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Illiquid, Overvalued July 7, 2025
As "dip buyers" get eviscerated, more dominos fall, and at a tipping point, the herd realizes the tide has reversed and it's time to sell--but alas, it's too late.
Illiquid, Overvalued describes a great many assets that are on the books as "rock-solid investments." Illiquidity means there are few if any buyers for the asset being offered for sale, and this can arise from various conditions. 1. Credit is tight and expensive, limiting the pool of potential buyers to those with cash. 2. Nobody wants the assets because they're grossly overvalued. 3. The pool of buyers with the expertise and financial backing needed to buy the asset is inherently limited. 4. "Animal spirits" have left the room and buyers are "on strike" due to caution / fear of future losses. Bill Ackman outlined some useful principles of illiquidity in a recent commentary on X in his discussion of the illiquid nature of many assets held by Ivy league university endowment funds: "Harvard's endowment is principally invested in illiquid private assets including real estate, private equity, and venture capital funds. Real estate and private equity funds are highly levered so relatively small changes in asset values can have a large impact on equity values. For example, if a real estate fund's asset values decline by 15% and the assets are levered 60%, the fund's equity value will decline by 37.5%. The increase in cap rates and interest rates have impaired real estate and private equity asset values. These funds do not generally mark to market as public assets are marked leading to a wide disparity between public values and private values when overall values decline. Venture funds generally mark their assets to the last round valuation so these marks can also be overstated as these values can become stale. I believe that a substantial part of the reason why many private assets remain private despite the stock market near all time highs is that the public market will value private assets at lower values than they are being carried at privately." In other words, assets held privately can be "marked to fantasy" because they're not exposed to the market's appraisal of their liquidity and value, which are two sides of one coin: if nobody has the cash and willingness to buy the asset, its value is essentially zero, regardless of its "book value." When Alan Greenspan issued his mea culpa in late 2013 about missing the subprime mortgage implosion and the resulting Global Financial Meltdown (Why I Didn't See the Crisis Coming Foreign Affairs), he identified two sources of his failure to "see it coming": 1. He assumed markets would remain liquid, i.e. that a buyer would emerge for every seller 2. The total failure of everyone's sophisticated models to predict the collapse of confidence. The core failure lay in the models' reliance on the notion that humans make decisions rationally as Homo economicus, when the reality is we are extremely prone to irrational exuberance (a.k.a. running with the euphorically greedy herd) and panic (running off the cliff with the herd). He invoked Keynes famous "animal spirits" as the missing variable in economic models. Irrational "animal spirits" generate "tail risk," events that supposedly happen only rarely but when they do happen, they trigger outsized consequences, and the Fed's models failed to accurately account for "tail risk" because they happen more often than statistical models predict. All this boils down to illiquidity caused by a panic-button urgency to sell and a profound reluctance to buy: When "animal spirits" are confident in ever-higher asset valuations, participants place a constant bid under the market because prices will keep going up so I'll make more money. This constant bid is called liquidity: cash is flowing into the asset class, be it stocks or housing or cryptocurrencies or commodities. When "animal spirits" turn to panic, sellers rush to sell as buyers vanish as they fear that prices will keep going down so I'll lose more money. Buying into a downtrend is known as "catching the falling knife": the initial "buy the dip" players have their heads handed to them on a platter, and those on the sidelines decide not to try to catch the falling knife. This is an illiquid market: the bid keeps dropping until buyers are willing to gamble that "this is the bottom." But should asset prices continue sliding after an initial euphoric pop higher--"the bottom is in, buy!"--then those who held back find their caution reinforced: that wasn't the bottom after all, and everyone who jumped in lost money. As every surge of "buy the dip" players loses, the market goes bidless--everyone who wanted to play "catch the falling knife" has been burned, and those who have lost the "animal spirits" to gamble stay out. Bids (offers to buy) dry up and asset prices crash to levels no one in the greed-euphoria stage could imagine were even remotely possible. Those who follow liquidity assume that the more cash sloshing around the system, the more money will flow into assets. But this assumes participants are rational and prices are "fair value". When panic takes hold of the herd, no matter how much cash is sloshing around, none of it will be gambled on a losing bet. Take a look at this chart of the Nasdaq dot-com bubble, and note the bubble symmetry: what shot up soon plummeted back to pre-bubble levels. Stocks that had reached $60 per share were recommended as "buys" at $45--a rational play perhaps, but wildly off the mark, as the stock eventually bottomed at $4. When sellers desperate to sell swamp buyers, prices decline. If bids dry up, prices crash. 
There is a domino-like effect to euphoria /liquidity turning to caution and then to panic / illiquidity. When overvalued illiquid private assets are sold at huge discounts, this topples the first domino of caution in professional money managers, who then move to sell the overvalued assets on their books to credulous "retail" investors and overseas buyers. As "dip buyers" get eviscerated, more dominos fall, and at a tipping point, the herd realizes the tide has reversed and it's time to sell--but alas, it's too late. The Federal Reserve can pump billions of dollars of credit "liquidity" into the financial system, but if nobody wants to "catch the falling knife," the credit will just sit there untouched, as everyone who was dumb enough to borrow money and gamble it away--leaving the debt still to pay--has already been wiped out. Illiquid and overvalued: two sides of the same coin. Check out my new book Ultra-Processed Life and my new fiction/novels page. Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com. Subscribe to my Substack for free My recent books: Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases originated via links to Amazon products on this site. Ultra-Processed Life print $16, (Kindle $7.95, Hardcover $20 (129 pages, 2025) Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF) The Mythology of Progress, Anti-Progress and a Mythology for the 21st Century print $16, (Kindle $6.95, Hardcover $24 (215 pages, 2024) Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF) Self-Reliance in the 21st Century print $15, (Kindle $6.95, audiobook $13.08 (96 pages, 2022) Read the first chapter for free (PDF) When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $15 print, $6.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF) Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $6.95, print $16, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF). A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $6.95, print $15, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF). Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World (Kindle $3.95, print $12, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF). The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $3.95 Kindle, $12 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF) Money and Work Unchained $6.95 Kindle, $15 print) Read the first section for free Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com. Subscribe to my Substack for free Ultra-Processed Life print $16, (Kindle $7.95, Hardcover $20 (129 pages, 2025) 
Ultra-Processed Life is my term for everything that is analogous to ultra-processed snacks: attractively marketed, instantly alluring, easy to consume, addictive by design, tasty in the moment but harmful over time, its origins a black box of unknown processes, the brightly colored product bearing no resemblance to the real-world ingredients, an idealized form of what is inherently imperfect, untethered from the natural world or the future, disconnected not just from the consequences of our consuming the snack but disconnected from the consequences unleashed by those consequences.
This book recounts my journey of discovery of how our everyday realm has drifted away from the foundations of human life and happiness without our noticing: the everyday realm is the river and we're the fish oblivious of the water. This book charts my exploration of what's so normal we don't even see it for what it is. As with many others, the catalyst for my exploration was a life-threatening medical crisis that did not have a specific cause. This led me to wonder if our entire way of life is like an ultra-processed snack: tasty but not healthy, edible but stripped of the nutrients we need to be healthy, addictive by design. Read the Introduction and first chapter The Mythology of Progress, Anti-Progress and a Mythology for the 21st Century print $20, (Kindle $9.95, Hardcover $24 (215 pages, 2024) audiobook, Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF) 
What if growth--and policies to accelerate growth--are no longer working because our fix for every problem--growth at any cost--is failing? We're told Progress is inevitable as a result of technology, but everyday life is getting harder, not easier--the opposite of Progress, what I call Anti-Progress.
What if the real source of the unraveling is far deeper than economics or politics? What if the problem is what we see as the inevitable destiny of humanity--Progress--is actually a modern mythology, disconnected from the real-world consequences of growth for growth's sake? We indignantly reject that Progress is a mythology, but our need for mythology hasn't gone away because we've mastered technology; we've created a modern mythology of technology that is heedless of its own consequences. To truly progress, we need a new mythology aligned to 21st century realities. That's the goal of this book. Read the Introduction and first chapter for free
Recent entries: Illiquid, Overvalued July 7, 2025 To Make America Great Again, Start Here July 4, 2025 America's "HealthCare" System Is Now a Structured Financial Skim/Scam July 2, 2025 The No-Win Bubble "Wealth Effect": Either Way We Lose June 30, 2025 The Economy--and its Future--in Four Charts June 27, 2025 Hollowed Out June 25, 2025 Is Life Now a Snack? June 24, 2025 Meta-Thoughts on the War June 23, 2025 How Housing Bubble #2 Bursts June 18, 2025 Good News! AI Can Do More BS Work June 16, 2025 And So It Begins June 13, 2025
Now That the Parasites Have Consumed the Host....
June 11, 2025
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Smith's Neofeudalism Principle #1: If the citizenry cannot replace a kleptocratic authoritarian government and/or limit the power of the financial Aristocracy at the ballot box, the nation is a democracy in name only. The Smith Corollary to Metcalfe's Law (The Network Effect): the value of the network is created not just by the number of connected devices/users but by the value of the information and knowledge shared by users in sub-networks and in the entire network. (CHS, 4/6/16) My Credo of Liberation: I no longer care if the power centers of our society--the distant, fortified castles of our financial feudal system--are changed by my actions, for I am liberated by the act of resistance. I am no longer complicit in perpetuating fraudulent feudalism and the pathology of concentrated power. I no longer covet signifiers of membership in the Upper Caste that serves the plutocracy. I am liberated from self-destructive consumerist-State financialization and the delusion that debt servitude and obedience to sociopathological Elites serve my self-interests. (Thank you, Klaus-Peter L., for reminding me) "We've become a culture of excuses rather than solutions: solutions always require sustained effort and discipline." (CHS 4/9/16) "Fraud as a way of life caters an extravagant banquet of consequences." (CHS 4/14/16) "Creativity = problem solving = value creation." (CHS 6/4/16) "Truth is powerful because it is the core dynamic of solving problems." (CHS 7/21/17) "We live in a system of human emotions that masquerades as a science (economics)." (CHS 1/1/18) "Always remember, your focus determines your reality." (George Lucas) "Diversity is for poor people. Sameness is for the successful." (GFB) "When power dissipates suddenly, it dissipates completely." (CHS 7/14/19) "Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves." (Henry David Thoreau) "Markets cannot price in the value of non-monetized natural assets such as diverse ecosystems." (CHS 7/14/19) "Magical thinking isn't optimism, it is folly." CHS 1/3/22) "Tune in (to self-reliance), drop out (of hyper-consumerism and debt-serfdom) and turn on (to relocalizing capital and agency)." (CHS 1/5/22) "The path to everything you desire starts here: like yourself as you are right now." (CHS 11/20/22) "There are only two signals: how many essentials you produce and share and if you're consuming less with better results. Everything else is noise." (CHS 12/17/22) "Liberation is no longer needing any confirmation or feedback from others or the world for one's sense of self. Wealth, fame, recognition, admiration, praise, prestige, approval, sainthood, martyrdom, success: none are needed, none are desired." (CHS 12/26/22) "When fame, wealth, prestige, status and glory are out of reach, you're free to pursue other more valuable things." 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