Epocalypse

The word was invented in January 2016, in the forecast for that year, from four others: economic, epoch, collapse and apocalypse. It was meant to describe a downturn that would not be a second dip of the Great Recession but the end of the arrangement that had produced it, the death of money as it had been known, and it became the tag under which the most sweeping essays on the original site were filed. Fifteen carried it. The ones that survive here are these.

• 2016 economic predictions: the year of the Epocalypse: the forecast that coined the term, and the check against what happened.
• This graph says it all: the 2016 recession was already here: the August 2016 call, on a seventy-year chart.
• The cashless-society war intensifies: the record of the war on cash, kept through 2016.
• The inevitability of economic collapse: the list of flaws that were never fixed.
• An apocalypse upon us: the summer of 2022 in one list.
• The money of the apocalypse: the digital dollar’s pilot, the week a crypto exchange failed.

The others under the tag, the “Death of the Great Recovery” series of 2018, the flash crash of February that year, the housing and car-sales pieces, the bet-my-blog piece of that summer, were not among the pages that this site restored, and are not reproduced. Their titles are on the record in the archive, and their arguments recur, in later form, in the predictions section.

What the word claimed, read ten years on, was too much and not nothing. The collapse it named did not come in 2016 or 2018. The conditions it named, an economy dependent on stimulus it could not withdraw, a bond market that could not price risk, a public being taught to live without cash, were all present, and most of them are present still. A word that overreaches can still be the right word for what it points at.