As we’ve been warning for quite a while (too long for my taste): the world’s grand experiment with debt has come to an end. And it’s now unraveling.

Just in the two weeks since the start of 2016, the US equity markets are down almost 10%. Their worst start to the year in history. Many other markets across the world are suffering worse.

If you watched stock prices today, you likely had flashbacks to the financial crisis of 2008. At one point the Dow was down over 500 points, the S&P cracked below key support at 1,900, and the price of oil dropped below $30/barrel. Scared investors are wondering:  What the heck is happening? Many are also fearfully asking: Are we re-entering another crisis?

Sadly, we think so. While there may be a market rescue that provide some relief in the near term, looking at the next few years, we will experience this as a time of unprecedented financial market turmoil, political upheaval and social unrest. The losses will be staggering. Markets are going to crash, wealth will be transferred from the unwary to the well-connected, and life for most people will get harder as measured against the recent past.

It’s nothing personal; it’s just math. This is simply the way things go when a prolonged series of very bad decisions have been made. Not by you or me, mind you. Most of the bad decisions that will haunt our future were made by the Federal Reserve in its ridiculous attempts to sustain the unsustainable.

The Cost Of Bad Decisions

In spiritual terms, it is said that everything happens for a reason. When it comes to the Fed, however, I’m afraid that a less inspiring saying applies:

Yes, it’s easy to pick on the Fed now that it’s obvious that they’ve failed to bring prosperity to anyone but their inside coterie of rich friends and big client banks. But I’ve been pointing out the Fed’s grotesque failures for a very long time. Again, too long for my tastes.

I rather pointlessly wish that the central banks of the world had been reined in by the public before the crash of 2008. However the seeds of their folly were sown long before then: