In his most recent post, Ethan Penner looks at no reckoning or reprisal for bad investments, no seeming connection between macroeconomic risk and reward, and asks how sustainable is this, and anyway, where does real wealth come from?

Penner writes:

"I have long wondered how real economic growth occurs. I'm not referring to the kind of growth that moves deck chairs around, shifting prosperity from one set of industries to another while the whole pie is unchanged. Nor am I referring to the kind of growth that bankers and politicians can trigger by inflating a money supply and making debt cheaper and/or more abundantly available. This sort of growth is either a pure illusion or the kind that borrows from the potential prosperity of future generations. We've borne witness to a lot of those forms of growth for quite some time."