by Charles Hugh Smith
Of Two Minds
Concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the few at the expense of the many and you guarantee collapse.
Very few are willing to to face the reality that the U.S. economy was on life support long before Covid came on the scene. In a nutshell:
1. Every layer of the economy is vastly over-indebted, and entire swaths are zombies, unable to service their existing debts without borrowing more at lower rates of interest.
2. Productivity has stagnated for decades as capital has been incentivized to seek productivity-killing monopolies and cartels, and socially-economically destructive speculations rather than investments that increased productivity in a socially beneficial manner.