mr smith herein presents the course we're on and some of the back story to why and our destination;

January 3, 2020

One of the dishes at the banquet of consequences that will surprise a great many revelers is the systemic failure of the Federal Reserve's one-size-fits-all "solution" to every spot of bother: print another trillion dollars and give it to rapacious financiers and corporations.

Though 2020 is widely perceived as "the worst year ever," it was only a snack. The real banquet of consequences will be served in 2021. The reason 2020 was only a snack is that systems didn't break down in 2020. The reason 2021 is the main course is that systems will break down, and once broken, they cannot be restored.

I made the chart below to explain how systems fail and why they cannot be restored. Systems have numerous sources of potential fragility:

1. Systems can be tightly bound to other fragile systems, setting up the potential for a domino-like cascading collapse that starts with one system failure that then brings down every connected, interdependent system.

2. Systems can be hollowed out by self-interested insiders who mistakenly believe the system can survive endless looting.

3. Systems can be weakened by perverse incentives that provide strong incentives to under-invest in core functions and divert revenues to profiteering and extraction (stock buybacks, bonuses to managers, etc.)

4. Systems can appear robust to casual observers because insiders cloak the decay of function, accountability and transparency.

5. The decline of functionality / results can be hidden by bureaucratic obscurity (accounting statements in which all the important information is buried in footnotes starting on page 217, etc.) and by complexity thickets that reduce accountability to near-zero: no one is responsible for the decay of function, accountability and transparency.

6. Process replaces results as the Prime Directive of the system. Devoting resources to following processes rather than to getting results generates an illusion of functionality even as the ability to evolve and adapt is lost.........read more.......