Sowing Lysenko's Seeds in a Monetary Twilightzone

The U.S. economy has become opaque. Galactic sums of money disappear into centrally planned interventions. Every week new stratagems are employed, directives issued. No one knows who devised them. By legerdemain, the risks of impenetrable credit schemes are shifted onto the unsuspecting. Expansive swaths of the economy are subsumed into a quasi-governmental underworld. 

Glimpses into the financial funhouse are frightening and disorienting. The wealth of pensions, municipalities, and charities has been pilfered. The Treasury has been emptied to recapitalize banks so the capital can be loaned back to its former owners, the taxpayer, with interest. Monetary and credit excesses are cured with even greater excess. It is three card monte inside a shell game inside a Ponzi scheme inside a Rube Goldberg device in a hall of smoke and mirrors at the center of a maze one can only navigate by shuffling blindly through darkness.

We have entered the monetary twilightzone. The future of the world's largest economy now rests in the hands of a few secretive men. Their guiding philosophy is derived from a thought experiment conducted by a Ph.D. student who concluded that monetary intervention by enlightened academics can create a new world in which economies will never again suffer economic depressions. 

The natural world is seldom so agreeable as to reform itself in the image of utopias imagined by academicians. Rather it reasserts itself. Ruthlessly. In the first half of the twentieth century, communist states adopted agricultural policies based on the ideas promoted by Trofim Lysenko. Lysenko proposed that seeds exposed to cold would pass the genetic characteristic of cold tolerance to the next generation of plants in a Lamarkian mode of evolution. The denouement of said agricultural policies was mass starvation and death on a horrifying scale. 

When ideas that conflict with nature are pursued with determination, the amount of energy required to maintain them soon consumes the entire system. More and more energy is required to sustain them and more and more of the resources of the system need to be diverted to perpetuate them. The system becomes infinitely elaborate, circular, confused, grotesquely distorted.  Many have hypothesized as to the outcome of the current monetary experiment. But it is unlikely that anyone truly knows how this will end as we have breached the outer limits of the mapped economic universe. It is probably not premature, however, to rule out one possibility, and that is that our newfangled financial innovations will lead us back through a hole in time to 2005 and folks will resume borrowing against their homes to purchase luxury vehicles. Not in our lifetimes.