I should read Michael Malice's new book; this brief blurb about the book addressing "catastrophic" thinking amongst members of what Malice and others call the "New Right"-- a group which includes me, according to Malice's definition-- caught my ear. I wonder what Malice has to say about economics?

For me, the way it was put in the aforelinked podcast implied emotionalism and panic. But in terms of economics, I think the threat is quite real. There are trillions-- yes, plural, and many times so-- worth of global debt. But it's not as simple as "I owe you $100 and you owe me $100, so we'll just call it even"; rather, it's governments owing governments money, banks owing banks money, governments owing banks money, banks owing ordinary people money, people owing banks money, people owing governments money, governments owing people money, and so on.

Imagine a spider web with billions of threads in it, so dense that the eye can't even make sense of it. Each one of those threads represents someone or something owing someone or something else money. Heck, even the money owed is just debt-- fiat currency-- versus actual assets! Once even handful of the major threads come undone, it's going to be like chain-reaction margin calls on the stock market; "I don't have the money, I need it from Joe, who needs it from Frank, who needs it from Goldman, who needs it from the Greek State, who needs it from the ECB, who needs it from..."

When this happens, entire governments-- right down to or especially local municipalities-- are going to go belly up. Except this time, central banker hands are tied, because they already have inflated balance sheets from the last recession, and interest rates are near or at the zero bound. As a result, it will be more or less total freefall. Picture what happened to Detroit, but this next time on a country-wide or even global scale. Remember "Occupy Wallstreet"? Imagine that, times ten, or fifty, or one hundred.

The average American can't even afford an emergency $500 car repair, and the average state or municipality can't even come close to meeting pension "entitlements" as is-- now imagine 2009 hitting again, but even worse.

So back to Michael Malice and his book: I'd be interested to know if he'd categorize the above as being some kind of irrational discourse. I should also add in the interest of fairness that there is still some rope left with which to hang ourselves: wifey is always saying, "next step will be NIRP", to which I add, "and stock nationalization, like the 'plunge protection team' at the Bank of China". So maybe those two things will "ride us over" the next crisis, to the point where it'll only be "2009 times two"-- then the one after that will be "the big one".