Hollow Men, Hollow Markets, Hollow World

American wealth has grown far faster than the economy for 25 years, creating an illusion of prosperity built on borrowed time. This separation began as a deliberate policy choice by central banks, but it's now collapsing as inflation reveals the bill that was never paid.

• Wealth and GDP growth moved in lockstep for nearly 50 years, then abruptly diverged in the mid-1990s. Alan Greenspan discovered monetary policy could inflate asset prices without sparking wage inflation, turning a one-time crisis tool into permanent policy. Every Fed chair since has accelerated this separation.
• The justification for this experiment depends entirely on inflation staying low. Once people know that everyone knows inflation is a real problem, the entire mechanism fails. That moment has arrived. The story holding everything together has changed.
• We redistributed massive wealth to the already wealthy during a crisis that didn't require it. Covid stimulus and earlier tax cuts pushed hundreds of billions into the pockets of people who faced zero economic hardship, stacked on top of trillions in asset inflation already pulled from the future.
• The math now demands one of two impossible choices. Either destroy enough wealth to match the economy's actual growth (equivalent to another 2008 financial crisis), or impose wage and price controls that nationalize large parts of the economy and destroy long-term growth potential.
• Neither option is politically bearable, which means we're headed toward something worse. The system will choose policy desperation over wealth destruction, lashing out culturally and economically as it becomes clear there is no good way out of this story.