EU Mandates Bail-in Laws

EU mandates States institute bail-in laws. It does make it look like they think the beginning of the end is near, maybe even within a year or so, based on timing.

In a comment, Ann K asks, how long until the collapse? That is kind of like looking at two nearly infinitely large masses, and trying to say exactly how much bigger the big one is. One the one side is an economic model which you know is unsustainable. On the other side are very smart people trying to stave off collapse as long as possible, with full control of the economic machinery, and the very media that tells people what to think. Beneath it all is a mass of idiots who don’t even know they are lied to. Of course there is one other problem. Everything today is a lie. From housing, to unemployment, to currency, to probably even the national debt, it is all a lie. It makes accurate prediction very difficult, if not impossible.

It would not even surprise me that since you are looking at predicting a shift in cognitive function, and some assert cognitive function is dependent on quantum mechanical movements of charges and ions, you might be trying to predict an event that, at its core, is triggered by a quantum mechanical event that itself cannot be predicted beyond a probability graph.

What is happening is we are waiting for the straw which breaks the camel’s back. What that rhetorical straw will really do is trigger the societal amygdala just enough to provoke enough amygdala-centric thinking in enough people that everyone else notices their amygdala-centric behavior and begin to see threat from that themselves. It is a tipping point, that begins with everyone ignoring threat because everyone else is ignoring threat, and ends when everyone is threatened by everyone else’s sense of threat.

Right now, everybody invests freely because the idea that you could lose everything is laughable. Indeed we’ve had several times when it seems everyone should have lost everything, and they didn’t. That has turned off threat perception in investors, and turned off their amygdalae. Once a big enough event happens, and enough people lose everything for people to begin acting in a protectionist manner, they will begin to draw out enough value from the system that the eggheads won’t be able to paper over the problem. Then everyone’s amygdala will turn on, they will all head for the exits, and then everyone will begin to lose everything. As they do, amygdalae will turn on even more, people will head for the exits ever faster, and so on. It will happen in stocks, it will happen in banking, it will happen in currencies. The collapse will happen fast, due to a small change in the informational inputs to humans, but a massive change in how the societal brain as a whole weighs the relevancy of the bad information vs the good.

It will happen in other realms as well. It will begin to produce violence, which itself will trigger amygdalae, and make violence more common, which will feed forward the same way. As all the irritation grows, people will desperately begin to look for discernible clues predicting threat, and begin to feel brief respites from threat in the presence of similarity. That is, whites will be less tense around whites than blacks, and blacks will feel less tense around blacks than around whites, asians, latinos, etc. People will look to similarities as a means of conflict avoidance -“Hey, you’re Italian? I’m Italian! Paisan!” As similarity begins to produce favoritism, dissimilarity will heighten the sense of threat.

Those who promote increasing diversity or importing foreigners will be seen as increasing threat, and they will be opposed aggressively by many. Segregation will return with little fanfare, people will grow accustomed to being around the similar, and that will make being in the presence of those who are visibly different even more threat-stimulating. As people of each subgroup start to screw “the other” to rectify sins of the past, that will become the game, and it will feed forward in the irritated environment. These feelings will all feed forward, with each advance in the process laying the groundwork to increase it even more.

The really interesting thing is, all of this, from aggression and violence, to personal economic protectionist behavior, to in-grouping, to morality – they are all amygdala driven. They will all arise together, and they will all feed off each other.

The question is, where is that first straw that will break the camel’s back? There are funds out there like Renaissance Technologies, which hire a lot of computer whiz’s to create a supercomputer that can read news articles and listen to TV and radio with voice recognition, and convert it all into data about what investors are hearing about each stock, ie is the sum of all the media buzz positive or negative?

But I think just as important is, how are investor amygdalae weighing the relevance of that data? To what degree are they weighing the negative heavily? Are they disregarding it altogether? A lot of negative buzz, presented to amygdalae that are ignoring threat will have a different response from a small amount of negative buzz applied to amygdalae that are in the midst of a threat-induced freak out.

You must begin looking as closely at how people are reacting to the negative, as to how much negative data there is. If I were doing this professionally, I would look for indicators of amygdala activity in the chosen population. Thus if looking at banking, I’d look to deposit withdrawals or precious metals. If investing, the degree to which negative buzz on a stock elicits selling of it. And so on. Those are the all important measure of how reactive the amygdalae of the individuals within the system are. Behind the coming events will be a graph of increasingly reactive amygdalae.

Greece’s default will be a big test of the amygdalae of elites and investors, as I expect will be the default by the next nation after that. Now I’ve never seen this before, so I could be wrong, but it is my belief that each of these is a hair trigger test – all you can do is watch at the right time, and try to realize in real time that ITZ is underway and get ahead of it over the few weeks it will take to reach critical mass and blow. The only way to predict the collapse is to spot the shift in amygdala sensitivity in real time. My suspicion is the main obstacle will be normalcy bias.

But whatever happens, ITZ coming.