Unfortunately, this was expected, ... it's been too long the US (and World) economy was surfing in a gray area, and the Pandemic, the consequences of the Global warming (in spite of some are claiming) , and the war finally pushed it off the cliff.
This is exactly right.
The Global Financial System failed in 2007-09.
It failed after being exploited beyond its capacity to recover without intervention.
The intervention righted the ship (kind of) and patched a couple of holes.
Various corners of the patched economy came up with some innovative distractions for a couple of years:
- Zero Hour Contracts / Gig-based employment
- Influencer Marketing (aka Paid Shills)
- Significant expansion of staffless checkouts in shops and supermarkets
- The first wave of Augmented Reality
- Personalisation based on Surveillance
- Algorithms overseeing both the gig-based employment and the surveillance
- Cryptocurrencies and NFTs
- Gradual shift towards working from home (long before the trend spiked during Covid)
- Much more complex AI models
But the post-2008 economy never really recovered.
Jobs (
real jobs, not gig-jobs) did not become more plentiful, there was little investment in infrastructure, social mobility decreased, home-ownership moved increasingly out of reach of anyone in their twenties or early thirties.
Essentially, in the 2010s, we never experienced real, visible, unambiguous economic growth like we did in the mid-eighties, the late-nineties or in the mid-late 2000s.
We are still living in the long shadow of 2008.
The downturn happening now results from fractures in a decade-long fragile situation, which was never properly resolved.
