Halcyon Days, Hype and Halucinations

The collapse of monopolistic walled gardens because of "Boy's Club" activities becoming public should not surprise anybody. The "Big Three" steel companies of 1960 are gone; their progenitors, the railroads, are in public hands. The boys club of Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnagie and Andrew Mellon who had enlarged the dam at the South Fork Hunting Club which collapsed causing the 1899 Johnstown Flood.

My Halcyon Days were the first 51 years of my life. I had grown up in a rich family with a decades-long pattern of building successful enterprises, and a hunkering down during the bad times was destroyed by events of the "great recession". I was left unwinding my family holding, selling possessions, and caring for family members. The days in the 2005 bubble and the decades before always felt better.

As an engineering student, my sophomore economics class has always bothered me. Economics courses presented the same sketches and curves as Calculus classes, but the narratives were different. There was a heavy emphasis on the markets of Wall Street and the Chicago Board of Trade. It is my central thesis that the conflict between the Mathematical and Narrative thinking is a large dysfunctional region of our society.

Bitcoin was designed to avoid central authority, such as governments and sovereign banks. Given the US experience with the lack of centralized banking between the Bank of the United States and the Federal Reserve, why should we expect Bitcoin to present a stable economic basis for our economy? The math brains of the blockchain do not perceive the social problems of runs on the banks of the 19th century. The math models do not address the underlying social needs.

Standing at the beginning of the 2009 financial crisis, a giant economic fantasy of complex derivatives, only understandable by Physics graduates, was the wrong model. Alan Greenspan, "the Maesto," cryptic pronouncements could never really cover the excesses of Wall Street and Washington. This model would collapse. I believe Washington failed to supervise the large financial lenders, letting them grow too big to fail, too big to regulate, too interconnected to campaigns. Too concentrated not to fail. Too big to not fail.

Look at the math of Cantor, Boltzman, Godel, and Turing. Math and logic can lead us to endless recursive circles. Adam Smith's invisible hands are sometimes an illusion.

The banker always desires more control in attempts to defer the costs of risks. Hype gets funding, but the enterprise need to deliver. Outlandish claims need to results in outlandish compensation. Today we label the outlandish as halucinations.