The Crisis Finance Capitalism Can’t Escape

Rising Rates, Oil Shock, and Debt Collapse Threaten a Global Depression

The control room of a decommissioned and abandoned coal-fired power plant, Kelenföld Power Station in Budapest, Hungary, entered service in 1914 and was shut down in 2005. This Art Deco control room was built between 1927 and 1929. Photo credit: Zulbak

The 2026 World Financial Crisis

Trump is threatening to escalate his war against Iran, and Iran is prepared to destroy the oil production and transport capacity of Arab OPEC countries that do not act to stop the US attack. The result will be to deepen the world depression that already is underway.

Yet the stock market has continued to rise, as have interest rates. The latter cannot stay up without crashing the real estate and stock markets. Yet the media and many investors view interest rates as rising so as to compensate investors for the risk of inflation. The reality is that higher interest rates will increase the economy’s inability to cope with the breakdown that already is in progress.

How did the myth of interest rates rising in response to price inflation begin?

The moral rationalization is to protect the purchasing power of creditor claims on debtors, as measured by the purchasing power of debt claims over consumer prices.

The pretense is that creditors use their interest receipts to buy goods and services. But already in the 18 century, critics of debt financing recognized that bondholders recycle most of their money into new loans. When they do spend part of their interest income into the “real” non-financial

economy, it is mainly to buy prestige real estate, primarily in major financial centers, and secondly on luxury goods—mainly imported from Italy in the mid-18 century just as today.

By the 19 century, creditors sought some excuse to justify their interest charges by depicting these as compensation for the risk that they might have to suffer a loss through loan defaults or by a loss of their purchasing power over goods and services as prices rose—and more to the point, over the labor that produced these products.

Austrian economists such as Böhm-Bawerk went so far as to claim that interest was a payment for the “service” of abstaining from consuming their income, but using “time preference” to consume more later. Having to pay interest thus was depicted as the price of “impatience.” It was as if wage earners (“consumers”) had a choice to abstain from running into debt, lacking prudence when they did so. This prompted Marx to quip that the Rothschild bankers must be the most abstinent family in Europe. It was as if there was no financial sector of bankers and bondholders acting independently of the economy of production and consumption.

Raising interest rates to slow employment and keep wages low

The more recent 20 century logic is that of Paul Volcker when he increased interest rates to over 20% at the end of the Carter administration in 1980. He saw wages rising as a result of the Vietnam War’s “gusand butter” fiscal policy, called military Keynesianism in times when the aim was to increase profits, investment and employment. Volcker, formerly a Chase Manhattan banker, wanted to increase unemployment so as to keep wages from rising further. He succeeded in creating a crash as bank interest rates rose to 20%.

That obviously is not the aim of today’s rise in interest rates. But it is the effect. And this is just the opposite from compensating for risk. It sharply increases economic risk throughout the economy, not only for industry and employment but for the financial sector. That is what makes today’s high stock market prices so puzzling, seemingly based simply on a short-termism focus on the waves of rumors floated by the Trump administration about the likelihood of peace in the Persian Gulf restoring the happy status quo ante.

Governments lower interest rates mainly to increase debt-leveraged prices for financial wealth

The guiding fiction in the idea that rising interest rates will slow price inflation by reducing bank credit creation and thus investment and employment. The fiction is based on the myth that banks help the industrial economy by creating credit to lend to companies to expand the economy. But that is not what banks do under the finance capitalism. They lend against assets already in place and available to be pledged as collateral, for the purpose of buying more real estate, bonds and stocks. The effect of these loans is to inflate asset prices, not consumer prices.

Governments and their central banks may pretend to be lowering interest rates to spur the economy, but the basic reason is to re-inflate prices for financial securities and real estate. That’s the main aim of today’s finance capitalism, after all. Its aim of increasing fortunes by creating debt-leveraged asset-price gains has turned economies into a great Ponzi scheme.

This policy must fail because preventing prices for collateral held by banks and other creditors from falling in price, and thus causing a loss of financialized asset-price gains, requires the economy to take on more and more debt.

Obama’s bank bailout and ZIRP has left the US economy debt-leveraged

The US Federal Reserve’s response to the 2008 junk-mortgage bank crash is informative for how the government may seek to cope with the coming financial crisis.Real estate and corporate debt prices were plunging because of defaults on junk mortgages and the web of bad casino bets on financial derivatives. The Obama administration’s response was to inaugurate the Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP). The Federal Reserve rescued the banks from negative equity by the loading the banking system—and via it, the financial markets—with low-interest debt leveraging.

The result was the greatest bond market boom in history—but not a boom for industry and labor. A K-shaped US economy saw sharply rising wealth for the One Percent (and to a lesser degree for the rest of Ten Percent), but the industrial economy has continued to suffer its long decline as wages and industrial profits are being spent on the FIRE sector—Finance, Insurance (including health insurance under the privatized Obamacare) and Real Estate.

Financially engineering the post-2008 asset-price “recovery” for real estate, stocks and bonds has left the economy so highly debt-leveraged that there is little room for an economic downturn caused by the interruptions of OPEC’s oil and gas trade. The oil shortage is indeed raising the commodity price levels, but this is not a result of higher employment or wage levels increasing demand. It is a result of Trump’s war to maintain control of the world’s oil trade in US hands. Iran has responded by saying that if other nations do not act to stop Trump’s attack, Iran will destroy Arab oil production and the whole world will pay the price of being pushed into a prolonged economic depression. And much of the world has stood by, as if believing that the United States can conquer Iran as it did Venezuela and somehow restore normal relations under US control and avoid world depression.

Trump is said to be thinking of one last great air strike. Whether or not this occus it is now obvious that the effect of world oil shortages and the resulting rise in oil prices will force major industries to shut down throughout the world: chemical producers, fertilizer and mining companies that depend on sulfuric acid, energy users such as aluminum and glass producers, plastics manufacturers needing naphtha (and cous households require energy for heating, lighting and transport). These companies' linkages for production will be interrupted at critical points, forcing them to lay off their employees and shut down because they cannot continue to produce and make profits.

It also means that such companies will not be able to meet their scheduled debt service obligations to their bondholders and bankers, not to speak of needing to stop their stock buyback programs. That is what happens in a depression.

The result will be not only price deflation, but a deflation of markets and consumer “demand” and a wave of debt defaults. That threatens a transfer of collateral and other property from debtors to creditors, whose problems with collecting may nonetheless leave them with negative equity. So we will be back in 2009, but without any opportunity to pile on yet more debt to enable economies to “borrow their way out of debts” that have been taken on for the past 17 years.

Rising interest rates are an untenable solution to today’s imminent depression

The big qusion that must be asked is how long the US economy can sustain long-term interest rates of over 5% for Treasury 30-year bonds, 4.6%+ for 10-year bonds, and circa 7% for home mortgage loans. Many loans for commercial real estate and also private equity are soon coming due to be rolled over. How can these debts be re-financed at the rates that are looming. And new construction and property sales will be constrained by the inability of new borrowers to pay the higher carrying charges for homes or other properties.

The government will try to do what it usually does: bail out the financial sector, not the “real” economy, which already is being crucified on a cross of debt. But governments are not moving to protect labor’s wages and living standards, or even their industry’s solvency. Central banks aim to save the financial sector—that is, financialized wealth that has been inflated by debt-leveraging as prices for real estate, stocks and bonds have been bid up on credit. But the Federal Reserve already has been acquiring an enormous increase in Treasury bonds to finance Trump’s soaring budget deficit. How will voters respond to the administration favoring the wealthiest One Percent while leaving the rest of the economy to suffer?

Law Code Stele of King Hammurabi, basalt, Babylonian, 1792–1750 B.C.E. Photo credit: Musée du Louvre, Paris

How should the West react to such a problem if we lived in an ideal world?

There is an age-old solution to mitigate an economic crisis from resulting from interruptions in harvests, and it is applicable to today’s interruption of the world’s energy trade. But that solution is not one that has become part of Western civilization’s way of coping with rising deabts..

The laws of Hammurabi c. 1750 BC typified how Mesopotamia and other West Asian civilizations coped with such interruptions in production from the 3 through the 1millennia BC, restoring economic order for thousands of years. Hammurabi ruled that if the Storm God Adad caused a crop failure as a result of a flood or a drought, the debts that cultivators had run up during the crop year and expected to pay on the public threshing floor at harvest time would be cancelled. (Many such debts were to the palace and its bureaucracy, so this did not create a revolution by angry creditors. Business debts among merchants were left intact—only grain debts by the disrupted agrarian population were cancelled.)

If these personal debts had not been cancelled, Babylonia’s agrarian population would have been subject to debt bondage to creditors, and to losing their land tenure rights to what would have become an emerging creditor oligarchy. I have described all this in “… and forgive them their debts” and in Temples of Enterprise.

Such debt cancellations by rulers in the face of natural disasters enabled the West Asian economies to avoid the emergence of creditor oligarchies. But Western societies have never had such central rulers, whether “divine kingship” or Confucian emperors to prevent such oligarchies from gaining control of governments and causing widespread public discontent. As I have described this failure of Western civilization in my Collapse of Antiquity, all Western government has been by oligarchies (as Aristotle noted), and they invariably fall subject to money-love and wealth addiction that polarizes economies between creditors and debtors, landlords and renters, leading to economic collapse such as that of Rome.

Prospects for today’s US and foreign economies in the face of the oil crisis

Today’s financial markets seem to expect the Federal Reserve to follow its usual knee-jerk reaction to rising consumer prices by raising interest rates. As noted above, this is supposed to slow the economy and create a “reserve army of the unemployed” to keep wages down by causing economic distress. But the US economy is not in a boom or even thriving. It and other economies are already in distress as a result of the looming oil and energy crisis. In addition to companies scaling back their production, commercial real estate and homeowners face real estate mortgages falling due. Rising interest rates will push the cost of refinancing these mortgages and other debts beyond the ability of debtors to pay out of their falling income.

The result threatens to be a vast transfer of property from debtors to creditors. The United States and Western Europe thus may experience something like Asian countries did in their currency crisis of 1997-1998. That would be a bonanza for vulture funds to sweep in and acquire real estate and companies at distress prices.

Nobody is suggesting a “Babylonian” solution of suspending debt service for economies that are unable to pay on an economy-wide scale. The West’s creditor-oriented legal systems call for a transfer of property ownership as banks and bondholders take over collateral that has been pledged for debt or property that debtors are forced to sell.

Much of this collateral consists of claims of other companies throughout the economy, so the crisis will engulf the entire social and political system. This is what was threatened back in 2008-2009 when the junk-mortgage and bank-fraud crisis led to a collapse in real estate prices. But the economy’s Ponzi Scheme of increasing wealth by debt leveraging by supplying new credit has reached the limit.

We can now see that the long useep since 1945 that seemed to be a series of self-correcting business cycles has been a failed finance-capitalist detour from industrial capitalism that has no automatic self-correcting market forces. The solution must come from ousde the market system. And that is something that neither academic economics nor the public relations ideology of free markets (meaning unregulated and privatized economies Thatcher-Reagan style) have recognized. The future will call for thinking about the unthinkable. It requires recognition that debts that can’t be paid, won’t be.