Well, well, well, the stock market is finally getting interesting. Actually it is the bond and FX markets that are getting interesting but I’m too stupid for those so i focus on the stock market.Of course, maybe the authorities will manage to manipulate things and avoid some sort of breakdown. They’ve been pretty good at that in the past. Well, they’ve forestalled a breakdown for years now, but of course they mostly caused the conditions in the first place. The point is that they will do everything they can to maintain control of the markets, but at some point they will lose control and that’s when it will get interesting. Until that point it is a rigged game, and at that point it becomes chaos. It’s a rigged game but the ideology for the rules is incoherent. Obviously it is not a free market, but a democracy can’t have as its purpose increasing the wealth of the very few (ubless, of course, the majority of citizens decide that they would like to impoverish themselves so a handful of people can be ridiculously wealthy, which seems an improbable intention, even if it is an actual result brought about by our dysfunctional political system). Anyway, right now the system, meaning the Fed, Treasury and whatever passes for fiscal policy, but mostly the Fed, seems to be intent on maintaining the peace by lowering rates until they inflate bubbles and then rushing in shore up the toppling financial structure. There is no overall vision, just a richochet between creating a disaster and then trying to repair the damage. There is nothing about this game that efficient deploys capital where it is needed or advances industrial policy or makes the economy deliver humanitarian advances. It is simply a pinball machine driven by the relentless quest for profits and indifferent to whether those profits come from gambling or making things. Anyway, seems like we’ve past some sort of inflection point. Rate hike medicine powerful enough to stop inflation, especially since it is probably the wrong medicine to deal with supply chain breakdowns and resouce depletion, is going to ruin the economy, which i guess will bring down inflation. If the patient has a fever and you freeze them to death, it is true that you’ve lowered the fever.