I don’t pay much serious attention to traditional capital markets these days, but when I do happen upon an article every now and again, it tends to be laden with doomsday rhetoric and predictions about the impending collapse of our financial system. From what I’ve been told (and I really don’t pretend to have a clue), we’re in the midst of some strange experiment with negative interest rates, where income inequality is the worst it’s been since pre-WWII, the gold standard is in vogue again, and oil prices are a signal of worse thing to come. I’ve heard that the financial system is going through a “natural reset”, while others are birdwatching for black swans . Capital is in flight. Silicon Valley is a bubble. Student debt is a bubble. State pensions are vastly underfunded. China’s growth is slowing. The Big Short was better than the Revenant.



Like most people, I like to think that I care about what’s going on in the world. But even when I’m feeling unseasonably studious, I’m not entirely sure how to go about validating any of these claims. Absent the patience and reach to sift through raw economic data, I’m left to my own humble devices. These mostly consist of casually reading Zero Hedge (and becoming kind of a Debbie Downer as a result of), getting clickbait-ed into terribly written Forbes articles, tweeting about Bloomberg’s sweet data visualizations, and trying to find seeders for a decent copy of a movie about events that I spent an unenthusiastic semester of undergrad studying. If I’m feeling ambitious this weekend, I might watch another documentary on how the fractional banking system is the devil incarnate and why I should blame all of my problems on the Fed .