American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn

https://economist.com/business/2026/06/03/american-capitalism-has-taken-an-apocalyptic-turn

by andsoitis • 2 months ago

179 157 2 months ago

economist.com

dotcoma2• 2 months ago

https://archive.is/q1GxG

Teknomadix• 2 months ago

Isn't there a better alternative to this archive site?

dotcoma2• 2 months ago

It does the job for me, but please do tell me if you find a better alternative.

LargoLasskhyfv2• 2 months ago

What's wrong with it? It shows the article, with a little banner on top, showing when it was captured. Doesn't mess with scrolling, what's not to like?

ProAm• 2 months ago

Why does everyone on HN complain and post about anything and everything except the content of the link.

datadrivenangel• 2 months ago

Is there any graceful way to let the pressure out of the system and begin rebuilding trust and stability or is the only way out to immanentize the eschaton?

denkmoon• 2 months ago

It would require participation by all strata of society. So no.

VonGuard2• 2 months ago

Legislation and court rulings have shown that shareholders get everything they want, ever. They want Southwest to stop checking 2 free bags? It happens. Etc. Ad Nauseum.

Somehow, we need legislation that says companies are beholden first to their employees, then to their customers, THEN to shareholders. I don't know how to do that. Co-ops are the only real answer maybe?

saratogacx• 2 months ago

Costco's code of ethics makes this really simple, it is too bad it, or a variation thereof, isn't more commonly observed.

In order of overriding priority

1. Obey the Law 2. Support our members 3. Support our employees 4. Support our suppliers 5. If we do the above, we'll reward shareholders

strenholme• 2 months ago

The Southwest thing is confirmed: https://archive.ph/20250311162848/https://www.cnbc.com/2025/...

“Southwest has been under increasing pressure to raise revenue and improve returns after activist hedge fund Elliott Investment Management took a stake in the airline last year and pushed for changes to the carrier’s business model.”

quasse• 2 months ago

The US actually has a legal structure for employees to have beneficial (+ tax advantaged) ownership of their companies, the ESOP (employee stock ownership plan). It's a legal structure where a trust buys the company from the original owners on behalf of the employees and then allocates a percentage of those shares to the employees each year.

There's no requirement that this be a 100% ownership arrangement, but there are a surprising number of companies in the US where that's the case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_employee-owned_compani...

Since it's basically a leveraged buyout of the company by the employees, it provides a much more ethical succession option (IMHO) for privately held companies with founders who want to step down but do not want to sell to private equity. I wish more people were aware of it as an option.

ggm• 2 months ago

Fnord!

ModernMech• 2 months ago

The current proposal on the table is to have the rich pay a lot more taxes. They scoff at the idea, so probably we will end up doing something less graceful.

sghiassy• 2 months ago

We came back from the gilded age. So there’s hope right?

spicyusername• 2 months ago

Pretty much, yea

nozzlegear• 2 months ago

Sounds like we need a modern day Teddy Roosevelt?

anon2915• 2 months ago

Gilded age is one of the GOATed times in America though.

insane_dreamer2• 2 months ago

I'd rather not go through a Great Depression, thank you very much. Maybe everyone should re-read The Grapes of Wrath.

tim3332• 2 months ago

The Great Depression was a bit of a monetary screw up which we've probably figured out how not to do again.

dionian• 2 months ago

"much of wall street is in a fatalistic mood" yeah the SPY is going vertical, sure sure.

cm20122• 2 months ago

Yeah, this article does not seem evidence backed to me. There is a ton of optimism now.

Obscurity43402• 2 months ago

Isnt Economist , like, a super prestigious publication? Why would they let something flimsy seep thru?

pfisch• 2 months ago

How though...there is no reasonable way anyone could look at the oil futures price and think it isn't being manipulated, which suggests maybe a lot of the market is equally fake.

Also SpaceX is getting ready to cheat SPY so the owners can basically use everyone's retirement funds as their exit liquidity.

All the AI companies seem like they are a massive bubble that they are also going to try to dump on the market in what I'm sure will be a similar scheme.

Then in politics we seem to be driving the US empire into the ground, while Trump steals billions. In just the last year Trump stole more than 10x Pelosi's entire net worth from her entire 40 year career in politics. The corruption coming from the white house is so extreme, it is probably more than all us politicians have stolen in all of us history combined. And what is absolutely insane is that a huge portion of the population seems to be in favor of it continuing this way.

We are speedrunning the end of the US empire, when it could've been a slow US decline that could've lasted the next 40 years which would've given us a chance to turn things around.

Schnitz2• 2 months ago

You can be in a fatalistic mood and buy.

cm20122• 2 months ago

No, you cannot say the mood is fatalistic when purchase interest in stocks is at an all time high

ted_bunny3• 2 months ago

Is the concept of local maximum tripping you up?

Stitch4223• 2 months ago

Perhaps the danger is not 2008, 1999, 1973 or even 1873, but 1789.

1789 was the year of the French Revolution [1]. The rest are years with financial crises.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution

dwabyick• 2 months ago

Oh it’s definitely starting to feel like 1789 vibes. The oligarchs have taken too much, too fast.

BurningFrog2• 2 months ago

The French Revolution was an orgy in mass murder that led to the slaughter of millions in the Napoleon wars.

It really need to be romantizied much less!

IndeanCondor• 2 months ago

It was a coalition of monarchies, so terrified of the prospect of even a single popular republic rejecting the divine right to rule, that began the bloodshed and invaded France.

Blaming the Revolution for the Coalition wars is just bad history.

In case you didn't notice, the Revolution won. All contemporary republics fundamentally inherit from the French Revolution - you're surprised that the systems of govt honour and romanticize it's progenitors?

Aside, if bloodshed prevention is your only barometer for history, supporting the Coalition view of events is even sillier, because the Bourbon Restoration directly led to the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848, which was yet more bloodshed. Almost as if unjust systems are fundamentally untenable...

avidiax• 2 months ago

The French Revolution is no longer possible. The surveillance state plus wealth mobility means the wealthy will be in New Zealand before anyone erects a guillotine, and the people that would foment a revolution are heavily surveilled and infiltrated.

c1sc0• 2 months ago

Are you sure about that? Tech cuts both ways & asymmetric drone warfare has become cheaper than ever … how hard it is it to sink some yachts or down some jets?

Retric• 2 months ago

New Zealand is zero defense vs a large populist uprising, especially one taking place in New Zealand.

That’s the thing social structures like money and nations only mean something when the masses decide they mean something. Billionaires only get a vote by convincing other people what to believe.

gamerslexus2• 2 months ago

It's kind of true:

... federal intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement are circulating reports with a new domestic target in mind: anti-technology extremists.
This new effort follows President Donald Trump's National Security Presidential Memo 7, which instructs the Department of Justice to target anyone holding “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” and "anti-capitalism” beliefs.

https://www.wired.com/story/us-law-enforcement-warns-of-anti...

To be fair though in the times of French Revolution the surveillance capability was really basic compared to today, the tech capability to organize protests was lower too. Which one prevails? We know that in PRC and maybe Russia it's surveillance, but what about US?

ProllyInfamous• 2 months ago

My attorney's advice to me was:

>"PL, don't build a guillotine"

PL> "I'm going to build a guillotine; be my lawyer and give me advice as if it's going to be built."

>"... don't make it entirely functional."

PL> "It's going to be built functional."

>"... hmm ... use a bicycle cable lock to add a safety to it – lock&key. But remember that my original advice was not to build it in the first place."

----

Exhibit Z

somenameforme2• 2 months ago

Inequality and other such issues are universal, the French Revolution was not. What was unique about the French Revolution is not even that the government bankrupted themselves fighting wars and then tried to refill their coffers by sharply increasing taxes in a fashion that disproportionately affected the lower classes, but that this was all paired alongside widespread crop failures that sent the cost of food skyrocketing driven widespread food scarcity.

The average person couldn't care less, at least in terms of action, how much money somebody else has. If people have food in their belly and a roof over their heads, you're only going to draw out radicals. And in modern sharply divided societies those radicals will be framed (probably accurately) as being disproportionately made up of one side, and the other side will oppose them all their might and widespread public support behind such opposition.

So there will never be a popular revolution in a place like the US in its current divided state. The most probable scenario by an overwhelmingly wide margin is 'nothing', but the only other possibility would be a civil war. And I do think that's possible, but the chances are extremely remote. It would require something very extreme like one side trying to ban the other side from political office. We've probably been closer than some might expect, but we're now probably much further, rather than closer, to those times and outcomes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=French_Revolution...

haizhung• 2 months ago

That’s incorrect, in fact, fairness and equality is one of the few universal social contracts that are valued in every culture on earth (though lived/implemented differently).

And I would argue that’s one of the key differences that separates humans from animals. Humans have an intrinsic desire for things to be fair.

tsoukase• 2 months ago

Oh, the good old reflex that is activated in panic situations but never realised. Then the revolution was from capitalists against kings. Now the former are already in power with their servants (CEOs) and there is no alternative. So no change, no revolution.

randycupertino• 2 months ago

I would say with inflation, wealth inequality and skyrocketing housing, gas and grocery prices as well as super high amounts of consumer debt and families stretching to keep up it feels a lot like pre-bust 2005/2006 economy out there right now. We might not be on the cusp of a subprime mortgage bank crisis but it does feel ominous lately.

maxdo2• 2 months ago

You just named symptoms not cause.

1. People vote for old idiots .

2. Local politics is all about milking any potential work with permits. Sky rocket housing due to that .

3. American lost engineering culture everywhere except software . Now software is dead as industry we used to know

jjtheblunt2• 2 months ago

American lost engineering culture everywhere except software

microprocessor design : Apple Silicon and lately Intel Panther Lake and later?

j16sdiz• 2 months ago

People vote for old idiots .

i think this is also a syndrome not a cause

sfblah• 2 months ago

Personally I think those are also symptoms. In my opinion, the cause is:

1. Easy money for far, far, far too long in the US and a complete political unwillingness to take any risk of a recession, no matter the long-term cost required to stave it off. In my mind, this explains the rich-poor gap, the rise of crypto, insane valuations, house-price inflation, the weird delta between US and rest-of-world standard of living/salaries, and probably even the migration crisis.

tim-tday2• 2 months ago

The new mortgage backed securities are the instruments trading the debt used to build AI data centers (the AAA rated debt that is anything but). The music will stop when there’s a blip in liquidity. Everyone will rush for a chair and there won’t be enough for everyone.

I don’t know when that will be but if the big ipos coming down the pike cause an everything squeeze that might do it.

Or maybe nothing is going on. What do I know?

andsoitis4• 2 months ago

wealth inequality

Can you explain what is wrong with people having different levels of wealth?

Or asked differently, if it is bad, should every individual have the exact same wealth?

305superuser2• 2 months ago

Like anything some is good too much is bad, a gradient work for a complex society, a brutal difference like kings and dark ages poor eventually bring collapse

analognoise• 2 months ago

Yes, this is easy to explain.

It creates a country nobody is willing to fight for. Beyond certain levels of inequality, you get systemic dysfunction.

Beyond a certain point, having a country where teeth are “luxury bones” and you have people putting off healthcare items due to cost isn’t sustainable. We’re past that point, and need to cut the rich down multiple pegs.

vannevar• 2 months ago

Can you explain what is wrong with people having different levels of wealth?

There's nothing wrong with it, in moderation. Where it becomes a problem is when the distribution of wealth starts diverging widely from people's expectation of what a fair distribution would be, accounting for different levels of ability and luck. Aside from this cognitive dissonance, there are also pragmatic limits on how big a disparity can be while still having a functional democracy. It's clear that truly enormous disparities in wealth, made even worse by a lack of regulation in political donation, lead to major distortions in the principle of "one person, one vote" which is a cornerstone of democracy.

Or asked differently, if it is bad, should every individual have the exact same wealth?

No, because people have different levels of ability and experience different amounts of luck. Inequality is inevitable, and the vast majority of people understand and accept that. But they also expect that the system should at least roughly resemble a meritocracy, and that is impossible to maintain in an unregulated capital system because of the feedback loop between capital and income. Most professional sports leagues recognize this problem: once a franchise starts winning, they make more money, which allows them to buy better players, which leads to more wins, etc, until you have a league where a handful of teams can win the championship and the others are perennial also-rans. So they cap the amount of money that can be used for salaries. They are free, of course, to make as much money as they can, they just can't plow it all back into player salaries. Capital is regulated to preserve the fairness of the system. That doesn't mean the teams are all equal, there are still franchises that perform better over time than others. But it's more clearly tied to intrinsic merit like coaching systems and player development, not just going out and buying proven superstars.

Similarly, a person of average skill can get lucky and make a large amount of money. Having that capital in turn makes it easier to make more money. Over time, and across many such situations, capital starts outrunning merit as a predictor of someone's future income, which is socially demoralizing. That's where the US is today: a pervasive feeling that the system is rigged. To a great extent, this widespread perception contributes to the current political climate in the US.

anovikov• 2 months ago

JFYI, consumer debt to GDP ratio is at the lowest level in a generation. There's really nothing at all concerning about household debt load and of all principal types of loans there is only one that is problematic: student loans. But it's just one out of many. Every other kind of debt is at historically low levels.

matrix872• 2 months ago

I'm kind of confused. It's not clear to me how or why the line keeps going up. People are spending less because of economic insecurity, everything is more expensive because of tariffs and war, interest rates have been high for four years.

The general cultural mood feels unsustainable. Like the peak-woke period around 2022 before the pendulum swung really hard in the opposite direction.

I don't know if there's a word for it, but I feel like the US has this tendency of trying to shove cultural change down people's throats in a really top-down manner that tends to backfire.

At least one really positive outcome from this whole """AI""" movement thing is that class consciousness has been increased quite a bit from it. If you're a capitalist, it's better to be one quietly and fuck people over in secret instead of painting a huge political target on your back. They've done the opposite of this. And one key difference here is that the early 2020s DEI movement had way more people behind it. This is just a small group of rich people.

Either the market is going to crash and they'll end up getting humiliated, or there will be a wave of populist backlash. In either case, we (people working in tech, SWEs, HWEs, etc) will probably get fucked over even worse than how it's been over the last couple years.

ai_fry_ur_brain2• 2 months ago

We've (tech workers) been in the labor aristocracy for the last 15 years ignoring the plights of the rest of labor. We kind of have it coming.

intended• 2 months ago

K-shaped economy, Asset bubble, and AI spending.

The retail / average consumer in America is seeing a very different world than the rich and ultra rich.

ryandrake• 2 months ago

Yes. When people say "The economy" is improving, they are only talking about the stock market, which primarily effects rich investors and old people's retirement.

krackers• 2 months ago

It's not clear to me how or why the line keeps going up

Because people believe it will go up, it's a prediction market for attention. The stock market seems to have decoupled from underlying "real value" of a company and is closer to cryptocoins now. Of course the flipside is that you also have the same volatility of cryptocoins.

ted_bunny3• 2 months ago

Just wait until TPTB crash the dollar on purpose to try to make their crypto stronger.

Ekaros2• 2 months ago

On some level it is probably due to flows. As long as money keeps flowing in and things don't get revaluated things look great. More money in line goes up. Money can come from both investing and corporate revenue.

Once things are valuated again to lower point it might all cascade and crash.

rawgabbit• 2 months ago

It's a bubble. When the music stops, everyone will be crying.

aeternum2• 2 months ago

I thought the Economist used to have much higher quality articles. Where is the historical analysis?

Is it more apocalyptic now than during the cold war when kids hid under their desks? Did America really win the space race because of a presidential speech or was it the apocalyptic threat that if we lose, we will all live under communist rule? Would American manufacturing have ever caught up to Germany if it weren't for the existential threat of the world wars?

Perhaps American capitalism has always thrived on fear of the apocalypse.

Barrin92• 2 months ago

Where is the historical analysis? Is it more apocalyptic now than during the cold war when kids hid under their desks?

the Cold War apocalypse was solely military in nature which had few implications economically, whether you get nuked or not doesn't change an investors strategy, you just assume the world doesn't end and carry on. The cold war calculus was if anything maybe the most rationally (albeit scary) period of human history, but exceptionally stable.

There is a difference between billionaires being afraid of the communists, which was of course self-serving, hysteric and at times bigoted, but the communists were at least real and had killed some few ten million people. That's a very different form of apocalyptic thinking than billionaires giving lectures on the actual Anti-Christ in the Vatican.

Economic manias happen in periods of social transformation and hot war, not cold ones. And on that front we do look a lot more like we are in the 1920s, or some bizarre 19th century evangelical revivalism period rather than the 1960s.

aeternum2• 2 months ago

whether you get nuked or not doesn't change an investors strategy

I'm not sure about that, I think it would make me favor investments in science and technology, or if college age I would likely choose engineering over say art. The "Sputnik Shock" did have a cultural effect not to mention more direct methods like the National Defense Education Act.

wesselbindt3• 2 months ago

America won the space race? The only milestone where the US got there first was having boots on the moon. Every other milestone (first artificial satellite, first organism in space, first man in space, first woman, first spacewalk, first craft on the moon) was achieved by the soviets first. Taking the one arbitrary milestone where the US did come in first and declare it the finish line feels weird as heck.

Dibby0532• 2 months ago

Well, because obviously the finish line of the space race was the Moon.

Had the Soviets declared the line on the "first woman in space", now we probably would use Soviet GPS, we would use Soviet maps of planet surfaces, we would have Soviet Mars rovers, Soviet Voyager... You get the idea.

Ekaros2• 2 months ago

It is sore loser behaviour. Combined with typical fascist totalitarian terrorist state mind washing of the population it does stick. Repeat lies enough time and people actually start believing them instead of the naked truth.

yojo• 2 months ago

Schumpeter is one of their columns; this is an editorial piece, not one of their news articles.

The regular stuff is still well written, IMO.

tjwebbnorfolk• 2 months ago

Author appears to take resilience and preparedness to the logical extreme and mistake it for some kind of doomsday worship. Indeed, the rise of armchair-eschatologists is at an all-time high. This article is a much better example of such thinking than the likes of Anduril and Anthropic.

saltyoldman• 2 months ago

No reason to black pill. Tons of opportunities - be creative.

seydor• 2 months ago

Is it true that Thiel moved to Argentina

aussieguy1234• 2 months ago

With investments AI and robotics automation, I've long been convinced that capitalism is going to eat off its own head, even before the current AI boom.

The general public won't accept a system where only a small few have the means to get by and without much work being available to humans anymore, we'll need an alternative economic system, or face serious civil unrest.

With capitalism, for work to be done, you need the possibility of homelessness and/or other types of poverty to motivate humans to work. But that isn't required for robots.

anon2915• 2 months ago

America is a communist nation since the majority of the populace holds the majority of the productive capacity in joint ownership

thyrsus• 2 months ago

That claim needs explanation. My understanding is that substantially less than 20% hold the controlling ownership of U.S. productive capacity.

anon2915• 2 months ago

The majority of Americans own stock and most of that is investments in the S and P 500. This is probably the closest any nation has gotten to mass public ownership of the means of production. Certainly more so than explicitly communist nations in which supposed shareholders (i.e. the citizens) have no right at all to influence company decisions.

In America shareholder lawsuits and such are common even from minority holders.

pixelatedindex• 2 months ago

Seems more like an aristocracy where the productive capacity is owned by the billionaire class

anon2915• 2 months ago

No ones labor is worthless. Guys this is so retarded but I understand why tech people find this difficult.

Humanity runs off of romance. This is not sexual romantic love but rather the thrill of other human people.

An AI cannot provide this. This interaction has value. Technology frees us from having to deal with the mundane so we can deal with the exemplary.

Just go to a poorer country and see that it is not possible there. America is friggin awesome.

achierius• 2 months ago

Why are there homeless people then?

Capital doesn't care about whether your work is "inherently valuable". That you think poor countries are somehow fundamentally different in this regard, exposed to the downsides of the market in a way that we here are not, is a defect of imagination.

anon2915• 2 months ago

There are two reasons I've seen that people are homeless.

The first reason, prevalent in third world countries, is because people are ostracized from society by people who don't consider them fully people. See tribal conflicts in Africa or India.

The second reason, more common in the US, is because we conflate 'homelessness' for 'mentally ill' due to the dearth of mental health facilities. These people, due to how they behave, are not people most people want to interact with. By and large, most normal behaving homeless in the United States end up not homeless about a year later, and the data show this. There is almost zero family houselessness in America. Almost no families begging on the street. Pretty much the only families you see begging in America are gypsies who are lying about their lot in life. In much of the world, there are destitute families literally begging on the street for survival.

That you think poor countries are somehow fundamentally different in this regard,

They are inherently different. Countries like my parent's birth country of India have more than enough resources to be rich but are held back by a social system in which some people are considered less than dirt and others are elevated to be besides gods. India is - or used to be at least - a socialist country, and is still just barely capitalist. The idea that capitalism causes poverty is... insane. I would encourage people to travel to other countries and see what homelessness looks like there. If you get out of the western bubble, you'll realize that the homelessness of America is of an entirely different quality and kind.

Frieren• 2 months ago

Fascism needs existential threats. Nobody in their sane mind will accept their hateful ideology if they were not desperate, and in panic.

A millenarian economy is necessarily a paranoid one.

The economy does not need to be paranoid, it becomes paranoid with inequality increases the stakes on everything, when you can be obscenely rich or depressingly poor and there is no in between. That makes reasonable people paranoid. High equality with opportunities for everyone makes people reasonable and wanting to work for the common good.

“Merely regulating it is insufficient,” wrote Pope Leo XIV in a 40,000-word essay on AI last month. “It must be disarmed.”

Of all the messages, the Pope was far from "apocalyptic". He was trying to defend the working class and avoid discrimination and xenophobia embedded in the models. No, end of times bullshit.

If things are so dire, why are American stocks so expensive?

Because it is disconnected from the average working class experience. "Everything is good because stocks are up" is a non sequitur (except for the people that only care about their portfolio).

BloondAndDoom• 2 months ago

Nobody in their sane mind will accept their hateful ideology if they were not desperate, and in panic.

Wish this was true, but clearly not. Unless you define existential as “inconvenience”

ai_fry_ur_brain2• 2 months ago

These rich folks should probably study Mao and the revolutions of 1848 before the worst possible things happen.

ted_bunny3• 2 months ago

Have you not noticed they are on the offense? It's the poor who need to study Mao.

tim3332• 2 months ago

It's a rather negative take on things. Take Musk for instance:

Mr Musk is America’s richest capitalist in part because he is its loudest Cassandra

He's actually been going on about "A World Where All Is Free? That’s Elon Musk’s Theory of ‘Sustainable Abundance.’" https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/business/a-world-where-al...

Also booming stock markets, solar output, AI development and the like could be ok maybe?

giardini3• 2 months ago

paywall

giardini3• 2 months ago

"The Economist" is falling into the rut that the remainder of British publishing has been bogged down in for a decade: increasingly liberal headlines generated via social-media topic measures to gain increased eyeballs (enough to survive).

Increasingly, British news sources are drifting leftward, primarily b/c right-wing sources are increasingly rare and, let's be honest, dull. Maybe with a little bit of say, "DEI", in the topic we can raise some eyeballs, is a typical move.

But that's a dead end. The real news is that good article headlines are hard to find and good composition is hard to write. No easy way to do that other than to find better writers.

queenkjuul2• 1 month ago

It's fascinating there are people that believe things like this

giardini3• 1 month ago

Not nearly as fascinating [that] people believe.

American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn

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