r/economicCollapse

I feel like the economy is about to get 1000% worse

This is 100% speculation, but I have been seeing some CRAZY ads recently that have me convinced the economy is headed into a nose dive. I keep seeing ads advertising selling, not buying clothes on depop and other sites like that, which is on the tamer side. On the more wild side I have noticed a ton of ads about surrogacy and selling your eggs, and how much money you can make, which is crazy imo.

reddit.com
u/Infinite-Sun-6297 — 6 hours ago

The K doesn’t have to be divided this way.

Everyone complains about the rich get richer. That’s true. The most talented, smartest people on Wall Street are there to make more money. It’s a living if you play your cards right. But over the last several decades the group hasn’t benefited. With pension funds, retirement funds, benefits unions of various kinds. Those are the people who had their money managed by the best and brightest. But those funds have disappeared in terms of representation. The few have the most, and the most have the least. If wealth was more equally distributed more people in the bottom, half of a K would have savings and not debt and would therefore be able to participate in the stock market going higher because as it is now market can go up very high, but it’s not taking all Americans with it and that’s just not acceptable. That system won’t work.

reddit.com
u/Onomatopoeia-sizzle — 11 hours ago
▲ 284 r/economicCollapse+2 crossposts

Corporate earnings are accelerating while job growth is stalling

I’ve been looking at two charts together:

Chart 1:

US job market growth has basically plateaued since 2024.

Not collapsing.
Not recessionary.
Just… stuck.

Worker mobility is weak. Hiring has slowed. Wage growth has cooled.

Yet…

Chart 2:

S&P 500 EPS expectations for 2026 and 2027 keep getting revised higher — and the slope is actually getting steeper.

That combination is fascinating.

Historically, strong earnings growth usually came with:

  • expanding employment
  • broad wage growth
  • increasing labor demand

That combination says a lot.

Corporate America may be learning how to grow profits without adding many more workers.

The drivers seem to be:

  • AI/software leverage
  • margin expansion
  • pricing power
  • concentration
  • high-end consumer demand

That may explain why the economy feels so strange.

The aggregate numbers look strong: stocks, earnings, GDP. But many workers feel stuck because growth is becoming less tied to broad labor participation and more tied to capital, technology, and scale.

In short: The market is betting on profit growth without labor growth.

u/398409columbia — 3 days ago

How much damage are we doing to America's wine industry? | CBC News

The beer is really concerning!?
1/10 on both side of the exports and imports from 10 years ago.

Wine exports down to 1/3 of what they were a year ago.

cbc.ca
u/Infinite-Albatross44 — 4 days ago

Why the economy isn’t crashing faster

I think the reason the economy isn’t going down the tubes faster is because of the banks are doing. I’ll use auto as an example but I’m sure it applies to real estate and other things as well. So let’s say you have a $15,000 loan on a car in the car is only worth 5000. If the owner defaults on that car, then the bank has to retrieve the car via a repossession sell the car at auction for $5000 and then collect $10,000 from the consumer for the defaulted loan. But the consumer doesn’t have the $10,000 in fact many consumers are carrying $10,000 of extra debt when they try to come in and trade in their car. So the banks have realized that they would have to realize a loss on their financial statements if the consumer who’s defaulting on the car goes into repossession.

So what does the bank do to avoid showing a loss on the $10,000 to consumer doesn’t have? They make a deal with a consumer to allow them to pay a lesser amount and keep them in the column of current as opposed to delinquent on their financials. So the consumer calls up and says I can’t pay my $400 a month payment the bank may say OK can you pay us 200 a month? And the consumer will go for that not realizing or caring that all that extra money on the back end it’s gonna be added to the loan and there will be more interest later, but let’s forget that part. So now the bank has an extend and pretend loan with a defaulting consumer with a loss that they have not realized. The banks have a relatively small number of defaults because of this, maybe 2%. But the bank is creating another problem for itself if the car was worth $5000 at auction when they were supposed to repossess it, it may only be worth 2500 when they actually do repossess it later so they’re deferring a depreciation hit. This is economic stress on the balance sheet of the banks as they float the consumer. But there’s no regulatory body there’s no FDIC saying hey you’re doing this wrong there’s no SEC saying what are you doing? You can’t do that.

reddit.com
u/Onomatopoeia-sizzle — 5 days ago

Will the current looming economic crash likely be worse than 2007?

I was only 9 when the 2007 housing market crashed and I have some memory of it but not much.

I have been on edge about the economy for about a year now and I have been feeling like maybe I’m wrong because no one else seems worried around me up until about a month ago.

It seems likely a major crash is now likely coming and I’m curious what everyone’s takes are. Will this be worse than 2007? What exactly needs to happen for it to be worse than 2007?

reddit.com
u/InterestingSwan6280 — 6 days ago
▲ 2.0k r/economicCollapse+1 crossposts

As the US birth rate shrinks, so too does the number of colleges and universities in the country, which has crashed to its lowest count in many decades. Also a factor is the cost of higher education, which has skyrocketed beyond overall inflation in recent decades, souring some potential students.

reddit.com
u/StarlightDown — 8 days ago

The Coming Tsunami of Chinese AI

“On that front, China is moving faster than many policymakers realize. Its open-source models are the best in the world and trail America’s best-paid models by just months. One survey found that 24 percent of Y Combinator’s most recent cohort of Silicon Valley startups were using Chinese open-source models because they are cheap to run and easy to fine-tune.”

The whole driving engine to the market is AI but no one priced in cheap Chinese competition. It’s not just high flying stocks, its private credit, circular economics, construction industry, the massive capex of trillions already spent. AI crash will be as epic as .com and as markets go so does sentiment and the real economy already struggling with inflation dives into recession.

A dreamer dreams she never dies
Wipe that tear away now from your eye
Slowly walking down the hall
Faster than a cannonball
In a champagne supernova in the sky
Someday, you will find me caught beneath the landslide.

nationalreview.com
u/Ill_Station_6165 — 11 days ago

Auto rejection rates

This is a really scary looking chart because it illustrates just how frightened the banks are about the economy. This table doesn’t even include most of 2025. IWhat does it say about our society if people cannot afford a car loan? The number of 84 month loans has tripled and the rates are too high.

That means a couple of things. The price of the cars is too high. The interest rate is way too high and the consumer is not strong enough financially to handle even a $200 monthly payment. Car prices aren’t coming down if anything they’re going up. Interest rates for people who get denied for an auto loan are probably not going to see their rates fall, meaningfully. Those people are locked out of the auto market and possibly locked out of the job market as a result. .

u/Onomatopoeia-sizzle — 10 days ago