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American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn

economist.com

21–30 of 360 posts

Re: American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn

#21

I would say with inflation, wealth inequality and skyrocketing housing, gas and grocery prices as well as super high amounts of consumer debt and families stretching to keep up it feels a lot like pre-bust 2005/2006 economy out there right now. We might not be on the cusp of a subprime mortgage bank crisis but it does feel ominous lately.

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"create"

Re: American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn

#23

I would say with inflation, wealth inequality and skyrocketing housing, gas and grocery prices as well as super high amounts of consumer debt and families stretching to keep up it feels a lot like pre-bust 2005/2006 economy out there right now. We might not be on the cusp of a subprime mortgage bank crisis but it does feel ominous lately.

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Re: American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't there a better alternative to this archive site?

What's wrong with it? It shows the article, with a little banner on top, showing when it was captured. Doesn't mess with scrolling, what's not to like?

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-a...

Re: American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn

#25
I'm kind of confused. It's not clear to me how or why the line keeps going up. People are spending less because of economic insecurity, everything is more expensive because of tariffs and war, interest rates have been high for four years.

The general cultural mood feels unsustainable. Like the peak-woke period around 2022 before the pendulum swung really hard in the opposite direction.

I don't know if there's a word for it, but I feel like the US has this tendency of trying to shove cultural change down people's throats in a really top-down manner that tends to backfire.

At least one really positive outcome from this whole """AI""" movement thing is that class consciousness has been increased quite a bit from it. If you're a capitalist, it's better to be one quietly and fuck people over in secret instead of painting a huge political target on your back. They've done the opposite of this. And one key difference here is that the early 2020s DEI movement had way more people behind it. This is just a small group of rich people.

Either the market is going to crash and they'll end up getting humiliated, or there will be a wave of populist backlash. In either case, we (people working in tech, SWEs, HWEs, etc) will probably get fucked over even worse than how it's been over the last couple years.

Re: American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn

#26
I thought the Economist used to have much higher quality articles. Where is the historical analysis?

Is it more apocalyptic now than during the cold war when kids hid under their desks? Did America really win the space race because of a presidential speech or was it the apocalyptic threat that if we lose, we will all live under communist rule? Would American manufacturing have ever caught up to Germany if it weren't for the existential threat of the world wars?

Perhaps American capitalism has always thrived on fear of the apocalypse.

Re: American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn

#27
post #7
post #6

"much of wall street is in a fatalistic mood" yeah the SPY is going vertical, sure sure.

Yeah, this article does not seem evidence backed to me. There is a ton of optimism now.

How though...there is no reasonable way anyone could look at the oil futures price and think it isn't being manipulated, which suggests maybe a lot of the market is equally fake.

Also SpaceX is getting ready to cheat SPY so the owners can basically use everyone's retirement funds as their exit liquidity.

All the AI companies seem like they are a massive bubble that they are also going to try to dump on the market in what I'm sure will be a similar scheme.

Then in politics we seem to be driving the US empire into the ground, while Trump steals billions. In just the last year Trump stole more than 10x Pelosi's entire net worth from her entire 40 year career in politics. The corruption coming from the white house is so extreme, it is probably more than all us politicians have stolen in all of us history combined. And what is absolutely insane is that a huge portion of the population seems to be in favor of it continuing this way.

We are speedrunning the end of the US empire, when it could've been a slow US decline that could've lasted the next 40 years which would've given us a chance to turn things around.

Re: American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't there a better alternative to this archive site?

What's wrong with it? It shows the article, with a little banner on top, showing when it was captured. Doesn't mess with scrolling, what's not to like?

Well, for one, it wants me to scan a QR code as a captcha.

Re: American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn

#30
Author appears to take resilience and preparedness to the logical extreme and mistake it for some kind of doomsday worship. Indeed, the rise of armchair-eschatologists is at an all-time high. This article is a much better example of such thinking than the likes of Anduril and Anthropic.
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