The Week Carney Sold Canada Out….

The Week Carney Sold Canada Out….

 

The Liberal government's marquee fall legislation is expected to strengthen a controversial section of the Labour Code, two senior government sources tell CBC News. 

The Carney government plans to amend the Canada Labour Code to explicitly allow the minister responsible to direct the Canada Industrial Labour Relations Board (CIRB) to end work stoppages and order arbitration.

-       Liberals looking to give minister explicit authority to end strikes: sources, CBC

By Gregg Wall (9-19-2026)

Make no mistake about it, this was truly a monumental week for Canada.   The week PM Carney sold out Canada and further enriched his American banker buddies, the Epstein class, BlackRock, and resource extraction leviathans.  Carney had his crony-capitalist orgy in Toronto where 300 executives… a who’s who of American oligarchs, robber barons, CEOs, fund managers, et al… descended upon Toronto to snap up Canadian public assets behind closed doors.   Four publicly owned airports gobbled up or to be gobbled up, infrastructure, highways, land, trains, bridges… essentially, you guessed it, the private equity model of grabbing property and extracting killer rents from consumers, the enterprise, labor, the public, the government.  Theft by any other name.  The proceeds from these sales will go to finance, not a better Canada, but Carney’s great crony capitalist Xanadu. 

Undoubtedly, Carney burned political capital this week, by selling out Canada to the ultra-sleazy Epstein class, the very same American billionaires that have run the United States into the sewer.  America has become a crack and opiate den, where 90% of Americans can’t afford medical care or have put off healthcare services.  

If I may drive the point a little harder, bear with me dear readers, Carney aims to import America’s crippling  economic model, Trump’s economic model into Canada… a model noted for:  endless corporate welfare; Wall St bailouts; crippling debt & deficits; failed supply-side & trickle-down economics; catastrophic inequality; a labor force that has been decimated & impoverished; endless state socialism for the 1% and corporate elite; endless austerity for the peons (like myself); never ending wars and war spending; resource extraction; a devalued and trashed currency, catastrophic price gouging, rent seeking, absurd profit taking; bankrupting national debt.  All under the guise of improving growth and GDP.  Too bad all the above has been an abject failure since the late seventies and early eighties, because these sadists never learn (and too many members of the public are perfectly content with culture war victories and “my team won”).  And the Mark Carney’s of the world and the 300 barbarians in Toronto really hope that the public … 25% of whom queue up for food banks to survive… never learns or questions. 

How is this possible?  You might ask, how is Dear Leader Carney selling off Canada for parts to America’s predatory elite, when we are, allegedly, in the middle of a trade war with the Trumpinator?  Both Carney and Trump appear to be milking the trade war for all its worth, as a means to distract and frighten the Canadian public.  In the case of Carney, the trade war has been the perfect smoke screen as Carney and Libs pass a far-right corporate, pro-oligarchy, private equity agenda, that wouldn’t stand up to the light of day, if the entirely manufactured trade shock had never occurred.  Meanwhile, Trump looks less and less like the winner here.  Carney’s effort to sell Canada to the evil American gringos this week… makes Trump look increasingly less relevant.  Trump is going to wage a trade war against American bankers, billionaires, US companies & investment firms that own a sizeable share of Canada, the Canadian economy, government, resources, and infrastructure.  Aren’t Canada’s new American owners (aka the Epstein class) also Trump donors?  Carney is bending over backwards to enrich Americans to the complete detriment of Canadians.  Carney’s capitulation into cowardice and greed, appears to be a version of: If you can’t beat the Americans, let them buy Canada.  Trump’s near daily pronouncements against the “evil Canadians” sound increasingly melodramatic and hollow, that is purely performative theatre designed to distract from the most hideous, perverse U.S. presidency the world has ever seen.  Ask yourself, why would 300 CEOs, bankers, fund managers and oligarchs descend upon Toronto this week to feast on Canadian assets in a prospective war zone?  Truth, reality are so much stranger than fiction because fiction must respect the boundaries of the conceivable, the possible… reality is held to no similar standard. 

Where have we seen Carney’s antics before?  Come to Alberta, come examine Marlaina Smith’s far-right economic playbook, where her government, political party, and the entire Alberta economy is centered around pandering to criminals, grifters, MAGA wannabes & losers, and American owned Alberta oil and gas.  That’s right, Dani too is hellbent on selling off the Alberta government, province, resources, utilities, and services… and use the power of the state to protect the ownership class.  And many wonder why Carney has made no moves to protect Alberta and Canada from Dani Smith, the US oil & gas industry, and the Greedcare imported from the United States.  Here too, Carney has catered & pandered to Premier Smith, promised free pipelines (picked up by the taxpayer), in the midst of an Alberta O&G production and profits boom.  Odd, how these themes keep repeating themselves, odder still on how the public remains mute on the Carney crime wave.  It’s as if both the Liberal and Conservative parties of Canada have the same identical death wish for the Canadian people, with the end goals of vast sums of taxpayer and Canadian credit line wealth transferred to wealthy parasites.  Carney is not the harbinger of crony corpocracy, crony corpocracy has already arrived… Carney is merely locking it in and taking it to the next level.  Carney continues to lean on financialization, supply-side, trickle-down -- as well as failed metrics like growth, GDP, and trade balances -- that consistently do not translate into better standards of living, higher wages & benefits, and the very best of what Canada stands for: like well-funded public education and healthcare.  And we were expecting from PM Goldman Sachs?  This is worse than a coup against Canadian sovereignty, in fact, if we believe the polls, Canada’s overthrow by wealthy Americans is being welcomed with rapturous applause by a tidal wave of support for the Carney/Liberal government.  The liberal voter today looks just as cultish as MAGA or well-heeled Dem voters in the States, who simply want to pull the lever every other November and return to brunch.

Carney’s summit in Toronto, again, relied on tried-and-true failures:  

Globalization and race to the bottom on corporate welfare, deregulation, privatization schemes, tax cuts, for-profit war spending.  All the factors that have seen nation-state debt soar, and centrist parties and administrations wiped out and thrown out of power in Europe and N. America.  

Over reliance on resource extraction with its inherent boom-bust cycles. 

Private equity, which has its own problems, an over-reliance on cheap debt, endless price gouging (because they can), which leads central banks to hike rates, excessive debt & leverage, and an inability to repatriate capital (zombie enterprise). 

Again, not once does Carney state how any of this raises the standards of living, incomes, and lives of the Canadian people. The conceit, the framing just assumes the public is immediately on board with more failed far-right economics, more oligarchy.  More misery from Thatcher, more privatized profits, more shifting of known costs, bailouts, and the padding of profits onto the backs of labour, the public, the taxpayer.   And Carney and Libs are going on the warpath against Charter rights, Indigenous rights, and organized labour.  Everywhere where privatization has been tried, it’s revealed as a fraud.  Oligarchs and ownership under pay for the asset (airports), run up the debt and leverage (to pay for dividends & buybacks), jack up costs to the consumer/the public, extract management fees and rents, slash & burn labour, leech off the state… services suffer & erode.  And then, the cries for taxpayer funded bailouts begin.  Balance sheets under privatization are depleted and heavily leveraged.   It’s as if, PM Brookfield was placed into his present position, not out of altruism, but deliberately placed to sell out Canada… see Bill C-5 and Carney’s eradication of laws and regulations stemming from Bill C-69 (Impact Assessment Act, the Fisheries Act, and the Species Risk Act).  Carney isn’t here merely to install billionaire rule, corpocracy, technocracy, a dictatorship of monied interests… Carney is here to finish the job, once and for all: Greed Rule.

Perhaps the most bizarre event this week, post-Carney Toronto greed orgy, was the immediate pivot to EU partnership?  It’s as if the MSM, globally, couldn’t erase the optics of Carney selling Canada to American billionaire pigs fast enough?  The MSM went from praising Carney’s Great Canadian Sellout to banging the drums for Carney’s hookup with Frau Genocide, the Queen of Endless War… von der Leyen.  No details for the public … just this is a great opportunity for Canada and Europe, and it very well may be.  Or it could be lousy or somewhere in between.  Irregardless, the Canadian people must have the details and fine print on any EU proposal.  Conveniently, left unsaid, much of the EU and the UK are in the same economic malaise, debt & economic crisis that America and Canada presently find themselves in and that Carney and Libs, recklessly & unhinged, are pushing Canada harder into.  Nation-states have been looted and ransacked by the Billionaire Pig – Monopoly class, and collectively, these malefactors of obscene wealth and privilege have no interest in paying taxes to support the very institutions that made them fabulously wealthy: the people, the state & the governments they loathe.  Which brings us back to Trump, his theatrics, and the trade shock… a trade shock that has been corporate America’s best friend, in terms of making Canada a 51^st vassal state for Wall St/Billionaire rape and pillage.  Hey, why mass Trump’s fascist shock troops and tanks on the Canadian border, when Canada, thanks to the Carney government, can be owned outright?

 

Thibault Camus / POOL/AFP

 

 

 

This is certainly a bit more than I wanted to write on a beautiful sunlit Alberta Friday afternoon.  We won’t have many more days like this, before the snow flies and the bears and wolves attack my humble cabin.  In conclusion, Canadians should not continue to trust in Carney and give him a free hand to continue his pimp out Canada agenda.  What’s clear?  Carney is a product of the 80s, Goldman Sachs, America, Wall St, “greed is good.”  Carney has bet the farm… not on the Canadian people, education, preservation of the Canada environment, fostering excellent relations with Canadian labour, long overdue reconciliation with cherished First Nations, a thriving 90%, and the CHA… but rather, Carney has bet the house on such well known failures as:  Reagan, Thatcher, supply-side fraud, trickle-down lies, billionaire supremacy, privatization scams, PE & VC nihilism, the sale of public assets, US oil and gas… repeat, US oil and gas… and lethal & toxic U.S. healthcare via provincial premier proxies (we see you Dani and Doug), etc., etc.  This apparently is the Canadian liberal-pimp agenda: everything must go, nothing can be publicly owned, everything must be fettered by greed, obscene rents, and private ownership.  And above all, shaft the indigenous and all Canadians.

And if I have one final take away, it’s this: know your enemy.  We think of Nazis as brownshirted thugs marching around with arm bands, or Trump’s ICE thugs.  But it’s imperative that the world wake up to the source of fascism… billionaires, oligarchs, bankers, capitalists, CEOs, monopolists, Techbros… the extremely wealthy.  They pivot to fascism because it scapegoats “the other” and divides humanity, deflects attention from the oligarchy’s catalogue of crimes and endless war against humanity.   

Who supported Trump?

Who financially backed Trump? 

Who supported Hitler?  

That’s right, wealthy German industrialists.  The billionaires of their day.  When centrist parties die, the wealthy pivot to the populist right, the far right.  They pivot to fascism and violence.  Carney is having a moment right now, but if he keeps enriching a predatory few, while enslaving Canadians, he just might set off the rise of virulent right-wing extremism that may make the Alberta separatist appear moderate by comparison.  It certainly is the trend, see America, France, and Germany. 

In this environment where supply-side is well-established and a proven failure, where tens of millions of Canadians wrestle with acquiring the essentials, it would be best for Carney to pivot to the master, Lord Keynes.  It would be best to adopt the Norway model, public ownership, crown corporations, and a $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund (not Carney’s pathetic, lousy welfare fund for corporations financed by more Canadian debt and the sale of public assets).  Alas, I don’t think Carney can find it within his tiny, shriveled banker heart.  Keynes certainly isn’t what Carney sold his billionaire benefactors in the run up to Carney’s coronation, but Keynes is what is required.  Europe, watch your back!  The globetrotting Carney maybe coming for you next, as President of the EU Commission.  Carney’s ambition knows no limits.

Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2026

Game Theory

Game Theory 

The Prisoner's Dilemma

The prisoner's dilemma is the most well-known example of game theory. Consider the example of two criminals arrested for a crime. Prosecutors have no hard evidence to convict them. However, to gain a confession, officials remove the prisoners from their solitary cells and question each one in separate chambers. Neither prisoner has the means to communicate with the other. Officials present four deals, often displayed as a 2 x 2 box.

1.   If both confess, they will each receive a three-year prison sentence. 

2.   If Prisoner 1 confesses, but Prisoner 2 does not, Prisoner 1 will get one year and Prisoner 2 will get five years. 

3.   If Prisoner 2 confesses, but Prisoner 1 does not, Prisoner 1 will get five years, and Prisoner 2 will get one year. 

4.   If neither confesses, each will serve two years in prison. 

The most favorable strategy is to not confess. However, neither is aware of the other's strategy and, without certainty that one will not confess, both will likely confess and receive a three-year prison sentence.

Ultimate Guide to Game Theory: Principles and Applications – Investopedia

 

By Gregg Wall (9-5-2026)

Game theory is the study of probabilities and decision making … where participants are not isolated but dependent upon one another.  Game theory was originally devised in the 1940s by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern.  Today, it’s used in business, economics, energy policy, government, legal teams, politics and campaigning, etc.  Academics, boardrooms, elites, lawyers, management teams, politicians may employ consulting firms, such as McKinsey, Boston Consulting, and Bain and Company, to run analysis, reports, and conduct live games (especially when the stakes are high). The classic scenario is the prisoner's dilemma but there are many other games, war games, and AI and big data are and will remain key features in current and future gaming and analysis. For a more exhaustive explanation of game theory, see the Investopedia article highlighted above, and there are a great many other resources and videos to investigate online. 

Assumptions of game theory are that the participants are rational actors that are seeking to maximize their benefit.  Of course, humans are highly complex, with varying cultures, educational backgrounds, and morality in praxis, which is where the math and probabilities come in. The game struggles with the all too human elements, emotions, and motives of empathy, betrayal, greed, loyalty, love, integrity, honesty. The game involves two or more players and the game developer, the aforementioned army, corporation, government, or political party, etc.  The players are given the scenario or game in advance, the options, and will want to formulate some expectation or anticipate what option or choice the other rational player will choose… as the ultimate outcome is dependent upon the joint decision.  From the game developer’s perspective, the aim is to forecast an equilibrium or outcome where no player benefits by changing their decision.  During the Cold War, game theory promulgated mutually assured destruction, the idea that America and the Soviet Union, as rational actors, were dependent on each other not to launch a first strike for fear of equally devastating retaliation.

Again, dependency is critical to the game’s outcome in game theory.  I would also add understanding who is developing the game and insight into what their goals and motives are…  is additionally extremely helpful to the participants, particularly in the real world. The game involves two or more players but the typical set up or scenario is binary, binary decision making, binary outcomes. This is fascinating because it’s no accident that we see binary decisions and dependencies presented to government officials, prospective customers, whether to buy products, corporations setting price for a products, services, or military hardware.  For instance, Trump’s love of bilateral trade framing and negotiations is no accident (Trump loves to exploit the asymmetry of the United States and military dependency in Europe).  The decision Americans make every other November at the ballot box is generally binary.  Through no fault of their own, the majority of citizens are too busy with their daily lives to ever question why we are limited to two choices at election time.  We are simply told the system, the US government, doesn’t work with more than two options.  The winner takes all nature of American politics only increases the urgency and increases the participation of the players (i.e. the voting public). The ramp up to the US election by the MSM and two parties dives directly into the competitive nature of the races, the embellishment and instigation of fear, the manipulation of culture wars.

 

 

So, let’s pull “the game” into the real world. 

America’s and Israel’s ongoing war with Iran, and the economic, monetary, and political costs involved… who wins and who loses is classic game theory in action. Trump exploits fear and constantly frames war with Iran, as nuclear containment, which in turn, is used to validate extreme for-profit U.S. military budgets and endless conflict (even though Trump assures us that the Iranian nuclear program was eliminated in 2025).  Presentation of a binary outcome… die in a nuclear holocaust or continue fighting… is critical to Trump’s sales pitch to the American people.  The American people are presented with a decision that is a foregone conclusion, no critical thinking or decision making is required (because the Trump admin, members of congress, and the Deep State are all over it).  Notice, the binary dynamic, the either-or proposition.  Notice, the consent is immediately manufactured.  Notice, the sales pitch requires the suspension of both disbelief, a considerable amount of ignorance as to the actual facts surrounding the crisis, and for a considerable cross section of the public to be so overwhelmed with their daily fight for survival, so as to not even notice they are being misled (which is why the American public is kept on the edge of precarity, edge of poverty, poorly educated by the MSM, and overwhelmed as both parties and the MSM flood the zone).  The American public is led to believe they are the winners in this game with Iran, as we are protected from nuclear Armageddon, while the true winners are the folks that framed or set up the game: Bibi Netanyahu, U.S. politicians who day trade stocks, Wall Street, for-profit military contractors, U.S. oil majors and soaring fuel prices, MSM - as advertising revenue and ratings often climb in wartime, warmongers, and McKinsey, et al.  Notice, the American people are truly the losers: another forever war, catastrophic debt and deficits, austerity to pay for the war, another Trump promise broken, a FED which refuses to contain inflationary spending and soaring prices, devalued currency, lower standards of living. 

Yet more winners, in the long march of history, are: China, Iran, and Russia who wiped out twenty US military bases in the Middle East; the asymmetrical warfare waged by Iran; the defeat of American military hegemony; another blow struck against the petrodollar; bond vigilantes… those who have longed for the end of the American century and the unilateral world order coming undone. 

Again, it’s critical in these binary dynamics not only to understand the game, the choices presented (or the lack thereof via manufactured consent), but more importantly, who is framing the game, who is presenting the choices, and the framer’s motivations… who truly wins and who truly loses. Which brings us to today’s final game, the November elections. 

The November elections for the most part fit into the classic game theory model of the prisoner’s dilemma, at least that’s what the framers want us to think.  There’ll be whole lot less abuse if everybody remains evenly divided, votes for two parties that are entirely inimical to the public’s interests, two parties that work tirelessly on behalf of the oligarchy and run the public into the ground every two years.  While Americans are keenly focused on affordability and the economy, the framers of the game -- the establishment, the ruling corpocracy and oligarchy -- want the public focused myopically on culture wars.  American politics and Western politics are riddled with false dichotomies, political duopolies, binary options, decision making, and outcomes: winner take all.  Believe it or not, some political campaigns used to educate, talk about meaningful issues like debt, deficits, tax policy, the economy and foreign policy… those days weren’t long ago but today they are long gone.  Presently, the MSM and the two major parties beat the fear drum, campaigns are dumbed down, and culture wars proliferate campaign discourse. Which is nauseating because most culture wars boil down to choice, freedom, and individual liberties.  As I’ve written before, if you want to be gay, a feminist, speak out on Israel’s genocide, please do so… or conversely, if you don’t want to be gay, want to be a fundamentalist Christian, or be pro-Israel have at it.  Liberty is destroyed when a political party wants to impose their belief system, ideals, and values on everyone else. 

The political game is presented as follows: both major parties take in massive contributions from billionaires and corporations, often the same contributors will give to both parties to hedge their bets, with the idea of protecting a failed status quo that has seen wage & wealth inequality soar.  Both major parties make all kinds of vague promises to Americans to improve the lives of the public on affordability, the economy, and jobs… they promise the moon to get elected. Once in office the promises are ignored, excuses are made, and gridlock and the courts serve the big money contributors. But notice both sides, Dems and GOP, actually are dependent upon one another to keep culture wars alive and perpetuate manufactured differences between the two parties (that are otherwise identical in bending the knee to corporations, imperialism, war, wealth, and Wall St.).  Lesser evil and zero sum framing often amplifies fear in the run up to the election and encourages a surge in voter participation.  High participation and turnout lend the political duopoly - as well as the political process and oligarchy that’s buying the candidates and government - credibility.  The entire game is designed to keep the players, Dem and GOP voters, at each other’s throats, instead of society uniting to actually solve economic problems and addressing the source of human misery: wholesale corruption, the political parties themselves, the very nature of the dark triad individuals & personalities who are drawn into running for office, the oligarchy, monopolies, endless for-profit wars, lobbyist, and campaign finance rules that are continuously flouted by the uber rich, et al. And let’s not forget 250 years of structural defects within the Constitution, the US government, and the American economy. Those few brave enough to suggest real economic change, such as public healthcare, are castigated and demonized as “communists” and “socialists.”  This, even though the biggest socialists in America today are the 1%. In this game theory model (aka Elite Theory) cultural, economic, educational, and political gridlock becomes the ideal (again for the preservation of a failed status quo, greater wealth for the predatory few, and an American public that is viciously attacked from all sides). 

In the election game, the ideal is for both parties to attract voters who reflexively vote for the same parties, year after year. From the establishment’s perspective, unthinking, low information, and even lower expectation voters, who are perfectly content with “my team won” are the ideal.  Once again, the people who pour millions into these races don’t think along those lines… they expect huge returns and without fail, they receive huge deals, no bid contracts, positions in government or the private sector. The winners: banks, billionaires, foreign governments, monopolies, multinationals, judges and politicians, Wall St, and war contractors.  The losers:  the American people, families, labor, children, public schools, democracy, freedom, hopes and dreams… wiped out.  

Yet more winners are the Global South, that is countries have that been preyed upon by America and the West for generations and centuries.  For them, an America in man-made crisis and decline is a positive event, a defeated global hegemon brings hope for a better world.  

Once you realize the culture wars are not meant to be won, they are meant to be continuous in the service of political duopoly, the Uniparty, and the oligarchy… it naturally follows that political duopoly and culture wars are game theory for the preservation of the ruling class.

 

 

 

To wrap this up, in game theory always be thinking about binaries, dichotomies, framing, decision making, politicians as salespeople pushing ideas and continuously probing & offering sales pitches. Be thinking about economic & political shocks, the flood the zone news flow presented by Western media and politicians.  In the game presented to you, who ultimately benefits and who ultimately loses. Who always wins and who always loses. How do you win at game theory? How do you win at another money pit war presented to the public?  How do you win every other November?  

Answer:  Don’t play the game, reject false dichotomies.  Think outside the binary, box presented.  Don’t support the political duopoly, don’t support the avarice surrounding the political process and the economy.  Raise your expectations as to the possibilities and outcomes.  Do not support the war effort.  Don’t surrender to the unrelenting message of fear.  Vote third party or if a reasonable option does not exist, simply don’t vote at all.  Don’t lend the establishment your credibility every other November.  If enough people do not vote, the system is revealed as a tyranny, the façade, the mask are removed.  The dictatorship and lie are exposed. Protest continually, boycott political events for the duopoly, protest forever wars, engage in civil disobedience, labor strikes.  Don’t ask, demand more.  Sustained civil disobedience - and yes, even political revolution - have successful histories and bring about real change.  These strategies work, the elite live in a constant state of fear… afraid of being found out as cheats, hypocrites, liars, pedos, and socialists with their faces forever buried in the government trough.  The establishment wouldn’t be spending trillions on data centers, a police & surveillance state, the criminal justice industrial complex, and the prison system if they weren’t deeply worried. 

Real resistance must be sustained.  Democracy and freedom… and the creation of an economy that functions for all… are not preserved and created by voting for the Uniparty and a killer elite every other November.  Expect and demand accountability and justice from the corpocracy, oligarchy, and politicians.

Warning: False binaries over time breed acceptance, apathy, celebrity & politician worship, codependency, despondency, fear & hate, flights into escapism, habitual and problematic substance abuse, etc.  This is exactly what the establishment wants.  Fight, stay focused, stay alive and fight for a better world.  If you can imagine it, a better world, a better economy, and government are entirely possible.  

It’s ours for the taking. 

Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2026

$40 Trillion

$40 Trillion

Our debts aren’t going to just disappear. Absent a conscious effort, we are just waiting for an increasingly likely economic meltdown. The ancient world had a different understanding of the nature of money, which is why debt forgiveness became a standard feature of their cultures. We need to start seeing money and debt the way people saw it back then: As a system to distribute resources that, like any system, can be periodically reset.

-      An Ancient Sumerian Solution to Our $40 Trillion Deficit, NYTimes

By Gregg Wall (8-22-2026)

This week was notable for: the U.S. crossing over the $40 trillion in national debt threshold; long term interest rates climbing and 30 year Treasury yields soaring north of 5.30% (a 19 year high); the Treasury intervening in markets with a token effort, swapping out long term debt for short term debt in an effort to calm markets and yields; AI and hyperscaler lending continuing to surge, expecting to climb well into the trillions; Trump’s man-made oil shock and inflation continuing; and crypto, on cue, began rising from the dead. 

Treasury Secretary Bessent says America can grow its way out the debt, by which he probably means further US dollar debasement and inflation.  When the world is tapped out and you cannot sell more units, one can always arbitrarily jack prices on the constant set of units or even the declining number of units sold to achieve magical growth.  But the growth fairy has existed for decades, and nation state debt continues to climb, the oligarchy grows obscenely richer, and the peasantry grows poorer.  At the moment, the only thing certain is death, manipulated markets, a burning planet, a soaring Gini coefficient, endless for-profit wars, and catastrophic national debt. 

As we reach $40 trillion, it’s instructive to talk about how we got here; the ramifications; and the fallout. 

In the beginning, there was Greenspan’s legacy, the FED put, the 2008 market crash, and Ben Bernanke.  The 2008 crash was notable not only for the finger pointing that transpired, but the trillions in transactions and bailout money that sloshed around (a congressional audit pegged it at $16 trillion, but the number ultimately climbed as high as $29 trillion), and for the fact that no responsibility and accountability ever transpired.  Millions of Americans were laid off and millions lost their homes – the opioid epidemic that started in the late 90s gathered steam.  Billions in profits were made off bailout money, with sweetheart lending deals from the banker of last resort.  The FED adopted easy money policies, zero bound rates, and QE… monetizing problematic debt instruments, reinflating markets, and expanding the FED balance sheet with eight to nine trillion dollars printed out of thin air.  No wonder the badly mauled U.S. dollar is no longer what it used to be. 

But the worst part, seemingly few lessons were learned, no serious reforms enacted (Dodd Frank and the subsequent roll back are a joke), technocratic elites, like the FED chair, continued to operate behind closed doors, and the national debt detonated into a supernova (Trump, of course, being responsible for approximately 30% of the national debt).  The key lesson: Congress, the two-party system, Wall St, the pathocracy, private equity would learn that they could now get away with just about anything… the sugar daddy of last resort would switch on the printing presses and make it all right: no risk, all reward, privatized profits, tax free bailouts.  The only people who paid were the 99%.  Ben Bernanke, who would get his Nobel in economics, along with subsequent FED chairs, financed for-profit wars that would continue aimlessly through the decades, and bailouts would become profit centers unto themselves: including Trump’s first term Wall St/COVID bailout, and Peter Thiel’s SVB bailout under Biden.  Financialization, private equity, venture capital, greed-first, national debt and the money supply exploded and with-it moral hazard.  GFANZ would commodify and monetize planetary collapse.  Successive FED chairs adopted the Greenspan put, the idea that Wall St was too big to fail.  Only exorbitant privilege could offer such a squandered & wasted gift and deliver such a curse: an Epstein class, a kleptocracy, and what increasingly looks like a banana republic.  Deregulation returned with a vengeance, always with the promise of delivering the great panacea, the holy grail: economic growth.  And yet, the crisis in America grows. 

And the ramifications of greed, debt, exorbitant privilege, and money supply gone wild?

The number of billionaires climbed from 329 in 2007 to 935 in 2025. 

The world’s richest man possesses as much wealth as the bottom 45% to 50% of the population.

35% to 40% of Americans work gig;

70% of Americans can’t afford the basics;

90% of Americans put off healthcare, doctors’ visits, and medical procedures because they cannot afford them.

DOGE and Trump slashed and burned services, like SNAP, not because people didn’t need it, but because they could.

Local, state, and federal spending now make up between thirty-five to forty percent of GDP. 

America’s real economy has been offshored over the span of decades, and Trump’s tariffs program has done very little to bring the factories back. 

Meanwhile, financialization is a money pit, which relies upon greater and greater amounts of private and public debt to sustain it. 

The US economy is reliant upon consumer spending, and the top ten percent make up 50% of consumer spending.

A top-heavy economy… characterized by oligarchy, totalitarian monopolies with absolute control over prices and wages, massive debt and deficits, stripped down public services, massive consumer debt, endless wars, and ubiquitous wage slavery… all but ensure that Mr. Bessent’s fabled growth fairy will appear desiccated, emaciated, and flying on one wing & a prayer.

The US economy increasingly looks like a command economy with monopolies and oligopolies dominating various sectors of the economy, the wartime economy and police state juicing GDP and soaking up surplus labor, and of course, financialization and big tech rounding out sectors that need fewer employees as AI and automation grabs hold.  Stir in gerontocracy and essentially a Uniparty and American looks a great deal like the Soviet Union in its final days.

Trump, at a time that America needs allies and friends more than ever, has managed to alienate the world, as only Trump can manage.  Bessent’s pitiful plea, this Friday, for friends and foes to rally around the U.S. in crushing the Iranian economy, comes across as obscene, pathetic, and weak. 

The fallout is obvious, domestically the stock market benefits the predatory few, even though when the bailouts inevitably arrive, the establishment says they’re looking out for the pension funds and the little guy’s 401K.  A vehicle that used to be a way for businesses and startups to raise cash for CAPEX has become the tail that wags the dog, smothering the American economy and government.  And financialization and the stock market (shareholder value uber alles) have become an abomination, that is entirely at odds with fiscal sanity, responsible foreign policy and governance.  Just this Friday, the stock market was rising again, despite lousy fundamentals and a dollar that is wilting.

Put simply, excessive leverage, financialization and Wall Street are dependent upon an ever-rising pool of private and public debt… essentially a Ponzi scheme. Therefore, Wall St, oligarchy, and private equity, at least in their present incarnation, must perish. 

Nor does the fallout from catastrophic national debt and money printing – unlike America’s failed leadership – operate in a vacuum.  People forget, Trump has clearly forgotten:  The quid pro quo in allowing the U.S. to possess exorbitant privilege is the U.S. would be a reliable and responsible financial center and military force, the dollar would retain its worth as a storehouse of value… and the U.S., in turn, would enjoy all the benefits that accrue, like seemingly unlimited power, dollar hegemony, inflated financial markets (thanks to the petrodollar), and cheap financing. 

But the U.S. hasn’t lived up to its side of the bargain: It’s trashed the dollar, deflated the dollar, run up obscene debt, its military hardware is grossly overpriced and defeated by China/Russia, via Iran.  The rule of law that anchors the system is shredded, see Trump's attack on the ICC/ICJ and the revolving door bribes and pardons emanating from the White House.  America’s ability to protect client states and allies is increasingly in question.  Worse, a rogue POTUS has taken over, who is not only incompetent, myopically focused on self-enrichment, and is emotionally & mentally unstable, but is clearly willing to shakedown anyone and any nation for a buck. 

The corrosive effects of all this…  the $40 trillion in national debt; a burgeoning oligarchy with nothing but contempt for the U.S. government, democracy, and its people; and the transference of the nation’s credit line into the pockets of bankers, billionaires, multinationals, the oil & gas industry, and war contractors… is one of the greatest disasters to ever befall a nation.  

In short, the United States is exactly what you get when insatiable greed, monopolies, rigged markets, a foreign government, and the Epstein class rules the nation: crony democracy is a ruse, entertainment, and a sideshow scam in a circus of lies. 

Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2026