For those who feared Trump’s brilliance might stave off the Apocalypse, all hope is not lost:
After bingeing on credit for a half decade, U.S. consumers may finally be feeling the hangover.
Americans faced with lackluster income growth have been financing more of their spending with debt instead. There are early signs that loan burdens are growing unsustainably large for borrowers with lower incomes. Household borrowings have surged to a record $12.73 trillion, and the percentage of debt that is overdue has risen for two consecutive quarters. And with economic optimism having lifted borrowing rates since the election and the Federal Reserve expected to hike further, it’s getting more expensive for borrowers to refinance…
Some companies are growing worried about their customers. Public Storage said in April that more of its self-storage customers now seem to be under stress. Credit card lenders including Synchrony Financial and Capital One Financial Corp. are setting aside more money to cover bad loans. Consumer product makers including Nestle SA posted slower sales growth last quarter, particularly in the U.S.
It is interesting, because as amygdala atrophies in response to the use of debt, that diminishes the cognitive force of responsibility which would keep debt at reasonable levels. As responsibility diminishes, you borrow more. The free resources of that diminish responsibility more. And at the same time the consequences of not borrowing grow larger and larger, and become more than the weakened amygdala can handle, further forcing ever more irresponsibility.
It is tempting to rage at the decline, and blame individuals for being too stupid to realize they are destroying the nation, but the truth is all of this is a sort of programmed failure of the system. The amygdala and the nature of resources is designed to produce an compulsive growth far beyond rationality, and it is almost designed to then produce a collapse of incredible completeness.
A part of me wonders if this instability and fluctuation is an evolved plan to speed evolution. Basically we will go r and explode the first generation model into numbers far beyond what the environment can sustain, full of mutations and diverse phenotypes, then we will have a period of intense K-selection designed to kill back everything which is not of the absolute highest quality for generation one. Then, once all the dead wood is cleared and only the best remain, we begin the cycle again, multiplying this newer, fitter, iteration of the species as quickly as possible, and as much as possible, until it all collapses again and that generation is culled to the ground to create a new generation two, and the cycle continues, beginning generation three’s explosion with only the best of generation two.
In retrospect, even though it would appear a bloody mess of chaos and destruction when viewed from a distance, this would be the best possible way to combine extreme r to produce extreme diversity, and then utilize extreme K to cull that diversity for the most adapted organisms possible. Maybe that is all the plan, and all we are, are cogs in a machine designed to produce complexity and greatness.
[…] For those who feared Trump’s brilliance might stave off the Apocalypse, all hope is not lost: After bingeing on credit for a half decade, U.S. consumers may finally be feeling the continue […]
Everywhere you look the Apocalypse is showing its signs. The US Army just approved a new service pistol, the Sig Sauer P320 that can very quickly have its barrel changed from 9mm to .357, .40 S&W or .45 ACP. Lockheed Martin started producing F-35s in Japan and Italy, in addition to Texas. Ammunition suppliers have been increasingly sourcing Turkish, Israeli and S. Korean companies, in addition to American ones. Missile defenses are going up all over Asia. The price of gold and silver are down, probably so elites can move their money quickly. Oil is flaccid too, regardless of the Saudis going broke or fighting with Qatar. This is because consumers can’t afford more expensive oil. And the Stock Market is higher than ever, so the heavily invested can quietly divest without losing too many assets. Bitcoin is higher than ever and the police have just stopped enforcing the law in huge urban swathes of Western Civilization. I wonder if the grocery stores will stay stocked when it all goes down, I doubt it.
Good to see you venture into the world of economics.
But: “After bingeing on credit for a half decade, …: ” where do you get ‘half a decade’ ?
You are a smart man/woman, I have a lot of respect for you having read your book and columns,
but this is not a one, two. three, four or five or even 6 dimensional world.
The complexity of it is beyond the human imagination.
I have said for a long time a great teaching tool for children is: scissor,paper,rock., How long does it take for each one to figure out the hopelessness of the game?
Most seem to never comprehend it, hence the debt.
I am just reiterating what you already know, but pass thru the world of economics more often,
the laws of economics will be here well after the politicians, r or K , are gone.
Dave, you do realize that’s quoted from the Bloomberg article, right? And of course that time frame is laughable, as we’ve been binging on debt for at least 30 yrs.
Much (most?) of the “wealth” in our society today is just promises of future production. When those promises are defaulted on (in a huge chain reaction), poof, there it all goes.
Too bad Mother Nature never counted on her clever little monkeys coming up with fusion bombs… and then being dumb enough to let insane people get their paws on them. Even if we survive this cycle somehow, if we don’t get off the wheel we won’t make it through the next couple because the tech exponential expansion ain’t stopping.