The OZ of tech is fragile these days, as Nvidia’s boss is caught with his pants around his ankles, Elon the Musketeer’s political life is in somewhat of a shambles, stocks are trading at 400 times earnings, data centers are outspending one another as the public anger grows with their disruptions, and socialism is becoming a more comfortable word in America.
Will the walls come tumbling down?
I hark back to 2008 for clues. Harking is my style of the day, because it’s gray outside and my oatmeal is getting cold.
2008 was a controlled fire, a one-off matter of exuberance as banks fiddled with the mortgage markets in an unbanksmanlike manner. It seems there are new and amusing ways invented every day to find one’s pants around one’s ankles.
No matter, the taxpayers cleaned up the mess, as the little people always do when the big people get over-enthusiastic.
But 2008 is over and well gone.
These are both more complicated and more sensitive times.
Not confined to America, this time the world is in on the deal, and the cards have too many Jokers in the deck.
Small businesses unable to repay loans from the heady days of zero interest,
Nation after nation is broke, from Argentina to Russia,
Strongmen using austerity to blame and punish the poor,
Students protesting in France and elsewhere,
Overvalued markets nervous in the U.S., Europe and Asia,
Thousands of data centers cross-financed in an unsustainable race that has too few chairs when the music stops,
Maxed credit cards, students with debt and no jobs,
Entire families with too much month left at the end of the money,
Record bankruptcies in those nations that allow them, and
wise old China, waiting in the wings for the curtain to rise on Act Two.
Looking back, indeed, 2008 looks as simple as a wet dog shaking off water.
Yet, we’re told we may not look back to the times when taxes paid for government, stocks were valued at four times earnings, a single wage-earner could support a family, university was affordable and had a job waiting after graduation.
Somehow or another, we rebuilt Europe and Japan, but hadn’t the foresight to Marshall Plan America. With the only industrial power left standing, we shipped it off to China to make our millionaire class a thousand times richer.
That newly formed billionaire class left our mortally wounded middle class to make do.
Bringing an actor in to make us feel better, our wives got jobs, and kids looked for work after school. An immigrant from South Africa became the world’s richest man, bought himself into the Oval Office, and pillaged and raped his way through bureaucratic government. Not satisfied, he spent billions to keep other immigrants out. Makes you wonder what would have happened if our own native Americans had his money.
But those who would scare us from looking back don’t want us to compare all that messiness.
Unfortunately for them, I was there. And, worse yet, I was paying attention.
I watched as we sent our WWII returning soldiers to free university educations, and built Levitt towns to give them a boost up the housing ladder. My dad came home from Douglas Aircraft, where he was building interiors for DC3s, to restart his architectural practice.
I can tell you, because I was there, that we had no idea that we would turn on Russia, our ally in WWII, because they were communists. It was fine in those days to do business with dictators, and snuggle up to African oligarchs who stole all their nation’s wealth, but communism was a no-no.
And then an entirely comical thing happened in the America I loved…and still do.
We spent our blood and honor, fighting communism in Korea and Vietnam. Then, in 1972, Nixon and Kissinger went to China and threw their arms around a communist country. You have to have been there to see the comedy in that, but all that came later made you wonder who got the last laugh.
Now the United States is in decline and China is on the rise.
Seems no one in America is laughing…