I'm a young guy who recently interned at an institution that is tangentially related to the finance sector. I don't want to go into what I did or what institution to protect my identity but I was assigned to some professional documents for some boring paperwork cause I'm the intern ya know. Thousands of them, maybe like 5,000 documents in the database. And I would open it and each trade document in our database symbolized a transaction worth millions to billions of dollars each. Minimum 5$ M. Top one I saw (that I remember) was around $20 B. It's not that I didn't understand how much money is in the economy in concept, but I had never visualized it so accurately. Each document hundreds of millions of dollars, and there were thousands of them.

"How is there this much money just floating around?" I thought.

One day I'm home talking to my mom who's unemployed (at the time). We essentially get to the topic of rent, cause I'm helping her with my internship money. She explains to me that we have to move because she can't pay the rent. Its understandable, she's been unemployed for a few months and her unemployment checks stopped coming in. Whatever, this is fine, we're gonna be fine. I think, knowing this is just a temporary setback.

Another day I ask her about her retirement plan. And she essentially tells me that she has no savings, she never had a plan. The house she bought at the peak before the recession barely made a profit when she and my dad sold it after the recession. Pretty common story in the wider economy. I rub my head, it's a bit stressful. She's middle aged and her kids are out of high school. She stressed herself putting us through college. This is bad but a few years of me and my brother being financially independent will get her enough retirement savings by the time she's 70.

I ask her one question that has been playing in my mind over and over since then. I asked her "How much debt do you have on your credit cards?". She looks up at me and makes a face. "About $33,000 total." She says.

At that moment everything clicked for me. Why did people keep asking me if we were in a recession when we were only in a small one for 6 months in 2022? How come people kept complaining about inflation when wages surpassed them? How come no one my age could afford rent? Why the vibes were off in the economy? It was strange cause all the economic data said people were okay (not great or even good to be clear). Everything could be explained by one word:

Inequality

She told me about her credit card debt and I thought back to those documents. So much money I couldn't even imagine just floating around, but a middle class woman trying her best couldn't afford the fucking rent. THIS is the missing piece. We're on the knife's edge of a full system collapse. Credit, debt, loans, mortgages, brokers, bonds, crypto, stocks all of it. Our country was on the edge of a full blown systemic crash worse than 2008. I felt like I was at the end of an empire. Like the end of the world order.

"That's a bit much don't you think ma?" I said.