Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon
by Wilsoniumite on 1/30/2026, 10:14:23 AM
https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/01/27/surely-it-has-to-be-soon/
Comments
by: torginus
I feel like there's some credibility to 'this time it's different'<p>The US economy depends on the country's position of world hegemon - the US dollar is the world's main reserve currency, the US enforces international order and trade rules via its military strength, it dominates technology and culture through 'US defaultism'.<p>I dont think AI even factors in to this.<p>The US economy is priced for global reach - if it manages to lose that through a combination of credible competitors, and loss of goodwill - it's going to be in heaps of trouble.<p>The looming US debt is also a great question - a lot of economists have argued that since most US debt is good. It's mostly in forms of treasuries purchased in USD that pay in USD - this means the indebtedness creates a huge amount of dollars abroad that foreigners have to then spend on US services, driving demand.<p>Should the US become an unfriendly power to the rest of the western world, it will find the demand for its currency plummeting, which I don't want to outline is a big issue.<p>All said, I think if the US continues down the political path it currently seems to be pursuing, 'this time it's different' actually will be.
1/30/2026, 11:58:54 AM
by: Dirak
Bad faith analysis. Your original hypothesis failed (and has failed consistently from 08-25), and the rest of your article is you trying to contrive narratives to support your foregone conclusion that the US economy <i>will</i> collapse (soon, as you claim).<p>In Europe, people hold cash at negative interest rates because they have so few new ideas and so little innovation to invest in. Where exactly do you think the money will go?<p>If you insist on believing the US economy will crash without a well thought out thesis, I think that’s a beautiful thing. When you sell your positions on US companies, I’ll gladly be on the BUY side of that order.
1/30/2026, 11:47:57 AM
by: trilogic
What is different this time? Maybe:<p>1 Online shopping market in the range of 5 trillions 2 Electricity and energy price raise 3 Impossibility to lower interest rates 4 Tech market also in the range of multi Trillions 5 Global education and power expansion ...<p>Meaning that a % of all this money flow goes private pockets destroying medium class, which gets poorer.<p>It is like a memory leak that keeps sucking resources while growing exponentially until the system crashes. The real question for an economist is how much ram has the system and how much the memory has leaked?<p>This Legendary site is interesting: <a href="https://usdebtclock.org/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://usdebtclock.org/index.html</a> Especially when combined it´s data with AI.
1/30/2026, 11:44:24 AM
by: n0um3n4
my bet is: "new" tech, emphasis on "new", will keep US on top or whatever US become after the big reveal.
1/30/2026, 11:31:35 AM
by: lvl155
Software sector basically got cut in half just on Claude Code. You have to wonder what is next. I don’t think loss in economics is 1:1 with replacement so it’s not zero sum. Production doesn’t necessarily go up. In fact, net output is going to go down if you think about all the B2B lost too.<p>Whoever comes into power next better start thinking about universal income fast. We are gonna get there sooner than expected.
1/30/2026, 11:41:21 AM
by: wolvoleo
I do really hope the AI bubble will collapse soon. The sooner it blows the less damage it will do. And hopefully we can go back to doing real work without all these leadership guys breathing down our necks to see if we are doing enough of this AI all their shareholders want us to be involved in.<p>It will suck even for us in europe due to shortsighted pension funds having invested in AI as well. But we'll just have to deal with it. I'm sure it will happen sooner rather than later.<p>PS: I'm not an AI hater as such. It definitely has its usecases where it shines. The problem is like with all hypes; it's not good at <i>everything</i> and it won't be all golden mountains tomorrow like the investors expect. This overhyped investor circlejerk is what screws up technology. It happened to blockchain, it happened to metaverse. All things that have their merits but somehow investors thought it would change the world overnight and make them insta-rich. Obviously didn't happen and it won't happen now.
1/30/2026, 11:21:16 AM
by: tock
Stocks might go down if AI doesn't bring in enough revenue. The real risk seems to be currency depreciation though. The USD is already down 15% this year compared to the Euro. I'm worried about what the next FED chair appointee will do. JPow has stuck to his principles so far.
1/30/2026, 11:49:24 AM
by: singularity2001
Maybe simultaneous with the crash of the Chinese economy, which was predicted for 40 years now
1/30/2026, 11:46:35 AM
by: SchwKatze
I'm kinda new into economy crashes, was a kid in 2008, is there a way to protect of it?
1/30/2026, 11:27:11 AM
by: benrutter
I feel like one of the following is true (and I don't know yet which is the case):<p>- I'm genuinely a lot more pessimistic than is accurate around what is and isn't a bubble - Bubbles are just slower to burst than I expect<p>Possibly some combination of both. But even ignoring AI which is relatively new, it seems "obvious" to me, that whatever value Bitcoin has, investment in the asset is detached completely from that value. I'd have expected to see Bitcoin crash a long, long time ago, and have been thinking it's "just around the corner" for years and year.<p>And yet, the bitcoin price as a whole, although it's dipped recently, and is clearly volatile, <i>still</i> remains something like 10x what it's value was 5 years ago[0].<p>[0] <a href="https://charts.bitbo.io/price/" rel="nofollow">https://charts.bitbo.io/price/</a>
1/30/2026, 12:00:47 PM
by: philipallstar
> This is the 11th time that tariffs have happened, and it just isn’t surprising anymore.<p>There are tariffs everywhere, all the time. Canada just dramatically cut its 90% (or something) tariff on Chinese cars. Tariffs haven't just started happening because someone you don't like did them.
1/30/2026, 11:27:45 AM
by: Noaidi
No one will ever get the timing right, but if you see the fundamental flaws of the economy, you know a crash is going to come. There were a lot of people who predicted the housing crash, not the timing but the crash. There are several signs that this is happening and the one no one is talking about is gold and silver prices. Don’t worry about the timing, you’ll never get the timing right, just worry about the fundamental economics and the flaws and protect yourself.<p>I happen to agree just because of golden silver prices that it’s going to happen sooner than later, regardless if war breaks out with Iran.
1/30/2026, 11:27:40 AM
by: newsclues
Who do we expect will replace Americas global leadership and will they really be better for everyone?
1/30/2026, 11:19:36 AM
by: captain_coffee
Some sort of an AI crash / bubble bursting is expected to be honest - now if that will take the rest of the US economy as well.... debatable. Any strong opinions on this?
1/30/2026, 11:25:45 AM
by: drstewart
Surely the surge of predictions of an incoming crash will never end though.
1/30/2026, 11:27:05 AM
by: brador
I keep seeing soon, sliding into, moving towards.<p>USD Currency futures have already collapsed.<p>World trade will move to (not a good idea) RMB or (mistakenly) crypto.<p>Euro is the only real option left and it’s beautifully positioned in the center. Great leadership too.
1/30/2026, 11:49:58 AM
by: metalman
This isn't a crash, it is something else comming, perhaps the "jackpot", where society/civilisation unravells, climate disaster kicks in with real persistant challenges everywhere, and some third, fourth, fifth effects that break our millenial run to the top of our planets ecosystem as the ultimate apex species. It has been a good run, but useing the same tacticts as our stone age ancestors, is, I think, about to bite, hard. And it is literaly this, our strategy is to keep useing the same tacticts.Jackpot.
1/30/2026, 11:43:44 AM
by: scotty79
Where it's gonna crash to? Where is going the capital move to when everythings going up? (except crypto apparently)
1/30/2026, 11:30:54 AM
by: carabiner
This is really obscured by the K-shaped growth, dual economy now. We've reached a stable pattern of a deep underclass serving the wealthy. We won't have a crash or "correction" because the entrenched top 5% has figured out a way extract value from everyone else indefinitely.
1/30/2026, 11:30:19 AM
by: johnnyanmac
There's quite a few factors here that delayed what should have logically already happened.<p>1. All the tarriff reactions cause US companies to import a huge amount of stuff for 2025. From what I understand, we're about to exhaust all of those imports.<p>2. The unemployment reports (especially the U3 numbers) hide quite a bit of turmoil going on under the hood of the job market.<p>- If you lost your job and switched to Uber/Doordash, you're not unemployed.<p>- If you are riding on severance pay instead of filikg for unemployment, you're not unemployed.<p>- If you got tired of throwing out hundreds of apps only to get automated rejections and take a break a month, you're not unemployed.<p>- If you just graduated into this hellscape and can't qualify for any unemployment, you're not unemployed (you're technically not part of the workforce yet).<p>There's a lot of these small shifts in how jobs work that make U3 less reliable in reflecting reality. And I only touched the surface of these issues.<p>3. Continuing on the U3 with a point worthy of its own bullet: the unemployment appears flat, but the makeup of what's happening per industry really lays down the reality. The only industries growing are hospitality (aka food service and similar sorts of duties) and health care. And to top it off these "growing" industries shift more and more to fractional work. Pretty much every other industry is down. So people are getting laid off/fired and moving to part time work to get by. "Stable" by unemployment numbers, but very unstable on the day-to-day. Add in the recent congressional bills for healthcare subsidies and we're throwing more gas on rhe fire.<p>4. I'm sure it's been said so much by now, but AI in the US is the only thing holding up the GDP. Without that massive investment, the GDP would be at best, dead flat. The US isn't growing in a way that reflects actual yields to anyone outside of a select few shareholders. We're not building more houses, mining more materials (on the contrary, we've resumed ransacking others'), manufacturing more machinery, nor even producing more service value for customers and businesses. We're putting all hedges on one thing with an uncertain outcome. If that industry declines, so does the rest of the US.<p>5. The K shaped economy. I have to check these numbers again, but I believe that spending is indeed up, but the makeup of spending per income band is more stark than ever. The too 10% income households makes up half of US's spending. But there are signs that even many high income houses add also starting to hunker down on spending.<p>----<p>That was a lot and it still only scratches the surface. But the TLDR version is that there's a lot of statistics massaging over the real struggles of life and many industries reaching a breaking point they did a good job putting off. But by this point it will only take a needle to break this camel.
1/30/2026, 11:38:50 AM
by: pembrook
Some advice for those who are young:<p>If every idiot (I'm including myself in this) on HN/Reddit/Youtube/Tiktok/mainstream news/etc. thinks we're in a bubble and is crazy pessimistic and thinks economic collapse is near...it means <i>we're not actually in a bubble.</i><p>When the bitter, frustrated pessimists on HN shift their tone to being neutral or even mildly optimistic, then I will start worrying. Because that will mean the general public must be reaching 1999 levels of euphoria for a hint of optimism to show up here.
1/30/2026, 11:51:32 AM
by: baal80spam
Any time now:<p>1. Market crash<p>2. AI bubble bursting<p>3. Year of the linux desktop<p>Have I missed something?
1/30/2026, 11:34:00 AM
by: zerosizedweasle
It is a giant Ponzi scheme and those tend to collapse at some point.
1/30/2026, 11:40:58 AM
by: csomar
> Which is to say that no individual decision make want’s to be the first mover, so the market does not move.<p>Uh, that's not accurate. Hathaway is sitting all cash because of it and so far they have been the one losing. Even if you assume (and correctly I think) that the market is overvalued, their stock pile of cash is eroding: <a href="https://newzsquare.com/warren-buffett-warns-of-fiat-currency-erosion-amid-record-382-billion-cash-pile-at-berkshire-hathaway/" rel="nofollow">https://newzsquare.com/warren-buffett-warns-of-fiat-currency...</a><p>> A year ago there were a few signs. Right now, it feels like everything is primed to blow. Is that new?<p>The market is unhealthy. Too unhealthy that I think it can no longer self-heal the usual ways (recession/crash/etc.) and we'll instead move to more advanced stage of hyperinflation, global war, etc.
1/30/2026, 11:40:27 AM
by: nodesocket
I know HN always has its fair share of doomers, and generally the HN communities track record anecdotally regarding finance and the market is frankly terrible. Tesla (stock price wrong), Bitcoin (wrong), AI a huge dot com like bubble (wrong in my opinion - TBD though).<p>I’m optimistic on the US. We could realistically print a 5 handle GDP, oil at rock bottom prices, lower federal income taxes this year. As far as Gold and Silver I just see it being propped up by speculators. Silver spot is down 15% this mornings and gold down 8%.<p>I predict double digit gains in the S&P by end of year and strong financial conditions with mag 7 continuing their lead. Tesla also will be a big winner.
1/30/2026, 11:50:11 AM