The "Year of Chaos" Arrived Late but Hit in Full Farce
Many are saying in one way or another that 2025 was the most chaotic year they've experienced.
Asked by his interviewer, “How do you feel about the year overall,” political humorist Matt Labash responded:
Oh, it’s gone great. If you’re in the chaos‘n’dysfunction business.… I warned of this before the 2024 election, even if the reality on the ground was much worse than I imagined it would be. But at least it’s allowed me to use, over and over again, one of the sweetest phrases in the English language: “I told you so.”
Like Labash, I predicted that 2024 would be the Year of Chaos, particularly starting up around the actual election week toward the end of that year. I won’t quite say, “I told you so” because, as I’ve noted at various points along the way in 2025, no chaos ensued at the end of 2024 over the election. (In fact, the Democrats practically took it in stride, compared to the chaos the Republicans threw up during the election week and beyond in 2020 and into 2021.)
However, it turned out the chaos was only a tiny bit late in arriving because, as soon as Trump was inaugurated it whipped up on steroids. Unlike Labash, I won’t say it was “much worse than I imagined.” It was, in fact, about as exactly as I imagined as any prediction as vague as “chaos” can be. And we can see how true that is as we just look at some of the articles today about the year in review as well as a few that describe where some of the government programs and players that got caught up in the chaotic inferno all ended.
I’m going to start with the biggest player—the US dollar, which got burned more than most saw coming. One area where I actually did get very particular about the type of chaos was my prediction that this would be the year when the dollar finally started to collapse, and collapse is chaotic by nature. Today, I’m turning to headlines that make the claim that this was a year of collapse for the dollar and for the reasons I laid out.
Death of the dollar is part of the chaos
I won’t go into detail about the dollar’s demise because I just covered that story yesterday. (See “Ditching the Dollar Is the New Popular Trump Trade.”) However, I do think from the standpoint of validating my prediction that we were headed into a time of notable chaos, this summary article of the collapse of the dollar, which did not arrive in time to make it into yesterday’s headlines, merits inclusion today:
The dollar, we are told in the article I’m quoting, experienced its greatest annual drop in over decade during the year 2025, and it was due to the very reasons I gave for my prediction clear back at the start of 2025:
The US dollar is on course for its biggest annual drop in nearly a decade after Donald Trump’s trade war triggered a slide in the value of the greenback.
Mr Trump’s tariff blitz, as well as perceived attacks on the independence of the Federal Reserve, contributed to the dollar tumbling more than 8pc against a basket of 10 major global currencies….
Ironically, the one currency most writers thought was going to get wiped out by all of Biden’s sanctions against it (which were continued by Trump) fared far better than the US buck:
At the same time, the Russian rouble has emerged as the strongest-performing currency of 2025, a remarkable rebound for its war-battered and heavily sanctioned economy. It has risen 45pc over the 12 months against major currencies….
The dollar’s slide was cemented in April when it fell 4pc in a month after Mr Trump’s so-called “liberation day” tariffs sent shockwaves through global financial markets.
This has led to what have finally become well-founded fears that the dollar is losing its place as the number-one safe-haven investment in the world, resulting in …
a clear move away from the US dollar, especially among non-OECD countries keen to reduce their exposure to dollar-based assets because of growing concerns about sanctions and financial fragmentation.”
The “financial fragmentations” come as the currencies of other nations start filling in the trade gaps left behind by the international trade currency (the dollar).
However, what’s bad for the buck is good for gold, which many have said for a long time is real money when the fiat stuff starts burning away. I’ve sometimes called it the anchor currency as this article being quoted now does:
The implications are significant. A lower reliance on dollar assets weakens the dollar’s global dominance, increases volatility in currency markets and strengthens gold’s role as a monetary anchor.
Before we end on the irony of the ruble’s rise, we should note that it is rising quickly for the same reasons that it plummeted under Biden’s sanctions … or, to be more accurate, the ruble is rising quickly because the cause of its original demise is seen as nearing reversal:
Much of the recovery was driven by expectations that Mr Trump might force a ceasefire in Ukraine on terms favourable to Russia.
Tatiana Orlova, from Oxford Economics, said the actions of the president had driven much of the roubles moves this year.
She said: “There was a bout of weakening in July and August, when Donald Trump started changing tack, and tried to exert pressure on Russia via the main trading partners that purchase Russian oil.
So, it is not that war sanctions did not hurt the ruble. They very much did, which is why the prospects of those sanctions being lifted under some sort of Trump peace bargain are giving the ruble oxygen again. It can rise quickly because it was pushed down hard against a spring board under Biden; so, it is rebounding now as the catch on the springboard is released … or, at least, as currency investors anticipate the release and get ready to capture the immediate gains, causing those gains in advance with their own speculation.
The ruble’s stronger exchange rate has also been reinforced with currency controls that do not let the ruble [British: “rouble”] trade freely on international currency markets.
Russia stops money from leaving the country, which may be artificially propping up the rouble’s value.
Jane Foley, a currency strategist at Rabobank, said: “We have got capital controls in place in Russia, so if you like [the stronger exchange rate] gives a false impression of the strength of the economy.
“Often when currencies strengthen we associate that with a strong economy, but with capital controls you are getting a significantly altered view.”
Anyway, dollar down, ruble and gold up.
Wolf Richter also put out a derivative article based on this one, which reinforces the claim that the dollar got trounced this year:
The share of USD-denominated assets held by other central banks dropped to 56.9% of total foreign exchange reserves in Q3, the lowest since 1994.
The low in 1994 came at the end of a long decline in the dollar on international exchanges that was a response to the massive inflation the Fed helped fuel in the 1980s, which was primarily caused by the collapse of the petrodollar during the Arab oil embargo that froze up a lot of oil trade. Now we see another kind of trade-based collapse of the dollar happening.
The downturn in value of the dollar came via the vehicles I had laid out for its crash at the start of the year (first for my paying subscribers, then months later for everyone)—bonds, particularly Treasuries, but all dollar-denomimated bonds that trade in international markets. So, we read today that is exactly what happened through most of 2025:
USD-denominated foreign exchange reserves include US Treasury securities, US mortgage-backed securities (MBS), US agency securities, US corporate bonds, and other USD-denominated assets held by central banks other than the Fed.
Richter disagrees with my tariff-based/trade-based cause. I don’t see, even when he explains it, how that view makes sense. Richter argues,
Trade agreements don’t dictate currencies. Companies that trade with each other can use whatever currencies they agree to use. And they have always traded in their local currencies, nothing to do with the USD.
While it is completely true that companies trade using their local currency, the fact that US products are sold in US dollars means currency exchanges are essential through those companies’ local banks and ultimately their central bank, which processes the checks or debits, because the US producers demand their local currency. The company trades in its local currency, but its local central bank exchanges those currencies for US dollars to complete the transaction, and they do this, not one check at a time, but by moving dollars in huge bundles called bonds—most often US Treasury bonds. They settle their account with the US central bank by moving some of those bonds in bulk from time to time.
When there is far less trade with the US in those countries, there is far less need for those huge dollar containers (dollar-denominated bonds), so central banks stop purchasing as many of those and may even, as they did, switch to purchasing bonds in other national currencies where more local trade is happening. Hence the “financial fractionalization” this article talks about from a global market that once relies more on US dollars.
Chaos in the overview
Another of the headlines I’m running today is not available without a subscription, which is something I only run if I cannot find the story in an available version from some other publisher and only when the headline or article summary carries the essential information I want to pass along.
This time, that statement comes from The Wall Street Journal’s summary of the year gone by … or gone bye-bye and good-riddance:
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of 2025
Terrorists are weaker and the border is secure, but chaos and conspiracy theories are spreading.
I only have the snapshot, but clearly The Journal considers 2025 to have been a year characterized by chaos.
Social Insecurity
Now let’s drop down from the broad economic overview to look just at the government level. As we sweep down closer to the ground-level view (which we’ll get to), we find that the chaos brought to US government agencies has been beyond anything ever seen in the US.
The whole landscape of government is smoldering like it has been bombed. DOGE firings likely couldn’t have been more chaotic than they were—with very large groups of employees fired and rehired a number of times over. I noted all along the way how hamfisted DOGE was and how ineptly trained (if trained AT ALL) its idiot savants were for their own roles of making absolutely massive governmental decisions about what should be tossed out in every government department and particularly how extremely little time this group of kids gave to making those decisions about the streamlining of government. That was certain to be a huge fail. Many on the team were barely out of high school and had never run anything governmental in their lives! In fact, they had never run anything other than something on the level of their associated student body or chess club. What a circus.
While DOGE caused or added to enormous problems in air-traffic control and in just about every government agency; let’s just pick one that made the headlines today in order to bring things down a little closer to ground level. I’ll focus on the Social Security Administration since it is one of the biggest and most crucial agencies to a massive number of Americans who were forced by their government decades ago to contribute huge portions of every paycheck to this agency’s managed funds as a government retirement and disability insurance program:
Trump’s ‘hostile takeover’ of Social Security has led to a multi-million-case backlog
Since the Trump administration took office in January, the Social Security Administration has experienced significant deterioration following cuts by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Caseload backlogs have swelled to over 6 million, and applicants now face substantial obstacles in obtaining basic information.
This concerns me because I hope to retire in summer of 2026, and Social Security is a huge part of my and my wife’s retirement plan. We were forced to bank money into the program all our lives from the time we were kids and wondered clear back then if we’d ever get our money back out of it. At the moment, however, we worry less about whether we will get all our money back than we do about whether or not we’ll even make it through Social Security’s enrollment process in time for our scheduled retirement dates; or will our current work terminate before our social security (already applied for) kicks in, leaving us with none of those funds for awhile?
While we completed our application ahead of time, based on SS’s recommendations, we haven’t heard anything back yet about how much they have approved for each of us. Our checks are supposed to start in two weeks, which is also when my wife’s retirement starts, but we’ve heard nothing about their determination as to how much either of us will be receiving. Maybe the first check won’t arrive until March … or June. Who knows? But good luck in actually getting any information on where things stand:
According to a Washington Post report, “Long-strained customer services at Social Security have become worse by many key measures.” Employees who were not terminated or resigned in response to the changes have been reassigned between departments with minimal training for their new roles, further compromising service delivery.
As the report notes, those efficiencies put in place by DOGE staffers have left the agency in “turmoil” as multiple commissioners have come and gone, leading to “record backlogs that have delayed basic services to millions of customers, according to internal agency documents and dozens of interviews.”
Of course, Republicans long warned us that we’d never see our Social-Security returned back to us as we were promised we were entitled to see. What they didn’t tell us is that they would be the ones doing their best to make sure we never saw that money, which was ours, so we are entitled to it, returned to us.
In summary, the chaos at this massive government agency that many have been forced by the federal government for decades to fund now looks like this:
The Post reported that “regional offices abruptly disappeared in a rushed reorganization. New policies to fight fraud were rolled out only to be canceled or changed, prompting confused customers to jam the phones and the website, which crashed repeatedly. Daily operations in some respects became an endless game of whack-a-mole as employees were pulled from one department to another….”
“Training on the phone system and complicated claims and benefit programs lasted four hours for some reassigned workers when it should have taken six months, another employee said. As a result, some customers still can’t get basic questions answered or are given inaccurate information, according to a half-dozen staffers who answer the phones or work closely with employees who do,” the Post reported, and one employee added: “They offered minimal training and basically threw them in to sink or swim.”
It looks like the worst government nightmare we’ve ever seen. And the worst part is we saw absolutely no reduction in the government’s deficit spending come out of it! This makes calling it a “boondoggle” sound like undeserved praise.
Of Musk and Men
Now let’s really bring things down to just above ground level as we look at the DOGE derivative problems by focusing on the one man overseeing it all—Elon Musk (the boss of barely-past-highschool “Big Balls”)—where yet another story today emphasizes the “chaos” at the center of the DOGE tornado that ravaged a broad path through government, which now looks something like the East Wing of the White House:
Elon Musk’s 2025 recap: how the world’s richest person became its most chaotic
How the tech CEO and ‘Dogefather’ made a mess of the year – from an apparent Nazi salute during his White House tenure to Tesla sales slumps and Starship explosions.
Ah, the joy that unfolds when the corporatocracy joins the technocracy to form a rich kleptocracy of billionaires who will eventually be the ones using the new East-Wing, gold-plated ballroom, which we are assured they paying for so that they can enjoy larger and more lavish parties with the president, whom we are assured is not selling Bidenesque access to the president in exchange for those donations to the big ballsroom he wants to build. (Apparently, DOGE-reduced and streamlined governments need big ballsrooms for swinging their golden clangers around on the dance floor.)
The year of 2025 was dizzying for Elon Musk. The tech titan began the year holding court with Donald Trump in Washington DC. As the months ticked by, one public appearance after another baffled the US and the world. Musk appeared to give a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration, staunchly championed a 19-year-old staffer nicknamed “Big Balls,” denied reports of being a drug addict while advising the president, and showed up at a White House press conference with a black eye—all in the first half of the year alone.
“Elon’s attitude is you have to get it done fast. If you’re an incrementalist, you just won’t get your rocket to the moon,” Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, told Vanity Fair in an expansive interview earlier this month. “And so with that attitude, you’re going to break some china.”
And, guess what? The rest of us get to be the broken China as we depend on the government agencies Musk slashed his way through as quickly and with as little thought as possible in his get-’er-done attitude.
Musk saw huge, multibillion-dollar wins and equally large losses in business this year. In his dealings with federal agencies, he was able to secure new enormous government contracts [for his own companies, the kleptocracy part] and expand SpaceX’s operations. With Tesla, he was approved for a pay package that could make him the world’s first trillionaire even as the company’s global sales plunged. At the same time, Musk and his businesses were the target of protests, lawsuits and an exodus of high-level executives. He ended the year with a fortune worth some $600bn.
So, all good in net for the billionaires, the rest be run over, I guess.
Muskman’s own home life is predictably a chaotic mess with paternity law suits and estrangements everywhere. Little Xie, the equivalent of Mini Me, however, got to sit at the presidential desk in the offal office. So, that was good … for him. Baby Musk got more time with the president in his office than I am ever likely to see.
In the background, his turbulent personal life continued to provide surprises. Rightwing influencer Ashley St Clair sued Musk in February for custody of their five-month-old baby, revealing that Musk had fathered a 13th publicly documented child, for a total of now 14 children. As Musk made regular attacks in posts on X against transgender people, his estranged daughter Vivian Wilson, who is trans, was featured in New York magazine and modeled at New York fashion week. And the New York Times published a lengthy investigation into Musk’s father, Errol Musk, who was accused of child sex abuse.
The relationship that dominated Musk’s public life, however, was his friendship and falling out with Trump. On the day of his inauguration, Trump empowered Musk to gut government agencies, which the tech billionaire did with zeal and abandon. But by June, Musk and Trump had broken up. Their bromance burned hot and fast.
I think the truest word there is “abandon.” Enough on Musk, though. The point to be made is that the man put in charge or reorganizing government is, himself, the King of Chaos, who seems to think the best thing that could happen to humanity is that a number of us move to Mars under his rule so he can become king or maybe demigod of his own planet.
Thus was chaos well rewarded during the Year of Chaos when it was in its ascendancy:
Though the drama surrounding Musk was frequently absurd and unpredictable [practically the definition of “chaos”], it was also consequential. This was a year when the richest person in the world obtained new levels of wealth and power that few in history have ever approached
(The article listed in the headlines below contains many more details about the chaos that is Elon Musk if you want to explore it beyond my just making the point here.)
The chaos has taken American attitudes to a bleak level
Finally, let’s take the view right down to ground level. It is no wonder that Americans now expresser deeper disillusionment with both political parties as chaos swirled up into a nation-engulfing firestorm that even managed to shut down the government for more time than ever before.
Gallup Poll Reveals Americans Hold Very Bleak Attitude To Close 2025, Sick Of Both Parties, Worried About The Economy
As 2025 comes to a wrap, a new Gallup poll reveals, unsurprisingly, that most Americans are entering the new year feeling unenthused and glum about the current state of the country, from politics to the overall economy and more.
I believe the dysfunctional congress has hit its lowest level of approval ever with only 17% of the electorate approving of the deeply fractured body.
74% of Americans are dissatisfied with how the country is going in general. Confidence in the economy has also fallen precipitously since Trump took office:
This decline in confidence and distaste for both parties is also showing up in the distaste within each party for itself, but especially among Republicans, and most particularly within the MAGA majority that runs the party, where splits of big MAGA promoters away from MAGA have been hitting first-page news on nearly a weekly basis for the last three months.
The biggest of these came from one of Trump’s leading supporters, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is back in the news again today:
‘Absolute rage’: Marjorie Taylor Greene boosts MAGA host’s vulgar video denouncing Trump
Just days before she was set to exit Congress, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) shared a clip of a MAGA influencer going on a tirade against President Donald Trump.
In the video, podcast host Andy Frisella denounces Trump with a profanity-filled rant.
Yes, yet another mega MAGA influencer is starting to split away from Trump in a sputtering, spitting rage of words that I will mostly not quote because they would burn out my beeper. In a nutshell (suitable attire for this guy), Frisella rages that Trump is “lying” to his MAGA supporters and “exploiting” them to “the highest degree.”
He claims that Trump “needs to understand that he is violating the promises that he has made to the American people,” and he says that his long time of giving Trump “tons and tons and tons of benefit of the doubt” is OVER!
Way over!
Greene, for her part, summarized the Year of Chaos this way:
“This is 100% where the base is.”
“We started 2025 with an America First electoral mandate and are ending the year with absolute rage and Trump voters planning a 2026 tax revolt,” she added.
Let’s hope it is a tariff-tax revolt.
Ah, well, what did they expect when they chose the world’s most blatant narcissist to be their president—a man who clearly in all things cares only about himself and addresses the needs of others only to the extent that it benefits him by attaining the power and praise they bestow upon him? He has spent his life as a man with no principle higher than self-aggrandizement—a man who sees those who sacrifice themselves for others as “losers!”
According to MTG, a formerly hyuge MAGA favorite, the MAGA meltdown has already gone from MAGA being mad to “absolute rage.”
Now, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), who was also a hugely vocal supporter of Trump seems also to be turning to rage:
“President Trump decided to veto a completely non-controversial, bipartisan bill that passed both the House and Senate unanimously. If this administration wants to make its legacy blocking projects that deliver water to rural Americans; that’s on them,” Boebert said in a statement to Colorado’s 9News.
Boebert seems to fear that Trump’s vote against a unanimous bipartisan bill that helps her district was likely retribution for her pressing him on the Epstein Files, which he has resisted releasing in every way he can think of: (If so, how small-minded, vengeful and protective of his pedophiliac Epstein buddies is that?)
She added that she hopes “this veto has nothing to do with political retaliation for calling out corruption and demanding accountability. Americans deserve leadership that puts people over politics….”
Boebert was among lawmakers who recently pushed for a vote to release the Epstein files.
The Epstain chaos
Of course the whole Epstain Affair is also madness that has resulted in a year of absolute chaos because Trump promised to deliver the goods and then has been the primary cause of stopping them from being delivered at every single turn.
This is where much of the shakedown and fracturing among his MAGA loyalists has happened as it turned out that protecting pedos finally became a bridge too far for some to continue to run with him. Of course, someone who runs the government like a mafia Don values loyalty above everything. So, Trump hasn’t budged an inch to the former loyalists and has literally branded some who didn’t stay with him, on this issue in particular, as “traitors.”
Trump only budged in telling congress to release the files because a nearly unanimous vote rapidly became obvious once the temporarily disbanded congress came back together after getting their heads batted in by their electorate back home (verifying that sending congress home early was just a ploy by Speaker Mike Johnson to avert the vote that rapidly assembled as soon as congress re-assembled). Naturally, Trump didn’t want to needlessly appear on the wrong side of a vote that was going to be large enough to override his veto, making him the loser if he took his resistance that far. So, he dodged to an alternate route of now depending on endless redactions to thwart the will of congress and the people.
The chaos rapidly escalated from concern over maybe 10,000 Epstein files that Trump had kept from release for months, to another MILLION pages being discovered this month; and now today it ratchets up to the “DOJ has 5.2 MILLION pages of Epstein files left to review.”
Thanks in part to DOGE, Trump’s DoJ is finding it hard to get this volume of files redacted in time for last week’s mandated release, causing more chaos. So, they are advertising for lots of untrained redactors. No wonder then, some of the victims names already escaped redaction, while it appears many of the alleged perpetrators’ names have been safeguarded with redactions. That’s almost as inept as DOGE, except that the perps are not really all that SAFEguarded because the untrained DOGE-like redactors didn’t realize that, if you only redact the words by covering them with black digital boxes and then release those digital files to the public, the public can simply digitally remove the black boxes. And, so they have.
Ah, well, that, too, is what clown government gets you!
So, yes, 2025 has been chaos everywhere, and that is certain to continue into 2026 as another article notes what I am also predicting, which is that the likely shutdown of government in January will afford plenty more opportunity to redact all the data that goes into government job and inflation reports in order to continue to mask the stagflationary recession we are already in. After all, you cannot report real GDP without having a clue what real inflation actually is.
Claims this other writer:
Another Government Shutdown Looms To Start 2026, Allowing The Trump Administration To Not Report Key Statistics
Anything to divide, distract, and blot out the collapse, the government and the media will do it.
With that nauseating prediction, let me close by circling back to Matt Labash for something slightly more encouraging:
Writing forces you to clarify thoughts and to find order in the chaos. Or to possibly refine the chaos that constantly swirls about us, making it funny or sad or beautiful, or maybe even just giving voice to it while raging against it, helping readers who feel it too, but maybe haven’t quite articulated to themselves just how or why it’s eating them alive. A lot of the writers we like, we tend to like for a common reason: because they make us feel like we’re in good company in what can be a lonely, forbidding world.
As I have no delusions about changing this mad, mad, mad world any with my writing, maybe that is the best I can do—give some company to others who are also reeling in the chaos, help them believe their own feelings are more stable than the world around them is—that it is not they who are crazy but the whole darned world. Maybe sometimes I can even manage to bring a dash of sophomoric humor into it … and maybe once in awhile even good humor as my funny bones are strained to find anything more darkly humorous than reality, itself, right now. If you find that kind of moral support is worth anything, I hope you’ll also consider supporting me as we close out the year so that I can begin and maintain a new one with you:
