Among the big winners of the Everything Bubble is–yes, I know you’re shocked–Wall Street.
Is the “Everything Bubble” about to pop? Let’s start with what we’re told: there is no bubble , all the assets soaring to unprecedented heights are reasonably priced at a “permanently high plateau” because of AI, scarcity of housing, scarcity of Ferraris, interest rates trending down, the Fed waving dead chickens around the campfire, people buying toothpaste, and so on: you name it, it’s a reason for assets to drift higher.
This all sounds rather splendid, but somehow the pump inflating the bubble goes unmentioned: it’s the money, Honey , the tens of trillions of yen, yuan, euros, dollars, pesos, etc., being borrowed or conjured into existence since the last spot of bother in 2008, where each unit of currency enters the global free-for-all chasing assets.
Thanks to historically low yields, cash is trash and the way to make a killing is to rotate from AI chip makers to Ferrari to Colgate, and then on to the next hot sector: maybe uranium, maybe bat guano, maybe a new doggy-themed crypto, maybe the next iteration of the yen carry trade, it doesn’t really matter because capital is digital and therefore mobile.
Hand-in-hand with the endless spew of new “money” and credit are financialization and globalization , which have transformed every asset into a fully globalized, commoditized asset that can be securitized, packaged, collateralized and leveraged in a financier’s Heaven of finance becoming the measure of all things .
The house across the street is no longer shelter: it’s a financialized asset that’s now part of a portfolio of rental properties owned (and leveraged) by some entity based in Dubai, which might securitize the portfolio and sell it to pension funds in Norway.
Or it’s one of dozens of short-term vacation rentals (STVR) in a wealthy family’s private wealth management portfolio.
The same holds true for every asset on the planet. Farmland isn’t for growing food–it’s for growing wealth as the global “scarcity” of places to stash capital drives its value out of the reach of those who would actually like to use the land to grow food.
For the wealthy, what’s abundant is credit, and what’s scarce is assets to soak up the sea of capital sloshing around the wealth management funds, philanthro-capitalist foundations, and other outposts of the top 0.1%, which as this chart illustrates, have ridden the credit-fueled Everything Bubble to unprecedented heights of private wealth.