The email is dated 26 Jun 2016, right after Brexit, and in it, Epstein writes:

> return to tribalism . counter to globalization. amazing new alliances. you and I both agreed zero interest rates were too high, as i said in your office. finding things on their way to collapse , was much easier than finding the next bargain

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This is a perfect example of what Naomi Klein calls "disaster capitalism." It's been the norm since the crash of 2008, when bankers were made whole through public bailouts and mortgage holders were evicted by the millions to "foam the runway" for the banks:

wallstreetonparade.com/2012/08…

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How Treasury Secretary Geithner Foamed the Runways With Children's Shattered Lives

According to former TARP Special Inspector General, Neil Barofsky, HAMP was nothing more than a cynical program to give banks more time to handle foreclosures.

^{Pam Martens (wallstreetonparade.com)}

The crash of 2008 turned a lot of people's homes - their only substantial possessions - into "distressed assets" that were purchased at fire-sale prices by Wall Street investors, who turned around and rented those homes out to people who were now priced out of the housing market at rents that kept them too poor to *ever* afford a home, under slum conditions that crawled with insects and black mold:

pluralistic.net/2024/10/01/hou…

8/

Note here that economic collapse helps the Epstein class only if society has no social safety net. If Obama had supported homeowners instead of banks, there wouldn't have been a foreclosure crisis and thus there wouldn't have been any "distressed assets" flooding the market.

9/

So it's no surprise that the Epstein class are also obsessed with austerity. Peter Mandelson (British Labour's "Prince of Darkness") is a close ally of Epstein's, and also a key figure in the crushing austerity agenda of Blair, Brown and Starmer. He's a machine for turning Parliamentary majorities into distressed assets at scale.

10/

Same for Steve Bannon, another close Epstein ally, who boasts about his alliances with far-right figures who exalt the capital class and call for deregulation and the elimination of public services: Le Pen, Salvini, Farage. Combine that with Epstein and Thiel's gloating about "finding things on their way to collapse...much easier than finding the next bargain," and it starts to feel like these guys are even happier with "number eat shit" than they are with "number go up."

11/

Trump is the undisputed king of the Epstein class, and he seems determined to drive "The Economy" over a cliff. Take his tariff program, modeled on the McKinley tariffs of 1890, which led to the Panic of 1893, a financial crisis that saw one in four American workers forced into unemployment and 15,000 businesses into bankruptcy (that's a lot of distressed assets!):

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of…

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financial crisis

^{Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)}

Then there's Trump's mass deportation program, which will force lots of businesses (farms, restaurants, etc) into bankruptcy, creating another massive pool of distressed assets. Trump's given ICE $75b, while the DoJ Antitrust Division and FTC (which protect Americans from corporate scams) have seen their budgets take a real-terms cut. The majority of DoJ lawyers and FBI agents are working on immigration cases (against workers, not employers, mind!).

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The Antitrust Division has $275m to fight all of America's corporate crime:

organizedmoney.fm/p/white-coll…

I'm not saying that Trump is *trying* to induce another massive economic crash. I'm saying, rather, that within his coalition there is a substantial bloc of powerful, wealthy people who are on the hunt for "things on their way to collapse," and who are doubtless maneuvering to frustrate other Trump coalition members who are solely committed to "number go up."

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White Collar Crime Enforcement In The Age Of ICE

Laws are just wishes without enforcement.

^{David Dayen (Organized Money)}

Even the collapse of crypto creates lots of opportunities to "buy the dip." Not the dip in crypto (crypto's going to zero), but the dip in all the *real* things people bought with *real* money they got by borrowing against their shitcoins.

The thousand-plus children that Epstein lured to his island rape-camp were often "distressed assets" in their own right.

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Julie K Brown's groundbreaking reporting on Epstein for the *Miami Herald* described how he sought out children whose parents were poor, or neglectful, or both, on the grounds that those children would be "on their way to collapse," too.

The Epstein class's commitment to destroying "The Economy" makes sense when you understand that trashing civilization is "much easier than finding the next bargain." They want to buy the dip, so they're creating the dip.

16/

They don't need the *whole* number to go up, just theirs. They know that inclusive economies are more prosperous for society *as a whole*, but it makes criminals and predators worse off. The New Deal kicked off a period of American economic growth never seen before or since, but the rich despised it, because a prosperous economy is one in which it gets harder and harder to find "things on their way to collapse," and thus nearly impossible to "find[] the next bargain."

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Image:
Gage Skidmore (modified)
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil…

CC BY-SA 3.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/b…

eof/

File:Peter Thiel (51876609719).jpg - Wikimedia Commons

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