The Borg IS the illusion...
I had hoped that more people would see this coming, but I'm realizing that in order for this all to end, the vast majority can't see it coming...The Baby Boomers are like a 747 trying to land on an aircraft carrier in heavy seas. They've already made two unsuccessful passes and this next one has to stick. The hippies of the '60s agitating for civil rights, have morphed into cynical reactionaries, fretting over 401k balances. Back in the 1990s there were predictions that the stock market would crash when the Boomers all tried to retire at the same time. People scoffed at the idea, and came up with myriad "reasons" why that wouldn't happen. Turns out they were right. The foundation is already gone, only the facade of the Dow still stands thanks to money printing. Like the Berlin Wall circa 1989, this is the Potemkin stock market - as fake as the people who throw their money into it, straight to the Caymans.
The number of people who will see this coming is statistically non-existent. They're bought in and sold out to the indefinite status quo...
People make plans. They invest. They borrow too much money. They wed themselves to the status quo. They've chained themselves to the Titanic. I started this blog at the height of the housing crisis, and then tracked that asinine insanity to the days after Lehman. So this is all just deja vu. It's literally an absolute repeat EXCEPT, instead of banks failing, now entire nations are failing (China, Brazil, Greece, Japan, [insert any country here]).
AND, the other big difference of course was the colossal short that Wall Street had put on subprime and on the rest of Wall Street. Lehman failed because the other brokers made it fail. They shorted the fuck out of it and then pulled their money. Ironically, that Big Short meant that there was more clarity on what was taking place at the time. There were no headlines saying buy these 5 stocks right now. There was none of that bullshit. Today, we have alternating headlines saying this is 1929 and others saying this is the best time to buy stocks. There is no consensus on anything.
It's called conflict of interest. Wall Street doesn't get paid to sit in cash. And then there's survivor bias, meaning the funds that already failed are gone. They are not part of the discussion, they no longer exist. We only hear from the successful ones that have miraculously navigated this shit show - not from the 674 hedge funds that closed last year. Going out with a whimper.
Most ironically from an historical standpoint, the people who have the most invested in this shit show are the ones eating its seed corn. They still don't realize that they are the ones destroying the status quo, and selling it for special dividends. Their fake ponzi wealth grows in inverse proportion to the rate of collapse. They want *more*, so they destroy more. We have no part in this, other than to stand on the sidelines marvelling at how efficiently they're self-destructing. We could only get in the way.
So the handful of us who don't believe in bankrupting grandchildren while destroying the planet, are on our own. Because we're surrounded by desperate denialists who've welded themselves to the hull of the Titanic: financially, emotionally, mentally, and in every other respect. They can't imagine a world without shopping malls.
So they don't.
