Category Archive: 5.) The United States

Solutions are only possible outside these ossified, self-serving centralized hierarchies. Correspondent Dan F. asked me to reprint some posts on solutions to the systemic problems I've outlined for years, most recently in How Much Longer Can We Get Away With It? and Checking In on the Four Intersecting Cycles. I appreciate the request, because it's all too easy to dwell on what's broken rather than on the difficult task of fixing what's broken.

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As many of you know, oftwominds.com was falsely labeled propaganda by the propaganda operation known as ProporNot back in 2016. The Washington Post saw fit to promote ProporNot's propaganda operation because it aligned with the newspaper's view that any site that wasn't pro-status quo was propaganda; the possibility of reasoned dissent has vanished into a void of warring accusations of propaganda and "fake news" --which is of course propaganda in...

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Correspondent James D. recently asked for an update on the four intersecting cycles I've been writing about for the past 10 years. Here's the chart I prepared back in 2008 of four long-term cycles: 1. Generational (political/social).2. Price inflation/wage stagnation (economic). 3. Credit/debt expansion/contraction (financial). 4. Relative affordability of energy (resources).

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Alas, fakery isn't actually a solution to fiscal/financial crisis.. This chart of "debt securities and loans"--i.e. total debt in the U.S. economy--is also a chart of the creation and distribution of new money, as the issuance of new debt is the mechanism in our financial system for creating (or "emitting" in economic jargon) new currency: when a bank issues a new home mortgage, for example, the loan amount is new currency created out of the...

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Rising income and wealth inequality is causally linked to globalization and the expansion of Darwinian trade and capital flows. Stripped of lofty-sounding abstractions such as comparative advantage, trade boils down to four Darwinian goals: 1. Find foreign markets to absorb excess production, i.e. where excess production can be dumped. 2. Extract foreign resources at low prices. 3. Deny geopolitical rivals access to these resources.

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The percentage of household assets invested in stocks fell from almost 40% in 1969 to a mere 13% in 1982, after thirteen years of grinding losses. The conventional wisdom of financial advisors--to save money and invest it in stocks and bonds "for the long haul"--a "buy and hold" strategy that has functioned as the default setting of financial planning for the past 60 years--may well be disastrously wrong for the next decade.

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There are hundreds of extraordinarily diverse labor markets in the U.S. economy, and it takes a much more granulated approach to make any sense of this highly fragmented and dynamic marketplace. onventional economists/media pundits typically view the labor market as monolithic, i.e. as one unified market. The reality is the labor market is highly fragmented. Thus it's little wonder that conventional measures are giving mixed signals on employment,...

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Finding work that fits who you are is rarely easy, especially if you don't fit into the mainstream, and usually it requires a lot of compromises, hard work and dead-ends. But that’s the process. Establishing a satisfying career is difficult in today's economy, doubly so for those who find life within hierarchical institutions (corporate America and government) unrewarding, and triply so for those burdened with student loan debt and college...

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The broke and broken country of Venezuela appears to be the first nation-state to issue a cryptocurrency token (the petro) as a means of escaping the financial black hole that's consuming its economy: Maduro Launches Oil-Backed Crypto "For The Welfare Of Venezuela".

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