Retro future history textbook: “In the Hoarding Twenties a few things came together. For a while now the idea that the market was more efficient than the state had taken hold. Regulation had been used to reign in corporations and so deregulation was in. Taxes had been used to reign in the super rich and so reducing taxes was in. People wanted to starve the state because they didn’t know which part was superfluous but they all agreed that they didn’t want to pay for it. At the same time, the central banks had been told to keep interest rates down and exchange rates stable. This facilitated global trade and required further deregulation in the form of free trade agreements. The net result, however, was that the rich kept growing richer and they invested their money in stocks and since interests were down and bonds were down, stocks kept rising. And since there was no tax shares going up but only when they were sold and other things were bought instead, they kept going up. So keep hoarding, people thought. Hence the name. As the rich kept getting richer, they started looking for ever riskier and energy intensive investment possibilities. Crypto currencies, non-fungible tokens, data centres for centralised computers and large language models, each wave more expensive than the last, each one a larger bubble, risking world economy and pensions. It all ended with the Taxing Thirties. As the name, taxes went up, stocks went down, salaries were capped, growth was capped due to CO₂ limits, industrial development and population growth slowed down significantly. And of course the effects of the climate crisis started affecting the rich countries, at last.”