Some wag on twitter pointed out that if the people the right called "radical leftists" were actually radical leftists, they'd be in favor or seizing the means of production, not medicare-for-all and that what counts as "radical left" in the United States is center-right most anywhere else.

I dunno. I've read maybe twenty books on the Great Recession. I've read four or five on the Great Depression. Economics is a science filled with jargon and jargon is a tool for obfuscation. Watchmaking is all about wheels and pinions because gears and axles are understood by all and the fuckers started measuring things by ligne a hundred years after the adoption of the metric system so I've gained a bit of a perspective on the unguent powers of jargon...

...and all this song'n'dance waving-of-hands about nobody knows what causes recessions? It's fucking bullshit. Purest, unadulterated bullshit. A recession happens when you write off the debts on your balance sheet as un-collectable. Plain and simple. That's it. Because see when you won WWI? All that money Germany owed you was an asset and when Germany crashed their economy it wasn't anymore. All those war reparations that were going to pay off the munitions factories and shipyards in the UK suddenly became a hole in the balance sheet and the munitions factories and shipyards didn't get paid. The US spent 52% of its GDP on WWI and that money disappeared into a fuckin' hole because wars.destroy.money.

WWII was fought with rationing and deprivation by all sides - the UK didn't exit rationing until 1954 ffs. Meanwhile Woodrow Wilson told Truman that he could have vengeance or peace but not both so we went with the Marshall Plan instead of the Treaty of Versailles and Command Economied Europe and Japan into UN-sanctioned Potemkin capitalism and lo and behold, massive post-war boom. But a lot of that post-war boom was bought with future promises that we're now having to pay off with fewer workers, fewer resources and a much higher cost-of-living.

There are more people over 65 in Japan than there are under 15 and Japan has been under 1% interest since 1996. The workers born under McArthur's GHQ are retiring with nothing to prop them up but hikikomori.

Recessions are where your assets become liabilities.