BUT THOU, O LORD, HAVE MERCY UPON US...

You can spin it however you like — the times we're living in are terrifying, and they force a detour toward the heavens: time to beg indulgences and mercy from the Big Guy Upstairs.

The confessed and convicted goal is simply that disaster catch us having confessed, in the grace of God, of the holy Apostles, and — though one isn't a feminist — of the Most Holy Virgin.

I'm not writing this out of fear of Donald, even though the guy is a piece of work, but because of what the people who know say — the well-informed, the clued-in insiders, the savvy wiseguys. Like a certain Yves Bonzon: hats off, take a bow.

This illustrious necromancer (Lausanne, Switzerland, 60 years old), interviewed in the European press, declares that “he considers himself a ‘dinosaur’ of the markets”.

Well, that says it all! By the time the mummies and the old-money reactionaries showed up, Yves had already spent eons selling stock placements, cryptocurrencies, and resilient investments. Since 2015 he has been Chief Investment Officer of the Swiss group Julius Bär, and before that he held various posts at Pictet and UBS.

You can't make this up:

(El País, Madrid, Feb 23, 2026)

He made his debut amid one financial disaster and rose to fame in the middle of another; the guy has earned his stripes.

Without pretending to be the keeper of papal infallibility, it seems to me, Sancho, that the damn economics schools out there in their embroidered flower garden are going to have to update the pile of nonsense they've been teaching up to now. Take, for instance, the old refrain about the best allocation of resources.

Yves, from his unbeatable vantage point as chair umpire — the term used by those who follow the Chile Open — states, unfazed:

Swallow hard, take a breath, wait for your heart rate to settle, digest that, and read what comes next:

Anyway... no one's asking you to take his word as gospel. The powerful have always used the State for their own interests and purposes — including the tax system, tax breaks, and confidences shared with Jeffrey Epstein — but it's one thing to do that, and quite another to say so out loud, all while carefully wiping their ass with neoliberal theory.

Invoking the much-hyped AI, Yves reckons that not all that glitters is gold, that some companies will succeed and others won't. (When it comes to that kind of forecasting, so could I!) Standing on solid ground, he states: Under the old paradigm of supply and demand, not everyone finishes the race…

Which prompts the interviewer's question, “Doesn't that paradigm hold anymore?”, thereby touching the sacrosanct altar of economic theory, the law of supply and demand...

The answer alone is worth the trip:

“...because one consequence of neoliberalism is the loss of supply chains” is just another way of saying that once neoliberalism shows that your rivals, competitors, and/or enemies are more efficient... Down with neoliberalism!

Capitalism isn't dogmatic, and it doesn't lose sleep over useless theories meant to fool the unwary, the credulous, and the naïve: what really matters is profitability, profit, earnings, returns, dividends.

Which is why these days protectionism is practiced shamelessly — a method that until recently was condemned to public execration by the Capitol, and which now presides over economic policy thanks to one eminent philosophical insight: “Don't be a bunch of idiots”.

Which lets the madman in the White House play Monopoly in the morning, at noon, and in the afternoon — and, when he's got insomnia, even at night.