Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,
The golden Colossus of Trump looms over the national scene this summer like one of Jeff Koons’s giant, shiny, balloon-puppy sculptures — a monumental expression of semiotic vacancy. At the apogee of Trumpdom, everything’s coming up covfefe. The stock market is 5000 points ahead since 1/20/17. Little Rocket Man is America’s bitch. We’re showing those gibbering Asian hordes and European café layabouts a thing or two about fair trade. Electric cars are almost here to save the day. And soon, American youth will be time-warping around the solar system in the new US Space Corps!
Enjoy it while you can. Events are converging ominously this summer in the direction of unwinding expectations and serial train wrecks of finance and politics. Mr. Trump has made hubris simple by bragging on the supposed triumphs of “his” economy. When it blows up, he’ll own that, too, and the second half of 2018 liable to be a debris-field of shattered national economies, zombie corporations, and floundering institutions.
A new supreme court justice will be the very apex of Trump triumphalism, but whoever the pick is will goad the Democratic “progressives” to new depths of antagonism, so expect more street-fighting by the black-masked Antifa forces during the senate confirmation debate. Some sort of martial law will be invoked by a governor, or perhaps even the president himself. Initially that would amount to little more than curfews, but they’ll be ignored, and then the fun will really begin. Think: national guard troops and angry clashes.
The tone will be low, and sinking fast.
If Antifa acts up the way I anticipate, it will drag the Democratic Party closer to extinction. The party celebrated a week ago over the rise of Evita Peron wannabe, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her youth and glamour intersect with her socialism, a doctrine that caused more human deaths in the 20th century than all the religious wars of the previous centuries. What’s not to like about it?
The blowup of the bond and stock markets later this year will put to a gloomy rest the ludicrous notion that America has been enjoying a great economic boom. It’s actually been an engineered hallucination, thanks to the global monetary authorities applying the magic of limitless credit to a bad habit of credulous speculation. The central banks have launched a program of so-called “quantitative tightening (QT)” — an idiotic phrase meant to counterpoise the equally fatuous “quantitative easing (QE),” PhD economist-speak for grotesque interference in the bond markets — that will choke down the credit supply at exactly the moment that governments and giant corporations need new loans to pay the interest on old loans. The trajectory there is obvious.
The big question, of course — hardly ever asked in the public arena — is what that will do to currencies, i.e., money. It...