this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2026
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Late stage capitalism just means late stage fiat currency doesn't it, since all the money flooding in is debt and QE, and every dollar created and placed into the market is new cheap debt issuance?
Then we bail all the bad debt out when it fails, so the perverse incentive to issue bad debt is always there, because its not capitalist and nobody would backstop this mess if it was their own capital.
Everything you described falls under the umbrella of Capitalism.
Capitalism will always result in this sort of devolution, because it rewards this sort of behavior.
Constant GDP growth fuels capitalist enterprises because valuations go up and Capital is expanded. That incentivizes governments to make access to Capital easier and regulations on growth looser, which the firms themselves favor in terms of lower taxes, cheaper loans, larger capital markets, etc.
How many business leaders lobby, vote, and push for higher general taxes, stronger labor rights, stricter regulations, and more expensive loans?
The only time you'll see them doing any of those things, is when it directly hurts one of their major competitors.
This makes perfect sense within a Capitalist framework, because private ownership of the means of production and increasing profitability are literally the core of Capitalism. So of course Capitalists will always tend towards what makes the most money.
All the worst traits of modern Capitalism, (Everything is a subscription, planned obsolescence, shrinkflation, extreme litigiousness over patents and copyrights, ads in everything, predatory pricing & monetization) are the logical result of a Capitalist system.
You can have late stage capitalism with any monetary system. Though relying on inherent value tends to leave poor people in much worse conditions much more quickly.
If anything it seems more like crony capitalism, when the CPI is understated and all investments are excluded it drives down borrowing rates and bond yields, which raises stock values and provides a stream of revenue to those with access to the most credit.
People like Elon Musk who avoid paying taxes by borrowing cheap debt, which who would lend to him their own capital when his collateral is Tesla stock and silly ideas like space datacenters. Which is entirely built on speculation and pumps to new all time highs whenever QE is unloaded into the market; they would be taking the risk that Tesla doesnt go to 0 for a small fixed income payout, if it was their own money and a bailout wasnt guaranteed.