2018 will Be the Bad Year
Nov 30, 2017
By Hamilton Nolan
Yesterday, the highly unstable leader of North Korea tested a nuclear missile capable of striking the highly unstable leader of America. And what happened to the global economy? Nothing! Our stock market surged to new highs. Look at the horizon there—do you see it? It’s fucking bad.
The classic idea of free financial markets is that they are exquisitely sensitive to risk. The more risk you take, the higher the return you make to compensate for that risk. Yet any rational person looking at the USA today can tell you that the risks we are now facing are terrifying, and seem to have become fully separated from the financial markets, which just boom and boom and don’t stop booming. The confirmed threat of a global nuclear standoff could not even make the market fall by one point. Something has to give.
America is behaving like a doomed and desperate convicted felon, holed up smoking as much crack as possible before we have to report to jail. Tons of post-recession free money from central banks, eight years of steadily rising asset prices, the eerie absence of volatility, and the post-election conviction that Donald Trump’s band of goons would—if nothing else—cut taxes on corporations have all combined to fuel a manic investment wave that have made stocks and bonds and real estate and every other asset everywhere expensive as hell. Bitcoin is a classic bubble. Housing prices are insane. And Republicans, who have proven too incompetent to accomplish almost anything, look like they will be able to successfully pass a tax bill that funnels more money to corporations and their investors, who decidedly do not need it. But who will be happy to take it, even if they know that exploding the deficit to give already rich people more money, during a time of essentially full employment, is the opposite of long-term financial probity. They also know that our president is a dumb, incompetent loon. (Wall Street, though it may be evil, benefits by seeing political situations with a ruthless clarity.) It is this situation of clear short term opportunity combined with infinite geopolitical and economic dark clouds looming that has fueled our manic economic boom. Get it while the getting is good, for tomorrow you may be dead!
https://splinternews.com/2018-will-be-the-bad-year-1820845988
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