The Bezzle

A net increase in psychic wealth.

“As to whether I have been deceived, disillusioned…The answer is yes, I suppose. I had the misfortune to be nourished by the dreams and visions of great Americans—the poets and seers. Some other breed of man has won out.”

Henry Miller

Here’s my expert technical analysis of the QQQ’s:

This funny video explaining cryptocurrency - almost 3 years old - went viral again. It’s satire. Most people did not seem to realize that.

Amazon vs Nvidia

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The Bezzle

“In many ways the effect of the crash on embezzlement was more significant than on suicide. To the economist embezzlement is the most interesting of crimes. Alone among the various forms of larceny it has a time parameter. Weeks, months, or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. (This is a period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.) At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in—or more precisely not in—the country's businesses and banks. This inventory—it should perhaps be called the bezzle—amounts at any moment to many millions of dollars. It also varies in size with the business cycle.

In good times people are relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful. But even though money is plentiful, there are always many people who need more. Under these circumstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle increases rapidly. In depression all this is reversed. Money is watched with a narrow, suspicious eye. The man who handles it is assumed to be dishonest until he proves himself otherwise. Audits are penetrating and meticulous. Commercial morality is enormously improved. The bezzle shrinks.”

- John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash 1929

An insightful reply to the above:

People think they're going to get paid X, but they're only going the get X/2, either through outright default, or the sneakier default of inflation.

WSJ Fed Publicist Nick Timiraos, September 2020

No one in Congress objected to the Fed’s “new inflation strategy” of seeking above-2% inflation for an extended period of time. This was a financial war crime.

Ben?

So Neel Kashkari replied to Timiraos’ tweet, and I responded to Kashkari.

Link

Almost 4 years later:

Link

“One of the most profound comments that I’ve heard over the past couple of years was with a labor leader who represents low-income service workers…She said to me, inflation is worse than a recession. That is contrary to conventional economic thinking." - Kashkari

Conventional economic thinking is nonsense.

Yet there is never any accountability at the Federal Reserve for their horrific policy errors which permanently harm hundreds of millions of Americans.

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fyi Here is the RSS feed for the podcasts I've been on, if you want to import them into a podcast app or something. A while back I went with "All I Wanted Was A Pepsi" as my Substack podcast title, after the Suicidal Tendencies song, “Institutionalized.”

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Below the fold we have, among other things, Rob Arnott, a funny takedown of current A.I. hype, some tunes, systemic risks at the banks (and the FDIC), “economic realities”, NYC lofts for $175 a month, permanently high plateaus, assorted real estate madness, Dallas suburbs, reaching for yield, Canadians, hordes, Cem Karsan, low-IQ lenders, private-perfidy I mean equity, a new Japanese word, Utah highway patrol, comets, CLO’s, probability, panic, Yellen-bashing, and olive oil. Hope you see something that interests you.

I’ll try to take tomorrow off from reading, and rest the eleven brain cells left.

Also, I did not watch the “debate,” nor did I discuss it here!