Nouriel, this is an excellent essay. As always, the points which you make are sensible, insightful and illuminating.



My take on it all, for what that is worth, is that the Capitalist Class, especially in America, aka the 1% or the 0.1%, have gone into overdrive in their efforts to transfer wealth from the poor and middle class to themselves. The greed and avarice of these people is limitless.



The efforts of the American super-rich remind me of parasites that seek to take more and more from their host organisms but in the end they take so much that the host dies. This trend to hyper-charged capitalism arguably began at the time of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The sophistry associated with the attempts of the capitalist class and their stooges in Washington, apparently knows no bounds.



One really wonders just how much more it will take before the many struggling Americans who voted for Trump realize that they were cheated politically, economically and socially.



America’s insane political and economic policies, not to mention its crazy gun laws, (or to be more precise, lack of them) give every indication that this country is like the proverbial lunatic asylum that has been taken over by a bunch of homicidal maniac patients.