In the weeks following the United States shutting down over what has turned out to be mainly a nursing home epidemic, the economic geniuses on CNBC and Bloomberg discussed the various letter recoveries.

The United States was waiting for the zombie apocalypse. The country was given a coronapocalypse instead. But could the two events merge and provide the nation with a dangerous economic trend? Corporate America’s worst-kept secret had been the swelling number of zombies kept on life support and hidden away during the boom phase of the business cycle.

Forget performing William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The real art form is politicking. They sport taxpayer-funded windbreakers, speak with authority and urgency, and lead a brigade of specialists. When a crisis unfolds, whether it is a hurricane or a virus outbreak, politicians stand before the cameras, appearing to be in control of the situation—but they see an opportunity.

Wouldn’t you feel great knowing that your stock picking is fully insured by the Fed? Billionaires and wealthy hedge fund managers know the feeling.

The US economy is imprisoned, most of the population is under house arrest, and the inmates in Washington are running the asylum. And yet while the nation appears to be walking the green mile, investors residing in the Wall Street cell block have been extended pardons from the market gods.

Today’s brand of the left-leaning politician is all about substituting what sounds good for what actually works. Modern politics, whether in the US or Europe, is about taking a chainsaw to everything that produced even a modicum of success to appease the deities espousing progressive orthodoxy.

In 1971, Isaac Asimov wrote an extraordinary novel, The Gods Themselves, about a machine that generates unlimited energy for free, defying the fundamental economic principle known as scarcity. It is later learned that the Electron Pump is originating from a hole in space that connects parallel universes. Doomsday is nigh as it is discovered that galaxies will soon be destroyed and that the sun will metastasize into a supernova. The crux of the story is comparable to what is transpiring in California.

Japan has not recovered fully from the lost decade of the 1990s. The Asian financial crisis was exacerbated by the dot-com crash and then a few years later the global economic collapse. Tokyo has tried everything to combat anemic growth and deflation, and resolve the zombification of the Japanese economy through an immense buildup of government debt and a dramatic loosening of monetary policy, including subzero interest rates.