More than 3,000 years ago, between the 12th and 13th centuries BC, the legendary king of Ithaca, Odysseus, set sail from the ancient city of Troy to begin the journey home.

The stories of the Trojan War, and of Odysseus’s voyage home, have been passed down to us in the form of epic poetry from Homer. Most of it is pure fiction.

But like modern film, TV, and ‘true crime’ podcasts that abuse dramatic license to entertain their audiences, Homer’s epics may in fact be “based on a true story”.

The Trojan War, for example, likely happened. The bit about the horse, on the other hand, probably didn’t.

It’s certainly possible (and even probably) that one of the key leaders in the war had an arduous journey back home to Greece, spurring ancient entertainers to weave elaborate tales of sirens and sea monsters.

One of the most important parables in Homer’s tale of the long journey home for Odysseus is the story of Scylla and Charybdis.

Odysseus’s journey took him through a particularly narrow stretch of sea; on one side of the strait was a small, rocky island where a six-headed monster named Scylla lay waiting to destroy any ship that dared to pass.

According to Homer, Scylla was such a dreadful monster that “no one-- not even a god-- could face her without being terror-struck.”

But on the other side of the narrow strait was the deadly whirlpool of Charybdis, which would swallow up the entire vessel and all the men on it.

Odysseus’s impossible task, of course, was to swiftly and stealthily sail right down the middle… to just barely avoid the whirlpool of Charybdis, while somehow managing to avoid the long grasp of Scylla.

For a while, Odysseus refused to believe the situation was hopeless; he was convinced that he would be able to sail, unscathed, between Scylla and Charybdis without a single loss.
After all, he was a king. And an unparalleled expert when it came to sailing. Surely he would be able to succeed.

And yet everyone who had ever come before Odysseus had believed the same thing. But no one had ever succeeded. Literally every ship that ever tried to sail between Scylla and Charybdis had been destroyed by one of the two evils.

Eventually reality set in, and Odysseus knew that had would have to choose between the lesser of the two evils.

He chose the monster Scylla.

Odyssesus realized that sailing too close to the whirlpool would mean losing his entire ship and everyone on it. Sailing too close to the 6-headed monster would mean losing, at most, six men.

Odysseus concluded that it was better to lose six men was than to lose everyone.

And that’s precisely what happened; as his ship sailed through the strait, just barely avoiding the whirlpool, “Scylla pounced down suddenly upon us and snatched up six of my best men.”

But the rest of the crew (and the ship) survived the challenge and passed through the strait.

This story is one of the best allegories of the state of the global economy today.

Central bankers and economic policymakers are like Odysseus. They have managed to sail the global economy into a very narrow strait.

On one side of today’s economic strait is the evil inflation monster. And this monster is guaranteed to chew up and spit out incalculable quantities of unsuspecting, unprepared people.

Yet on the other side of the economic strait is the full-blown collapse of the sovereign bond markets… and by extension, collapse of the global financial system.

Like Odysseus, central bankers were at first in denial. They didn’t want to believe they were even in such dire economic straits. They infamously rejected the notion that inflation existed at all. Then they claimed it was transitory.

Then they finally started trying to do something about it-- to turn the ship around. But it was too little, too late.

Now they find themselves squarely in the middle of these evils-- inflation, and collapse of the sovereign bond market.