Alan Greenspan's response to Black Monday 1987 (the 'Greenspan put') established that central banks would not tolerate asset price volatility, creating a series of puts (Bernanke put, Yellen put) that socialized losses while privatizing gains, accelerating inequality.

Proximity to the fountain of money (financial assets, credit access) creates an accelerating wealth-generation mechanism, while conventional individuals relying on wages have become progressively poorer, driving massive inequality acceleration independent of real productivity differences.

The intellectual misconception that 'freedom has no price' and that unrestricted markets automatically reconcile conflicting consumer, societal, and firm interests has caused societies to conflate market deregulation with human freedom, when in fact they are separable concerns.

The millennial and Gen Z generations, having grown up in crisis/low-growth environments without asset ownership participation, are now demanding systemic change—mirroring 1960s baby boomers' rebellion against the constrained post-war order, creating a generational symmetry.

By late 1970s-early 1980s, the idea that freedom (political, personal, economic) has no price and automatically produces better outcomes became the dominant consensus across all political parties and countries, regardless of political ideology.

In 1937, a book titled 'Planned Societies and Economies Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow' brought together economists and sociologists from Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, the Soviet Union, and New Deal America to debate not whether societies should plan their economies, but how much planning and how much freedom should be left to markets—a consensus that has now fractured.

Politics and society were treated as externalities to be separated from economics in neoliberal theory, but this separation is impossible because economics is fundamentally embedded in politics and social structures; keeping them artificially separate increases the likelihood of extreme social outcomes and revolutionary rejection.

Baby boomers who originally wanted to shrink government and deregulate markets in the 1980s-90s ended up increasingly dependent on government intervention (central banks, fiscal stimulus, cycle suppression) to maintain the asset values they had accumulated—the opposite of their stated goal.

Government regulation of corporations atrophied significantly between the 1980s and 2010s as antitrust enforcement weakened, and the criteria for monopoly—which had been price to consumers—were never updated for technology platforms that charge zero price but extract value through data and behavioral extraction.

Chief executive compensation grew from 40-50 times average worker earnings in the 1970s to 300 times by the 1980s, reflecting the shift from stakeholder capitalism (where executives were stewards of broad prosperity) to shareholder capitalism (where their sole obligation is to maximize stock price).

Share buybacks now constitute approximately $1 trillion annually in the United States, representing roughly 50% of capital expenditures, and function as corporate self-liquidation to boost stock prices rather than investment in productive capacity.

The 1930s and today share seven fundamental structural similarities: technological disruption of labor markets, severe financial crises and high financialization, climate disruption, pandemics, extremely high inequality, loss of confidence in institutions, and proliferation of alternative political-economic systems as ideological consensus breaks.

The Federal Reserve's intervention since 2008 prevented a 1930s-level depression (avoiding 30% unemployment and pension fund collapses) but created secular stagnation instead, requiring perpetual fiscal and monetary support because underlying productive potential has not recovered.

Information age started in early 1970s but did not become significantly disruptive until late 1990s, and has progressively increased disruption through three successive waves, with the waterfront of assets and activities impacted being approximately 3,000 times greater than the industrial revolution and progressing at 10 times the speed.

Financialization began in 1979-1982 with Paul Volcker's deregulation of capital markets, and the ratio of financial paper to underlying assets has grown from 1:1 in the 1950s-80s to 6:1 or 10:1 today, representing a 5-10x expansion of the financial cloud relative to the real economy.

Financialization creates disinflationary rather than inflationary pressures when capital stays in financial markets (distant from real economy), because the money velocity is low and it inflates asset prices rather than consumer prices—a key difference from mainstream monetary economics.

Abundant cheap capital from financialization dramatically reduces the cost and increases the speed of technological innovation, allowing almost any idea to get funded and iterate rapidly—turbocharging the pace of information age disruption relative to what capital constraints would normally permit.

The information age changes the role and marginal utility of labor more deeply than the industrial revolution, which only displaced human muscle; the information age displaces human cognition and judgment, potentially approaching singularity (indistinguishability between human and machine contribution) within 15-20 years.

Declining marginal utility of labor creates psychological and mental health impacts on workers who become aware their labor is becoming obsolete—the emotional impact compounds economic displacement to create behavioral crisis.

Instead of a unified consensus on proper political-economic organization (as in post-1945 or post-1980 periods), the world is now fragmenting into multiple competing systems without agreement on what is right or wrong—China, Russia, United States, and Europe each pursuing distinct models.