Over 40 Trillion in debt. Approaching 50 Trillion by 2030.

The deficit for the last year was 2 Trillion. In the 3 years before that it was always between 1.7 and 1.8 Trillion.

Student loans, Auto Loans, Credit cards - all maxed out. Delinquencies are at an all time high because people are squeezed.

US has over 100% of GDP in debt. Countries like France or Japan are even worse off.

No money for investment into infrastructure - everything goes into AI. Budget cuts and layoffs everywhere.

If AI suceeds, hundreds of Millions will lose their jobs. If AI bubble pops, we have a recession/crash. Hundreds of Millions will lose their jobs.

Even if we tax the Billionaires and get an additional 1 Trillion every year out of them, the budget deficit would still be 1 Trillion every year.

Without a crash/reset there is a 0% chance that things will get any better. With a crash/reset chances are at least 1% or more.

The financial system in 2008 collapsed because it was unhealthy. Full of zombie companies, overvalued houses/stocks etc. If the recession of 2008/9 had been allowed to run its course it would have been painful - but we would have had a more or less healthy economic system for the next half a century afterwards.

By printing unimaginable amounts of money and doubling the debt since 2010 - all they have done it to push back the problem without adressing any of the underlying issues.

Now we have more debt and a higher interest rate. Everything is much worse than in 2008 and as such a recession now will be 10x worse.

If it had crashed in 2008 the system would have been clensed and reformed and everything would be much better now.

During the first round of quantitative easing 2008-2015 the Federal Reserve decided to save the homeowners and brought home prices back up to their real value prior to the crash. A lot of non homeowners lost out on the opportunity of getting an affordable house. And people/institutions who were cash rich got to increase their wealth at a historic rate.

What happened in 2008-2015 was certainly unfair. Government intervention saved homeowners, made a few cash rich people/institutions incredibly wealthy, and shorted the window for non homeowners getting a good deal on a home.

During the 2020-2022 quantitative easing things were different. The Federal Reserve did basically the same thing by setting the Federal Funds Rate to 0%-.25% and spending a trillion buying mortgage back securities which no sane investor would touch. However the difference is that instead of bringing home prices from a historic crash back up; it brought houses from a historic high to an absolutely crazy new historic high. Normally this should correct itself post quantitative easing, but due to the lock in effect home prices aren’t dropping despite home sales being at rates not seen since the 2008 crash.

What happened in 2020-2022 was also unfair, but unlike the previous quantitative easing period the second qe period has caused significantly more irreversible harm. Instead of government intervention saving home owners it gave homeowners a historic gift, it didn’t make cash rich investors incredibly wealthy like in 2008-2012, but they did certainly benefit, and it also screwed non homeowners making home affordability significantly harder.

To summarize 2008-2015 the qe undid the damage that the housing crash did to homeowners and didn’t really have a direct impact on non homeowners. The 2020-2022 qe was a massive wealth transfer to homeowners and has a persistent negative impact on non homeowners.

Using myself as an example I’m a successful Gen Z who managed to buy in a $145,000 house in 2021 at 3.5%. I pay a $950 mortgage. If I bought my same house today using my same downpayment it would be a $1,700 mortgage. This didn’t happen because I made a smart/lucky investment. This was because I managed to take advantage at the last moment of the Federal Reserve market manipulation, and for the rest of my life I’ll be living life on easy mode compared to my piers who missed the Federal Reserve market manipulation wealth transfer.

I’m less concerned about an economic collapse and more concerned with a permanent K shape economy. The deaths of the American Dream, middle class, and wealth mobility.

Is the US currently in - or will we soon be in - stagflation??

This could be what finally pops the bubble folks.

Prep yourself best as your resources allow.

Let it rip tater chip.

Gee, I wonder why?

About 84% of S&P 500 stocks are now trading at least 10% below their all-time highs, according to new analysis from the Kobeissi Letter.

So what is happening today is easy as fuck for me to intrinsically understand. I might suggest I have pattern recognition and consolidation skills the military would consider magical.

This is “post war attrition” era

Meaning everything that brought prosperity in the late 20th century, and I mean almost everything in a material context, expanded and rose during that era, and is by necessity contracting today

Demographics, land availability, administrative overhead, energy ROI, Tax Receipts, the list goes on and on.

This is not a recession. It is not a depression. It is a species-wide decline cycle in what amounts to a human Predator-Prey cycle.

And the consequences are hell on earth for very many people, yet somehow to this day society manages to normalize it, because in most contexts… there isn’t necessarily a whole lot anyone can do about it. Politics should pivot away from Reagan type moral ideologies to save some lives, notwithstanding the government and even the elites can’t easily afford to support everyone’s asses in a material sense. The “wealth of the rich” is mostly just claims on existing resources, not hoarded material wealth that would scale to the size of the population for long

The productive conditions aren’t even all deteriorating outright. Innovation has gained wild efficiency in the last couple decades. But that efficiency still is not enough to scale to the demographic composition of today, doubled with not being able to quite scale to the really high population numbers of today’s America.

-Edit:
The WORST part of this “Efficiency” is obvious… as time goes there are less and less thermodynamically or financially meaningful jobs for the number of humans alive!!!
-

So it is both “too many people” and “too few young people”. Hell if we HADNT gained this efficiency by today, there would be even bigger messes afoot, even if more jobs remained available for longer. Wages would still fall way behind costs. Serious gains in efficiency still can’t solve every quirk of a proverbial “downshift in a predator prey cycle”, or the mathability of a human population scaled way beyond land area equilibrium.

Finally, one of the biggest obvious squeezes in this phase is the competition for desirable land and real estate. Caused by outright high population, many formerly “central” places start running into seemingly mysterious physical and economic MATHABILITY problems. These areas became ruthlessly competitive because these cities remained a desirable location for education, work, food and housing, but you have twice as many humans trying to operate in those spaces as you did 35 years ago. When population scales that hard, the lubrication of a city does NOT scale linearly (traffic, for example). A diner in a big city cannot stay in business easily without charging $30 for a simple meal, but only the top 30% of earners can afford to eat there at that price. For affordable meals the diner would have to pay staff $10/hour, but in a central location, housing costs require a worker to make $20-$30 an hour to afford it, since the numbers of people vying for a spot in that city exceed what the land area can support physically

So my point is the problems we have today are a function of WAY MORE than just “eat the rich” or “nobody wants to work anymore”, you know those catch phrases from earlier in the decade.

Ready to blow off a little steam? Poke fun at your favorite incompetent jackass ruining running the economy? Got a screenshot from social media that you've been dying to post but didn't want to violate Rule 7? We're gonna see if a regular Meme Monday might help scratch the itch.

Starting today, a pinned post for all things memes, screenshots, art, whatever will pop up on Monday mornings. Feel free to dump and vent about how badly you think your elected overlords leadership are bungling and how insane your neighbors/friends/family/coworkers are about believing that everything is gonna be okay.

Some regular sub rules apply - try to be mindful of truly insulting wording against groups of people and overly specific threats against specific people - we're not trying to test boundaries with Admin. Don't be overly spammy in the comments. Stay on topic of economic collapse specifically. Keep it SFW.

Have fun!

*Please note!* Post is new each Sunday evening. Top level comments should be at least 150 characters to encourage quality discussion, and users should refrain from making several top level comments in a week. Please mention location at the top of your comment when discussing local recession indicators.

Share your observations of local recession indicators or personal recession indicators. Examples include, but are not limited to:

• increased use of credit or decrease in savings to afford necessities
• deferred maintenance on homes or cars in your neighborhood
• "I buy houses for cash" (or similar) signs popping up
• bankruptcy attorneys experiencing higher volume of clients
• regional job losses/large corporate layoffs
• decline in housing starts or spike in homes being listed

Keep it civil and avoid judging any user for their personal financial experiences as shared here.

Margin debt in the US last month was $1.45T, compared to free credit in accounts of $425B, or 3.42:1. It has been over 3.3:1 since May this year.

Margin debt rose from $1.007T to $1.502T (i.e. 49%) in the 12 months between June 2025 and June 2026.

https://www.finra.org/rules-guidance/key-topics/margin-accounts/margin-statistics

Farms, trucking companies - eh, all the food is riddled with e.Coli anyway.

So apparently recent data analysis proves that buying power and housing affordability are worse now than ever in recorded american history. This mirrors in Europe.

Are we really heading into a redo of the great depression? Which ended in WW2...

Seeing all the conflict around the planet i dont actually deem it a stretch to think.

Just seems more people are tired of caring for the skewed politicians and oppose them.

I dont see most people pick up weapons to "fight for their country" (read some old pricks with invested bias).

What do you all think?

Published by: Joe Weisenthal (Bloomberg)

Link: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-10-01/what-a-weird-market-looks-like?srnd=phx-oddlots

Inflation and interest rates always bounce around with the business cycle and other random factors. However it’s long seemed obvious to me that these measures are deeply related to domestic politics in any given country. Think of the countries that have had incredibly low rates (Switzerland, Japan, etc.), and what they have in common is a high degree of domestic stability. Then think of the countries that famously have really high inflation. Your Zimbabwes, your Argentinas, your Turkeys, and so on, and the various forms of domestic dysfunction they’ve experienced. And, as a general rule, when countries go to war (one of the ultimate manifestations of dysfunction) inflation tends to go up.

I’ve never found the popular saying that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon” all that convincing. Inflation, at its core, is a political one. To the extent a country is lucky enough to have a central bank that can really dial in and control inflation, it’s because that country has a political environment that is capable of allocating monetary authority to some independent entity not controlled by a king or a president or by the public directly.

Yesterday in the newsletter, I wrote briefly about surging bond yields in France (which I’ll get back to in a second) and it made me think back to the euro crisis. In the early 2010s, the Eurozone tried to come up with an arrangement to bail out countries suffering from a run on their sovereign debt. The deal was basically this: You got a bailout, but then in exchange, you had to let the ECB, the European Commission, and the IMF (the so-called “Troika”) come in and dictate your economic affairs. Sovereign bond investors didn’t trust local elected politicians to pay back their debts unless some more serious institutions were brought in from the outside to run the show. If you recall, one of the catalysts for the Greek sovereign debt crisis was an accusation that the country had published false economic data, which is the kind of thing that blows a government’s credibility to shreds among investors, since that’s a classic symptom of political dysfunction. Another catalyst for the crisis was Angela Merkel saying that EU member states had to be responsible for their own bank bailouts, which made investors question whether the political trend of deeper and deeper European integration had hit a wall or would go in reverse.

So, surging borrowing costs in peripheral Europe during the early 2010s weren’t really about debt loads, they were about a lack of confidence in domestic political leaders, and specifically whether the domestic political leaders would have the impulse and political capital (two sides of the same coin, really) to make difficult spending decisions that would prioritize bondholders getting repaid.

Let’s turn back to France in 2026. One thing I hadn’t realized until after wrapping up yesterday’s newsletter is that France actually pays more to borrow than Italy. Up until late last year, since the history of the euro’s formation, Italy had always paid more to borrow than France. But now France is looking at a presidential election next year, where the two leading candidates are from the “far right” and “far left” parties, and investors don’t like what they see on the horizon.

This brings us to the US. When we talk about the drivers of inflation, and higher rates right now, the story is that there is all of this AI spending, there are unfavorable demographics (booming entitlement spending), and also the war in Iran. But of course, policy could do a lot here. Continuing the war is a decision. It’s also a policy choice to refrain from cutting domestic spending and/or raising taxes on wealth and consumption. It’s a policy choice to not reform the healthcare system and reduce costs. We don’t have a national political situation that is amenable to raising taxes or cutting spending or reforming huge sectors of the economy. Spending continues to boom, and the market expects more rate hikes from the Fed to keep inflation in check. And that’s how you wind up with higher and higher yields across the curve.

If we were to have some election, where politicians had a broad mandate to do serious fiscal tightening, you would expect inflation (and then rates) to come down. But literally nobody expects that. It’s unimaginable. So sustained, increasing deficits are talked about as if they are some immovable structural force, rather than a policy choice.

*Please note!* Post is new each Sunday evening. Top level comments should be at least 150 characters to encourage quality discussion, and users should refrain from making several top level comments in a week. Please mention location at the top of your comment when discussing local recession indicators.

Share your observations of local recession indicators or personal recession indicators. Examples include, but are not limited to:

• increased use of credit or decrease in savings to afford necessities
• deferred maintenance on homes or cars in your neighborhood
• "I buy houses for cash" (or similar) signs popping up
• bankruptcy attorneys experiencing higher volume of clients
• regional job losses/large corporate layoffs
• decline in housing starts or spike in homes being listed

Keep it civil and avoid judging any user for their personal financial experiences as shared here.

Ready to blow off a little steam? Poke fun at your favorite incompetent jackass ruining running the economy? Got a screenshot from social media that you've been dying to post but didn't want to violate Rule 7? We're gonna see if a regular Meme Monday might help scratch the itch.

Starting today, a pinned post for all things memes, screenshots, art, whatever will pop up on Monday mornings. Feel free to dump and vent about how badly you think your elected overlords leadership are bungling and how insane your neighbors/friends/family/coworkers are about believing that everything is gonna be okay.

Some regular sub rules apply - try to be mindful of truly insulting wording against groups of people and overly specific threats against specific people - we're not trying to test boundaries with Admin. Don't be overly spammy in the comments. Stay on topic of economic collapse specifically. Keep it SFW.

Have fun!

To maintain their lifestyles amid rising prices, consumers are drawing on resources including food banks and ChatGPT.

I think the interest rates and the DXY are the canary in the coalmine of the environment and market conditions. There is some kind of liquidity crisis brewing and I believe we are headed for stagflation where people are cutting back, more layoffs, etc. When the crash happens, which I think it will soon, I would love to see the revival of the dying middle class, lower prices and affordable housing to stimulate the common consumer and Americans. Let's start prioritizing our own people again instead of hiring abroad for cheap labor and profits. The costs of living and inflation have outpaced wages and we really need to tackle the debt and spending issues. But I am concerned that they just print money again which will only accelerate dollar debasement and the above issues

"The cuts hit nearly every major federal agency, with the Departments of Education, Agriculture and Housing and Urban Development."