Approximately two weeks ago a minor press report noted that the U.S. government has distributed approximately $1.5 trillion in transfer payments, SAC, IRS refunds and the like. The numbers cited were current, going back through 2005. The truck orders noted above are certainly a key indicator of businesses responding logically to economic policies and prevailing conditions, but the planned distortion of the U.S. economy seems to have been going on for a long time now. Perhaps the experience of spreading dollars around for 10 or 12 years without stepping in a cow pie is what has incentivized our, enlightened, monetary policy leaders to embrace the notion that everyone is too big or important to fail, hence their debt must be purchased. I'm thinking of opening a blockbuster video outlet based entirely on debt instruments, just to get in on the action. There are incredible distortions in the economic and the financial worlds. The corruption began in earnest during the .com bubble over 20 years ago. Since then, the Fed has bailed out every corruption to help save the economy. This requires more and more debt. Now that the liberal socialists are going to be in power, the final endgame is going to play out as debt skyrockets to untenable levels. Everything runs in cycles and everything has limits. Except it seems everything accepts stupidity and arrogance. Given the Federal Reserve, Congress, and the pandemic, navigating the business cycle is equivalent to sneaking through a house of mirrors. The stock market is making new highs as unemployment rates to the same. Thousands line up for free food and soon will do the same to be vaccinated. The nation's governor's Titan restrictions by the day while the Federal Reserve remains loose in its monetary operations. Wolf Richter of Wolf Street has split the U.S. economy into, the weirdest economy ever, and writing about the trucking boom and online sales and, the most distorted economy ever, when addressing the record low-junk bond yields. Trucking companies had cut their equipment orders to nothing during the two-year-long freight recession. But by September, according to Richter, they were ordering large numbers of class 8 trucks that haul the goods across America. And in November, orders for class 8 trucks exploded to 52,600 orders, according to FTR Transportation Intelligence, matching the prior two historic records of July and August 2018. People are buying stuff because they haven't been buying dinner out in plain tickets. And stuff must be shipped. Fleets are placing big orders anticipating needing more trucks throughout next year, FTR said. This was tripled the number of orders in November of last year, the biggest year over year percentage gain, 199 percent, in years. Is it possible trucking entrepreneurs are making a mistake? In particular, a theory of depression must account for the mammoth cluster of errors which appears swiftly and suddenly at a moment of economic crisis, and lingers through the depression period until recovery, Murray Rothbard wrote in economic depressions, their cause and cure. Buying trucks would seem to fall right in the bullseye of the Austrian business cycle. Rothbard continued, the booms and busts are much more intense and severe in the capital goods industries. The industries making machines and equipment, the ones producing industrial raw materials are constructing industrial plants than in the industries making consumers goods. If the economy really was showing this sort of strength, then why did, the effective yield of the ice-bio-f-a-us high yield index, which tracks U.S. traded junk bonds across the junk bond spectrum, fall to 4.61 percent at the close on December 3, the lowest in history, Richter explains. Worldwide, corporate borrowers are bellying up to the bond bar. Almost daily grants reported, unsurprisingly, issuers are making hay while the sun shines. Data from S&P Global show that year to date domestic junk bond issuance stood at $405 billion at the end of November, already lapping the prior $345 billion full-year high-water mark set in 2012. Richter Chronicles recent yield blow-ups. The surge in yields back in 2015 and 2016 was largely the result of the shale oil and gas industry getting ripped apart by the great American oil bust. In 2018, as the Fed was raising interest rates and unwinding QE, junk bonds started quaking in their boots again. A year later, the repo market blew up, and the Fed piled into repurchase agreements. In addition the Fed cut rates, to keep some big mortgage rights, real estate investment trusts, and hedge funds that had massively borrowed in the repo market from imploding and spreading messy stuff around Wall Street. This March, the everything meltdown caused junk bond yields despite, with the ice bank of America high yield index more than doubling in a month, from a record low yield of 5.02 percent on February 20 to 11.38 percent on March 23. Despite the bond market operating on a knife's edge, the junk yield is priced for perfection in an environment with danger around every corner. Rothbard wrote, this, then, is the meaning of the depression phase of the business cycle. Note that it is a phase that comes out of, and inevitably comes out of, the preceding expansionary boom. It is the preceding inflation that makes the depression phase necessary. However, the Fed is not allowing the economy to heal, but instead induces more distortions and weirdness. Richter sounds Austrian in his analysis. Instead of allowing corporate debt to be shed via bankruptcies and debt restructurings, at the expense of those investors, traders, and speculators, the Fed is creating an environment of free money that exhorts companies to borrow even more. And then the even greater debt hangover bogs down the economy during the good time while everyone is waiting for the next blow-up so that the Fed would rescue them again, turning the whole thing into a Fed-managed paper exchange. Jobless consumers, no matter what the Fed does, according to Richter, Mike just refused to prop up on their own the weirdest economy ever. There is one universal truth. The farther a governing body is from the actual people it is attempting to manage the more irrelevant and corrupted becomes, and the more it serves only the elites in its bureaucracy. A centralized government controlled by bureaucrats who don't even live in your region, and make decisions with no regard for their welfare is basically a communist Soviet Union framework of government. They import human garbage from other regions and place them on the dull relegating local resources to others, and they do it to prevent any cohesion from developing among the population thus negating the possibility of an uprising. Keep the locals at each other's throats so they don't blame the real culprits of their misery. The authoritarian government. Yay it's Marxism. But a European Union sounds so much nicer. It is not being foot loose and fancy free. During the shutdown the banks of the Federal Reserve pumped trillions into asset companies like BlackRock, Blackstone and Vanguard who together have assets of over $30 trillion. They take that money and buy up company bonds and stocks. Blackstone is also buying up vast real estate across the world, especially in Asia. The banks of the Federal Reserve are creating a form of collateral by owning distressed businesses, homes and land which became that way due to the shutdown these are businesses that were thriving before the shutdown. They went belly up due to these decrees, not because they were doing badly. This was the Nomad Economist. Please like, share, leave me a comment, subscribe. And please take some time to subscribe to my backup channels, I do upload videos there too. You'll find the links in the description box. You will also find a PayPal link if you want to make a donation. Thank you wholeheartedly to all those of you who have donated. Stay safe and healthy friends.