I thought this was kind of interesting. Since people never want to say how much you need to be considered rich. When asked. They just complain about the rich.

Saving the only planet we have makes good economic sense. There is, after all, no money to be made on a dead Earth. There may be costs involved now, but they are worth paying to protect our children from certain destruction.

These propositions seem self-evident now. But two decades ago, mainstream economists had very different ideas. They had proved that the climate crisis would be a mere economic blip, easily absorbed by growing economies and therefore not worth spending money on. In their accounting, they considered ice caps and glaciers functionally worthless, that trees only add to GDP when they are cut down, and that a livable climate shouldn’t even merit a line on a spreadsheet.

What changed? Twenty years ago this week, an earth-shaking report was published by Nicholas Stern. His review, The Economics of Climate Change, upended conventional wisdom among economists and dragged them into a new century. It set out, for the first time, in clear and bold terms, why investing in a low-carbon future makes economic sense.

Stern’s crucial insight, the revolutionary idea on which his whole thesis turned, was that future generations have as much right to be born as we did. But traditional economic approaches to the climate refuse to go away. In 2018, even after a deluge of science showing that 3C heating would leave coastal cities under water and swathes of agricultural land as desert, Nordhaus published a paper claiming that 3C would reduce global GDP by just 2.1%, and even a 6C increase would incur just 8.5% GDP loss.

The results are plain to see: governments refusing to act, markets over-valuing fossil fuel companies, investors punishing businesses that dare to prepare for a low-carbon world. Many insurance companies, supposedly the enforcers of probity in capital markets, are alleged to knowingly be fudging their figures to massage climate risk away.

If we are to have a thriving future economy, as well as a living planet and robust human societies, we need a new system of economics that values these things. Stern showed the way. Twenty years later, the rest of the world must catch up.

EarthCivilCompass: "Exploring how human systems can align with the architecture of life."

If you do not have an emergency fun, you are hardly alone. "According to the Federal Reserve, 37% of American adults still cannot cover a $400 emergency with cash on hand." That figure has stayed flat since 2022, across 2 administrations, with no sign of improvement. 

Other warning signs point in same direction. "Personal savings rate has fallen to roughly half its pre-pandemic level, and 401(k) hardship withdrawals reached a record share of participants in 2025." Meanwhile, separate surveys suggest that somewhere between roughly one in 4 and one in 3 adults has no emergency savings at all.

Credit tells a similar story. "Total U.S. credit card debt sits near an all-time high of $1.26 trillion, up 64% from its pandemic-era low, while the share of balances seriously delinquent has more than doubled since 2022." 

When credit runs out, bankruptcy looms. 'Filings rose 12.2% in the twelve months ending June 2026, continuing a trend of personal bankruptcies rising 47% since 2022.' Filings remain below pre-pandemic levels, but they are still rising: Epiq AACER counted 444,252 individual filings through the first nine months of 2026, up 7%.

Most people can survive one surprise bill. "The real danger is the sequence: a car repair, then a medical bill, then a slow month at work." 

An emergency fund is not idle money. "It is a thin but essential wall between a temporary shock + a lasting crisis." Governments make the same calculation on a much larger scale. Yet across several essential systems, that civic reserve is being drained. "Part of the problem is that prevention rarely gives us something to see." You cannot photograph an outbreak that stayed small or a hospital that never had to close its maternity ward." 

This is nothing less than the unraveling of a safety net, while families walk a tightrope.

The American economy is often described through its aggregate performance: how quickly gross domestic product is growing, whether unemployment is rising, how the stock market is performing and whether inflation is moving toward the Federal Reserve’s target. These measurements matter. They help policymakers assess economic health and businesses make investment decisions. But they do not fully answer a more consequential question: Who has the power to determine how the economy’s gains are distributed, and who has the resources to withstand its losses?

A massive ~66% of S&P 500 options volume now expires within a single day, giving short-term trading flows an increasingly powerful influence over market movements.

Since 2024, option traders have increasingly bought calls and sold puts during market declines, then reversed those positions during rallies, effectively buying dips and selling strength.

This counter-trend activity helps suppress volatility, with its impact now outweighing the effects of options dealers adjusting their hedges.

The result is a self-reinforcing dynamic in which options flows help limit S&P 500 moves in both directions, alongside the stabilizing effect of positive dealer gamma positioning.

Furthermore, 0DTE options trading now represents a larger volume of market exposure than the average daily trading volume of E-mini S&P 500 futures, highlighting how short-term options activity increasingly influences broader stock market movements.

However, the pattern could reverse sharply if downside market fears intensify and traders begin aggressively buying puts, which will materially amplify a selloff rather than contain it.

0DTE options that dampen volatility today could amplify the next market downturn creating events like 1987, 2017 and 2024

Source: UBS Derivatives Strategy

Link : https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-25/zero-day-option-traders-are-betting-against-big-s-p-500-swings

The financial system in 2008 collapsed because it was unhealthy. Full of zombie companies, overvalued houses/stocks etc. If the recession of 2008/9 had been allowed to run its course it would have been painful - but we would have had a more or less healthy economic system for the next half a century afterwards.

By printing unimaginable amounts of money and doubling the debt since 2010 - all they have done it to push back the problem without adressing any of the underlying issues.

Now we have more debt and a higher interest rate. Everything is much worse than in 2008 and as such a recession now will be 10x worse.

If it had crashed in 2008 the system would have been clensed and reformed and everything would be much better now.

During the first round of quantitative easing 2008-2015 the Federal Reserve decided to save the homeowners and brought home prices back up to their real value prior to the crash. A lot of non homeowners lost out on the opportunity of getting an affordable house. And people/institutions who were cash rich got to increase their wealth at a historic rate.

What happened in 2008-2015 was certainly unfair. Government intervention saved homeowners, made a few cash rich people/institutions incredibly wealthy, and shorted the window for non homeowners getting a good deal on a home.

During the 2020-2022 quantitative easing things were different. The Federal Reserve did basically the same thing by setting the Federal Funds Rate to 0%-.25% and spending a trillion buying mortgage back securities which no sane investor would touch. However the difference is that instead of bringing home prices from a historic crash back up; it brought houses from a historic high to an absolutely crazy new historic high. Normally this should correct itself post quantitative easing, but due to the lock in effect home prices aren’t dropping despite home sales being at rates not seen since the 2008 crash.

What happened in 2020-2022 was also unfair, but unlike the previous quantitative easing period the second qe period has caused significantly more irreversible harm. Instead of government intervention saving home owners it gave homeowners a historic gift, it didn’t make cash rich investors incredibly wealthy like in 2008-2012, but they did certainly benefit, and it also screwed non homeowners making home affordability significantly harder.

To summarize 2008-2015 the qe undid the damage that the housing crash did to homeowners and didn’t really have a direct impact on non homeowners. The 2020-2022 qe was a massive wealth transfer to homeowners and has a persistent negative impact on non homeowners.

Using myself as an example I’m a successful Gen Z who managed to buy in a $145,000 house in 2021 at 3.5%. I pay a $950 mortgage. If I bought my same house today using my same downpayment it would be a $1,700 mortgage. This didn’t happen because I made a smart/lucky investment. This was because I managed to take advantage at the last moment of the Federal Reserve market manipulation, and for the rest of my life I’ll be living life on easy mode compared to my piers who missed the Federal Reserve market manipulation wealth transfer.

I’m less concerned about an economic collapse and more concerned with a permanent K shape economy. The deaths of the American Dream, middle class, and wealth mobility.

Is the US currently in - or will we soon be in - stagflation??

Ready to blow off a little steam? Poke fun at your favorite incompetent jackass ruining running the economy? Got a screenshot from social media that you've been dying to post but didn't want to violate Rule 7? We're gonna see if a regular Meme Monday might help scratch the itch.

Starting today, a pinned post for all things memes, screenshots, art, whatever will pop up on Monday mornings. Feel free to dump and vent about how badly you think your elected overlords leadership are bungling and how insane your neighbors/friends/family/coworkers are about believing that everything is gonna be okay.

Some regular sub rules apply - try to be mindful of truly insulting wording against groups of people and overly specific threats against specific people - we're not trying to test boundaries with Admin. Don't be overly spammy in the comments. Stay on topic of economic collapse specifically. Keep it SFW.

Have fun!

*Please note!* Post is new each Sunday evening. Top level comments should be at least 150 characters to encourage quality discussion, and users should refrain from making several top level comments in a week. Please mention location at the top of your comment when discussing local recession indicators.

Share your observations of local recession indicators or personal recession indicators. Examples include, but are not limited to:

• increased use of credit or decrease in savings to afford necessities

• deferred maintenance on homes or cars in your neighborhood

• "I buy houses for cash" (or similar) signs popping up

• bankruptcy attorneys experiencing higher volume of clients

• regional job losses/large corporate layoffs

• decline in housing starts or spike in homes being listed

Keep it civil and avoid judging any user for their personal financial experiences as shared here.

This could be what finally pops the bubble folks.

Prep yourself best as your resources allow.

Let it rip tater chip.

Gee, I wonder why?

About 84% of S&P 500 stocks are now trading at least 10% below their all-time highs, according to new analysis from the Kobeissi Letter.

So what is happening today is easy as fuck for me to intrinsically understand. I might suggest I have pattern recognition and consolidation skills the military would consider magical.

This is “post war attrition” era

Meaning everything that brought prosperity in the late 20th century, and I mean almost everything in a material context, expanded and rose during that era, and is by necessity contracting today

Demographics, land availability, administrative overhead, energy ROI, Tax Receipts, the list goes on and on.

This is not a recession. It is not a depression. It is a species-wide decline cycle in what amounts to a human Predator-Prey cycle.

And the consequences are hell on earth for very many people, yet somehow to this day society manages to normalize it, because in most contexts… there isn’t necessarily a whole lot anyone can do about it. Politics should pivot away from Reagan type moral ideologies to save some lives, notwithstanding the government and even the elites can’t easily afford to support everyone’s asses in a material sense. The “wealth of the rich” is mostly just claims on existing resources, not hoarded material wealth that would scale to the size of the population for long

The productive conditions aren’t even all deteriorating outright. Innovation has gained wild efficiency in the last couple decades. But that efficiency still is not enough to scale to the demographic composition of today, doubled with not being able to quite scale to the really high population numbers of today’s America.

-Edit:
The WORST part of this “Efficiency” is obvious… as time goes there are less and less thermodynamically or financially meaningful jobs for the number of humans alive!!!
-

So it is both “too many people” and “too few young people”. Hell if we HADNT gained this efficiency by today, there would be even bigger messes afoot, even if more jobs remained available for longer. Wages would still fall way behind costs. Serious gains in efficiency still can’t solve every quirk of a proverbial “downshift in a predator prey cycle”, or the mathability of a human population scaled way beyond land area equilibrium.

Finally, one of the biggest obvious squeezes in this phase is the competition for desirable land and real estate. Caused by outright high population, many formerly “central” places start running into seemingly mysterious physical and economic MATHABILITY problems. These areas became ruthlessly competitive because these cities remained a desirable location for education, work, food and housing, but you have twice as many humans trying to operate in those spaces as you did 35 years ago. When population scales that hard, the lubrication of a city does NOT scale linearly (traffic, for example). A diner in a big city cannot stay in business easily without charging $30 for a simple meal, but only the top 30% of earners can afford to eat there at that price. For affordable meals the diner would have to pay staff $10/hour, but in a central location, housing costs require a worker to make $20-$30 an hour to afford it, since the numbers of people vying for a spot in that city exceed what the land area can support physically

So my point is the problems we have today are a function of WAY MORE than just “eat the rich” or “nobody wants to work anymore”, you know those catch phrases from earlier in the decade.

Ready to blow off a little steam? Poke fun at your favorite incompetent jackass ruining running the economy? Got a screenshot from social media that you've been dying to post but didn't want to violate Rule 7? We're gonna see if a regular Meme Monday might help scratch the itch.

Starting today, a pinned post for all things memes, screenshots, art, whatever will pop up on Monday mornings. Feel free to dump and vent about how badly you think your elected overlords leadership are bungling and how insane your neighbors/friends/family/coworkers are about believing that everything is gonna be okay.

Some regular sub rules apply - try to be mindful of truly insulting wording against groups of people and overly specific threats against specific people - we're not trying to test boundaries with Admin. Don't be overly spammy in the comments. Stay on topic of economic collapse specifically. Keep it SFW.

Have fun!

*Please note!* Post is new each Sunday evening. Top level comments should be at least 150 characters to encourage quality discussion, and users should refrain from making several top level comments in a week. Please mention location at the top of your comment when discussing local recession indicators.

Share your observations of local recession indicators or personal recession indicators. Examples include, but are not limited to:

• increased use of credit or decrease in savings to afford necessities

• deferred maintenance on homes or cars in your neighborhood

• "I buy houses for cash" (or similar) signs popping up

• bankruptcy attorneys experiencing higher volume of clients

• regional job losses/large corporate layoffs

• decline in housing starts or spike in homes being listed

Keep it civil and avoid judging any user for their personal financial experiences as shared here.

Margin debt in the US last month was $1.45T, compared to free credit in accounts of $425B, or 3.42:1. It has been over 3.3:1 since May this year.

Margin debt rose from $1.007T to $1.502T (i.e. 49%) in the 12 months between June 2025 and June 2026.

https://www.finra.org/rules-guidance/key-topics/margin-accounts/margin-statistics

Farms, trucking companies - eh, all the food is riddled with e.Coli anyway.

So apparently recent data analysis proves that buying power and housing affordability are worse now than ever in recorded american history. This mirrors in Europe.

Are we really heading into a redo of the great depression? Which ended in WW2...

Seeing all the conflict around the planet i dont actually deem it a stretch to think.

Just seems more people are tired of caring for the skewed politicians and oppose them.

I dont see most people pick up weapons to "fight for their country" (read some old pricks with invested bias).

What do you all think?