The US has attributes that render it incredibly resilient

I mean, so much of it is simply that its an enormous open liberalized market system. So while you can point to Ohio going into economic decline or Mississippi and West Virginia just kinda existing as these banana republics since their inception, the rest of the country can keep growing in a manner that dwarfs their under-performance.

But then a downturn hits Wall Street or Silicon Valley, and nothing good happening in the Gulf Coast or the Midwest really matters, because several hundred billion dollars getting flushed all at once can't be ignored.

The resiliency is largely just in these heavily fortified economic bastions that the national population gathers around, like refugees around a burning barrel. The Fed comes around and dumps more fuel in the barrel and everyone says "This is fine". But then some dipshit like Rand Paul or Donald Trump starts taking stabs at the Federal Reserve because of all the contradictions in the "We live in a palace while you huddle around a barrel" economic system. And that presents an existential threat to the country.

We can make a lot of very educated and intelligent guesses. But the timing will only become obvious in hindsight.

We can see the stress points. But they're well insulated and fortified and deliberately made opaque from the outside. So its difficult to determine what their state actually is, until the cladding finally gets pierced or the interior begins to give way.

But we can also see a pattern of history. The Volker shock preceded the '83 collapse. The rate hikes in '06 ultimately triggered the '08 collapse. The minor rate-hikes starting in '16 combined with COVID ran us into a big '20 downturn. And now we're trying to raise rates again specifically to suppress wage growth. Everyone with an ounce of memory regarding economic trends knows where that's headed.

And you might say "We know how to fix this, we just lower rates and give out a bunch of free money again". But that's hard to do when we're losing dollar hegemony and our Congress is full of people who hate domestic spending.

You can see the tower trembling. I agree you can't say when its going to collapse, but you can see all the pressures building. Something is going to give in the next few years. This isn't '92. This isn't '03. This isn't even '14. We're way too unstable and way too hard up for real economic utility. There isn't some tech boom coming to save us. There isn't a glut of cheap energy coming to save us. :ron-paul-its-happening: