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Choose one, and only one: a stock market that inflates and pops in an endless series of ever-more destructive bubbles, or a real economy that is no longer in thrall to the engines of wealth inequality and speculative frenzy.

My projections are: less high-quality work gets done; less work of any quality gets done; those carrying most of the weight burn out and quit and everyone wonders why the quality of goods and services is sinking to new lows.

So sorry, but the lifestyle of low-cost credit and all the goodies it could buy is permanently out of stock. In focusing on geopolitics, we lose sight of the dependence of every economy on a functioning global economy of low-cost goods, services, materials, shipping, transport, capital, labor and financial instruments, all flowing freely across borders and around the world.

The decay in quality reveals that the collapse of the neoliberal-hyper-financialization-hyper-globalization model has already occurred.

All this suggests a strategy that’s only available to those few nations with these capacities: weaponize global depression. Before we get started, I need to stipulate that I don’t have an opinion one way or the other about weaponizing global depression: I don’t agree or disagree, I don’t “like” it or dislike it,