| Ever increasing personal debt and decades long stagnant wages are themselves a warning sign. It doesn’t take long for debt payments to outgrow stagnant wages - and a new round of large scale bankruptcy. There’s also the bit of wisdom I got from a professor: “The peak has come when the last hold out buys into the notion of permanent growth.” Tariffs threaten to ignite a sequence of events leading to the dethronment of the US. If the worlds base currency changes from USD be ready for the US to quickly look like Greece or worse. Lighting a fire under a hot market through continued low interest rates, increased government spending (even in the form of lowered taxes), and removing market stabilizing regulations (ala the consumer protection bureau or allowing large business mergers, and undoing net neutrality) leverage the market up to almost assure a breaking point. The last I checked, the underlying issues that contributed to the 2008 recession were also still intact - ARM mortgages, seemingly inexplicable real estate price growths, lack of bank regulation, mortgage backed securities, etc. Wellsfargo even created millions of fraudulent accounts to prop up their valuation. Just stagnant wages and increasing prices can pop a market. Here’s hoping this time the US takes on New Deal style projects to right itself. We need healthcare corrections, consumer protection, trust busting, and infrastructure. Fiber to the people. Even the opioid crisis contributes to this. Heroin addicts don’t easily keep work and their spending gets pretty ... singular. It’s having a destabilizing affect on whole populations. |