Madge Waggy
.You have felt this shift, even if you haven’t named it. The substitution of brands you never considered buying because your usual choice vanished six months ago and never returned. The creeping expansion of delivery windows—next day became three days became two weeks. The quiet removal of product lines, the shrinking package sizes, the prices that climb with weekly regularity while wages stagnate in their ancient tracks.
We are witnessing the end of an aberration. For seventy years, Americans inhabited an economic anomaly unprecedented in human history: the expectation that any material desire could be satisfied within hours, that shelves would remain perpetually replenished, that the distance between wanting and having would collapse to near-zero. This expectation was never natural. It was constructed from cheap petroleum, globalized manufacturing, debt-fueled consumption, and a just-in-time logistics system so optimized that it eliminated every buffer, every redundancy, every margin of safety in pursuit of efficiency.
That system is breaking. Not temporarily. Not cyclically. The fractures you see in your local supermarket are surface manifestations of tectonic shifts in manufacturing capacity, labor availability, energy costs, and monetary stability. The shortages will not resolve because they are not accidents. They are the new equilibrium emerging from the collision of demographic decline, resource depletion, geopolitical fragmentation, and the long-term consequences of monetary policies that treated money as a limitless resource while ignoring that it represents claims on finite actual goods.
Before you can adapt, you must see the machinery clearly. The supply chain was never a chain. It was a complex web of interdependencies so fragile that a single factory closure in Malaysia could idle an assembly line in Detroit six weeks later. When COVID lockdowns rippled across the globe in 2020, they didn’t merely pause production—they destroyed capacity in ways that do not heal within quarterly earnings cycles.
You have been told that current inflation is transitory, a temporary adjustment to pandemic disruptions that will resolve as the economy normalizes. This reassurance serves the interests of those who benefit from your continued participation in debt-fueled consumption. It does not reflect the monetary reality.
The United States expanded its money supply by forty percent between 2020 and 2022 through quantitative easing, stimulus packages, and COVID relief bills that contained hundreds of billions in unrelated spending. This money was not created through production of new goods. It was conjured into existence as digital entries in Federal Reserve accounts, then used to purchase government bonds that funded direct payments to households and businesses. The result is exactly what monetary theory predicts: more dollars chasing the same or fewer goods, with the inevitable consequence that each dollar commands less purchasing power.
Historical precedent is unambiguous about what happens next. When Argentina expanded its money supply to fund social programs in the 1980s, inflation reached 5,000 percent annually and the currency collapsed. When Zimbabwe printed money to pay government debts in the 2000s, hyperflation destroyed savings and redistributed wealth to those holding foreign currency or tangible assets. When Venezuela’s monetary authorities refused to acknowledge fiscal constraints, the bolivar became worthless and citizens resorted to barter, foreign currencies, and gold for daily transactions.
No comments:
Post a Comment