Things will probably evolve California-style with a neo-feudal top layer guarded by their armed retainers while the bulk of the population toils to support the edifice.
I'm not sure who will fill the role the clergy did in the Ancien Régime but rest assured some group will make the attempt. What you'll want to do is make yourself indispensable to someone wealthier than yourself, get yourself some knee-breeches and keep an eye peeled to the opportunity of the main chance.
From Politico:
This essay has been adapted from FIREFIGHTING by Ben S. Bernanke, Timothy F. Geithner and Henry M. Paulson Jr., published April 16 by Penguin Books.
As we pass the 10-year anniversaries of the defining events of the 2008 global financial crisis, it’s a good opportunity to reflect on what happened, what we learned and whether it could happen again. Certainly, none of the three of us or our colleagues had ever lived through a crisis like that one, a crisis that was in some ways worse even than the early stages of the Great Depression. The good news is that, this time, concerted government action managed to stop the panic, stabilize the financial system, revive the credit markets and help start a recovery that continues to this day. Indeed, on key dimensions, the U.S. recovery from the Great Recession compares favorably to recoveries from previous severe financial crises, both in the United States and abroad, and the recoveries of other advanced economies from this crisis.Seriously, if you find yourself in the orbit of Big Lou, start kissing backside immediately, it can really pay off.
Yet even so, the crisis was extraordinarily damaging, for both the United States and the world. Millions of Americans lost their jobs, their businesses, their savings and their homes. The popular anger generated by the crisis and by longer-term trends of increasing inequality, insecurity, and social immobility has roiled our politics and our society.
The U.S. government was not well prepared for the financial conflagration of 2008, which helps explain why this fire burned so hot, why the efforts to contain it often seemed so messy, and even why that response became so wildly unpopular. Better preparation could have created better outcomes. If the regulatory system had been less Balkanized and more capable of addressing the risks, if crisis managers had been empowered all along to use overwhelming force to avoid financial collapse, and if there had been mechanisms in place from the start to ensure that the financial system would pay for its own rescue, the fire would have been less intense, and the firefighting would have seemed less inconsistent and unfair.
A DECADE LATER, the vital question to ask is whether the United States is better prepared today. We believe the answer is: yes and no. There are better safeguards in place to avoid a panic in the first place—the financial equivalent of more aggressive fire prevention measures and stronger fire-resistant building codes. But the emergency authorities for government officials to respond when an intense crisis does happen are in many ways even weaker than they were in 2007.
It’s worth recapping why the system was so unsafe before the crisis. The basic problems a decade ago were too much risky leverage, too much runnable short-term financing and the migration of too much risk to shadow banks where regulation was negligible and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.’s and Federal Reserve’s emergency safety net was inaccessible. Meanwhile, America’s regulatory bureaucracy was fragmented and outdated, with no one responsible for monitoring and addressing systemic risks....MORE
