America is 'going broke slowly' says J.P. Morgan, as national debt balloons and tariff revenue looks shaky

[Bluetus]

28. That is only HALF the story

Yes, our finances are becoming critical, and as a consequence the Dollar is no longer the international standard and New York is no longer the financial capitol of the world. But those are all just symptoms of the real problem.

The real problem is that this concentration of vast amounts of wealth into the hands of a few, most of which don't give a shit about the USA in the first place, has created the situation where we are no longer the leading innovator in the world. In fact, we haven't been for more than a decade. Now the center of innovation for the most important industries in the 21st Century is in Asia.

Since WWII, Japan and Korea have steadily gained in technology and manufacturing. And in the past 20 years, China has come to dominate global manufacturing, first as a contractor to western companies, but now leading in their own products and companies. The US has become largely just a country of consumers that don't make much that anybody else wants. We are maintaining a lifestyle by rolling up debt, but that will soon come crashing down.

Think about it. What industries does the US dominate?

Autos? No way. We are down to just GM and Ford. Rivian is a rounding error. Tesla is a scam and moving into other areas. The big players (Toyota, Hyundai, VW) manufacture here, but the profits go abroad.

Computers and chips? Intel is a shell of what it once was. NVIDIA is big, but the fab is mostly elsewhere, and there are competitive companies popping up everywhere. IBM is mostly a service business now. Microsoft and Google are strong. So we are still a player here, but not dominant.

Pharma? Not so much. We still have some players like Lilly, but this is a truly global industry now. We could have a place in biotech, stem cells, vaccines, and other emerging fields, but Trump is whacking the research that enables that kind of leadership, so the future is not bright in this area.

Telecom? No real leadership here. We see the same technologies everywhere. Networking companies like Cisco are no longer dominant.

Entertainment? Yes, we love to entertain ourselves, and still spend lots of money on football, gambling, movies, but none of these things creates any value internationally -- well OK, the movie industry is still a net plus.

We are declining in all of the traditional industries as other countries advance. So where is our big investment? It is in stuff like crypto and AI. Crypto creates no value at all. Insiders get rich off that, but it is a zero some game. There is no underlying product with any intrinsic value. it is financial masturbation.

Infrastructure? The worst. Period. We are now many decades behind most of Europe and Asia. And that makes those other economies fundamentally more efficient than the USA.

Aeronautics? One word: Boeing.

Military weapons? Yes, that has been a big strength. Many countries have wanted our fighter jets. Some of that is still in demand, but the Ukraine war has shown that those old weapons are often far less effective than low-cost drones, In a very real way, the balance of military innovation is shifting to Iran, Turkey, Ukraine and others who have the means to develop these now, more agile systems quickly at a fraction of what the US weapons cost.

AI you say? 80% of the stock market gains (not profits, there are no profits) in the past quarter are directly related to speculation on the AI bubble. Maybe this will turn out to be enormously profitable, but people like Jamie Dimon are warning us that this is vastly over-hyped and after the carnival barkers take their billions from the rest of society, we will be left much poorer as a nation.

Bottom line, we have no national strategy and we are going against countries that have focused and aggressive national strategies. Our strategies are to enable the polluters in old, dying industries because they have the cash flow to pay the biggest bribes in DC.