It Was A Hoax From The Beginning

That Zero Hedge headline today sums up more than just the election antics of the FBI and Deep State. It really is a headline for many of our own experiences in our journey on this planet. Many of my generation entered into a paradigm where there was a nuclear family with 2.4 children and Leave It To Beaver episodes on a small black and white TV when we came home from school. We had to fill ice trays for an ice box big enough for a half gallon of ice cream and a couple of cans of frozen orange juice. We had windows and screens with fans and no air-conditioning. 

Then came the 70s and the promises of the 50s and 60s began to fade into reality. The markets and economy of America began to sputter. Jobs became more scarce. Economic pressures began changing the landscape of industry. Wages started losing ground to inflation. A fear began to creep into the Cleaver household. June had to get a job. The nuclear household began to break apart. Wally was smoking pot with Eddy before June got home from work. Ward was drinking a Martini or two and a couple of lines of coke with his secretary before he got home from work. We were developing cancer.

So we needed a cure. They gave us Reagan, but what they really did was give us a reset and put us into derivatives. Reagan promised us doubling the Defense budget. We did. We were off the “gold standard” thanks to Dick, but they needed to clear out the dead wood in the system and Volker did that with interest rates over16% ( so don’t tell me that can’t happen again). The Drexel boyz were the first to give us a hint of what they were doing in the back rooms. 

They were jacking the money supply to finance the biggest spending binge in history. We were spending money like there was no tomorrow. We had the Shadow banking system. We no longer had to worry about a two square foot ice box.  Everyone that was anyone wanted a Sub-Zero by the end of the 80s. We had five-hundred dollar Gucci  handbags the pharmacist’s wife had to have. The 2.4 kids were down to 1.4 and attended pre-school by age 2 to get ahead of education game. The nuclear family was getting nuked.

We needed more money and the nineties were the 80s on steroids. The tech industry was a whole new debt creator. Company after company was springing up. They were like little baby sparrows crying for more feedings.  No one seemed to notice the “old” rust bucket companies closing with Ward going back for retraining. It was a bonanza for the bankers. What could go wrong?

The next decade was marked by two market crashes. The printed money was creating malinvestment distortions but no one fully realized how distorted these would become. Ward was eighty and working as a cashier at Nordstroms in Bradenton Florida. June landed a part-time job as a night waitress at a Waffle House. They had Medicare but it wasn’t covering their prescriptions fully. Beaver and Wally visited when they could, but Wally’s job as a nurse ended when he was caught stealing Fentanyl from the Pixus. 

Beaver was an investment banker and was too busy to visit, but promised he was coming to Florida to see mom and dad for Christmas this year.