The next crash

I personally believe leverage is a huge problem at the consumer, corporation, and government level. When there is no control over the money being lent you create a float of money which appears to be sound or at least come from somewhere while in reality you may have received something as foolish as moneys I obtained via loan to loan you 1 million dollars to build a factory. You then you re-leverage the factory to pay off other debt so you end up owing twice the value of the factory. If people stop buying widgets so you can't make loan payments to me or the other entity you borrowed from, and both of us borrowed money to lend you, the two million dollars that no one seems to have will steam roll through the system unchecked. It's a bad thing.

In a lot of ways it's worse than inflation, for not only is money being added to the pool from essentially nowhere it's now so pervasive that the only way out is a nearly systemic default or the creation of funds to cover the imaginary money by federal banks. And the line will again be used that we made money on the deal.

Nominally that's absolutely true, but false in real terms. If you disagree perhaps you should've loaned money to Zimbabwe or Germany after WWI. You'd have made billions in a currency that became worthless in order to repay you. It probably would have made more financial sense to set the money on fire. I'd pay a dollar to see that, which is more value than you'd get from Zimbabwe.

Comments