You Didn’t Kill Capitalism. The Fed Did.

How Central Banking and Rigged Policy Gave Us $29 Sandwiches and Socialist Mayors

Dear Fellow Traveler:

Brandon Johnson didn’t win in Chicago because he hung out with Northwestern professors teaching radical street tactics during campus protests.

Karen Bass didn’t win in Los Angeles because she praised Fidel Castro.

And Zohran Mamdani didn’t win the New York mayoral primary because people read Karl Marx.

Mamdami won because voters read a deli receipt and decided it was time to burn the system down.

That’s the take away of this borderline comical article from The Telegraph lamenting about the sky high cost of New York City… and a $29 sandwich… Look at this take…

Why have voters embraced the firebrand young socialist?

The answer lies in the queues of young people outside the door of every vacant flat to rent in central New York, and in the Reddit forums where New Yorkers moan about paying $20-plus (£15) for a sandwich.

Mamdami followed up two nights ago saying that he had critiques of capitalism.

Before we point fingers at “capitalism,” let’s stop and ask what actually died here.

Because the system that’s so many people are angry at?

The one with unaffordable groceries, insane rents, and unearned bailouts?

That’s not capitalism.

American Capitalism truly died in October 2008.

Capitalism was terminally replaced by central planning, one interest rate and printed money unit at a time.

You Thought This Was a Market? Think Again.

The Telegraph wrote an article the other day stating that people in New York were upset about $29 sandwich in a bodega. Now, people could have actually just gone to the grocery store, but most people can’t cook for themselves.

That $29 sandwich isn’t the product of free-market greed.

It’s the inevitable result of monetary distortion.

Let’s recount what’s happened in New York in the last five years…

1. The Federal Reserve created $8 trillion out of thin air.

2. That money went through primary dealers, not to you.

3. It inflated assets first: stocks, bonds, rand eal estate.

4. Input costs rose. Credit got cheap, if you were rich.

5. Meanwhile, wages stagnated and prices soared.

That’s not a “free market failure.”

That’s a Cantillon cascade, written by Powell and executed by Goldman.

Capitalism Rewards Risk. The Fed Rewards Proximity.

Real capitalism is brutal but honest:

Take risks, offer value, get rewarded, or lose.

But the system we have now?

• Banks lose money, so they get a backstop.

• Hedge funds blow up, so the Fed buys the dip.

• But if renters miss a paycheck, they get evicted.

It’s not capitalism.

It’s monetary feudalism.

And people are waking up to it. The people who know what’s going on see it for what it is. We have a survival strategy and an investment allocation for what comes next.

However, those who don’t understand how our central bank continues to bail out only a small portion of the system believe this is capitalism.

Which is why they’re voting for anyone who promises to tear it all down.

“Price Stability” Was a Lie

For two decades, we were told the Fed was keeping inflation under control.

But they weren’t measuring the things that matter:

• Housing prices? Excluded from CPI.

• College tuition? Ignored.

• Asset inflation? Considered “wealth creation.”

The things that matter… they went up greatly in price.

Then, when rent doubled, politicians and central bankers blamed “supply chains.”

When eggs hit $7, they blamed Ukraine.

Democratic socialists like Mamdami blamed capitialism.

But no one blamed the centralized planners who created trillions in liquidity without accountability.

This Isn’t the Free Market. It’s the Federally Rigged Market.

Why are prices distorted?

Because it’s not a free market.

Consider:

• A group of twelve people sets interest rates in a private boardroom.

• Mortgage-backed securities are held on the Fed’s balance sheet, much like NFTs in a trust fund.

• Small banks are crushed by regulation, while megabanks continue to grow every cycle.

• The cost of compliance strangles every small business that isn’t “too big to fail.”

We didn’t get $29 sandwiches because capitalism failed.

We got them because the cost of everything is downstream of policy, not productivity.

If you want cheaper sandwiches… fix the money first.

You don’t need socialism to fix New York. It’s not going to work anyway (yet, they’ll blame capitalism when they fail and keep doubling down. Seen this movie too many times.)

Instead, you need:

• Interest rates that are set by markets, not bureaucrats.

• A currency that stores value, not leaks it.

• Regulations that protect competition, not entrench monopolies.

• Real accountability for those who control the pipes of capital.

Currently, the pipes are clogged, and the pressure is building.

Mamdani is just the symptom.

The real disease is debased money, bad incentives, and a little economic literacy.

Americans Don’t Hate Capitalism. They Just Think This Is It.

No one ever explained the Federal Reserve to Americans.

Central banking is not covered in high school curricula. A recent survey found that just 6% of Americans know that the Fed’s mandate is to control inflation and to maximize employment.

I’d wager to say that it’s about a stadium full of people who realize that the Fed is the backstop of the global financial system and protector of the dollar’s reserve status. The financial system (a very centralized concept) is more important than any individual actor - a hallmark of collectivism and centralized planning.

Markets don’t set interest rates - an unelected FOMC does.

No one taught Americans what happens when you subsidize speculation and tax production.

They were told that a free market would make life better, and instead, they got $2,800 one-bedrooms, $240 grocery bills, six-figure incomes with zero savings

So when a candidate says, “let’s try something radically different,”

They say: Why the hell not?

Honestly… we’ve already been living under a radical policy.

They just called it “stability.”

Burning Capitalism Isn’t the Solution. Understanding What Replaced It Is.

This isn’t about Mamdani.

It’s about the system that engineered scarcity, weaponized liquidity, and told the middle class to suck it up because “the S&P is doing fine.”

Until we fix the incentives, address the money, and stop pretending the Fed isn’t the most powerful unelected institution in America, you’ll continue to see revolutions over sandwich prices.

This is just the beginning.

What can you do about it?

Control yourself… control your wealth… and control your health. And invest in the outcomes of the system itself. It’s very therapeutic. The markets operate on a very predictable pattern now of selloffs, policy pivots, insider buying, and bailouts…

It’s one I laid out a week ago on YouTube…

Stay positive,

Garrett Baldwin