Blood in the Elevator

The vast majority of you who are reading this will never have the privilege of riding the elevator to the top floor. At that level, meetings are of greater significance, and outcomes are more pronounced. In many instances, it’s in these meetings where our economic fates are forged.

Since we aren’t invited to the “inside track” where crucial information, plans, and strategies of how they manufacture the economy, are discussed, we can either look to what they are releasing in yet another bleached Bloomberg interview, or we can look toward the messages of those who are “in the know.”

Since I’m not invited to the top floor either, this article focuses on the latter: the messengers, through a structural summary of the positions of Richard Wolff, Ray Dalio, and Scott “Prof. G” Galloway.

The takeaway: it’s not good. We, the People, are in harm’s way.

Three Perspectives, One Firestorm

Richard Wolff: The Decline Is Structural

Wolff generally doesn’t mince words, and his overall position is rather clear: economically and socially, the United States is a dying empire.

From 1870 to 1970, American capitalism offered a devil’s bargain: growth in exchange for obedience. It worked. The middle class ballooned. Home ownership became the affordable “American Dream,” and wages rose with productivity. All was good in the neighborhood.

Then came 1971.

Real wages flatlined, setting off a trend that persists fifty years later.

Since the 70’s, the average American worker’s wage increases have slowed to a crawl, despite the economy having tripled in size.

When adjusted for inflation, the 2024 federal minimum wage in the United States is over 40 percent lower than the minimum wage in 1970. Although the real dollar minimum wage in 1970 was only 1.60 U.S. dollars, when expressed in nominal 2024 dollars this increases to 13.05 U.S. dollars. This is a significant difference from the federal minimum wage in 2024 of 7.25 U.S. dollars (Statista).

What changed? Tax law. Policy. Institutionalized theft. A deliberate redistribution of wealth upward, cloaked in “market logic” and Reaganite dogma.

In short, capitalism’s drug of choice, “greed”, has taken a once reasonably balanced system, and turned the USA into an economic wet house.

As wages eroded, the GOP pulled the ultimate gambit: celebrate the nuclear family, while murdering the nuclear family. One is a political marketing talking point, the other is the observable action. The culprit is the GOP, while they’re blaming the opposition. The nuclear family was redesigned for those who can afford it (ideally white and evangelical), while it was simultaneously destroyed for those who didn’t fit the GOP’s biblical agenda.

Women were forced into the workforce, not for liberation, but to keep family units afloat. Naturally, this murdered any semblance of structure. Enter the latch-key generation, and the skyrocketing costs of daycare, and managing family finances turned into a juggling act of multiple jobs to earn more money that had less purchasing power. If you have to hold down a full-time job or multiple jobs, raising a family becomes a collaborative family affair (grandparents), or the streets will adopt inner city kids. Alongside came the debt traps: easy money through credit cards (at criminal rates), eternal debt through student loans, easily attainable (interest-only) mortgages, all constructed to subsidize stagnant wages, while keeping the illusion of the American Dream alive. Consumption remained high, but it was financed with IOUs. Meanwhile, we bred generations of workers from blue collar to knowledge workers, who became production machines, increasing output to benefit the few.

It’s the landlords, employers, and shareholders getting rich off rising productivity while wages remain a noose. Meanwhile, the middle class is gaslit into gratitude while their lifelines are being sold off piece by piece.

Ray Dalio: History’s Big Cycle Is About to Snap

Dalio isn’t some leftist firebrand; quite on the contrary, he’s a billionaire investor, representing the ever-growing class of socioeconomic succubi who should lose 99% of their wealth. However, at the very least, Dalio is outspoken about the future, and his warning is even darker.

Dalio is a “math” guy. He sat down with his billion-dollar abacus, calculating history. His equation frames the collapse of the United States as part of a recurring imperial cycle. Like Rome. Like the Ming dynasty. Like Britain.

According to Dalio, there are six stages, and we have firmly arrived at Stage 5, leaning toward six.

Stage 5, according to Dalio, is when internal inequality becomes so extreme, so combustible, that the political system ruptures.

Ok, in a nutshell:

• Unsustainable debt? ✅

• Loss of global currency dominance? ✅

• Widening values gap between factions? ✅

Among the inevitable and historically observable outcomes, Dalio puts the odds of civil war at 35–40%. Not a metaphorical war. An actual breakdown of our systems, introducing feast & famine, where those who have nothing left to lose will come after those who have more than they deserve.

Dalio is looking at it from a rather sobering perspective: the U.S. is overspending, overleveraged, and overconfident. The Fed has pumped trillions into the system, creating fake growth. And now, as inflation spikes and interest rates climb, the cost of servicing that debt is spiraling. To boot, the Trump 2025 budget that’s currently in various stages of approval will increase the debt at breakneck speed, shifting wealth, propping up value, while pushing us ever farther outside of the realm of “how the hell are we gonna pay for this?!”.

Astute investors aren’t stupid. They know the USA is in economic shambles, and what’s on the horizon. They are no longer buying what the U.S. is selling. The market is as soft as the GOP’s ethics.

Dalio’s advice? "Move your money out. Diversify. Get exposure to more stable countries." Sounds great in theory, if you have enough money to where it makes sense to move your assets elsewhere. For the majority of Americans, this is simply not the case, and it’s where Dalio’s remedial strategies suffocate. The problem is that those who are trapped inside the borders of the United States, his predictions will come true nonetheless: Ray insists that we will experience more than a mere market correction, but that it is the end of the American financial empire.

The wealthy will be able to “get out”, the rest will feel the full effects of greed-capitalism’s failures.

Scott Galloway: Capitalism Was Replaced by Cronyism

Prof. G is well spoken, but lacks all nuance for romanticism. He calls it what it is: The US experienced a hostile takeover of the American economy by elites who feasted themselves into financial obesity, to now treat its remains like nostril-offending roadkill.

His thesis? Modern American capitalism is no longer capitalism. It’s bailout socialism for billionaires and bare-knuckle market brutality for everyone else.

We privatize the gains, socialize the losses. We reward risk-taking CEOs with golden parachutes, while evicting single moms over $300 in unpaid rent.

Galloway doesn’t like to take prisoners, and even though he is filthy rich, he still punches at the grotesque rise of “transnational oligarchs”. In the MFM podcast, he called them hyper-wealthy individuals who treat national borders like speed bumps. They offload their U.S. assets while lobbying Congress for more favorable tax breaks, then relocate their profits to Dubai, Switzerland, or Singapore. And when collapse comes, they won’t be here to pick up the pieces. They’ll be safely tucked away. Most of them out of reach, out of harm’s way, watching the “Hunger Games” unfold.

Interestingly, Prof. G has said it once before: “America may not remain one country.”

Systemic Patterns

While the economy is on life support, there are those who gasp for air, and those who own the hospitals, the ventilators, and the tubes. Pay up, or they’ll turn the oxygen down. BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Apollo, KKR, Citadel, and Millennium profit from the volatility they help generate, shorting the crash they engineered. Lobbyists are the delivery staff, politicians are the executors, and greed-capitalists are the beneficiaries. The greater the chaos, the greater their returns. Volatility pays.

Every so often, they overplay their hand, and the scheme kicks back. In 2008, the mortgage crisis, with Lehman Brothers and others folding, firms like Blackstone swooped in to buy foreclosed homes by the tens of thousands, turning America’s suburbs into corporate rental units.

Or in 2023, when Silicon Valley Bank imploded, and the government rushed to bail out institutional depositors, while leaving smaller businesses in distress, with too many having to shutter altogether.

To some degree, this is nothing but blatant wealth extraction. Structured. Efficient. Legalized. From “too big to fail” to “FDIC coverage for the big players”, commonly, the little guy gets the shaft.

Confluence of Fragility

AI is reshaping the world of work, with layoffs in the thousands. Tariffs are evaporating global confidence in the United States as a stable trading partner, and the US Dollar as the international currency of trade. Meanwhile, our own economy is built on vaporware, high speculation, and irrational risk profiles. Basically, we’re “high of our own supply.”

Wolff, Dalio, and Galloway provide us with different perspectives, but reasonably similar conclusions. Their definition of casualties varies, but the symptoms are massive disruption, the end of the United States as we know it, the exodus of those who can afford it, and the feast or famine of those who are left behind.

None of the scenarios is romantic or desirable, but we should have all had it on our “Bingo Cards” - if we weren’t overly stressed, underpaid, and captivated by soul-soothing reality TV or dopamine-introducing UFC, the modern equivalent of the Roman Empire’s bread and games.

Yet, the issue prevails. Those who have resources will ditch out. Those who have not will need to battle it out.

What You Can Do (When You Can’t Opt Out)

You’re not rich. You don’t have a bunker in New Zealand. But you’re not powerless.

Before we break down conventional paths, I still want to point you toward GAS - The General American Strike, including the “financial noncompliance” option. It’s the people’s “Scorched Earth” proposition.

Hypothetical: The GAS Blueprint

Michael Zeitgeist

·

Feb 7

As I contemplate what it would mean for the American people to unite and take charge of the country, I also recognize that I am “leaning way out of the window” with this Substack.

Read full story

By conventional standards, if you’re still willing to play by the rules of a system you never agreed to, much less did you write the rules of engagement, these are some of the steps:

1. Get out of high-interest debt.

• That 24% APR is the real financial death sentence.

• Pay it off before inflation eats your paycheck.

2. Stop trusting the market.

• Index funds are inflated. The Buffett Indicator is at 200%.

• Diversify into real assets: tools, gold, land, solar, food.

• Buy through community: as a family or as a well-regulated community of partners.

3. Join a worker co-op or start one.

• Ownership is your only defense. If you don’t own, you’re a target.

• From food to land, co-ops are the main hedge.

4. Learn a trade.

• AI can write poetry and code, but it can’t fix your plumbing. Yet.

  • Rumor has it that 30% of Microsoft’s code is already written by AI. Yet, it can’t plunge a toilet.

5. Get politically hostile.

• Vote, yes. But also agitate. Organize. Educate.

• The system won’t collapse on your schedule. But it will collapse.

The Collapse is Picking up Speed

The stock market is a casino. The job market is a meat grinder.
The housing market is a trap. Student loans will wreck you.

The economy at large is unfolding to be a “Dexter” style crime scene: bloody, without mercy, and it will leave no trace of you, once you’re exterminated.

In that sense, Wolff, Dalio, and Galloway are not alarmists. They’re too educated and tapped in to just “cry wolf”. If anything, they’re more likely to be correct than blowing smoke for attention.

Bottom Line: If you’re wealthy, get out while you can. If you cannot, dig in like you mean it!

Below are some, but not all, of the source materials that were synthesized into this article.

Ray Dalio – The Changing World Order
Ray Dalio’s Civil War Warning
Scott Galloway – The Algebra of Wealth (TED Talk)
Scott Galloway – Oligarch Detachment & Economic Inequality
The Buffett Indicator (Current Value)
US Household Debt Hits $17.5 Trillion
Nvidia and AI Bubble Concerns
Silicon Valley Bank Collapse (2023)
Blackstone’s 2008 Housing Grab
Sears and Eddie Lampert Case Study
America’s AI Investment Bubble
The Rise of BRICS and Dollar De-Dollarization
BlackRock, Vanguard, and the Ownership of Everything
Tech Sector Layoffs Despite Record Profits
Corporate Bailouts vs. Worker Abandonment (COVID Era)

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~Z.

Do hashtags work here? Let’s find out:

#CapitalismCrisis, #AmericanDecline, #RayDalio, #RichardWolff, #ScottGalloway #Capitalism, #ClassWarfare, #ZeitgeistPulse