There is an echoing melancholy to this era, as we watch the end of Silicon Valley’s hypergrowth era, the horrifying result of 15+ years of steering the tech industry away from solving actual problems in pursuit of eternal growth. Everything is more expensive, and every tech product has gotten worse, all so that every company can “do AI,” whatever the fuck that means.

We are watching one of the greatest wastes of money in history, all as people are told that there “just isn’t the money” to build things like housing, or provide Americans with universal healthcare, or better schools, or create the means for the average person to accumulate wealth. The money does exist, it just exists for those who want to gamble — private equity firms, “business development companies” that exist to give money to other companies, venture capitalists, and banks that are getting desperate and need an overnight shot of capital from the Federal Reserve’s Overnight Repurchase Facility or Discount Window, two worrying indicators of bank stress I’ll get into later.

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The era we live in is one of abject desperation, to the point that analysts and investors — and shareholders by extension — will take any abuse from management. They will allow companies to spend as much money as they want in whatever ways they want, as long as it continues the charade of “number go up.”

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In reality, we’re in an era of naked, blatant, shameless stock manipulation, both privately and publicly, because a “stock” no longer refers to a unit of ownership in a company so much as it is a chip at a casino where the house constantly changes the rules. Perhaps you’re able to occasionally catch the house showing its hand, and perhaps the house meant for you to see it. Either way, you are always behind, because the people responsible for buying and selling stocks at scale under the auspices of “knowing what’s going on” don’t seem to know what they’re talking about, or don’t care to find out.