If you have not yet read Part 1: You're Just Not Prepared For What’s Coming, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

So I just want to raise my hand here and say that I am in favor of handing out serious punishments to the central bankers who negligently placed all but a very tiny few directly into harm’s way, knowingly and maliciously.  They knew they were harming pensions, savers, retirees, the young, the poor and the middle-classes.   They knew what they were doing was harming an entire generation of young people, fostering a deeply unfair and ultimately dangers wealth and income gap, and backstopping bank losses even (especially?) when those banks did stupid things that deserved losses. 

Yet they insisted and they persisted.  And here we are, with the third set of bubbles in 20 years and the largest wealth and income gaps in all of history.  I say the people responsible should be held accountable.

This Time Is Going To Be Different?

When these bubbles burst, and trust me they will, the aftermath is going to be especially ugly.  Like all bubbles, we’ll discover that a vast amount of lending took place towards ideas and projects and in support of spending habits that really should not have been undertaken.

Credit bubbles always end up making a pile of loans to really derelict ideas.  This time is no different, except the scale is so much larger.  There are so many bright red warning lights that it’s difficult to figure out which ones to convey.

Like the charts above, each one of these next charts could easily be an entire meditation that, if deeply understood, would reveal the whole story.  So settle in, take a deep breath and please consider the following.

First up, we have this deeply shocking chart for which the data has only gotten more shocking in recent months…