I started observing the slow-motion train-wreck in process in 2001 – a year removed from my perch as a junk bond trader on Wall Street and living several thousand miles away from NYC and DC in the Mile High City, where the view is a lot more clear than from either coast.
The United States has been in a state of collapse for several decades. To paraphrase Hemingway’s flippant description of the manner in which one goes bankrupt: two ways: slowly than suddenly (‘The Sun Also Rises’).
The economic decay was precipitated by the advent of the Federal Reserve; then reinforced by FDR’s executive order removing gold from the citizenry’s ownership, the acceptance of Bretton Woods, and the implementation of what is capriciously termed ‘Bretton Woods Two’ – Nixon’s completely disconnecting the dollar from the gold standard. If you study the monetary and debt charts available on the St. Louis Fed’s website, you’ll see that post-1971 both the money supply and the amount of debt issued at all levels of the system (public, corporate, household) began gradually to go parabolic.
I would argue the political collapse kicked into high-gear during and after the Nixon administration, although I know many would argue that it began shortly after the Constitution was ratified in 1788. At the Constitutional Convention, someone asked Ben Franklin if we now had Republic or a Monarchy, to which Franklin famously replied, ‘a Republic, if you can keep it.’
This post was published at Investment Research Dynamics on August 18, 2017.
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