The financial elites are pushing a narrative that asset prices, sales and profits will all return to January 2020 levels as soon as the Covid-19 pandemic fades. Get real, baby. Nothing is going back to January 2020 levels. Rather than the "V-shaped recovery" expected by Goldman Sachs et al., the crash in asset prices will eventually gather momentum.

Why? It's simple: for 20 years we've over-invested in speculative bubbles and squandered borrowed money on consumption and under-invested in productivity-increasing assets. To understand why the market value of assets will relentlessly reprice lower–a process sure to be interrupted with manic rallies and false dawns of hope that a return to speculative good times is just around the corner–let's start with the basics: the only sustainable way to increase broad-based wealth is to boost productivity across the entire economy.

That means producing more goods and services with less capital, less labor and fewer inputs such as energy.

Rather than boost productivity, we've lowered productivity via mal-investment and by propping up unproductive sectors with immense sums of borrowed money–money that accrues interest.