Peak Civilization

 Life sometimes imitates art in the most pathetic and scary of ways. The treasury is considering minting a trillion dollar platinum coin to avoid a government default. Back in 1998, the Simpsons ran an episode where the government had printed a trillion dollar bill as part of the Marshall plan, but it was stolen by Montgomery Burns en route to Europe. I'm not sure which idea is dumber. The two main discussion points around minting the coin are being able to forestall a default by raising money that will tide things over until Congress raises the debt limit. The second point is that this can be done without adding to the national debt or causing inflation. Huh? The government borrows money to run everything, so essentially, issuing a coin for currency will just be borrowing more money to cover the cost of that. While it's technically true that it wouldn't contribute to inflation, it would certainly contribute to the debt, but since the country has been monetizing debt for a...

 I saw this article today and thought it was both funny and scary - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/upshot/inflation-economy-analysis.html Even the article itself says that understanding how the economy works is still something of a "black box." This shouldn't inspire confidence in anyone that "things are under control." Apply the same analogy to brain surgery, airplane engines, or water quality monitoring - "Uhh, we don't really understand how these things work, but feel free to trust your life to them." I mean, it's not like we're talking about the system that everyone in the first world, and to a lesser degree, much of the third world, depends on. We don't know which direction prices are going, what money is really worth, and exactly how much rot there is in the whole thing, but trust us - we know what we're doing. As I outlined in my previous post, the reality is that we're living off the largess of past generations that ...

 People are looking at supply line issues as being an inconvenience. Go to your favorite store, find out they're out of Oreos or toilet paper. There are vague rumblings about Christmas being ruined this year, too, because there won't be many toys in stock. Eh, maybe celebrate the old-fashioned way by spending time doing things together as a family and getting drunk off the eggnog? The photos of ships sitting offshore is a little nice eye candy between the news reporting on the latest homicide-by-lawn sprinkler and a cute polar bear who thinks it's a kitten. What has not really been considered, even by people who write on the subject, is that supply chain issues have a cascading effect in a world that is run on funny money. Business is conducted through debt, both short and long term. People take on debt to buy materials to make products, to pay their employees, to ship things, pay for physical plants. Shipping companies have long-term loans on their ships, credit accounts f...