One of the steps in a societal collapse is a loss of faith in financial tools. The stock market has seemed like a casino for a long time to me, yet it is still cranking out money for the upper crust. It is the primary driver for business decisions that produce short term gain, but reduce long-term viability for the companies and for the environment.
Currently, there are no other real vehicles for the average US citizen to invest in for their retirements. In my parents’ generation, there were more. Heck, they had a lot of money in CDs and even those earned a decent rate of interest. Yet everything now is such a low return, or boom/bust like housing, so little guys like me are pushed into getting retirement accounts that are stocks. I’m not keen on that.
What’s even worse is that many jobs will employer match if you put into one of the stock market based retirement funds. But if you want to just put your money into a savings account, you miss out on the employer matching. So there’s strong incentive to keep putting your money into the stock market.
So I keep trying to read the tea leaves to figure out when the casino is going to collapse. …or even if it will. I think there are some folks that just assume that it will keep making money for the wealthy and the rest of humanity will just get left behind.
Until some earth destroying, population decimating event takes place. I mean a market crash is inevitable, it’s kind of baked into Capitalism and is an essential part of the system. If you are talking about collapse as in full collapse, then it probably won’t happen within our lifetimes. If you are talking about a market crash, then probably within the next few years. Much more likely to be after 2024 since this is the point where a lot of very large economies (US, UK, India, South Korea) have their elections, and governments (especially so in the US and UK) are likely to want to postpone a market crash until after the completion of the next elections.
A stock market crash or decline in economy isn’t really caused by anything more than people, collectively, thinking the economy is going to crash, like a self fulfilling prophecy. However a full financial market collapse would, in my opinion, only come after a huge world changing event, that most likely has to happen all at once (not climate change related disasters since the events won’t instantly happen all at once). It would have to be something along the lines of asteroid/comet collison, supervolcano eruption or nuclear winter.