Since a bottleneck implies a vessel with fluid passing through, I'll stay with that analogy. There's actually no bottleneck; the pipe is basically the same size

Since a bottleneck implies a vessel with fluid passing through, I'll stay with that analogy. There's actually no bottleneck; the pipe is basically the same size as ever. (Actually just slightly smaller because of capacity that was destroyed, rather than taken temporarily offline, during the slowdown.[0]) But the pipe in the first place was only exactly as big as it needed to be, because of the "maximizing ROE" stuff he mentions early in the thread. So when the fluid volume suddenly expands (slingshot effect following the slowdown), the whole system becomes a bottleneck. [0] Capacity destruction: "Nobody's buying our stuff, we can't afford to keep this one ship/plant/facility/machine running anymore or we'll go out of business." But since every other player in their industry who might've bought it is in the same boat, maybe they're forced to sell to a scrapper, who promptly disassembles the ship/plant/facility/machine. I got my house this way. It was a rental property owned by a company that could no longer afford to keep it, so I bought it, took it off the rental market, and thereby slightly reduced rental capacity in this town. Compare this to an airline temporarily parking a slew of their planes in a densely-packed parking pattern at an un-busy airfield near a nice runway.