Yves here. Michael Hudson, in this short but important piece, seeks to define two modern diseases that are devastating societies and what passes for our global order.
By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His latest book is The Destiny of Civilization
America’s 2025 National Security Strategy calls for gaining control of the world’s oil trade. Toward this end, Donald Trump’s Oil War aims at depriving Iran, Iraq and its neighboring OPEC countries of their sovereignty over whom they may sell their oil to, just as he has done to Venezuela. There is no remorse for the collateral damage being caused by the disruption in energy trade that is plunging most of the world’s economies into depression.
Such reckless (and wreckful) behavior conforms to the letter of what psychologists call a sociopath. The Mayo Clinic applies this term to “a person [who] consistently shows no regard for right and wrong and ignores the rights and feelings of others. People with antisocial personality disorder tend to purposely make others angry or upset and manipulate or treat others harshly or with cruel indifference. They lack remorse or do not regret their behavior.” To cap matters, “people with antisocial personality disorder [who] often violate the law, becoming criminals. They may lie, behave violently or impulsively …” This diagnosis can readily be applied to any nation aspiring to empire by conquest. But U.S. foreign policy has carried it to new extremes.
Just as sociopaths lack a sense of right and wrong (and fight against any such moral values constraining their abusive behavior), U.S. diplomats have rejected the United Nations Charter’s body of international laws of war that ban attacks on civilians. American weaponry and missile guidance systems are serving religious and ethnic genocide from Ukraine to the Middle East as Ukrainian, Israeli and various Wahabi al-Qaeda client armies have been recruited to serve as America’s foreign legions.
Trump’s impulsive, aggressive and manipulative demands accompanied by bullying violence violate the most fundamental laws of international behavior that formerly were considered to be the essence of civilization. The UN Charter’s rule not to interfere with the sovereignty of foreign countries is the legacy of Europe’s 1648 Treaty of Westphalia that ended its Thirty Years’ War. The United States has overthrown foreign governments and tried to bring about regime change from Russia to Iran by bombing civilians, especially young students and doctors, schools and hospitals, in the hope that such terrorism will lead populations to replace their governments with U.S. client oligarchies to stop the bombings that have become the hallmark of U.S. policy.
U.S. diplomacy also violates the international maritime law, bombing fishing boats from Venezuela and Columbia in Latin America to the Strait of Hormuz and Persian gulf, without warning or probable cause simply to demonstrate its immunity from the constraint of international law and the inability of the United Nations or any other international body to prevent piracy and murder on the seas.
Insisting that other countries obey its own sanctions aimed at isolated Russian oil production., the United States has destroyed Libya and grabbed Iraq’s oil production and taken control of its revenue, refusing Iraqi government demands for the United States to leave. It has likewise seized control of Venezuela and devoted all its oil-export proceeds to U.S. accounts in Miami under the Trump Administration’s direct control.
Trump’s behavior has gone seamlessly to the U.S. presidency from his background as a notoriously cheating real estate developer, lying and breaking contracts with his suppliers, bankers and labor, and treating fines and penalties simply as a cost of doing business, not to mention his predatory behavior toward women. There is almost a natural kinship between his former life and his present political role. Much as U.S. foreign policy seeks to block countries from having their own sovereignty and self-reliance, today’s financial and real estate magnates in the One Percent class, along with the ambitious politicians they recruit to gain control of U.S. policy, are reducing a widening swath of the U.S. population to debt dependency and the insecurity of living paycheck to paycheck.
U.S. strategists fear (and bullies are cowards) that foreign independence from U.S. control of trade in oil, information technology and automatic intelligence would enable them to resist the demands of America’s abusive imperial power. The creditor class, monopolists and other members of the rentier One Percent share a similar fear that the U.S. government might enact and apply laws that would limit their concentration of financial power and monopolization of wealth at the expense of the increasingly indebted 99 Percent being forced more deeply into debt (and debt arrears) just to make ends meet.
Similar drives for power characterize the CEOs and CFOs of today’s largest corporations, as well as gangsters, religious cult leaders and many politicians pursuing their respective ambitions. Sociopathic self-indulgence is celebrated as the driving force of progress, “free” of public checks and balances to permit economic polarization and the kind of self-destructive decadence that brought down the Roman Empire.
A Vocabulary to Describe Today’s Global Fracture and Its Civilizational War
We need an appropriate vocabulary to describe these phenomena, and also to characterize their attempt at self-justification by promoting today’s neoliberal ideology. I suggest the following two words:
Geopathology: the abusive conduct of international relations in an exploitative manner that injures and victimizes other countries by imposing a unilateral double standard of behavior. All imperialism aspiring to empire building is characterized by such geopathology.
Econopathology: the doctrine to defend the absence of social empathy. Its core is today’s libertarian “greed is good” individualism advocating unlimited self-interest and rejecting any government constraint or regulation to protect the basic social principle of reciprocity and mutual aid that provided the foundation for civilization’s takeoff.
Early civilization could not have evolved if Margaret Thatcher, Milton Friedman, Frederick Hayek and Alan Greenspan had managed to send themselves back in a time machine and arrive as gods from the future offering to enlighten chieftains, priesthoods and the kings of Mesopotamia, Egypt and China. Civilization never could have taken off if it had taken their advice. There would have been no protection of their subjects against falling into debt bondage, losing their land tenure. Such a takeoff would have gone directly from incipient civilization to an economic polarization and subjugation to a narrow oligarchy lording it over the population and fighting to prevent any alternative attempts at takeoffs by protecting personal liberty and widespread self-support as a precondition for progress.
Only a system of mutual aid and protection of personal self-sufficiency for the citizenry could have enabled archaic low-surplus economies to survive. They could not afford the luxury of inequality and deprivation of the population’s liberty and land tenure rights. And by the same token, today’s economies require some public authority empowered to prevent economic and physical aggression from leading to predatory oligarchies. Most have been financial in character and have sought to monopolize the land.
Greek philosophy realized the need to protect society against the pathological behavior that was an inherent result of money-addiction. All wealth, especially in monetary form, was recognized as being addictive, leading to behavior that injured others, and accordingly was regarded as asocial and frowned upon. Usurious creditors assigned such “dirty” activities to their slaves or freedmen to avoid being shunned in polite company. Rules for basic reciprocity and respect for the human rights of others acted to constrain the kind of behavior that today’s financialized and neoliberalized Western societies have lost. Money addiction plays no role in today’s utilitarian economic theory, or in the principles of law or political philosophy. Business school students are taught that their task as corporate managers should be to maximize capital gains for their stockholders and pursuing profits to pay dividends toward this end by cutting costs and conquering markets ruthlessly, as if all the ensuing exploitation and destruction is creative.
The common denominator between geopathology and econopathology is their denial of freedom and self-direction for other countries and people. Viewing foreign sovereignty and self-reliance as enabling other countries the ability to resist U.S. diplomacy views such sovereignty as threatening the U.S. security of maintaining its tributary empire. And like geopathology, econopathology aims to reduce other individuals to the dependent status of clients, debtors, renters, and ultimately to serfdom.
Wealth and power addiction are natural drives, but societies through the ages have sought to socialize. them Socrates found the ideal to be a wise central authority to keep this drive in check. That social protection against oligarchy was seen to be equally natural as a precondition for societies to avoid polarization and stagnation. But as Aristotle observed, democracies tend to evolve into oligarchies, that then to make themselves hereditary rentier aristocracies. And such nations seek to “free” kindred oligarchies from the constraints of public regulation (e.g., as Trump supports the libertarian Javier Milei in Argentina), and to prevent any such regulations from being applied on an international scale.
How can today’s economies cope with geopathology and its econopathology?
Sociopathology is not self-curing. Neither is econopathology nor geopathology. Ancient societies had cities of refuge to which such sociopaths and other lawbreakers were exiled, at least temporarily until such time as they became socialized and learned to regret and feel remorse for their behavior.
Today’s U.S. foreign policy has spent the past eighty years since 1945 putting in place a body of neoliberal anti-government doctrine and its anti-socialist rhetoric rejecting all ideas of diplomatic and domestic economic reform. The challenge confronting today’s Global Majority is to create an alternative multipolar system of international institutions and alliances based on the principles of mutual aid and tolerance for each other’s autonomy that always has been the ostensible ideal.
Creating such an alternative requires an alternative doctrine to that of neoliberalism, and also re-creating the basic laws governing international relations. What makes this possible today is that for the first time since 1945, a critical mass of countries now exists to establish new institutions to protect their autonomy and sovereignty.
(Way) past remedies to the normal results of a creditor dominated culture are now considered absurd. To enact a debt jubilee represents immense political powers. The most abusive class of institutional creditors have their affairs protected by Congress. Congress’s power is suffocating, but It does not have to be this way.
I think there is a far more basic and effective way to describe what is going on.
When it’s hundreds of millions and billions of people, it’s not so much culture and politics, as biology and physics.
In that states function as social super organisms, government, executive and regulatory, is the nervous system, while money and banking are blood and the circulation system.
We have evolved enough to understand that as government has to serve the whole society that it works best as a public utility. We haven’t yet come to see the same principle applies to banking.
When the medium enabling markets is a player and not a utility the rest are tenants.
So rather than resources being allocated where they would be most effective for the entire society, much is drained off to feed large egos.
The banks are having their Let them eat cake moment. It’s like the heart telling the hands and feet to go suck dirt, as it’s keeping the blood for itself.
When greed is the primary motivating factor, strategy is bacteria racing across the petri dish. Infinite growth economics.
The advantage of multicellular organisms is being able to sense and navigate the surroundings.
So basically what we have is a case of social sepsis, where the gut bacteria have run amok.
This actually dovetails almost perfectly with the thesis of Hudson’s “Killing the Host”
I agree that it’s more about systems than ideologies. Whether if Nate Hagens’s Superorganism or Paul Kingsnorth’s Machine, the ideologies are more rationalizations to justify the System’s workings. And the villain roles will be filled by someone, though the bunch we have are especially execrable.
Scab over a festering wound. Brittle, necrotic, disconnected from the underlying tissue.
At one time the Roman army had a formula where the plunder of war was distributed to various groups like the Roman treasury, generals and their staff, centurions – practically everyone involved; and the empire gained strength. Things changed as the cost of maintaining the empire increased faster than the returns of tributes and plunder. At one time in the US, the returns on Imperialism were shared through higher real wages, tax revenues and increased opportunity from strong economic growth. As professor Hudson points out, that has all ended with the adoption of the ideologies from people like Thatcher, Friedman and Hayek.
Even if the US corners the market on oil, there will not be any benefit to Americans because they will still pay the world price. Imagine a situation where the US decides to charge China a special levy on oil because it is a “threat.” All that will do is increase the price of Chinese manufactures, including all the components it exports, and it will come back to the US as inflation and all the social and economic pressure that entails.
The US is a great power, with an insatiable lust for increasing its control over the world but it has no mechanism to turn that into a way to pay for it. When I look at the US since the end of the Cold War, I see a country that spends enormous sums putting countries in their place with little to show for it. Sure there are some new revenues here and there, but most of it goes to the oil companies close to zero goes to the US government and even closer to zero goes to the average American. I would even guess that the returns don’t even match the interest cost of the debt which the country took on to fight these wars.I don’t see how the US imperial policy can work when its costs are higher than the benefits.
“At one time in the US, the returns on Imperialism were shared through higher real wages, tax revenues and increased opportunity from strong economic growth. As professor Hudson points out, that has all ended with the adoption of the ideologies from people like Thatcher, Friedman and Hayek.”
I have a slightly different take on this. It is not the adoption of the neo-liberal ideology that led to the “returns on imperialism” no longer being shared among the population at large. Rather, neo-liberalism was adopted to justify the fact that, since “the cost of maintaining the empire increased faster than the returns of tributes and plunder”, it was no longer possible to let all stakeholders take a share of the bounty (which was shrinking, then ceased to exist, eventually became negative — as has been most probably the case in the UK for a while).
In that sense, it is not happenstance that neo-liberalism — which had been existing since the 1940s — became prevalent shortly after the first oil shock and just at the time of the second one, just after the last colonies except Hong Kong and Macao were lost, and after the consequences of its neo-imperialist adventures made it impossible for the USA to maintain an ordered international gold/dollar based standard.
But perhaps this corresponds to what you mean anyway.
Good points. The textbook version of imperialism would be the imperialist country controlling other countries for their raw materials to be used in the dominant country’s manufacturing and as a captive market. The American twist came when companies realized that they could make even more money by manufacturing in low-wage countries and selling back into the US. It started slow and gained momentum in the 70s with the oil shocks and the ensuing fight by labor to maintain its standard of living during the ensuing inflation.
More and more people started to hear some version of, “You can’t rely on government for everything, your success relies on your own initiative.” There was also a push from the business community about the inability to compete with foreign competition because American initiative and economic growth was being strangled by high taxes, too many regulations and a lack of business freedom. It was a perfect opportunity for the views of Thatcher et al to become prevalent. I agree with you that it had been there, waiting for an opportunity. for their “rising tide to float all boats.”
Of course, neoliberalism failed to increase growth, they never wanted to compete with foreigners they wanted free access to American markets for their offshore production in order to maximize profits. Real GDP growth went from over 4% in the 50s and 60s, to about 3.5% from the 70s to the end of the century and about 2% since 2000 – and the only reason that growth is above 2% is because American governments are pumping trillions into the economy through budget deficits. Then again, the wealthy and corporations have never had it better and their politicians keep talking about how great the economy is.
The pharmaceutical and health sector have proven that, especially with a US-cornered market, they still manage to keep the masses out in the cold and extracting as much as they can from them.
ROW doesn’t allow this to happen on their turf.
I think focusing on the nation/nation state/government as the primary mover is misleading. “Russia wants…”, “the USA wants….” etc.
To varying degrees at the present time (less in Russia more in the US) the national government including the military, regulatory apparatus, law enforcement – or more broadly the legislative, judicial and executive branches – are more like tools in the hands of a select (and often corrupt) few who have usurped control while maintaining the democratic pretense so that the little guys don’t rise up and reclaim the power they once may have had – or revolt. Various factions exist within this small minority and each has their own goals; sometimes competing, more often overlapping and synergistic.
For a good explanation on this, I recommend Aaron Good’s “State of Exception: American Empire and the Deep State.” At the least he tries and more often than not succeeds in explaining how the so-called “deep state” has evolved, how it works, and for whom. IMHO it jibes very nicely with Professor Hudson’s works while offering some unique theories on the defining events in modern American history that have cemented and grown it metastatically.
Those Athenians may have looked down on power grabbing via money but were totally jake with warfare as an essential social function. To become a leader there it helped to have a record of bravery on the battlefield. One could argue that both money domination and the military version are aspects of the same thing.
Meanwhile in modern America we’ve added another form of social power based on media dominance. Same thing?
How fortuitous it is that Yves’s Links started out by citing the article on Aristotle’s description of the Athenian practice of ostracism to exile political leaders or others who threatened society by becoming too powerful.
A similar process could be adopted by the reformed or new United Nations to ostracize, sanction and isolate countries that threatened world order by their belligerence breaking international laws cited in the UN Charter. (You can guess whom I mean.)
The United States itself has become a “city/country of refuge” for lawbreakers around the world finding solace here, starting with Operation Paper clip welcoming Nazis coming to the U.S. and being absorbed into the U.S. foreign service, especially in Latin America.
No, we would do much better to drag these people out of their imaginary and force them to be value-accountable, hour for hour, for the costs their dumb projects inflict upon us. Familyblog “the cosmos” in which states larp and people pay for it. Let’s start punishing the people who give the Trumps and Bloombergs and Sacklers access to fire and water. If Athenianism worked, they wouldn’t have fallen to Rome. :)
One thing to keep in mind about the US, is that as the “melting pot,” World War 2 was the big stirring spoon.
Consequently we only understand Stick, not Carrot.
The Chinese have been around the block a few thousand years more, so they understand both sides of the equation.
That’s still not enough for some though, that’s why US defends israel – to the detriment of our own people and country. When their shenanigans become too much even for our oligarch protection racket, the last refuge is the fake nation that should never have been.
I have a few friends (libertarian/Alex Jones types) that still believe Epstein is alive and well in said fake state. Sipping mai tais with Bernie Madoff and Kenny Lay no doubt.
Thanks for your article today! I tried to read the ostracism link, but I ended up unable to claim my “free” substack article so I had to refer to the wikipedia article on the subject. I’ll admit it sure would be nice to give the public the ability to tell people to just shut up and go away for ten years, but alas we seem to have reached a state where the public itself is most often ignored.
The other article in links which seems almost like a companion piece to this is Matt Stoller’s article:
A Billionaire Explains Why American Business Now Feels like the Mafia
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/a-billionaire-explains-why-american
#HUDSONHAWKS
I’ve been wondering how detailed and precise electronic money can become. If there is a taxonomy of values, like the value of air, water, sunshine, etc. that form the basis of the idea of value, then we have a way of coordinating it all. Maybe something corny like Gaiacoin. To my imagination this would far better facilitate living in harmony with nature. It would end our frantic drive to plunder each other and begin to evolve at a natural pace. I think our Science is a classic example of how we should operate 24/7 – very deliberately and carefully. Because that’s exactly how the forest grows.
In a similar vein, I’ve lately been beset by the question, what if the zionists had said to their palestinian neighbors, hey you guys grow olives lets make the best olive oil? the envy of all! Now I get it, the Palestinians were pissed, but some mutual understanding was not impossible
More likely the Propertarians will enclose the atmosphere and hydrological cycle so we can rent our lives back from them.
Can’t wait for power failures to revalue some “wallets”.
Disembodied money supports disembodied power which prioritizes profit over life to the extent life can be converted to profit, which on trend appears to be until the power goes out.
Thank you, Dr Hudson. Using psychological pathologies for political economics does you inverse service. What may be true of particular individuals opens metaphorical doors when applied to the whole system.
With energy usage as a proxy for power, the three main blocs (CHI, USA, EUR) account for half of global power, enough to form a class system of nations. China accepted this in its rise to primacy, but now the BRICS form a more powerful block than USA + EUR. Financialization has left the means of production in China’s hands. As the BRICS break away, they are not powerful enough to have global dominance, but undercutting dollar hegemony unfetters other nations from its class structure.
> What makes this possible today is that for the first time since 1945, a critical mass of countries now exists to establish new institutions to protect their autonomy and sovereignty.
Whatever words are writ, Empire breakdown increases the autonomy of other nations via removing suppression. That may look like empathy, but whether that helps the less powerful remains to be seen. China is strong enough to dominate the BRICS, and other smaller powers are still at the end of the distribution line.
The US may be seeking to control the world like some James Bond villain but they are running out of the wherewithal to actually do it. They have lost the ability to make a lot of their advanced weapons systems due to the Chinese ban on refined rare earths and a lot of their weapons are no longer fit for service. For the US Navy, look at the Ford, the Zumwalt and the LCSs. The US Army is a lot smaller than it used to be and standards have dropped. It might be different if the American people were fully behind what the US is doing but most struggle to simply make a living and this is because the economic system has been rigged this way and sending the wealth of the country up to the top 1%. The political system has become dysfunctional and Trump is just symptomatic of this. And when gas and diesel shortages really kick in over the next month or two, that is when the stresses will cause some major cracks to develop. Not looking forward to it.
Whiz Bang heavily weighted to the Whiz, not so much the Bang…
I have a hard time seeing world events through the lens of the nation state and the treaty of Westphalia. The oligarchs are global and above the law, and the US government works for them. As such, it’s not US interests that are being pursued when the US acts. When the US acts, it acts on behalf of the interests of the oligarchs. And those interests are defined in terms of the one thing they can all agree on — their insatiable greed for profit. The tricky part, as Professor Hudson points out, is how that profit gets allocated. Because insatiable greed is a limitless demand, and profit a finite supply, greed always exceeds profit in the long run.
The result of this dysfunctional system is what they are now calling the K-shaped economy, where the small and shrinking group on the top extracts all the wealth it can from the large and growing group at the bottom.
“Wealth and power addictions are natural drives, but societies through the ages have sought to socialize them. Socrates found the ideal to be a wise central authority to keep this drive in check.”
This is one possible reading of what Plato was up to in the Republic. Could one also read the Republic as more of a thought experiment.
Both Socrates and Thrasymachus are also theorists, which is to say that both men were in search of interconnections. The thought experiment Plato may be engaging in during the later half of the Republic consists in trying to show that a state patterned after the method of reason must look like the Republic-state which is utterly intolerable.
In this interpretation, the role of reason is to pinpoint and highlight the limitations of reason. Plato may be engaging in the unmasking of reason as a disguised form of power-assertion; hence, the endorsement of central authority.
The issue of Plato’s real political allegiances may be more complex than what is literally presented in the last portion of the Republic.
I oscillate between resolve and despair. When Prof. Hudson published “…and forgive them their debts” in 2018 he put a picture on the cover of Jesus driving the moneychangers from the temple; and started the book describing how the Statue of Liberty echos back to the debt “clean-slates” which were declared by ancient kings such as Hammurabi. Light the torch of freedom (to declare the burning of debt notes). Hudson also links the Liberty Bell back to the Jubilee proclaimed in Leviticus 25, which orders the trumpets to sound throughout the land. “And you shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants.” (Leviticus 25:10) Jesus declaring a debt Jubilee was something the Romans most definitely would ban. Even before Leviticus, back in the the story of Joseph in Genesis, the strategy of “never let a crisis go to waste” was on full display. Joseph and Pharaoh used their insider knowledge to corner the market on grain, and then in the drought years sold grain to the starving citizens for all their money, and then for all their animals and land, and then finally for their freedom, when all but priests entered slavery. (See Genesis 47:13-26.) Now the Bible glosses over this a bit, but soon enough even Joseph’s family was enslaved. “There arose in Egypt a Pharaoh who knew not Joseph.” (Exodus 1:8) So very neoliberal! The Empire devours its own!
I am, sadly, old enough to remember the 60s, and the motto, slightly modified from Lord Acton, “All power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely!” We got rid of Johnson and were rewarded with Nixon and his “secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam, which turned out to be to fight on for five more horrible years, and then lose. No wonder he kept it secret! Not that we are far from Nixon. Trump lackey Roger Stone has a Nixon tattoo! Enough about despair!
Much of my resolve comes from Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). That’s right, no mealy-mouthed Climate Change, although I will give a shoutout to climatologist Katharine Hayhoe’s Global Weirding. We do not have the luxury of waiting 10 or 20 years to see if politics will somehow sort this out. I fear Gaia may well bring her version of the Last Judgment on humanity well before that; which I suspect would NOT include any Rapture! I am also old enough to remember fondly an old black-and-white movie, Zorba the Greek.
Sociopathic tendencies doesn’t get you down the chain to where there is support amongst the non-elite (because down at that level they have to know and not speak how immoral elite behavior is in order to avoid being ostracized) but ….. good old “nihilism and ego gratification” (because they deeply believe nothing matters ….well… nothing but self-indulgence anyways) with just the smallest fig leaf of “reason” (oh its “reason” held together by zip ties, duck tape, and high hope but… yeah it’s still “reason”) covering the ugliness of their view….well that gets you all the way to ground level.
See the West, certainly the U.S., never moved past the 19th century in the way they see the world or act in it, only their technology moved into the 21st century.
I totally agree that, “Trump’s Oil War aims at depriving Iran, Iraq and its neighboring OPEC countries of their sovereignty over whom they may sell their oil to, just as he has done to Venezuela”—proxies and enriched uranium makes little sense. These countries, together with US oil, amount to nearly 70% of the world’s supply. If you add Canada, 4th largest, and small N/S. American producers, you’re well over 80% which would make the US extraordinarily powerful; and Trump richer.
Iran, however, is winning the war and that’s a big problem with global repercussions. I think it could be said if you’ve seen one war, then you’ve seen one war. Trump likely knows a bit about WW2 and Churchill, but not much else, and which in no way prepares you for war with Iran in 2026. Rather than admire Churchill so much, Trump should have studied Eisenhower.
Trump is the kind of person who says to himself, if it ain’t broke, then break it; and make money. He is now flummoxed, his advisors are flummoxed and/or Zionists. Trump has no next move and I think he is still holding out for a miracle that might allow him to conquer Iran but will end by, “plunging most of the world’s economies into depression.”
I think the new words Geopathology and Econopathology are useful. I can’t speak for Americans but many don’t despise the rich, they want to be rich too. That’s why they buy lottery tickets. Americans spend more than $100 billion each year on state lottery tickets and roughly $150 billion with all forms go gambling.
There is plenty of evidence, especially in game theory, that people are better off cooperating than competing. Many people understand that but I’m not sure how to convince enough people in time before we go over the precipice.
Lastly, we have a new Fed Chair and if we get into a depression, I’m more interested in how MH thinks Trump and Kevin Warsh will handle the economy.