Executive Summary

• Why today’s ‘magnificent folly’ will unwind in the 2020s
• The return of Peak Oil
• Why the pace of change will accelerate faster from here
• Why time is of the essence for those with the courage to act

If you have not yet read Part 1: Good Riddance To The ‘Twenty-Teens’, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

This next decade will be a banquet of consequences.  The misdeeds and the mistakes will all be coming home to roost and I certainly hope you have or are taking steps to prepare yourself for them.

The profound failure to let capitalism run its course is the most radical, interventionist, large-scale social experiment that could possibly be run.  The early returns, with the debatable exception of higher financial asset prices, are dismal across the board.

As mentioned in Part I, 2019 saw the greatest degree of central bank rate cutting and easing ever in all of human history.

Folks, this ain’t normal (hat tip, Joel Salatin):

As a result of the above chart and 90 rate cutting/easing actions by global central banks, in 2019 everything financial went up in price.

The good stuff, the bad stuff and the truly horrible stuff (super junky credit) all ‘enjoyed’ big gains.  It was worldwide.  A global phenomenon, spiked into the closing days of 2019 with a truly monstrous $500 billion(+) injection by the US Federal Reserve.

Folks, this ain’t normal.

I know that the central banks had one great success back in 2016 that turned things around by flooding the world with liquidity.  So they think they can do it again, only we might note the trend here; each intervention works for a shorter period of time and requires even more each time.

Less and less effectiveness, requiring greater and greater injections.  Truly the behavior of a junkie near the end of their time on this planet.

The 2020’s will see the unwinding of this magnificent folly. It will be extremely painful, and possibly dangerous.