The billionaires who own our country hated the New Deal and they set out to undo it.

They won and here we are.

Over the past 47 years, according to the Rand Corporation, $50 Trillion in wealth has been redistributed from the bottom 90% of American society to the top 1%, primarily because a growing percentage of corporate profits has been flowing into the stock portfolios of the wealthy and the powerful.

And now, Americans elected a billionaire who blamed globalization and DEI for their financial devastation. Ironically, this billionaire has promised to help Americans by DOGE-ing social policies, cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy. It’s hard to see how this was a winning sales pitch to the US middle class, but it worked.

It worked because decades of neoliberalism have devastated the US and left Americans desperate for any kind of change.

What led to Trump’s election, twice, is that our political system failed. Not one politician or party thinks that the US political system can fix things, or that it should even try. The result is economic and social upheaval that has created a deep and lingering malaise.

The neoliberal shocks without safety nets devastated the middle class and workers, leading to outcomes never seen before: frequent school shootings, an opioid crisis, an obesity epidemic, medical bankruptcies, high maternal mortality rates, crushing student debt, world-leading incarceration rates, high rates of old-age poverty, a crisis of homelessness, rising suicide rates among low-education middle-class people, and other deaths of despair. Such social pathologies are unknown or rare in other advanced countries.

It’s hardly surprising that Americans grew angry – deeply, justifiably angry. Every four years, they elected a traditional Democrat or a traditional Republican, but none of them provided meaningful relief. They didn’t even provide credible plans for fixing America’s socioeconomic problems, since creating the necessary social policies would have require taxing the rich and the banks and corporations they own, and that has become politically impossible because the billionaires won and we are, for all intents and purposes, an oligarchy.

Given all this, a populist backlash was almost inevitable.

The billionaires had plenty of help in their endeavor, including foundations, think-tanks, captive intellectuals at numerous universities, and money, lots and lots of money to spread among the Congress-critters. They also had the able assistance of the professional-managerial-class (PMC), who John and Barbara Ehrenreich, first identified in 1977. From the beginning, the PMC was the intermediary and enforcer between the owners of the means of production, whether these were individual capitalists or large corporations, and the working class.

Unfortunately for the billionaires, their victory appears pyrrhic. The massive stock market sell off, precipitated by Trump imposed tariffs, is freaking out the wealthy investors who celebrated Trump’s second term. The movements of the market generate a feeling of panic and the world collapsing. For the wealthy investors who back Trump, and are feeling it directly in their portfolios, they are not happy. They must not have been paying attention to Trump’s tariff threats, but this isn’t what they signed up for.

Even worse, the intellectual rational for Trump’s tariffs appear dodgy. If Trump’s secret agenda is to crash the stock market to bring down long- term interest rates, the plan already failed. The yield on the 30-year Treasury is now above 4.75%, its highest since February 19th. So the plan to crash the stock market is now crashing the bond market too.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world has reacted to Trump’s deliberate act of sabotage by sending the message that it will not buy US debt. The result is that the price of that debt is falling, and so the effective interest rate on it is rising very rapidly. This is the exact opposite of what Trump says he wants. He says he wants the US interest rate to fall by a lot. It follows the collapse of stock prices on the US and international exchanges, and the sharp rise in yields (borrowing costs) for the US Treasury’s 10-year and 30-year bonds.

The tariffs, and the rest of the craziness you see is the direct result of the end of the American empire. These are levels of extreme disfunction that are part of the decline of all empires when the enormous extraction that was occurring on the periphery comes back to the homeland, leaving a dilapidated, threadbare and deeply polarized country.

For the billionaires, they better use some of that ill-gotten loot to hire some serious security because this is the America they created with their unlimited greed and avarice.

One of Roman historian Tacitus’s, most famous lines, is pertinent to our story. “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”

Update: Economic analyst, Adam Tooze, lays out the doomsday scenario. “But let us indulge the fin-fi impulse for a moment. What if providing liquidity does not cool the panic? What if investors, both American and foreign decide, that they no longer wish to hitch their wagon to the empire of the mad king? What if they decide that the US is indeed exceptional, but that it is exceptional in rather nasty ways? What if the report in the UK Telegraph is more than mere rumor and Germany’s leaders are seriously considering pulling its remaining gold reserves out of the USA, because of Trump-risk? Well in that case, holding billions in dollars newly created by the Fed does not give you the security you want. 

So you sell the dollars. You just want out of the mad house”