Anonymous
I think we have not had an economy for a long time. Not in traditional sense anyway. The whole think looks like a game that is a mix of monopoly and casino games. The money is fake, backed by nothing since the government is for all practical considerations bankrupt. The stock market evaluation of most companies is so far from what a sane mind would pay for them that is ridiculous. Industrial production is almost nonexistent and the so called “service economy” is just a pyramid scheme producing nothing of value, just transferring money around for the GDP benefit.
What kind of future we can expect is hard to tell but my impression is that it will be worse than anything seen before. Food production is today more centralized and it relies on a huge transportation infrastructure for delivery to the consumer, making it very vulnerable to failure. A lot of the basic items we use everyday is imported making them probably hard to get. The population in general does not possess practical skills and is physically unfit. The money that the government printed to paper over problem in the past will be worthless because will cause huge inflation.
Crow Bar, you ask “The question is, what will it look like? The 2008 crisis? The Great Depression 2.0? Venezuela?”. Probably all of them together. Times 100.