A Take on the Times, the Debt, and the Full-Tilt Crypto-Boogie

13 Nov

A Take on the Times, the Debt, and the Full-Tilt Crypto-Boogie

We could not have said it better, so we will let him speak for himself.  Doug Noland from Credit Bubble Bulletin has a long record of chronicling the birth of bubbles and the destruction of their popping.  

Here’s his recent take on the times:

“I have never been more concerned. Having watched ‘money’ and Credit run increasingly amuck over recent decades, I have long harbored fears of an inescapable future of calamitous financial, economic, social, political and geopolitical instability.

“That future is now unfolding.”

The establishment press has a long history of turning a blind eye to fiscal crises in development.  But now establishment journal Foreign Policy says, “Start Preparing for the Coming Debt Crisis.”

A couple of snippets:

“The next U.S. administration will likely face a global debt crisis that could dwarf what the world experienced in 2008-2009.”

“A surge in spending to mitigate the health and economic impacts of the pandemic has brought the total public debt in the United States to over 100 percent of GDP—its highest level since 1946 and a hurdle that will create a considerable drag on future economic growth. Other types of debt—household, auto, and student loans, as well as credit card debt—have seen similar surges.”

“Almost 20 percent of U.S. corporations have become zombie companies that are unable to generate enough cash flow to service even the interest on their debt, and only survive thanks to continued loans and bailouts.”

“Central banks’ balance sheets are stretched from the policies they have followed since the 2008 financial crisis and expanded in the course of the pandemic. Piling debt on top of debt seems to have reached a dead end.”

And finally, a few weeks ago we began warning about one of the craziest monetary schemes on the Federal Reserve’s drawing boards.  There’s no name for it, so we just dubbed it what it is:  The Full-Tilt Crypto-Boogie.  It will be some form of the Fed’s own digital-crypto-central-bank-block-chain-wallet-Fed-coin-currency.  

More evidence for it can be found in a passing mention in the Foreign Policy piece, a reference to a new funny money that is even funnier than our present funny money:  “A growing number of economists and policymakers are beginning to talk about the need to shift to a new, possibly digital monetary regime whose contours remain unclear.”

It’s coming! Have gold?