University of Michigan Sentiment by Political Affiliation:
Willful delusion and totally fucked up values are what keeps the American Powerball lottery working. It's called survivor bias, which leads to an overly optimistic belief in proven failure as a way of life. Sadly, you can't get happiness from corrupt values - a lesson that will be learned the hard way...
"Survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because of their lack of visibility. This can lead to false conclusions in several different ways. It is a form of selection bias...Survivorship bias can lead to overly optimistic beliefs because failures are ignored"
America's billionaires are wholly divorced from reality, being the sole beneficiaries of Ponzinomics. On a biblical scale, they are today's equivalent of Bernie Madoff:
"If you keep buying Powerball tickets, with enough monetary bailouts you too could be a robber baron like me one day"
“I’m thinking the next 50 years is going to be similar to the last 50 years”
U.S. stocks only move higher in lockstep with the implosion of the middle class. Only by suppressing middle class incomes can corporations accrue an ever greater share of the economy. Which has been taking place for decades now - going into overdrive during the past twenty years. What the Madoff-set continually forget is that ONLY because global interest rates are at historic lows can these cyclically unprecedented over-valuations be justified. And only because global deflation and poverty are rampant are interest rates pinned to these levels. To the billionaire beneficiaries, things have never been better.
However, it's today's useful idiots who still believe that the Fed controls interest rates, that do the real heavy lifting in this con job. During the 1970s when labor protections were still in place, low interest rates led to rampant inflation. It was the "structural adjustments" aka. removal of labor protections of the post-80s era that allowed this rapacious transfer of wealth to take place. To unwind any part of it now, would be deemed "socialism". As we are reminded daily on Faux News, it's un-American to question criminality.
Nevertheless, this abiding belief in exploitation as a way of life will come to an extraordinarily bad ending, when veneration of corporate greed hits the brick wall of no more bailouts. Sadly, today's empty values will collapse like a cheap tent, as public opinion turns on a dime.
“I’m thinking the next 40 years is going to be similar to the last 40 years”
"Chief executives at large companies make roughly $278 for every $1 a typical worker earns — that's up from a ratio of 20-to-1 back in 1965 and a ratio of 58-to-1 in 1989"
Overnight, Amazon imploded due to weaker than expected holiday sales.
The world's largest online retailer peaked over a year ago. This was the headline exactly one year ago today, at these exact same levels:
It turns out that things aren't as good as they look in La La Land
All those people who think that they get to go to the polls one year hence and vote for their own version of reality, are in for one hell of a shock. Because in the background, inconvenient reality has been chipping away at their beloved corporate Disney World.
Sadly, the Dow will not be reaching $650k on this monetary-fueled moonshot into the ground.
Contrary to MAGA Kingdom belief, the next 50 years will be NOTHING like the past 50 years. It can't be, there is no one left to use up.
No more carbon for the furnace
