The Market Nobody Pays Any Attention To, But Should

In this week’s podcast, I spoke with Dylan Ratigan about bonds, markets, and how the U.S. is on a path to financial ruin that will prove to bring enormous hardship to a very large number of people.

For thirty years, Dylan Ratigan sat in the rooms where money, media, and power actually operate. He built Bloomberg’s corporate-finance desk, created CNBC’s Fast Money, and hosted MSNBC’s highest-rated daytime show. Then, at the peak of his career, Dylan Ratigan walked away, not because he’d run out of things to say, but because talking wasn’t enough.

Truthfully, I really enjoyed this discussion.

Back to the story.  Yes, there are other paths we could take – it really doesn’t have to be this way – but all of those require leadership willing to both tell the truth and take political heat.  After all, telling people that it’s time to begin living within our means is never a popular political stance.

However, we backed up the story so that the full compounding of policy errors could be seen.  It all begins with the Federal Reserve believing that it knew best what the price of money ought to be.  Not the markets, not the lenders, but the Fed.

Bernanke’s 1% blowout rates gave us the housing crisis.  The total bailouts of the GFC miscreants begat more unsavory practices and behaviors by the Wall Street classes.

And now?  It’s hard to even imagine how any sort of fiscal or monetary restraint could be applied to a country awash in $40 trillion federal debt and $116 trillion of total debt.

Dylan also noted that we’ve crossed some sort of boundary where corruption and fraud now operate in the open, unpunished.  Trump and his family at the top, ‘learing centers’ at the bottom, none of it stopped and all of it unpunished.

AI is going to add its own layers of disruption, assuming it doesn’t go all Skynet on us and simply extinguish humans for some reason.  Where do we find meaning and purpose now that machines can do nearly everything?  What does ‘money’ even mean in such a system?

Dylan foresees a major spiritual and cultural reckoning as traditional measures of status, employment, and identity become less reliable.

At the end?  We’re both surprisingly optimistic.

Get through ‘the troubles’ that await, and afterward we can rebuild better lives, transitioning away from excessive centralization and consumption and toward local communities, human relationships, resilience, creativity, art, and a renewed sense of purpose.

Tune in to hear it all…