There is something almost touching about watching modern civilization cosplay an economy.
We carry on as though the structural unraveling all around us is merely an unfortunate, transient dislocation—a passing squall to be righted by the proper fiscal sleight of hand. Perhaps a technocrat will adjust an interest rate, murmur the correct Keynesian incantation, and wave a central banker’s wand to restore the illusion. It is a pathetic spectacle.
Even the fashionable warnings of “stagflation” are little more than sanitized euphemisms. The term is deployed to startle the public just enough to appear serious, yet it functions perversely as a sedative: it makes the looming abyss look manageable, clinical, and neat.
Reality will offer no such courtesy.
What ails our economic foundation was not spawned by the crises of recent quarters; it has been methodically engineered over half a century—thirty years at the absolute minimum, though the rot extends deeper still. This is not a cyclical downturn. It is a secular, generational decay so pervasive that it has ceased to be merely structural; it has baked itself into the culture, into the societal marrow, into the very flesh of the population.
Solvency is now an eccentricity. The individual carrying zero liabilities is a statistical ghost. We have normalized an order where households grossing a quarter-million dollars annually live on the razor’s edge of liquidity—functionally insolvent, hollowed out by lifestyle leverage, and sitting on balance sheets that are practically beyond salvage. They do not own their lives; they rent the appearance of prosperity from their creditors.
The sovereign states that govern them mirror this exact exhaustion. Yet there is a fatal asymmetry: a state does not go broke the way a private citizen does. An individual is foreclosed upon, cast out, and forced to face the consequence of arithmetic. A state, by contrast, limps forward under the sovereign privilege of coercion. When the paper facade frays to the point of collapse, it turns to the only lever it has left: extraction.
Governments will cross lines once thought sacred. They will move deliberately, coldly, to take capital from those who were prudent enough to preserve it.
Is it unfair? Indisputably. It is the theft of foresight to subsidize decades of institutional vanity and public gluttony. But when political survival becomes the sole imperative and an indebted, panic-stricken electorate begins howling for fresh blood to stave off its own ruin, no ruling class will hesitate. The prudent will be sacrificed to feed the machine.
https://boereport.com/2026/10/26/ai-gloom-revives-the-specter-of-stagflation-mcgeever/