The dentist’s waiting room had a TV mounted in the corner, muted, captions on. Some business channel showing a green chart going up and to the right like it meant something. A ticker at the bottom listing stocks I’d never own.
The captions read: MARKET HITS NEW ALL-TIME HIGH.
An old guy across from me smiled at his phone. Checking his 401(k), probably. Feeling rich. I wanted to tell him something I’d heard recently — an MIT professor saying the stock market looks expensive as hell, price-to-earnings through the roof, could be a bubble — but who wants that conversation from a stranger in a waiting room?
The professor had spent eighteen years studying why economies collapse. His conclusion, boiled down: we keep making the same mistakes. Not similar mistakes. The same ones. Too much debt, too much faith that this time is different.
It’s never different.
The pattern is simple enough that you’d think someone would stop it. Three to five years before every crash, there’s a boom. Everyone lending money based on the fantasy that asset prices only go up. Then reality shows up uninvited, and the debt becomes heavy again. Real. The kind of weight that crushes.
In 2008 it was mortgages. Before that, Japanese real estate. Before that, margin loans in 1929. The professor called them “variations on a theme.” Like a jazz musician who can only play one song, but in a different key each time so the audience thinks they’re hearing something new.
What I keep coming back to is the political fallout. Financial crises breed populists like rotting meat breeds flies. Economic pain creates demand for simple answers. Blame the bankers. Blame the foreigners. Someone handed you this bill, and by God you deserve to know who. The rage finds a target. It always does.
The politicians in charge when the music stops get punished, even if they inherited a bomb with the fuse already lit. And here’s the beautiful sick joke: you never get credit for preventing a disaster. You can’t prove a negative. If some Fed chair takes away the punch bowl early, all anyone remembers is that he slowed the boom. No statue gets built for the crisis that never happened.
So nobody stops it. Ever.
The professor has two kids. Six months old and four years old. He worries about them the way economists worry — with math. Current US policy, projected forward fifty years, puts the country at a deficit of ten percent of GDP. That’s not sustainable. That’s not even close. It’s a bill being passed to people who are currently learning to walk. People who’ll spend their prime working years paying off debts from parties they never attended.
We made promises to retirees. Benefits that assumed there would always be more workers coming up behind them. Fertility rates are collapsing worldwide. The math doesn’t work anymore. But fixing it would require telling voters something they don’t want to hear, so we keep the lights on with borrowed money and hope the future figures it out.
The future can’t vote, so screw the future.
There’s that movie, It’s a Wonderful Life. Jimmy Stewart in a bank, trying to stop a run, explaining that the money isn’t really there — it’s in Joe’s house and Mary’s house, all woven together in this fragile web of trust.
We built safeguards after the Depression. Deposit insurance. Regulation. Smart people watching the dashboards. It was supposed to stop this from happening again.
Silicon Valley Bank went down in two days in 2023. Startups with cash above the insurance limit saw some tweets, got nervous, started withdrawing. The withdrawals became panic. The panic became a death spiral. Two days. After all those safeguards. After all that learning.
Now the new con is crypto. Stablecoins supposedly backed by real assets. Some professor’s colleague studied one called Terra Luna. When she pulled back the curtain, there was nothing there. The backing existed only in the marketing deck. People lost everything when it collapsed.
And nobody went to jail. They never do. The guys who run these schemes walk away clean while the marks pick through the wreckage. It’s been that way since the tulip bubble. Probably since the first caveman convinced his neighbor that these particular rocks were special.
The green line on the TV kept climbing. The old guy kept smiling at his phone. Somewhere, economists carefully explain why this all keeps happening while knowing nobody with the power to stop it has any reason to try.
The hygienist called my name. I followed her back, sat in the chair, opened my mouth.
There’s something honest about dentistry. The decay is right there, visible. No financial instruments to obscure it. No marketing deck to explain why this particular cavity is different, more sustainable than the last one. Just rot that needs to be drilled, and someone willing to do the drilling.
The stock market doesn’t work that way. The rot hides. It hides in balance sheets and tranches and collateralized debt obligations. It hides until it can’t anymore, and then everyone acts surprised.
The drill started. It hurt.
That was honest too.