I see a lot of comments in the article on how this is just a scare piece, but it bears remembering just how big of a crisis the 2008 financial collapse was. St

I see a lot of comments in the article on how this is just a scare piece, but it bears remembering just how big of a crisis the 2008 financial collapse was. Stagnant wages in the 90s gave rise to credit cards and personal debt-as-a-feature capitalism, which was immediately blown out of the water by 2008. people lost their homes because the credit system keeping them afloat basically collapsed. businesses started shedding employees and shuttering doors, while banks across the world began a series of spectacular failures. Not just banks and auto makers, but capitalism itself looked to be slowly collapsing under its own weight of the hubris of mankind. Its really stunning to look back at some of the absolutely bombastic thing we said and did in the service of not people who were displaced and destitute after this collapse, but in the service of trying to keep capitalism going for ten more years. At some point we started bribing people to participate in the market that just made them homeless with "cash for clunkers." This was an asinine program designed to "boost the economy" by paying people to destroy their already running vehicles under the guise that they caused too much pollution. This didnt work. It could never work, and so we switched tactics toward simply bailing banks and auto manufacturers by cutting trillion dollar checks and printing more cash. Nobody who caused the financial collapse was ever arrested, save perhaps Bernie Madoff for his high treason of swindling the plutocracy. At the last few months of the term of George W Bush, a round of "stimulus checks" were cut and sent back to americans. The idea here was that americans would buy new televisions and sneakers. The reality for many, including me, was that money went to savings or closing out credit card accounts we didnt need. And here we are, once again, at the brink of another 10 year cycle. Things seem fine but theres hand-wringing from the usual suspects about systems of credit and debt so complex they cannot possibly exist outside a PhD thesis.