The Bell Ringing at the Top
8th April 2025
ZMan yanks back the curtain.
The reason regular people feel so much economic angst, despite the appearance of material prosperity, is that we have reached the end of the line for this model, where costs are socialized but profits are privatized. The NBA is one example where the quality of the product has been disconnected from its financial success. In a true market economy, the owners of the Celtics would struggle to give it away, because the NBA, as an entertainment product, is in steep decline.
If you look closely, you will see this dynamic everywhere. The offset to those cheap products at big-box stores is the collapse of American manufacturing, and the social capital that came with it. The offset to cheap labor via immigration has been stagnant wages and emergency rooms that resemble Tijuana bus stops. The offset to a rising stock market is endless financial insecurity. The hidden costs have accumulated to the point where they can no longer be ignored.
The reason Trump is trying to usher in a new economic model is that the old one, the financialized economy, is running out of places to hide the costs of endless credit creation and the auctioning off of social capital. It is not just that we cannot borrow more money. It is that we cannot continue to socialize the costs of creating more credit money. Just as critically, we can no longer tolerate an oligarchy built on privatizing the profits of this system.