very few I encountered in b-school). If you can figure out how to use statistics to determine the most probable outcome from a set of scenarios, or find predictive correlations from within a sea of data, that's real power. You can take a lot of the guesswork out of decision-making and consequently make the "right" call much more often.

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