66 The Trial Lawyer
The Financial Times published an article that week titled,“ The US economy is more fragile than it appears.” It’ s author, Tej Parikh, points out that our housing market is in trouble and starting to look like it did around the time of the Bush Housing Crash in 2008, that spending patterns are changing in alarming ways( my phrase, not his), and that both the labor and stock markets are vulnerable. The article is frankly alarming.
And former labor secretary Robert Reich titled his brilliant newsletter:“ Be Warned: The Financial Bubble Will Soon Burst.” The former Clinton cabinet member writes:
“ The financial economy— stocks, bonds, and their derivatives— is in for a big reality check, and I think it will happen soon.”
America has stared into this abyss before; three times, in fact. In the 1770s, a brutal financial crisis driven by colonial overextension, monopolistic control by the British East India Company, and political corruption helped spark the American Revolution. In the 1850s, it was wildcat banking, land speculation, and a collapse in trust that helped produce the Panic of 1857 and push the nation toward civil war. And in 1929, Republican deregulation, tax cuts for the rich, financial speculation, and an all-out assault on labor exploded into the Republican Great Depression.
Today, every one of the fuse lines that set off those explosions is once again being laid by a Republican president and Party that has abandoned any pretense of economic stewardship or patriotism.
They are actively destabilizing the pillars of our economy, undermining our democracy, and gutting the social contract that held us together for nearly a century. And unless we act— forcefully, quickly, and collectively— we may soon experience a collapse that makes 2008 look like a speed bump.
The risk of a modern economic depression is not academic or merely theoretical. It’ s also not fearmongering. It is real, it is avoidable, and it is being amplified by a political movement that openly disdains regulation, despises democracy, and seeks to roll back every gain the American middle class has made since FDR dragged this country out of the last Republican-created catastrophe.
We are now living under a Republican president whose party has:
• Repeatedly held the full faith and credit of the United States hostage in debt ceiling standoffs designed to force cruel cuts to programs that serve ordinary people;
• Demanded the Fed lower interest rates in a way that could push the nation into an inflationary spiral even as wages stagnate and housing becomes unaffordable for the bottom 90 %;
• Pushed for the end of regulations on banks, fossil fuel companies, tech monopolies, and Wall Street speculators, even as their recklessness increases systemic risk;
• Championed massive tax cuts for billionaires and multinational corporations, ballooning the deficit while cutting benefits and raising taxes on working people;
• Enabled trade wars and supply chain disruptions while cutting support for green manufacturing and public investment;
• Promoted and made billions from crypto;
• And perhaps most grotesquely, embraced open authoritarianism and white nationalism, eroding the rule of law and the very stability on which economic confidence depends.
Every one of these moves destabilizes the foundation of modern prosperity. And every one of them echoes the warning signs of past collapses. The mechanisms of economic catastrophe are not mysterious. We’ ve seen them before.
Start with sovereign debt and fiscal dysfunction.
In 2023 and 2024, House Republicans repeatedly brought us to the brink of default just to slash food aid, gut Medicaid, and kill green jobs. Now, in 2025, they’ re salivating over a new“ Balanced Budget Amendment” that would make countercyclical investment during recessions illegal. That’ s economic suicide.
When demand collapses, the government must spend to stabilize the system. That’ s Econ 101. But the GOP wants a permanent austerity straitjacket. Why? Because billionaires don’ t suffer in recessions: they buy everything at a discount and radically increase their own wealth when things rebound. For the morbidly rich, Republican recessions and depressions are“ buying opportunities”: it’ s class war, plain and simple.
Then there’ s financial speculation and asset bubbles.
We’ re once again living in an era of rampant unregulated financial engineering:
• Crypto Ponzi schemes.
• AI stock frenzies.
• Private equity gutting essential companies and loading them with debt.
• Trillions of dollars sloshing around the system chasing yield, while regulators like the SEC and FTC are neutered by courts stacked with right-wing ideologues.