by Charles Hugh Smith, Of Two Minds:

When you’ve been lied to, you’ve been betrayed. Betrayal has consequences.

Unsurprisingly, denying the pandemic is unstoppable and consequential is the order of the day: authorities everywhere are terrified these realities might leak through all their oh-so-obviously desperate firewalls and filters. Why are they terrified? Because they know the entire global economy, including the linchpin Chinese and U.S. economies, was extremely fragile before the pandemic arose: why else the panic-stimulus and panic-repo policies of the Federal Reserve and the People’s Bank of China in the pre-pandemic months of Q4 2019?

And so everything is covered up, and if that doesn’t work, then outright denial is the default policy. The number of cases globally is absurdly understated, the number of deaths in China is absurdly under-reported, and so on.

But the biggest denial campaign is aimed at masking the fragility of the global economy, as the only thing keeping the rickety, speculative-bubble, insolvent global economy from imploding is the belief and confidence of the masses that everything is going swimmingly, so keep on borrowing, borrowing, borrowing, buying, buying, buying and speculating, speculating, speculating.

While the real-world battle to limit the spread of the virus in China gets the headlines, the battle inside your head to maintain your confidence in the system is just as important. Economists talk about recession and depression in quantitative terms: deflation, sales, profits, employment and so on.

The key dynamic in recessions and depressions is confidence: confidence that the condo you buy today will be worth a lot more tomorrow, the business investment you make today will generate higher profits tomorrow, your job benefits will increase tomorrow, your house value will rise tomorrow, and so on.

Once confidence in ever-higher wages, benefits, sales, profits and speculative gains withers, all bets are off. The loss of confidence is akin to a loss of faith or loss of credibility: none of these can be restored overnight. Once your confidence that a speculative gamble will pay off is dashed, you’re not going to rush out to make the same gamble tomorrow.

Once your trust in authorities has been shattered by gross incompetence, authoritarian suppression and a laughably unbelievable tsunami of lies, you don’t wake up the next morning with your trust in bogus statistics and reassurances fully restored.

Once credibility has been destroyed by an endless parade of fabrications, lies and transparently false reassurances, your faith and trust that what you’re being told 24/7 is actually true is not magically restored.

Loss of confidence, trust, faith and credibility are self-reinforcing. Once you realize your speculative gamble is not just no longer going up but it’s crashing, you want out, not in. Once you see your neighbors going broke, you shut down your business before you lose everything.

Confidence doesn’t just evaporate; it’s replaced by uncertainty, anxiety and fear. Better safe than sorry becomes the implicit context: better to close now than gamble on a magical-thinking return to normalcy tomorrow. Better to go back to the ancestral village now rather than risk going back to work and becoming a victim of the “no big deal, just another flu” who ends up dead as a result of trusting the authorities’ reassurances.

The tragic irony is that Chinese authorities hid the epidemic to save political face, but their increasingly transparent lies and desperation are destroying what little international credibility remained after their attempt to save political face blew up. Rather than saving face, they’ve lost the last shreds of credibility they still possessed.

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