Sublime

When dollars run short, we face the future with fear. We strive to keep our heads above water. We strive to meet our bills and not go further into debt. We strive, period. Life becomes an exercise in apprehension. Some of us stop sleeping. Others of us take to our beds, seeking oblivion.

There is the rapidly increasing debt-financed purchases of goods, services, and investment assets, so debt growth outpaces the capacity of future cash flows to service the debts.

For finance to consistently grow as a proportion of GDP, either it is simply upping its take — which might be reasonable within bounds, but raises questions of adequate competition in the sector and of possible regulatory capture — or it is making more and more MBS-like time bombs. It is spinning off flows of toxic financial exposure, of whose valu

This crisis of real wealth may well be not merely situational, but structural, no evanescent crash, but what economists call a bad equilibrium—a toxic convergence decades in the making. The different forms of bucket emptying—wealth destruction—are long-run trends, not transient phenomena. All have been under way for at least a decade, and most as l

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.