Bring On The New Year…

   

Yeah, I know, the jpeg jokes just write themselves. And, are really not all that funny.

 

Neither is this:

    

 

15 minute video. I screen-scraped the first 1:45 of the audio transcript.

We are taught that wars start with a gunshot. An assassination in Sarajevo, a surprise attack on a harbor, a tank crossing a border. But financial history tells a different story. It tells us that the gunshot is merely the final act of a tragedy that was written years earlier in the ledgers of central banks and the balance sheets of failing empires. 

War in its truest sense does not begin on the battlefield. It begins when the money stops working. It begins when a nation US debt becomes so crushing that the only way to erase it is to destroy the creditor. It begins when the global trade system fractures and it becomes cheaper to seize resources by force than to buy them on the open market. It begins when the illusion of prosperity collapses and leaders need a common enemy to save themselves from their own angry citizens.

We are standing on the precipice of such a moment. The year is [now] 2026. The global economy is sitting on a $300 trillion debt bomb. The United States is borrowing $1 trillion every hundred days just to keep the lights on. China is facing a deflationary collapse that threatens the legitimacy of its regime, and trust in the global reserve currency, the US dollar, is fracturing. Economists call this a structural convergence. Historians have a simpler name for it. They call it the pre-war era. 

In 1914, the global financial system broke and the world went to war. In 1939, the trade system broke and the world went to war. Now, the indicators are flashing red again. Welcome to the financial coin historian. Today we are not just analyzing a recession. We are investigating the terrifying possibility that the financial crisis of 2026 will be the trigger for World War III. We will show you the mathematical inevitability of the debt cycle. We will expose the war economy that is already being built in the shadows. And we will explain why when the check finally comes due, the price will be paid not in gold, but in blood. This is the story of the war that the bankers built…

I don't yet buy all of the argument, and I wonder whether the text was AI-written rather than by a human historian with requisite Cred. We do in fact face a number of potential national and global large-scale adversities. And with people in charge like "War Secretary" Pete Hegseth, one would rationally be forgiven for elevated angst. (And then, there's Pete's boss, now abstrusely/overtly threatening to invade Iran. 3 a.m. Jan 2, Truth Social, "We're locked and loaded and ready to go.") 

Cosplayer-in-Chief

Short of WWIII, might we "merely" experience The AI Bubble in 2026, given the recursive, circular, Enron-Worldcom-esqe revenue laundering increasingly hiding largely in plain sight these days?  

FINANCIAL ALCHEMY UPDATE

 

 

Stealing The Future, 'eh?

 

Andrew Ross Sorkin?

 

UPDATE 

From WIRED

What aviation would be good at—moving people from one place to another, much more quickly than was possible with cars, trains, or horses—was clear enough early on. This is what elevates AI bubbledom to another level: The promise of AI, to investors, is nearly infinite. It’s beyond uncertain. It’s unknowable. And we should note that AI arrived after much of a decade of near-zero interest rate policy that led Silicon Valley investors to place bets on companies with little to speak of when it came to business models, but boasting big narratives. Uber, the poster child startup of the era, founded in 2009, did not post a profitable year until 2023. And the AI narrative is ‘Uber for X’ on hallucinogenic steroids. Different parts of the AI story, whether it’s, say, ‘AI will cure cancer’ or ‘AI will automate all jobs’, appeal to investors and partners of every stripe, making it uniquely powerful in its bubble-inflating capacities. And so dangerous to the economy.

It’s worth reiterating that two of the closest analogs AI seems to have in tech bubble history are aviation and broadcast radio. Both were wrapped in high degrees of uncertainty and both were hyped with incredibly powerful coordinating narratives. Both were seized on by pure play companies seeking to capitalize on the new game-changing tech, and both were accessible to the retail investors of the day. Both helped inflate a bubble so big that when it burst, in 1929, it left us with the Great Depression...

Read/listen to all of it.