Some Wicked This Way Comes

Economist Jim Rickards was one of the very few who predicted 2008’s Great Recession and no one really listened.  Now he’s at it again, claiming that the financial leaders haven’t learned from that last great debacle and that something far worse is now coming.  On this occasion, however, he has some powerful support.  Warren Buffett, George Soros, the Economist, Financial Times, and even the Nasdaq’s own in-house publication have agreed and warned it is time to prepare.  It’s a bit enervating to hear them talk since they view it as the next bump in the road of capitalism’s wild ride, while in reality it will leave millions of families devastated.  We should be listening.This delicate balance between capitalism and democracy turned out to be highly beneficial to both sides when it worked.  Capitalism provided the training, wages and the workers necessary to create economies, while governments absorbed many of the costs for social security, healthcare and other stimulations that turned vulnerable workers into contented citizens.Yet, when things went out of balance, the result became a remote and wealthy elite of capitalist barons or a welfare state imposing so many regulations on businesses and corporations that their generated wealth was greatly reduced.  It was never easy, but in those times when it worked, as it did in the immediate decades following World War Two, it changed the quality of life for hundreds of millions.  But when it didn’t, the results were bankruptcies, unemployment, financial collapse, and a restive populace.  Reforms were essential to restoring some sense of balance.In recent years, however, no such correction has returned, even following the financial fallout in 2008. In fact, elitist pressure from without and forces of greed from within have resulted in government loosening even more regulations on capitalism, allowing it to move away from society at ever greater velocity.Just how bad it has now become was revealed in a ground-breaking 2013 book by five authors – Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian and Craig Calhoun – entitled Does Capitalism Have a Future?  While the authors frequently held to different points of view as to the cause of capitalism’s troubles, they were united in their introduction to the book: "Something big looms on the horizon: a structural crisis much bigger than the recent Great Recession, which might in retrospect seem only a prologue to a period of deeper troubles and transformations."This conclusion has also been reached in September 2018 by Andrew Ross Sorkin, author of the bestseller Too Big to Fail, who noted in an interview that “something dark and ominous, far greater than the Great Recession,” is about to befall the financial order.As if the shared introduction to Does Capitalism Have a Future?wasn’t terrifying enough, its conclusion turns even more ominous:

The events of the last forty years have deeply disrupted the institutions that kept capitalism relatively well-organized through the post-war period.  Looking for an unemployment rate of between 60 and 70 per cent within the next three decades.  There is no way society can prevent capitalism from causing accelerated displacement and the attendant stark economic and social inequalities. Some new system will have to take its place.  Revolutionary the change will be – but whether it will be a violent social revolution that will end capitalism or a peaceful institutional revolution accomplished under political leadership cannot be known beforehand.

So, there we have it. Capitalism, as in ages past, has gotten ahead of itself, pushed things to the extreme, and is now disrupting society in a universal fashion so that its very excesses might result in its demise. Globalization has now outpaced democracy’s ability to retain accountability, leaving politicians with plenty of promises but no way to acquire the funds to fulfill them.The kind of capitalism driven by small and medium-sized businesses that produced most of the jobs and overall benefits to community life have been kicked to the side of the road in favour of an unaccountable form of wealth generation, where money is made from money and not community investment in goods, services and physical and social infrastructure.This is the world in which we now live, infused by a global economic system whose motivation is mostly propelled by greed and whose benefits are increasingly going to the few. We are in a vulnerable state.  Capitalism arrived just as navigation, trade and discovery were emerging, and it successfully propelled the movement toward modernism.  Each time it overreached, it was brought back, but at no such time was it able to elude the grasp of those established authorities assigned with restricting its tendencies to excess.  Such oversight is now in retreat, and capitalism owns the field of play.What comes next is something no one can predict.  Those possessing great sums of money will ride it out, looking for further opportunities. But for the rest?  Well, it will be devastating and wicked and there will be little equity left to endure the storm. Companies that were too big to fail, or to jail, never learned, and we as citizens too often voted for governments that facilitated the flight of money away from our dreams.