https://bonnerandpartners.com/a-bitter-winter-for-u-s-stocks/

1. You don’t get something for nothing. A prosperous economy requires real work, real sacrifice (savings), and real investment.
   
2. Real money represents real things – especially time. Real things are limited. Real money must be limited, too. If not, it is fake.
   
3. Real money is earned by real people who produce goods and services of real value. Fake money is conjured up and controlled by insiders in the financial sector, and it is made available at preferential rates to other large Establishment players. Government (or, more broadly, the Deep State), big business, and Wall Street are the main beneficiaries.
   
4. Since 1971, the U.S. has had fake money (not attached to gold). This has been the reserve currency of the entire world financial system. This has misled investors, voters, consumers, and businesses. It causes them to believe things that aren’t true – that they have almost unlimited credit, for example… that they can afford an expensive empire overseas and a costly welfare state at home… or that they can run up debts and grow their way out of them.
   
5. As more and more of the nation’s resources are captured by fake money and directed into unproductive uses – consumption, bad investments, government, war, paperwork, and regulatory compliance – GDP growth, “real” (inflation-adjusted) wage growth, productivity growth, and other markers of genuine prosperity decline.
   
6. All “wealth” created by fake money is fraudulent and/or temporary. Look for it to go back whence it came.
   

That is the background economic-monetary outlook.

We are in our fourth decade of the fake-money system. And its distortions and corruptions are now catching up to us.
It is a system that runs on credit, not on wealth. But the world’s credit is getting thin. Total world credit now exceeds $230 trillion, with about $60 trillion added since the debt crisis of 2008.
Since the output of the world is not enough to carry these debts – not to mention the promises made to future retirees – they will have to be offloaded, one way or another, either by bankruptcy (deflation) or more money printing (inflation).
That is the story we’ve been following for the last 18 years.
Meanwhile, there is also politics. It has wound itself about the economy’s neck like a python suffocating a jogger.