Mike Green on evolution, fragility and survival of the least fit

People think about evolution as progress.  Evolution's not progress.  Evolution is fitness within an environment.  And it actually breeds its own fragility, right?  If I'm a finch who happens to inhabit the Galapagos Islands and nobody has a beak that's seven inches long that can reach into a particular pine cone, then I can grow a beak that is first 1 1/2", then 2", then 3", and eventually it's 7"; it provides a huge advantage.  But if that environment changes, a 7" beak becomes an extraordinary disadvantage and I go extinct almost immediately.

What we have done is create a system that is so stable and where the focus itself becomes stability -  preserving the status quo - that we've created all the problems of specialization and fragility and inequality associated with it, where very few members of our society control so much of the resources and are actually in a position to defend those resources...  That sort of environment needs to be disrupted.

~ Mike Green, "The End Game Ep. 3," The Grant Williams Podcast, 1:25:35 mark

Barron's on Jerome Powell, the Great Stabilizer

[T]he Washington leader... has done more than any other to stabilize the U.S. economy...

Faced with a pandemic that has forced Americans to stay in their homes and shut down their businesses, the Fed, under Powell’s leadership, acted swiftly to prevent a major financial catastrophe from unfolding. The central bank cut interest rates to near zero, unleashed enormous bond-buying programs, deployed new lending facilities, and went far beyond what any Fed had done in the past...

[M]onetary policy is set to remain a steadfast support for the U.S. economy, and a backstop that takes the worst-case financial-market outcomes off the table. At the center of that will be Powell, whose term runs until February 2022.

~ Barron's, "Fed Chief Steers a Steady Course in a Turbulent Time," by Nicholas Jasinski, October 31, 2020

"No matter what happens
on Election Day, count
on Fed Chariman Jerome
Powell as the stabilizing
force for the economy
and the markets."

Hyman Minsky on stability

Stability leads to instability. The more stable things become and the longer things are stable, the more unstable they will be when the crisis hits.

~ Hyman Minsky

Jim Grant on the trouble with stability

Stability is a false ideal. Instability is a vital and necessary part of the capitalist drama. The purpose of the downside of the business cycle is to make the economy clean and honest again. To reduce the downside is to dampen the upside.

~ Jim Grant, "The Trouble with Prosperity: An Interview with James Grant," Austrian Economics Newsletter, Winter 1996

Hyman Minsky on stability

Stability is unstable.

~ Hyman Minsky

Nassim Taleb on the illusion of stability of pegged currencies in Southeast Asia in 1997

[W]e are not sure that the world we live in is well charted.  We will see that the judgment derived from the analysis of these past attributes may on occasion mislead you and take you in the opposite direction.  Sometimes market data becomes a simple trap; it shows you the opposite of its nature, simply to get you to invest in the security or mismanage your risks.  Currencies that exhibit the largest historical stability, for example, are the most prone to crashes.  This was bitterly discovered in the summer of 1997 by investors who chose the safety of pegged currencies of Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand (they were pegged to the U.S. dollar in a manner to exhibit no volatility, until their sharp, sudden, and brutal devaluations.)

~ Nassim Taleb, Fooled by Randomness, 2nd Edition, p. 102

Financial World: Fed can always stimulate business (1929)

It may be well again to stress the all-important point that the Federal Reserve has it in its power to change interest rates downward any time it sees fit to do so and thus to stimulate business. 

~ The Financial World, April 10, 1929