by Charles Hugh Smith
Of Two Minds
One of the dishes at the banquet of consequences that will surprise a great many revelers is the systemic failure of the Federal Reserve’s one-size-fits-all “solution” to every spot of bother: print another trillion dollars and give it to rapacious financiers and corporations.
Though 2020 is widely perceived as “the worst year ever,” it was only a snack. The real banquet of consequences will be served in 2021. The reason 2020 was only a snack is that systems didn’t break down in 2020. The reason 2021 is the main course is that systems will break down, and once broken, they cannot be restored.
I made the chart below to explain how systems fail and why they cannot be restored. Systems have numerous sources of potential fragility:
1. Systems can be tightly bound to other fragile systems, setting up the potential for a domino-like cascading collapse that starts with one system failure that then brings down every connected, interdependent system.