Funny How?
October 28, 2015·0 comments·narrative
Central banks insist they are apolitical technocrats making neutral financial decisions. Yet their actions have created unprecedented wealth concentration and fragmented political coalitions in every country on earth. The gap between what they claim to do and what's actually happening grows wider by the day.
• Central bankers are reshaping who holds wealth without admitting they're reshaping anything. Monetary policy decisions that supposedly serve the whole economy have instead funneled trillions to financial assets while collapsing inflation expectations and leaving real wages stagnant. The gap between narrative and outcome has become impossible to ignore.
• Political polarization isn't just getting worse between left and right, it's fragmenting within each side. Voter preferences are scattering across the spectrum rather than clustering around a center, creating a system where no consensus outcome feels legitimate to most people. This pattern appears everywhere: Congress, central bank voting, financial markets, every country studied.
• The models that guide monetary policy have become disconnected from political reality. Inflation expectations drive everything the Fed and ECB do, but those models treat politics as irrelevant background noise. Central bankers face career risk raising rates, so they keep accommodating, which keeps concentrating wealth, which keeps fracturing consensus.
• History suggests this exact dynamic leads to one of two outcomes, neither of them good. Either a new enemy or ideology emerges to artificially rebuild consensus, or the system ruptures in a way that breaks fundamental market rules. The political accident is approaching faster than anyone seems willing to discuss.
• Investors and citizens will eventually realize they were sitting at a table with a system they no longer understand. The question isn't whether the current structure holds, but what replaces it when the collision between unacknowledged political consequences and technocratic denial finally happens.
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