I’m Back. Also? The Economy Is A Mess.

“Good. Then climb up, get inside, and make it spin.” – Cobra Kai

Oh, wait, then she couldn’t circle back?

JW Note:  Monday was the third day (I think) that I had to skip a scheduled post since 2017.  It’s nice to be back.  Thanks for waiting.

I was driving down the road.  It was Christmas Day, back a zillion years ago.  There had been a fresh few inches of snow on the paved road.  I was going to see my parents.  The day was overcast, and cold, with temperatures hovering around 0°F (101.325 kPa).

My car was going around 70 miles per hour.  There wasn’t another car on the road, and I could see for miles.  Little did I know that I would soon have an auto-body experience.

Instead of snowplows, the county had used road graders to scrape the snow off the asphalt.  One result of that was that there was a continuous tiny hill of snow in the center of the road where the yellow line would be.

As I drove along, I reached to change the cassette tape.  Perhaps a switch to AC/DC® from the Crüe?  I wandered off just a little bit toward the center onto that little hill as I reached into the tape box.  It slowed my car.  On one side.  Just a little.

The result wasn’t little.  A force applied to one side of the car led to the other side going forward faster, a result most people call . . . spinning.

Or in this case, Tyrannosaurus Rexth. 

The car went into a very fast spin as the car’s forward energy was transferred into angular momentum.  I could probably describe the amount of energy in math, but I was concentrating right then and there on not being reduced to my personal lowest common denominator.  But you can think about it this way:  how fast would a car going 70 miles per hour spin if all the forward energy went into spin?

Fast.

This spin forced the weight of the car onto the driver’s side wheels as the car bled linear energy into rotational.  As the car spun, out of control, there was no real way to do anything.  Everything was happening far too fast.

The spinning car spun up a small tornado cloud of snow from the road.  Finally, the car tilted up on the driver’s side tires, and tilted up, 30 degrees from horizontal.  It stopped rotating.

The car then slammed down, at a complete stop, engine stalled, and every light on the dashboard on.  The defroster was blowing snowflakes into the car, and every window was covered with white flakes of snow, outside and inside.

There is only one thing I could do.  I got out of the car and stared down the asphalt at the path I had been on.  It all happened so fast that had little time to feel any fear.  Besides, who can be afraid when Bonn Scott was busy telling me all about Rosie?

How does he like his eggs in the morning?  Ohhhhhmmmmlette.

I had been going due east, facing right into the ditch.  I was now pointing due south.  The entire time, not a tire had left the narrow two lane asphalt road.  I looked back on the track the wheels had made, and it looked like the path of a figure skater doing a pirouette.  I got wiped off the car windows, got back in, backed up, and headed east again.

Much more slowly.

Back when the ‘Rona first started, the long-term implications (to me) were clear.  The immediate shutdown of large segments of the global economy would be disastrous.  It was certain to leave a mark.

The toilet paper binge was signal one.  When people panic, they feel that they have to do . . . something.  Buying toilet paper wasn’t rational.

Here at Casa Wilder we actually had a relatively ludicrous amount on hand before the whole mess hit.  It was (sort of) a prepping situation.  We kept buying more than we needed, and it kept adding up.  And up.  Before too awful long, we had the basement bathroom stacked pretty high with the stuff.

I hear that two guys stole a calendar from Capitol Hill.  Each of them got six months.

When the storm hit?  Well, let’s say that we were squeaky clean.  And we didn’t buy a single sheet.  We weren’t part of the problem, but part of the solution.

But the economy wasn’t.  Every bit of initial distortion from the economic dislocation was amplified.  It echoed down the system.  What kinds of shocks?

  • Initial runs on supplies.
  • Federal stimulus.
  • Initial lowered consumption of fuels.
  • More Federal stimulus.
  • Lower demand for office space.
  • More Federal stimulus, which increased unemployment benefits, distorting labor incentives.
  • Eviction moratoriums, distorting housing costs and lowering profits of building owners.
  • More Federal stimulus.
  • Spiking stock markets with contracting GDP.

I’m thinking that, in retrospect, Federal “aid” was probably the worst thing we could have done.  It provided the greatest expansion of government powers since FDR nearly destroyed the economy with the New Deal.  If the Federal government could tell a landlord in Podunk, Iowa that he couldn’t kick out people that refused to pay, it’s only a tiny step to saying that the landlord should let people move into his guest bedroom and feed them pancakes when they demand them.

French pancakes give me the crepes.

That might be the worst.  But the economic situation has all the charm of a pitbull that just quit smoking, and it will be the spark.

Wilder’s Law (might as well grab one when I can) says that Federal debt doubles every eight years.  The debt is right now at $29 trillion.  That means that (on average) the debt will rise by $3.5 trillion each year.  That’s a lot of money.  Some people work a whole year and don’t make that much!

I think we’re on track to more than double it in the next eight years, regardless of who is in the White House.  The end state of any exponential curve is, well, exponential.  The headwinds we are now facing are strong.

  • Medical costs, which are growing faster than Germany between 1939 and 1941.
  • Infinite Leftist “free” programs to see who will be trained to be the poet in Collective Farm #8675309 (I bet it will be Jenny).
  • Whipsawing energy availability. I promised Lord Bison I’d do an energy post again sometime soon, and we need to review where we’re at.  Is energy expensive because of political reasons, or because of physical reasons?  We need to have a great documentary about oil.  We can save it under non-friction.
  • Political division that mirrors only a few times in our history. Hint:  all of those ended in historic levels of bloodshed.  I’m sure this time will be different.
  • The man is a potato.
  • Lashing waves of inflation and shortage, as I predicted back in July. Heck, I priced cheap electric outlets the other day.  They were shocking!
  • China and Russia seeing their moment. Why didn’t anyone Xi that coming?
  • Joe Biden’s America? Borders are open, no jab required.  Oh, wait, have a job?  Jab required.

I wish that I could tell you that things will get better soon in the economy.  It is certain that they won’t.  The economy is shifting in unpredictable ways.  When you have a system that is working at its limits every single day and then subject it to amazing levels of stress?

It will fail.  No chips for new cars.  No drivers for trucks.  Chicago getting ready to lose a big chunk of cops.  The worst dislocations are yet to arrive.

The government solution will certainly make things worse.  How can I tell that?  It already has.  The dreams of those who assume that prosperity can be bought at the price of new law or regulation or printing more cash has always failed.

Second place winner, Collective Farm BR-549 poet competition.

Prosperity is hard.  Really hard.  The natural state of humanity has been one where starvation was always a possibility, where actually consequential diseases (see:  The Black Death or The Justinian Plague) was inevitable from time to time.  It was so bad that episodes of that show you love were on the streaming service that you don’t have and you’re not going to buy another one.

We live in a world that has become just like my car on that Christmas Day so many years ago.  It was moving down the road at full speed.  One tiny two-inch hill of snow caused it to spin.

I assure you we haven’t been anywhere close to the worst that this downturn will bring.  Prepare.  Stay away from crowds.  And if you and all you love all still there when all four wheels drop back on the ground?

Say a prayer.

Of thanks.

We can’t have too many of those.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

82 thoughts on “I’m Back. Also? The Economy Is A Mess.”

  1. I was a front seat passenger in a crash once.. Very weird. It happened so fast as the car blasted in front of us in slow motion. Bang of airbags and stench of explosive chemicals and 270 degree spin and the shoulder belt was a baseball bat blow against my chest and I could barely walk from exercise like microtears in every single muscle. Fun ride..

    Agreed economy is not wearing a seat belt. Tip- buy magnesium stocks, not toilet paper. Magnesium runs out in a few weeks, a key ingredient in aluminum production. Glass bottles are about to make a comeback for Woke Coke.

      1. I can remember various economics crises in the past, like the dot com bubble and then the housing bubble but this many looming all at the same time? Doubtful we can pull out of this, no matter how much magical “money” they print.

        1. Imagine your car’s engine overrevving. All those parts, moving too fast. All those parts, each dependent on the next to keep moving. One of those parts lets go. Even if the engine wasn’t redlining, this would be a catastrophic failure. with things moving in the red zone though, you’re talking parts coming through the hood, out the bottom of the oil pan, and into the passenger compartment after going through the bellhousing and the floorpan. Yeah; that’s about where we are right now…

  2. “I’m thinking that, in retrospect, Federal “aid” was probably the worst thing we could have done.”

    See there you go again, thinking like a rational person. It was terrible but that is the point. Who was thinking 18 months ago that we would have a labor crisis at the same time wages were going through the roof? People stop working and that is fine with TPTB because they stopped even pretending there was a relationship between tax revenue and spending. The more people who become permanent dependents of the state and who will vote to keep those benefits coming, the faster they can do the things they really want. Hint, it rhymes with genocide.

  3. I’m so looking forward to $5.00/gallon gas, and a loaf of bread costing about the same. When it comes, it’s gonna hurt like hell. We won’t be hearing much about systemic racism or white supremacy then.
    I was gonna be a democrat for Halloween, but I couldn’t stick my head up my ass.
    Let’s Go Brandon.

    1. There is always room for systemic racism.
      As things get worse, you’ll start hearing more and more on the news about how Whites are ruining America.

      1. Yep, gotta have someone to blame. Race is going to be at the forefront of issues soon, as people on all sides tribe up and get local.

    2. When you have plenty, you have lots of problems. When you’re hungry and thirsty, you only have two…

  4. The house of cards is coming down. I keep telling people that and most look at me like I’ve grown a second head from the “not a vaccine” that I refuse to get.

    The economy cannot survive evil people doing evil things on behalf of evil corporations doing evil things on behalf of evil governments doing evil things on behalf of evil multi-billionaire people.

  6. Like everyone else, I’m glad — and relieved — to see you back.

    Now for the quibbles. In the first paragraph, the “was” is missing from “I was going to see my parents.” 0 degrees F is equivalent to 18.3 Nm. Also, your car’s forward kinetic energy can’t transform into angular momentum, because those are unlike quantities. (It can, and did, however, turn into rotational kinetic energy.)

    Did I mention that I’m glad you’re back? At this point, I’ll stop quibbling, as I doubt you’re glad I’m back! I’ll get myself kicked out of your commentariat yet, wait and see!

    1. First: Fixed! Thank you!

      And, I’ll grant you the rotational kinetic energy note. Regardless, it was zippy.

      Thank you for the kind words. And I enjoy the quibbles!

  7. I don’t understand why everyone is so flummoxed by the toilet paper run – it’s called The Shit Hitting the Fan for a reason….

  8. Glad you’re back, was afraid you’d been assimilated by the Zuckerborg or the dreaded WordPresstapo.

  9. The laws of physics are irrefutable. Curse you Conservation of Momentum and Coefficient of Friction! Have had a couple of life experiences that taught Gravity is a heartless bitch. Glad you and your vehicle survived, but at least you learned something while giving your guardian angel a tough workout. I have also had a couple experiences with the laws of physics and was smart enough to learn from my mistakes too. Pain can be a great teacher. Great to see you back!

    1. When your car starts sliding like that, you need to abandon science and embrace faith. And by that I mean take your hands off the wheel and let God take over.

    2. It was (in retrospect) a really fun ride that I hope I never have to repeat. You’re 100% right – my guardian angel has to do leg day three times a week to keep up with me.

  11. Sir,

    Very glad your absence was not protracted, nor from sinister effect.

    Very soon, the only light left will be that which we shine upon each other. This may become impossible to support for very long.

    If ADE is a thing, I will be losing those I hold most dear within 18 months to something that wasn’t much of a threat to begin with, and that makes me very angry.

    My principle focus now is to ensure the safety and survival of my children and dear wife. Anyone who attempts to interfere with this will be reminded that there are consequences to adult decisions.

    We will not be getting ‘vaccinated’, so help me God.

    The time for argument and negotiation is over; those things have fallen away. There are only choices to be made, and outcomes to be borne, in the understanding that the decisions taken today may prove of great value in days to come.

    Diligentia; Vis; Celeritas.

    God Bless America, and any who would stand with Her.

    -M-

    1. I agree, and am concerned about ADE because the death rate isn’t going down.

      God Bless America. Let us go and find her.

  12. While the Chinese circle the globe and claim they have nuclear capability from space, we promote the freak Levine to 4 star admiral! Wow, I bet the Chinese are sweating bullets over that one.
    Meanwhile, we’re getting closer to having the 3.5 trillion dollar monstrosity being a reality. What’s the worst that could happen?

    1. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
      We don’t fight back, and our civilization wins a Darwin award.

  13. Welcome back.

    The post was too easy, though.

    You can just change the date, and repost it every week, without changing anything else.

    1. Well, we’re not quite yet at the steep and really spinny part – and that’s when I’m not sure we don’t roll right over.

  14. We also were well stocked in butt paper last year and like you, for a brief period of time we practiced Wipe Supremacy.

  17. *** ! ***
    .
    And I quoth:
    * “I got wiped off…”
    .
    I see what you did there.
    Genius, in an odd sort of double-take way.

  18. Since you posed the conditions, a standard car doing 70 mph that converts that kinetic energy to all angular kinetic energy will be spinning at 102 rpm ( a metric E-ticket ). Or seeing the same light pole pass every 1.7 sec as some of your remaining linear kinetic energy moves you closer to it—quite the ride. Murphy’s 2nd law requires the movement to be toward the light pole.

    Of course, the economy is like your ride. Real easy to keep inching the speed up while the driving is easy. Everyone (especially economists) thinks everything is linear when actually the entire universe is nonlinear, only approximated as linear over short time periods or in special cases. Some types of nonlinear systems can stay in equilibrium for a while. However, they quickly become chaotic with rapid changes in state — as happened in your car joy ride. Economics is likely an unstable, nonlinear system as demonstrated by the 2000 recession, the 2009 great recession, the China Virus depression. Each of those economic changes were tripped by a rather minor event (crash in specific sector of economy [tech], Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, and an engineered virus). And few people pay attention to the story of Black Swan Events.

    Everything is ballooned up so badly now, the change in state will be rapid and will hurt — as you would have if the car were going any faster. In your case, it is a V squared thing. The economy, who knows the nonlinear function.

    1. True, but friction (even on ice) ends the ride in a second or three, max.
      Otherwise the 102rpms would induce G-LOC, and the host would’ve blacked out without being able to relate the experience of the ride until consciousness was regained. If ever.

      And I say this not academically, but rather from firsthand experience, having done sort of the same thing in an automobile at similar speed, except in a maneuver around the (x) roll axis rather than the (z) yaw axis. My method left the vehicle shorter, breezier, and vastly less drivable, what with folding the roof into the cabin space, shattering all available glass, and tucking all four wheels under the chassis in a horizontal orientation.

      I therefore do not recommend initiating either maneuver.

    2. That seems (with the fault of memory) nearly the exact rate of the inital spin. Seemed to only go for six or so revs.

      The bigger the balloon? The greater the stored energy.

    3. Has anyone (everyone?) here seen a “double pendulum of chaos”? You can read up on Wikipedia, and I’ve made one, which I use to tell this tale:

      I draw the pendulum to one side, and say “this is like taking on a little debt. The pendulum swings for a while, and eventually the debt gets paid off.” The pendulum hangs still.

      Then I draw it back farther. “That was fine, so let’s try a little more.” The pendulum swings, but the bottom link now swings a little wider than the top link. If it were a leg, it would lift the heel on some of the swings, and it again comes to rest.

      “I got this figured out, so let’s take on a bigger debt.” Pull the pendulum about parallel to the table, and if I let it go very carefully, it swings like before. But if I let it go casually, it goes berserk. The bottom link swings all the way around, spinning like a nun-chuck. It may reverse direction; maybe more than once. The upper link jerks from side to side, sometimes about twice as fast as usual.

      “Betcha didn’t see THAT coming, did you?” Chaos has set in and it persists until the energy is nearly exhausted, when it comes to rest.

      Here’s a YouTube video that shows someone else’s double pendulum in action.

      And if two rigid links and two bearings can generate this much involuntary complexity, who knows WHAT the Congress can come up with?

      1. Chuck, thanks for finding the double pendulum.

        There is a related, but less complex case of the pendulum with an elastic string that can stretch and contract with the changing forces, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elastic_pendulum

        The double pendulum case is actually solvable, https://www.math.tamu.edu/~mpilant/math308/Matlab/Project3/Project3.pdf
        if skilled in quadratic, nonhomgeneous, simultaneous differential equations (. So neither system is actually random, although the double pendulum is rather complex. The real world would mix the 2 systems. That one would likely be functionally random since round-off error would prevent convergence fairly quickly or would just accumulate a lot of error. I could solve the later problem (i.e. cheat), but also know that the solution would only be accurate for a short period.

        That last bit of course applies to our wound up economy. However, the Fed is too stupid to realize it is way past even guess at their limitations. Congress and Joe are in far worse shape.

        Let’s go Brandon!

        1. Glad to hear that you liked it. I didn’t claim that the double pendulum was “random”; I described it as “chaotic”. The difference is subtle. Chaos is theoretically repeatable, but extremely sensitive to initial conditions, so trajectories diverge in a way which is “practically unpredictable”. No matter how hard you try (in the real, non-Matlab, world) “this time is different”, because the initial conditions from one run (in the chaotic energy zone) to the next cannot be reproduced.

          1. Sorry, the random comment was due to the numerous websites calling it so. After reading several of them, I became a bit disconnected from the actual thread.

            I did find in my posting that using the greater-than symbol triggers character functions while it deletes the intended text. In this case, it was an intended funny. The sentence should have read:
            “if skilled in quadratic, nonhomogeneous, simultaneous differential equations (i.e. know how to cheat with software). “

            Wilder’s site has the best contributors around, except for that one troll that went away quickly.

  20. “Stay away from crowds.”
    Ol’ Remus woodpile report.
    Really miss that website.
    Saved hundreds of his his entries.

      1. If you could have dinner with anyone, whom would it be?

        Remus. I would have given a great deal to have met him and had a conversation.

        I miss him very much… Tuesday mornings just aren’t the same now.

        1. Wow, that’s a difficult question, it would have been so much easier when I was young. Hmmm.

          Sounds like a good idea for a post.

          I miss him, too. I have not been able to remove his page from speed dial on my phone.

  21. The cities, where the supposed more intelligent, and wise, live to congregate, relegate, and ignore how it all must happen, will find things much worse than the rural areas. Things necessary will still be found in rural areas, and there’s bartering available to take the place of something that doesn’t make a good sandwich, and has absolutely no nutritional value.

  22. Sigh. The only really interesting and meaningful thing at this point is how large the gap comes between reality and what we are being told and when the balance tips towards the true believers saying “Wow, something seems wrong…”

  24. Things sure do look bad right now. It is not much certain how much more we can tolerate before this all blows up like an boiling pressure cooker.

    I fear it may take a lot more before we get to that point. I remember as a little tyke many moons ago, that people were proclaiming “The End of the World as We Know It” and yet things got a bit better and then a whole lot worse each time. Humans are remarkable in the fact that we are able to endure almost anything. It will take a determined segment that is influential to finally say, “Enough is Enough!”

    Bonus points for knowing who sang that song above.

      1. OK, be a spoilsport, but the fact that Matt D probably had no idea he’d inadvertently mentioned two songs was absolutely snortworthy.

        That the second one was more of a harbinger of TEOTWAWKI than the first was a double bonus.

  25. Glad you’re back up.

    Did a very similar maneuver in the mid 80s on I-80 coming home from a concert, only in snow deep enough to rub the floor with the wheels riding in the ruts from the semi trucks, right up until everything was rotating… and then it wasn’t and we were still going 70mph in the right direction.

    Any one you walk away from is a good one.

    When the spinning stops on the economy, I don’t think the outcome will be as good.

    nick

  26. 1. Do you have a trail of breadcrumbs like Bustednuckles for us mms to follow.
    2. Food production is good. More food production is gooder. But more food production and a means to stabilize it is bestest.
    3. Water is important. Potable water is even better. Access to it is best. Bailers anyone?
    4. Keep good cheer. Be Rhett Butler and read history for perspective. Start with Alls Quiet On The Western Front. You don’t have it so bad unless your loved ones suffer misfortune. And hope to see you on the other side even though you’ll probably have things you won’t talk about. Why, you’ll be just like your dad after the war.

    1. If things do go south, I’ll make it known in multiple ways.

      Yup, bestest food, bestest water. You bet – being of good cheer is a choice. I generally choose that . . .

  27. “I’m thinking that, in retrospect, Federal “aid” was probably the worst thing we could have done”.

    Not to brag but that first stimulus bill pissed me off. I paid attention to 2008 a lot. The only congress critter to vote no was Massie from Kentucky who still is putting up a good fight unfortunately to no avail.

    When Trump signed it I was even more pissed. I knew he and many would say well he had to sign it. Look where we are.

    Whats coming will be worse than 2008 and 1929 combined. Due to the unfunded liabilities and 3.5 trillion growth is small potatoes now. Add up the total to date and then add the 3.5 trillion they will soon pass and idiot will sign.

    If you haven’t noticed every city, state, and our nation is broke. Think about this, where does pention payment come from? No one is safe. When the job losses come after the intentional popping of the financial bubble may God have mercy on all of us for no one knows how it will turn out.

    Our faith in the end is all we can have.

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