Art Berman

6 days ago | artberman.com | Nate Hagens |Art Berman

What if everything we’ve been taught about economics—about value, money, and growth—is fundamentally backwards? What if our projections for the future aren’t just optimistic, but delusional, because they ignore what money and debt really are and what they ultimately depend on? For the past 75 years, we’ve lived through an extraordinary anomaly: an era fueled by cheap, concentrated fossil energy, exponential credit expansion, and an unusual stretch of geopolitical stability.

1 week ago | artberman.com | Art Berman

The “deep state” isn’t real—there’s no smoky backroom of rogue bureaucrats plotting to subvert democracy. But there is a sprawling, entrenched bureaucratic apparatus that frustrates elected leaders, slows agendas, and seems impervious to change. That’s not conspiracy—it’s what happens when government scales to complexity. The “deep state” has become a cultural emblem: liberals dismiss it, conservatives blame it. But both responses miss the point. It isn’t a cabal; it’s a metaphor.

2 weeks ago | artberman.com | Art Berman

Illegal immigration, wrote Matthew Continetti, is “the focal point of our age. And it has the potential to break the nation apart.”Not because of its scale—unauthorized immigration has remained relatively stable for years—but because of what it evokes: fear, identity, sovereignty, and the sense that the center may no longer hold. It has become a symbolic flashpoint, exposing deeper fractures in the national psyche and the political system. Los Angeles was the latest eruption.

3 weeks ago | artberman.com | Art Berman

The dominant view that oil will remain oversupplied well into 2026 is starting to crack. For months, the consensus has warned of a looming glut—blaming weak demand, slow growth, and the phased return of OPEC+ barrels. While I’ve been cautiously open to that view, I’ve also remained skeptical. Analysts have repeatedly missed major turning points in recent years, often favoring tidy narratives over the messy reality of global energy markets. This week, Goldman Sachs broke with that consensus.

1 month ago | artberman.com | Art Berman

The failure of the climate movement isn’t just political or scientific—it’s philosophical. At its core is a reductionist mindset: isolate one culprit, pursue one goal, rally around one fix. Fossil fuels became the villain, CO₂ emissions the metric, and renewables the savior—embraced more for narrative simplicity than system reality. Missing was any serious reckoning with energy, complexity, ecological limits, or human behavior. If fossil fuels caused the problem, then renewables must solve it.