A guy in northern California:
What is the strangest thing you believe?
Free markets are an illusion. I really doubt any such thing has ever existed. There has always been a class of people with so many more resources available to them that they can game pretty much everything to their advantage, to the detriment of those not in possession of such good positioning.
This most recent economic collapse has enriched an infinitesimally small group of people to a degree that’s difficult to imagine, but we’re not hearing or reading anything about them, meanwhile millions of people around the globe have yet to appreciate how bad things are going to get for them. Media, government and capital markets have long been captured by these forces and it’s not likely that much is going to done about it. We’ll just have to absorb the pain and maybe things eventually get a little better, maybe they don’t. Your mileage will definitely vary.