Time and Tide

On seeing the Old World anew...

(Time, as measured against what? Substack images)

“Time ripens all things; no man is born wise.”

~ Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)

Joel Bowman with today’s Note From the End of the World: Barcelona, Spain...

Free markets vs central planning... globalization vs protectionism... liberty vs tyranny...

History is full of epic matchups. Apparently equal, yet wholly opposing forces wrench at the heart... the brain... the wallet... and other vital organs... tearing us in impossible-to-reconcile directions.

The story is the same in markets, in politics, in love and in life...

Take the former. On the one side, innovation and competition tend to exert downward pressure on prices over time. It is the natural outcome of competition, of creative destruction, where weaker hands and lesser ideas are weeded out over time. Lessons are learned... skills acquired... processes bettered. The resulting price deflation should deliver, as Jim Grant once phrased it, a kind of “dividend for the working man.”

And it would... but for the dead weight on the other side of the fulcrum: the unnatural, para-market meddling of the State. Subsidies, grants, tariffs, taxes, fixes, quotas, manipulations, infernal obfuscations and, perhaps above all, flagrant counterfeiting on the grandest of scales; all these nuisances collude to exert tremendous upward pressure on prices.

Despite the great leaps of mankind, in other words, against his best efforts to economize, optimize, progress, streamline and advance, prices tend to float higher upon a steadily rising tide of liquidity: inflation. At the end of the day, the average Homo Credulous is left with less... and the State that rules over him with more.

Of course, no one force holds sway for eternity. Abused currencies eventually collapse under the mass of their issuers' hubris. The clock is reset. And the battle begins anew.

Old World Anew

We landed in the Old World yesterday, a one-armed writer with eyes wide open. Wandering the winding streets of Barcelona’s storied Barri Gòtic, we are reminded of history’s cycles, both great and small.

Some, like news cycles or fashion cycles, pass by in an instant. Unless you're paying close attention, these fads and distractions can pass right by without you even noticing them. In one season, out the next.

We're talking about background chatter... cocktail party banter... the ho-hum white noise of a workaday existence. Think of Orwell’s “two minutes of hate.” Enough to distractify; not sufficient to edify.

Other cycles, like stock market cycles or election cycles, occur over a slightly longer period of time. At three... four... five years, they are small enough to remain vaguely comprehensible... intellectually digestible... available even to our poorly evolved, mammalian brains.

The average bull market in stocks since the Great Depression, for instance, ran for about 4 1/2 years. The average bear market, being of roughly equal and opposite force, lasted about the same time.

Monitoring these cycles, armchair analysts can reasonably expect to see many ups and downs during their own lifetimes. Bears follow bulls; donkeys succeed elephants. For those of us in the cheap seats, it's all part of the entertainment, the passing parade.

Grander cycles require a still wider lens. We have to stand further back, to broaden our scope, just to view them. Take, for example, bond-market cycles.

All in all, it takes two whole generations for a bond-market cycle to complete its journey, from Ithaca to Troy and home again. A bond investor might go his entire professional career without seeing the market return to one or the other extreme (low to high to low... or high to low to high). And like Odysseus’ gallant oarsmen, many will perish along the way.

Circling the DOGE Drain

In the grand scheme of things, however, next to say the Templo de Augusto, a few blocks from where we tap today’s Note, this too is a relatively short cycle. Zooming out still further, we come to notice even larger, super cycles... great movements that lay hidden in plain sight from our granular, daily focus. Here we refer to the inhalation and exhalation of great political powers over time.

At one moment - the height of an empire, say - we find that it coagulates, congeals, coalesces. Power consolidates. It centralizes. We watch it swirl around the drain of a capital city... a Rome or a Madrid or a Washington, D.C. While mighty militaries patrol the distant frontiers, wealth and influence are sucked toward the center. Sensing the direction of the loot, degenerates, sociopaths and the morally depraved gravitate in the same direction.

Power brokers. Power meetings. Power players. Power lunches. Power mongers.

Bribing... conniving... contriving...

Muckraking... phone hacking... unashamed Faustian pacting.

Politicking.

The District of Columbia - and surrounding area - is an obvious, modern day example of this centralizing, centripetal trend. Just look at the grifters and opportunists lining its lucre-paved avenues. Witness the lobbyists scurrying hither and thither up and down K Street. Count the dollars sloshing around at election time.

Earlier this year, Elon Musk set for himself the unenviable task of reigning in government “fraud, waste and abuse.” One of mankind’s great innovators, Mr. Musk has plans to take our species to Mars. We may well get there before he is able to bring the US Leviathan to heel. You can track his team’s progress on DOGE’s X feed.

Trawl around the page for a while – if you can stomach it – and follow the literally thousands of millions of dollars passing from one greased palm to another. Finance... insurance... real estate... defense... construction... labor... transport... health... there is nary a sector of the economy absent from the public trough.

Mass and Weight

Even so, you can be sure the funds you see and hear represent a mere fraction of the actual amount actually shuffled around, so called “dark money.” Both behind closed doors and on telescreens across the world, political actors dance for the camera. The show goes on. Bread and circuses for all.

For the poor outsider, it seems as if the game is consciously rigged against him. It is as though a guiding hand is working the machine, ensuring that he is kept out of the loop. An omnipotent director is posited to account for the direction for the current. But no such operator exists...

No doubt there are nefarious actors involved, rabid parasites feeding at the system's rotten core. A dozen soft euphemisms spring effortlessly to mind, from “defense contractors” (war/armament/munitions factories) and “security specialists” (hired guns/mercenaries/hitmen), to pharmaceutical “consultants” (drug dealers/pushers) and environmental/ESG “experts” (climate alarmists/anti-human death cultists), to mis/disinformation “advisors” (propaganda ministers) and the rest of the unholy, symbiotic alliance between State and crony-corporate interests...

But these are merely byproducts of centralization, odious symptoms of a trend already in motion.

As the cycle of centralization continues, the cesspool at its dark heart gains in both mass and weight. Unable to move as quickly as it once could, it becomes taut... rigid... ill-adapted to absorb stressors... susceptible to disruption.

It is at this point, when the center can no longer hold, when the heaving political apparatus is laden with crushing financial debt and malignant public doubt, that we hear history cry out for a catalyst... a stimulant... an agent of change.

It's been over half a millennium since the last such catalyst reshaped the world around it. Might the next moment already be upon us?

Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...

Cheers,

Joel Bowman

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