Forum Post: Covid Cover

How does the economy work?

It has never worked for us and won't work for them much longer.

The FIRE Sector [Finance, Insurance and Real Estate] is a system of extraction that concentrates wealth at an exponentially increasing rate with the rentier class. The imaginary wealth produced on Wall St. also expands exponentially and damages the real economy of production, distribution and consumption of material goods and services. Each boom and bust cycle (each Wall St expansion and crash) brings us closer to the inevitable end. It's coming soon. This may be the one: the bursting balloon of finance from which we can't recover.

How does it happen? When the tiny fraction of the population who own most of everything, including the stocks, bonds and other securities, suffer a loss of the imaginary financial wealth (debt of one sort or another that has been created out of thin air) they fear for their real assets. Those consist of the productive capacity for the material goods and services that are the stuff of life for all of us. The Wall St. wealth extraction machine and real economic activity they own, employs, one way or the other, most of We the People. Their fear for the decrease of their hoard drives the elite parasites to slow the real economy with lay offs and production cuts. In other words, their Wall St. gambles went bad. To assuage their fear of greater loss, they take down the real economy and us with them. This is how the mindless "invisible hand" really works.

Such a crash was overdue when Covid-19 hit. The pandemic, which is certainly real and the steps taken to mitigate it justified, none the less provides cover for what would have happened anyway. The emergence of the virus and the crash of the imaginary economy of Wall St. were coincidental. And that convergence simultaneously gains support for the government bailout that the billionaires would have demanded of their wholly owned politicians and been given, of course. Am I over reaching here? Time will tell. If most of the 33 million plus who've become unemployed get their jobs back when the lockdown ends, I'm not altogether right this time. But eventually debt and stock market prices will grow too large to recover from a crash.

All this has happened over and over for thousands of years. Mesopotamian kings and priests like Moses reduced susceptibility to the evil by banning interest on debt and declaring Jubilees where individual (but not commercial) debts were forgiven. The opposite of what we do today. The billionaires, not we debt slaves, get the clean slates in this era. Today's middle class, what's left of it since Reagan's reign of economic terror, still think they'll sell their house and retire on the investments they make with the money they gain. But those investments will be regularly wiped out, the money will become increasingly worthless as the overall debt grows and the ultimate crash (when the balloon is too large to patch and reinflate) will either kill us all or we'll take over the production and distribution of the things we must have to live. Either way, "Wall St." will cease to exist.

Someday fools will realize that price and value are not connected and money is not wealth. Nor is anything real or lasting, except misery for we the people, created on Wall St.

But there is a glimmer of hope: Many businesses remain closed despite Republican Governors' "restart orders." Are middle classes awakening? Time will tell.

Video link to: "Covid Crash" https://youtu.be/ZTqZqXLmvd4