Green Horizon Magazine issue no. 42 is being mailed out this week

The current issue of Green Horizon Magazine (#42) will be arriving in mailboxes this week.

The cover is a graphic re: “The Roaring Twenties.”

Here is my Page 3 introductory editorial:

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Roaring Redux?

A hundred years ago the production of alcoholic beverages was illegal. Yet the booze flowed freely. So did credit during the 1920s. The Federal Reserve System had been established in 1913. It initiated monetary stimulus that eventually drove the stock market to unprecedented heights by 1929.

Easy money. Record high asset prices. Sound familiar?

Late capitalism is characterized by a whole layer of economic activity — Big Finance — that’s akin to the machinations and ethics of a casino. For example: Wall Street speculators gamble by borrowing shares of stock to sell short. “Naked shorting” occurs when dealers allow more shares to be counted as borrowed than the number of outstanding shares that actually exist! It’s supposed to be illegal. Yet it recently was responsible for the vertical ascents and reverse-vertical crashes of prices of certain selected stocks whereby canny insiders made millions in a couple of days while members of what brokers call “the retail public” lost their shirts.

Easy money and flowing credit feed speculation. They also exacerbate inequality. After all, ninety percent of paper assets are owned by the wealthiest five percent of the population.

The financial world was awash in credit during the last Roaring Twenties. Fortunes were made by those with first access to capital, but once the retail public started to participate in the stock market mania prices went parabolic and a crash became inevitable. Fast forward to the 2020s. Note that the Federal Reserve started implementing unprecedented stimulative policies (“Quantitative Easing”) in the wake of the Great Recession over a decade ago. Interest rates went to zero and stock prices went to the moon. Growth in the real economy — that tied to real production and consumption on “Main Street” — was tepid during the recovery from the recession. Wages have mostly stagnated. But Wall Street has done just fine.

When a disconnect develops between the prices of financial assets and the underlying real values they’re supposed to represent, a crisis is brewing. That’s where things stand in 2021. The Federal Reserve’s radical policies gave an artificial sheen to economic performance under Obama and Trump. Joe Biden might not be so lucky. Limits have been reached. Federal budget deficits associated with COVID relief efforts arguably were necessary, but meanwhile, combined with Trumpian tax cuts, the percentage of federal debt relative to GDP has doubled in the last five years.

Can we make it until 2029 before the house of cards all comes crashing down (again)? Not likely. The next roar we hear from Wall Street will be one of panic and distress, and we might be hearing it very soon.

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Money and power used to characterize the United States. It was during the 1920s that our country emerged as a global leader and a cultural force.

A century later we led the world in COVID infections.

A contemporary phenomenon is the MAGA cult which, in an utterly misguided way, expresses a sentiment that our Greatness is in the past.

When we think back to the 1920s, images of flappers and jazz might come to mind, but it was also a decade of the kind of aggressive US hegemony-seeking that would eventually lead to what Paul Kennedy terms “imperial overstretch.” Now, in our time, financial debt, civil unrest, and political turmoil are indicative of how the country has been straining. Instead of trying to “Make America Great Again” during the 2020s we should be wanting to Make America Green. Priorities must turn away from financial and geopolitical dominance toward ecological and communitarian regeneration. Let Wall Street deflate, let the military atrophy. All the grandiosity and paper wealth has been distorting the economy. All the roaring about “Greatness” did nothing to enhance the well-being of the people. And it sure was stressful on the planet. So let’s now turn our backs on the old visions of affluence and glory. Let’s make the upcoming Twenties the decade where we start coming back down to solid Earth.