Let’s start with one simple and important chart. You’ve seen it many times. It is the chart of the total assets of the Federal Reserve. It is a representation of how much fake money they have forcibly pushed down the windpipes of the American economy in order to give it the illusion of prosperity.

As you can see at the extreme left of the chart, this figure used to be fairly meaningless – – really just a way to “fine tune” things a little when needed.

Let’s take a closer look; you can see that for a little while, the Fed was tiptoeing its way make to something at least a few light years away closer to normalcy. In the autumn of 2019, when there was the faintest wisp of reality sneaking back into the system, Fed chair Powell started cranking the dials up. Once Covid hit, he had free rein, which is where that vertical spike came from. And, ever since then, it’s been adding literally nine more digits every month.

I am an amateur historian, and it would be nice to have similar examples of the 17 different instances of world history and tease out what happened – – – how 9 times things went this way, and 5 times it went that way, in during these three exceptions, the following happened, and this, dear children, is what we’ve all learned.

But there are no examples. Zero. None. What’s going on now is a hundreds-of-trillions-of-dollars experiment  whose denouement is absolutely unknown to anyone. I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but my guess is something along the lines of:

• the most grotesque maldistribution of wealth in human history;
• increasingly desperate attempts at huge tax increases, which will keep getting swatted back by the rich;
• an eventual violent uprising, leading to social chaos and an upending of the entire system

It’s a shame, too. I have a very fond place in my heart of honest-to-goodness American enterprise, entrepreneurship, and inventiveness. But what we’re going through doesn’t represent any of that. And, in the end, it simply won’t be worth it. When we look back at the smoldering ruins of what used to be, knowing that Jeff Bezos managed to score another $200 billion in pointless wealth somehow won’t be the salve to heal our collective wounds.

While it’s happening, though, Joe and Jane Average could not be happier. I spent a lot of time reading newspapers and periodicals on my trip to St. Louis and back, and the media is trumpeting the endlessly-ascending value in equities and, while admitting that, gosh, we’re not sure where this is all taking us, they sure are happy for the moment.