Date: Friday, 13 February 2026
https://ericzuesse.substack.com/p/the-american-system-is-now-collapsing
https://theduran.com/the-american-system-is-now-collapsing/
The American system is now collapsing.
12 February 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)
Semafor is a rapidly rising new U.S. news-medium that was designed to appeal especially to the top executives at U.S. corporations, and that is achieving it. Consequently, the following statement on February 12th, from its Business Editor, Liz Hoffman, is implicitly an indication that the neoliberal (or as Americans call it “libertarian,” meaning that the system is designed to increase the freedom for wealth, and that therefore it decreases the freedom for persons) economic system is now in extreme counterproductive stress:
A big complaint about modern financial markets is that they have the foresight of a goldfish. This critique, popularized by such proletariat rabble-rousers as Larry Fink, says CEOs can’t focus on the future because they’re sweating the next 90 days and obsessing over their stock prices. So they buy back shares while their factories rot and their products slide into obsolescence.
But look at the engine of the global economy, Silicon Valley, and you’ll see something that looks suspiciously like the long-term stewardship Fink begged for back in 2015.
Elon Musk’s deepest desire is to fling enough data centers into space so that humanity can live there forever. Jeff Bezos is building a clock inside a mountain designed to tick once a year for the next 10,000. Alphabet is hawking the tech industry’s first century bond since the late 1990s — after a quarter in which it spent the smallest percentage of its profits buying back its own stock, just 16%, in eight years.
And the tech companies are plowing shareholders’ money into AI investments that will take years to pay off, if they ever do, because they believe that it’s the right bet. (Their personal obsession with human longevity may be a factor here: If you plan to live for 150 years, and your net worth is tied up in a company you control, you care less about the stock price tomorrow than you do about the stock price in 150 years.)
Of course, tech CEOs until now have been able to make these millennial bets without sacrificing short-term riches. The wilder the moonshot, the higher their stocks went on the backs of FOMO-seized investors.
But that immunity is already fading, as Oracle has learned over the past few months. The tradeoff that Fink lamented is likely to hit stronger players as the cost of the AI race grows. Even moonshots come with bills to pay.
Congrats, Larry, you got your long-termism. It comes with AI porn generated in space, but you got it.
The first link in that article is to an article about Fink, which said:
“The effects of the short-termist phenomenon are troubling both to those seeking to save for long-term goals such as retirement and for our broader economy,” Mr. Fink writes in the letter. He says that such moves were being done at the expense of investing in “innovation, skilled work forces or essential capital expenditures necessary to sustain long-term growth.”
At a time when most investors are clamoring — and applauding — high dividends and bigger buybacks, Mr. Fink is bucking the trend.
United States companies spent nearly $1 trillion last year on stock repurchases and dividends, and virtually every big American company is engaged in these practices. …
Mr. Fink … is a relatively progressive finance executive who has been a longtime Democrat and has taken positions that many of his peers in finance abhor.
That article was from the 13 April 2015 New York Times. The quotation from Fink’s letter, in it, was addressed to “the chief executives of 500 of the nation’s largest companies” by “Laurence D. Fink, chief executive of BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world. Mr. Fink oversees more than $4 trillion — that’s trillion with a ’t' — of investments, making him perhaps the world’s most important shareholder.” Today’s BlackRock manages $14T. That’s an 11-year time-period. His annual compounded rate of increase during that period was 12%. Since the beginning of 2015, the S&P 500 has achieved an average annual compounded rate of increase of approximately 13.6%; so, Fink’s performance has been around 1.6% lower than the S&P.
As-of April 2015, the total net worth of U.S. billionaires was approximately $2.5 trillion, according to Barron's, citing UBS data. As-of 17 September 2025, according to Forbes, U.S. billionaires’ total net worth was $7.6 trillion; and, according to Americans for Tax Fairness on that date, “Most of billionaires’ $7.6 trillion has never been taxed.” America’s billionaires are free-and-clear (the neoliberal/libertarian ideal) because they control the U.S. Government. (That’s reasonable because the U.S. Government, in accord with its neoliberalism-libertarianism, represents its private wealth, not its public.) This is an annually compounded growth-rate of 11.5%, which is approximately what Fink has achieved for all of his investors, most of which are institutions (such as pension funds, endowment funds, etc.) not individuals, though billionaires control the vast majority of the firms that institutions invest in. Consequently: Fink has been not an extraordinary investor but actually an ordinary investor. However, America’s 400 wealthiest people have been extraordinary investors, far above normal. On 9 September 2025, Forbes reported:
Despite the ongoing discourse of economic slowdown, tariff threats and interest rate concerns, the richest Americans are shattering wealth records. The 400 wealthiest U.S. billionaires are collectively worth a record $6.6 trillion, up $1.2 trillion from last year. The bar for entry into the exclusive club [the 400 richest Americans] has increased to a staggering $3.8 billion — $500 million higher than last year’s cutoff and a record high. … The super-rich at the very top are richer than ever — and between the White House and the booming stock market, they’re as powerful as they’ve ever been. …
With the minimum net worth required at a record high, 500 American billionaires are simply not rich enough to make The Forbes 400. This includes famous faces such as Oprah Winfrey, LeBron James and Taylor Swift.
I suspect that whereas the ones at the very top are mainly invested in the asset-class that has been the best-performing one of all ever since 1991, which is the companies that are among the biggest sellers to the U.S. Government such as Lockheed Martin (also known as “federal contractors”), the other billionaires are not. Of course, Trump is now amongst the top 400 himself, at $7.3 billion, up from $4.3 billion in 2024, and his decisions this term have been especially beneficial for those stocks that he owns, perhaps including such federal contractors, which are now generally called “Defense and Aerospace” stocks — the corporations that sell to the U.S. Government. Basically, the U.S. President controls these corporations’ markets (he approves and buys their weapons etc.); and, since a U.S. President represents investors not the public, he serves these corporations the most; he actually represents mainly the billionaires who control these corporations; he doesn’t represent the general U.S. public. (Nor did Biden nor Obama nor Bush.) In a neoliberal (libertarian) country such as the U.S., that corruptness should be expected, because these corporations control their Government n order to control their market. Consequently, he’ll also be a neoconservative, since neocons place top priority upon further expanding the empire (which is American billionaires’ empire); and, since the “defense and aerospace” firms, in a capitalist country (such as the U.S.), are privately, not publicly (by the Government itself), controlled, the President’s decisions directly affect those private investors, and he serves them not the public.
According to Google AI right now,
Warren Buffett is the most generous billionaire, with lifetime giving exceeding $68 billion, primarily to the Gates Foundation and family foundations. Other top donors include Bill and Melinda French Gates, George Soros, and Michael Bloomberg, who have collectively donated tens of billions to health, poverty alleviation, and education.
They have received these tax-write-offs and public goodwill for donating to and controlling the boards of directors at ‘charities’ that reflect their concerns, not actually (such as Google pretends) the concerns and especially the necessities, of the poorer 50% of the nation or world. The latter — the concerns of the poorer half of the population — would be aimed instead at ending the U.S. empire itself and its $1.5T+ annual expenses for the U.S. Government’s military, which sanctions, coups, sabotages, and invades more lands, than all other countries combined do, and which adds secondary sanctions against any country that refuses to comply with the U.S. Government’s sanctions. Ending this imperial Government, which is the American warfare state, is vastly more important than all of the billionaires’ ‘charities’ put together, but many of their fortunes are being built upon it. No billionaire has created any charity tasked to expose and condemn it. Consequently, for example, Soros is famous for his foundations funding ‘charities’ called “NGOs” that foment Government-overthrow movements in the countries that the U.S. Government is trying to overthrow and replace. But should he be getting tax-benefits for doing that? He does get them. Do you, when you contribute to services for the poor, or for animal welfare? Only if you don’t take the standard deduction, which most of the lower-income households should take in order to minimize their taxes. So, the poor don’t usually get tax-write-offs for the charities that they donate to. A million ways exist for the American system to be based upon deceiving the American people, and it uses them, and this is one of them.
The total value of the U.S. stock market, as measured by the Wilshire 5000 Total Market Index, is approximately $69.5 trillion. According to Google AI, “As of early 2026, U.S. billionaires have a total wealth between $6.9 trillion and over $8 trillion.” On 21 March 2025, Visual Capitalist headlined “Wealth Asset Breakdown: America’s Top 0.1% vs. Bottom 50%”, and reported that the richest 0.1% (thousandth) of Americans — they said it was 134,000 households — own exactly $11T of stocks, which constitutes 49.3% of their collective $22.3T net worth. That’s $82,090,000 in stocks per household. The bottom 50%, 67,000,000 households, own $480 billion of stocks, which are 4.8% of their collective $9.9T net worth. That’s $7,164 in stocks per household. If the total collective wealth of America’s approximately 1,000 billionaires is $7.5T, then they own 75% as much in stocks as do all of the bottom 50%’s collective $9.9T of stocks. The richest 0.1% are collectively 22.3/9.9 or 2.25 times as wealthy as the entire bottom 50% are, but own 23 times as much stock as the bottom 50% do. This means that for every $1,000 of corporate stocks that are owned by a household in the top 0.1% (134,000 households having $11T of stocks), or $82,090,000 in stock-value per that super-rich household; the bottom 50% (67,000,000 households having $480B of stocks, or $7,164 per household) owns, per that bottom-50% household, only $7,164 / 82,090,000 x 1,000 = $0.09 (9 cents) of stocks.
The U.S. Government represents only billionaires, and those people are around 1,000 people, who are not in the richest 0.01 of the population, but in the richest 0.00000292397 of the population. Each one of them is unimaginably wealthier than all the rest of the individuals who are in the top .01 category. An academic article in 2017, about this, said, “As the [Forbes super-]rich list comprised 400 [billionaires’] households, it represents the top 2.5 percent of the 0.01 percent — the top 0.00025 percent of US households.” The U.S. population then was 325,000,000; so, since 400 / 325,000,000 = 0.00000123076, that 0.00025 figure was way off from the reality. Furthermore, since, now, “The bar for entry into the exclusive club has increased to a staggering $3.8 billion,” the top 400 are much richer today than they were nine years ago. It seems that, each year, the number of individuals in America’s Deep State keeps becoming fewer and fewer but richer and richer.
This deeply corrupt system is now collapsing.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
