What's Bubblenomics, you ask?
It's what we've been living since the 1980s:
1987: Market Crash lops some 23% off the stock market in a single day
1986-1995: Savings and Loan Crisis
1990s: the Roaring Nineties
2000/01: Tech Bubble Crash
2008: Housing Market Meltdown/Great Financial Crisis
And here we are, a week after the party who brought us Bubblenomics has retaken the Senate and expanded its majority in the House as well as taking more and more state legislatures and governorships - something like the most since in forever.
They seem poised to start up the big bubble blowing machines again and make life all hunky dory and fun once more - right?
How does Bubblenomics "work" and why do we keep falling for it?
For most people, it's a sucker's bet.
Wall St, Madison Ave., corporate America and the animal spirits intersect in our great laissez faire system and poof - bubbles are blown.
But this game isn't just for the rich and well connected - we can all soar with the rising bubble. Just climb aboard, there is plenty of room - in fact, there is always more and more room to accommodate more and more people because the magic hand of the bubble blowing machine keeps cranking the blower and the bubble grows and grows and grows and we all live happily ever after, right?
Well, of course not.
The problem is, we all know this story ends badly for a lot of people and good for a few.
For the few that it does end well for, they are promised a parachute when they step inside the bubble - they are connected and know how to get a parachute, you see.
Others, for various reason - fear of being left behind, greed, adventure, pure stupidity and more - hop into the bubble and rise and rise and rise with their new found friends. None of their friends have parachute - none of them even think to have one because they've been told the bubble will taken them to a magical land where everyone lives happily ever after.
And the ride up into the stratosphere inside the bubble is exhilarating - the rush, the view, the camaraderie - hey, we're all getting rich, isn't this fantastic?
And it's right about at that moment when — POP. There's a sudden jolt, like turbulence on an airplane, when all the people on board freeze, suspended in animation after the pop.
Some have a look of shear terror, but others seem perfectly comfortable. And then, those without out the parachutes notice some of their friends are wearing backpacks.
And then they take the plunge.
At first they are still mostly in the same grouping, like massive a flock of birds, but then some of them start jerking upward, but they aren't jerking upward, rather it is the majority of the people who are still streaming down while the fortunate ones have pulled the rip chord.
When it's all said and done, most don't survive the bubble, and even most of those who do survive return to a world below that is much, much different than the one they lifted off from only a few years earlier.
And, of course, the lives of their former bubble comrades are littered across the landscape, making life more miserable than life was before the bubble.