Making Sense of the Scams

Most of the local television ads in my hometown are about personal injury firms. They seem to occupy most outdoor advertising as well. I’d assume that most of the regions in America have at least one firm doing the bit about how it’s recognized nationally, but they’re local lawyers. A few of the firms in mine shovel this horseshit at every motorist with billboards, so even if you have no television, you can’t escape it.

Lawyers have been chasing ambulances with ads my whole life, but at some point, they seemed to have absorbed most of the local advertising market. Hypothetically, a reasonable person plopped down in my town from a vacuum would be quite puzzled by all these ads as to what most people around here are doing for a living.

Presented with this evidence alone, one might reach the conclusion that getting hurt in accidents and then getting money through representation by the best lawyers is how we’re surviving. I think this would be reasonable. Objectively, these legal ads are quite bizarre by sheer volume and another thing you don’t see elsewhere on planet Earth.

They really irritate me because I notice things. Spending lots of my time abroad makes the contrast very jarring. Although, I’d place the ambulance chasers in a different category from the ads which I find alarming:

I looked up Klarna, which has been marketed as some sort of Swedish innovation, but a Wikipedia search quickly reveals that the chairman is one of the usual suspects. Racking up debt for restaurant food deliveries isn’t a surprising practice in a society which allows people to fund their sports gambling on an app with a credit card.

What this illustrates to me is how the big scam keeps going through the various scams within it because America and the U.S. Dollar are the heart of the global financial and economic system. For example, credit card spending wouldn’t have fed any Russians during the 1990’s collapse because nobody wanted their currency. Russian food production imploded, so Russians didn’t eat.

By contrast, Americans have access to the rest of the world’s productivity because we have the global reserve currency. According to the Triffin Paradox, we must use the dollar to take more out of the global economy than we contribute because our most important contribution is the U.S. dollar. If we weren’t running trade deficits, the global economy would collapse because there wouldn’t be enough dollars to keep it functioning.

The Triffin Paradox also posits that this situation of trade deficits will eventually lead to such instability that the global reserve currency will lose its status. Thus, any country that issues the global reserve currency is riding a tiger that will bite it. Apparently, this was pretty much understood at the time of the Bretton Woods Agreement back in 1944, but the United States insisted on doing it anyways for various reasons.

The most important question is probably what happens to Americans when this reserve status is lost. Unfortunately, this is a subject purely for alternative financial media and post-apocalyptic horror movies. I used to cover this one, which should indicate that it’s still not for polite company.

President Trump is rejecting neoliberal economics and instituting tariffs in what appears to be a good faith attempt to restore domestic manufacturing by incentivizing foreign companies to produce in America because that would be more profitable than selling Americans products made abroad. This would create American jobs and lessen the hemorrhage that will precipitate a currency crisis sooner rather than later.

This attempt will probably last only as long as Trump remains in office, while moving a vast volume of manufacturing to America after foreign companies finally capitulate is a process that would span multiple presidential terms.

So, I’m inclined to think Trump’s manufacturing agenda is going nowhere because this is a uniparty matter and nobody after him will have the stature to continue such bold measures until they bear tangible fruit. His detractors have only to gesture at the stock market for disingenuous proof that restoring American manufacturing by reversing the conditions that sent it overseas is a terrible idea.

What bothers me about the stock market as an indicator of American prosperity is that the average American owns almost none of it, and when it plunges or surges, such movements aren’t based on anything physical materializing or disappearing.

There are also various circuit breakers triggered if it falls too much and too fast, and the machinations of the federal Working Group on Financial Markets, also known as the “Plunge Protection Team.” It’s just as shady as the Consumer Price Index used to determine cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security recipients or any other measure that I could cover.

Prior to Trump, it seems that the Biden Administration’s strategy was flooding America with as many migrants as possible. Using various means to endow them as spending conduits for federal dollars, it utilized perhaps fifteen million new arrivals to create the short-term illusion of economic stability. This influx is probably going to hasten the collapse, but the stimulus might’ve gotten Harris across the finish line.

I guess my point for today is that my lack of optimism about our economic and financial system is matched only by my contempt for the dishonesty with which these matters are addressed. All we can do is wait to see how bad things get.