The Bubble and the Crash, or Trump and the Death Rattle of the American Economy

There’s the American stock market, teetering on the edge on an historic crash. And there’s Trump. Now desperately everything he can to prevent it. Signing “trade deals” furiously, as if America didn’t have trading relationships with countries like Switzerland, that worked altogether very well. Suddenly deciding to lower tariffs on basics like coffee and food—tariffs that the idiot autocrat himself imposed. Promising people a “tariff dividend,” LOL, which is like a pickpocket saying: hey, I’m feeling generous, here, have a little of the cash I stole back.

Connect the dots of what’s happening right now. Here we have a freight train in motion, and the very lunatic who disengaged the emergency brakes now tugging it back from the other end. It’s probably not going to work.

Day after day, the stock market’s now roiled by jitters. These are precisely the kinds of jitters that precede major crashes. It’s hardly a secret that there’s a mega-bubble happening. I’ve discussed it with you here many times, and those of you who’ve done sessions with me should have a detailed understanding of it.

What’s happening now is the coasting-on-fumes phase of a bubble. That means that people are panic selling, and others are panic buying. They’re “buying the dip,” because that’s what American have been conditioned to do. The stock market can only ever go up, right? Wrong. Bubbles pop like this: day by day, there are less and less buyers of the dip, as widespread nervousness sets in. And on one fateful, when a threshold is crossed, when—there are just sellers left.

Now. Let me put all this in context.

Over the last decade or two, heroic efforts have been made in America for the stock market basically never to fall. Not in a healthy or prolonged way. Yes, there have been moments where the market’s dropped, like during the early days of the pandemic, or the financial crisis before that. But what’s happened next is that the government and central bank have intervened, with the express intent to prop up the market.

And there’s a reason for that. America’s the world’s last hyper-capitalist society, or at least it was, because it’s not anymore—under Trump, even capitalism’s dying a swift death, and the economy’s turning authoritarian. The reason that the stock market’s not been allowed to fall in contemporary American history’s very simple. It’s the only safety net in society.

There are semblances of others, true, but unlike other rich nations, America’s now notorious for having no real functioning, universal safety nets. In Europe and Canada, of course, people enjoy expansive social contracts with all kinds of modern rights. In America, you lose your job, you lose your healthcare, you lose your savings, you lose your house, you’re on the street, you die. It can happen in the blink of an eye, to people who thought “it would never happen to them,” which just means that they were conditioned into capitalism’s false consciousness, or the idea that nobody deserves anything as a universal right.

In a capitalist society like America, there’s only one real safety net, and that’s the stock market. Of course, it’s not one in the social democratic sense, universal, equitable, enduring. It’s just…capitalism. Available to those with a certain level of wealth. But understand how crucial this is: in America, the nation’s wealth is locked into the stock market. You can’t really avoid it: unlike in other countries, in America, when you work, your money just gets…imprisoned in the stock market.

And so people depend on it. To live on in their old age. To retire. To educate their kids. The stock market in America plays the role that genuine safety nets play in other nations. In France, the Sorbonne—its best university—is free. In America, you set up a college fund for a kid, hope the stock market booms, and take a deep breath, because it’ll set you back $100K a year. So the stock market is the (dysfunctional, incomplete, threadbare) equivalent of the safety nets other nations genuinely have.

This is why the stock market’s not allowed to fall. And that’s the one thing that Republicans and Democrats agree on, by the way. In that sense, Americans are prisoners of capitalism, politically, financially, and economically. The only real point of political institutions, of financial institutions, and of economic ones at this point is: the stock market must rise, at all costs, and those costs can include democracy, the planet, sanity, kids being addicted to dopamine hits of technology, doesn’t matter, the point is that the stock market is America’s only safety net, and that’s why it’s never allowed to fall.

But now we have a very, very different situation before us.

What Trump has done is to commit America to a course of economic suicide. I know, I know the Average American Dude doesn’t “believe that,” but that doesn’t matter—”disagreeing” with me on that score is like arguing with your doctor over whether you Really Have Cancer or not. It’s not a debate.

Beneath the surface of the stock market bubble, America’s economy has gone from bad to worse. Confidence is at historic lows. Prices are astronomically high compared to other countries, and I’ll discuss that more, because that’s a better measure of inflation than just rates of rising prices within a country. The job market is in apocalyptic shape, and it’s questionable whether many careers will exist. Startling numbers of Americans—70%, 80%—show signs of financial distress, and struggle just to pay the bills.

Trump has unleashed something monstrous in America. But the facelift of the stock market bubble is hiding it a little bit, at least for the Average American Guy, who looks only at his stock market accounts, desperately, greedily, furiously (and by the way, I keep saying “guy” or “man” because women and men diverge sharply here—women are thinking far more clearly about the economy, while men are in panic, trying to cash in, obeying Trump, pretending everything will be fine, thinking too myopically and narrowly to be altogether rational or sensible.)

But this facelift—the stock market’s fine! Whee!! Everybody look away from the fascist implosion and predatory capitalism turning life to ruins!—is made of cheap plastic. It’s melting off in the heat of the noonday, which in this case is a bubble overheating.

Already, people are almost asking the right questions.

The right questions aren’t: have we invested too much in AI and other assorted infantile narcissistic technofeudal fantasies? LOL, obviously that much is true. Do we really need chatbots to advance the cause of human civilization? In a planet on fire? This is how myopic and foolish capitalism makes people, which is to say, pretty fucking stupid. They don’t ask the right questions. Greed blinds them, and vanity diminishes them. Right now, the right question is this: what have we invested too little in? And the answers to that goes like this: everything that matters.

People, life, the future, the planet, democracy, civilization—all of it. Climate change, educating our kids, research in stuff we’re actually going to need, like basic raw materials from fertilizer to cement not being made of fossil fuels, financial systems that aren’t just predatory, social contract which endure, culture which doesn’t poison us spiritually and mentally, a society in which we can have relationships, intellect, and vibrant lives, not just inequality, greed, and despair.

As the facelift melts off in the heat of crash, in the aftermath of one of history’s biggest bubbles, then questions like this will finally begin to be asked. In America, the understanding will come too late: we didn’t care enough about the future to have one. And in that context, Trump’s “economic policy,” and to use words like those is like calling Pete Hegseth a philosopher, will be revealed as the suicidal ideology it really is.

And this is the death rattle. Unless you think your grandkids are going to eat AI on a frying planet, or unless you think turbo-fascism is wonderful for humankind, life, and prosperity.

The worst is yet to come for America. You see, right now, it doesn’t have a future because nobody’s thinking about one anymore. Even in the anodyne, psychopathic terms of capitalism itself. Even capitalism needs more than this fatal cocktail, to generate stock market returns over the long run—the combination of bubbles in lowest-common-denominator stuff like AI and crypto on the one hand, while autocrats prey on a society’s institutions and long-term wealth with the other, through trade wars, tariffs, fascism, and cronyism. Even capitalism can’t generate wealth that way.

Hear that death rattle again?

And so this last safety net in America, the stock market, probably has a bleak future, too, just like the rest of it. And that’s a subtle point, by the way. There’s a world in which the stock market in America “rises forever,” but only at the expense of greater volatility, which means more bubbles and crashes—and markets like those make for poor long term investments.

Then there’s a world in which the American economy, wrecked by Trump taking it from capitalism to autocracy, going backwards, away from the leap towards social democracy, goes downhill, for decades to come, as living standards plunge, and the stock market judders into decline along with it.

Which world will it be? I doubt we’re in a world where the American stock market can continue to rise forever anymore. That is because the costs of propping it up have now grown too large. Rather, I’d bet that the future is made of more and more volatility, combined with longer periods of declining values. In plainer English: the stock market is America’s only safety net, and it is probably going to come undone. When that happens, watch out.

Because without even that safety net, Americans will discover, the hard way, what it means to have made a choice as foolish as Trump, as replacing democracy with autocracy, of giving up on the future.

How will Americans live in an economy where the stock market no longer functions as a safety net, which is to say, a place to store wealth, at the very least? How will they retire? Educate their kids? Pay off their homes? The answer to that is: they won’t.

This is what the death rattle says. American life is going to become bleak in ways that are hard to imagine even now for Americans, or the rest of the world. Will we see elderly people just…be left to die? Will the ill just be abandoned? Are millions of people just going to continue to live right at the edge? Don’t kid yourself that any of that’s good for the economy or the stock market. Just ask the Great Depression.

It’s not a pretty picture. But all that’s why Trump’s trying to save the stock market from crashing. Because he knows that his political fortunes align with it, to some extent. It is the one thing left in society that Americans really care about, or at least agree on caring about. The only thing, I often say to myself. Because they have to. To them, it is everything, healthcare, retirement, education, housing, life. Without it, in America, there is little left at all. It is all Americans have, because they certainly don’t have a democracy, a modern society, or a future.

That’s the death rattle, too. Because this is the greater tragedy, if you ask me. That life should have been reduced to this kind of captivity to begin with. That’s not just moralizing, by the way. I’ve tried to teach you something about how economics really works in all the above, and what it means. Think carefully if you want your wealth to be part of this meltdown.

We are not in the old world anymore. In this one, throwing money at fascism, it’s monster-on-a-leash, predatory capitalism, and its autocratic fantasies, is probably the surest way to lose it.

Love,

Umair…and Snowy!

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