Crackpottery

When the stock market goes up, for example. But when stocks go up faster than GDP, it merely shifts wealth from average households to the richest ones — those that own most of corporate America.

Thursday, February 26th, 2026

Bill Bonner, from the W.B. Yeats ferry

We take the ferry back and forth from Ireland to France. In the summer, it is a pleasant ride. In the winter months, it is an adventure. We got on yesterday at Cherbourg. The sky was sunny. The sea was calm.

“Looks like it will be very nice,” said Elizabeth.

But once out of the port, and into the English Channel, the swells grew much larger. All we could do was lay in our bed.

It is now twelve hours later, and our boat has passed through the bouncy Channel and the even bouncier Atlantic Ocean. We are now steaming up the Irish Sea. It is much calmer, so we can get back to work.

Our job here is simply to connect the dots...and see what picture they form.

We cast no judgment on the dots themselves — no matter what blithering idiots put them there. We just try to understand what they mean and what they may portend.

What makes our work especially difficult lately is that there are one heckuva lot of dots to work with...strewn out like decoys as if to draw observers away from the ones that really matter. All that can be said about them is that at least they are often amusing.

In the news yesterday, for example, was Donald Trump’s generous offer to send a hospital ship to Greenland to help those sick people who have been denied medical care by their incompetent and cruel government.

Trump:

[The ship] “will take care of the many people who are sick, and not being taken care of there.”

“Help is on the way,” wrote Florence Nightingale on his twitter account.

But there are only two hospital ships in the US Navy fleet. And neither is on its way to Greenland. Instead, both the USNS Comfort and USNS Mercy are in dry dock in Alabama, being repaired. They’re not going anywhere anytime soon.

Oh my. Those poor Greenlanders...freezing their poor derrieres off...with angels hovering over their beds as they wait, desperately, hoping the ship arrives before icy winds carry them away, forever, from the land of the living.

But then came the worst of it. The local jefe, showing no gratitude for the hospital ship that wasn’t really coming, had the cheek to tell Trump what he could do with his floating sawbones.

“No thanks,” said he, going on to remind POTUS that they had a national health program in Greenland. People get the medical care they need at no cost.

He did not say so but the number of Greenlanders...and Danes from the mainland...who go broke each year because of high medical costs, is zero. In the US the figure is over 600,000. Nor did he rub it in by mentioning that the life expectancy for the newborn Dane is three years higher than for an American, 82 rather than 79. Even comparing life expectancy of the ‘native Americans’ to ‘native Greenlanders’ ends in embarrassment for the US. The typical Greenlander can expect 71 years of life. On America’s Pine Ridge Reservation, 66 is what he can look forward to.

But what to do with Trump’s offer? What kind of dot is that? Pure, unattached crackpottery? A joke? Or, is it just fanciful...like a deaf man imagining he hears Piazzolla?

After the president’s state of the union address, we must have gotten a dozen different analyses...fact checking, correcting, kibitzing...criticizing POTUS for saying nothing...or lying. Diane Sare:

Trump’s State of the Union: Two Hours of Sound and Fury Signifying Nothing, Except Perhaps the End of the World

Associated Press:

A look at Trump’s false and misleading claims in his State of the Union speech

Washington Post:

Why the longest-ever State of the Union address was the most inconsequential

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget reports:

Ultimately, the President’s agenda thus far has added significantly to the national debt, and we will be spending even more because of our past refusal to pay for our priorities. Interest payments on the debt will total nearly $17 trillion between now and 2036; annual payments will rise from more than $1 trillion this year to more than $2 trillion by 2035.

Was that all there was? One hour and 47 minutes of error and mendacity...like the hospital ship that will never come?

The parts we follow — the economic dots — were mostly fantasy or foolishness. Even the premises undergirding them were malarkey. Mr. Trump thinks Americans should be happy when the stock market goes up, for example. But when stocks go up faster than GDP, it merely shifts wealth from average households to the richest ones — those that own most of corporate America.

Likewise, he thinks the government should try to keep house prices elevated. But he says he’ll lower interest rates to make them more affordable to young people. What to make of that? Lower rates may or may not make housing ‘more affordable’ in terms of monthly payments...but they would almost surely make it more expensive. Then, when prices inevitably decline, the poor ‘upside down’ homeowner will tumble out of his house, just as he did in 2008.

The whole cluster of dots introduced in the SOTU speech was strangely isolated, like a rogue galaxy, unconnected from our known universe.

But what if that was the point? The president was not talking about reality but an alternative to reality...something better...like the world of professional wrestling that he knows so well. When The Rock beats the Iron Sheik, it is better than real. It is the meta-world of Byzantium…’out of nature’ and still very much a part of it.

Viewers have other options; they prefer to watch ‘wraslin.’ It is a world they like and understand. It is a world where the good guys win.

And what if the point of Mr. Trump’s display was not to describe the actual world, but to keep the fans happy with his fabricated one. In it, we send our hospital ships to help the sick...and enter a Golden Age ‘like nobody’s ever seen before.’ And like nobody ever will see.

Who wouldn’t prefer that to the real world?

Regards,

Bill Bonner

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