How This Ends
Global economic problems were not caused by COVID19; it was just a convenient opportunity deflect blame away from more fundamental issues. One of the main real problems is that a decade of near 0% interest rates had led to money printing on such a scale that certain activities which would otherwise not have been profitable were able to be profitable (in nominal fiat terms)... But while these activities were reaping high nominal revenues and profits, they were destroying real value from the economy.<p>Eventually, the situation became clear to some people at the top but by that point it was too late to prevent a catastrophic economic crash, so when they heard about COVID19, they pressured politicians to respond aggressively with lockdowns; that way the virus could serve as a convenient scapegoat for the crash and as a justification for massive fiscal stimulus to allow the elites to quickly cash out of their investments... The elites knew that after 2008, their reputations couldn&#x27;t take another beating. They couldn&#x27;t let themselves take the blame again.<p>The unfortunate reality is that the COVID19 fiscal stimulus didn&#x27;t solve any problem at all for the average person; it was purely a money-printing scheme to allow the elites to cash out by appropriating the wealth of regular citizens via the dilution of the value of their employment contracts and fiat-denominated savings.<p>The inflation we are experiencing now is a direct result of the elites&#x27; appropriation of public funds from the money printers.<p>Now we are facing some significant problems; after a decade of living in a parallel monetary universe in which irrationality, recklessness and negligence is rewarded, we have collectively lost our common sense. Our ideas about business, success, startups, finance, the economy, politics, everything is all wrong. For 10+ years, we trained ourselves to function in a totally dysfunctional environment and learned all kinds of lessons which only make sense in the context of that dysfunction.<p>As we head into a more contractionary monetary environment, we have to unlearn everything and re-evaluate all business relationships; we have to disregard people&#x27;s past financial track records (since they are meaningless in the context of a functioning system). In fact, it seems unlikely that someone who is particularly successful in the context of a dysfunctional system would also be successful in the context of a functional system... It&#x27;s a totally different skillset.