The spectacle of the American banking sector performing its quarterly ritual of “suffering through success” is a special kind of comedy, reserved for those of us who have long since abandoned the delusion that the global economy serves any purpose other than the enrichment of the least interesting people on Earth. This week, the behemoths of Wall Street—the JPMorgans, the Wells Fargos, the Citigroups—unveiled their earnings, and predictably, the numbers are astronomical. Yet, if you listen to the executives, you’d think they were managing a lemonade stand in a hurricane. It is the paradox of the parasite: the host is still alive, but the blood is starting to taste like anxiety. They are riding high, yet they are terrified. It is the existential dread of a man who has won the lottery but realizes he’s lost the ticket in a house fire.

The headlines scream of “unalloyed good news” being absent, as if the concept of “good news” in the financial sector isn't just a euphemism for “we found a new way to squeeze a fee out of a dying widow.” They are worried. Why? Because the Federal Reserve is playing a game of chicken with interest rates, and the bankers are terrified that the “soft landing” everyone keeps lying about might actually be a controlled flight into terrain. They’ve spent the last two years gorging on net interest income—the glorious spread between what they charge you for a mortgage and the insultingly low 0.01% they pay you on your savings—and now the party is thinning out. The easy money has been made, and the hard reality of actually having to manage risk is setting in like a hangover in a room with no curtains.

Let’s look at the players in this theater of the absurd. On one side, we have the “responsible” bankers who are currently mourning the fact that they might actually have to compete for deposits. Imagine the horror! Having to offer a product that doesn't actively mock the intelligence of the consumer. On the other side, we have the political class. The Left, ever the masters of performative outrage, will tweet something stern about “windfall profits” and “corporate greed” before quietly accepting massive campaign contributions from the very same institutions to ensure the status quo remains undisturbed. The Right, meanwhile, will continue their moronic crusade against “woke banking,” as if the primary problem with global finance is that a bank occasionally mentions Earth Day while it forecloses on a family farm. Both sides are intellectually bankrupt, serving as the bickering janitors of a casino that is slowly catching fire.

The “worry” these bankers feel is not for the stability of the nation or the well-being of the plebeians who keep their lights on. It is the selfish panic of the gambler who knows the deck is finally being shuffled. They cite “geopolitical tensions”—the catch-all excuse for any CEO who can't explain why their growth slowed—and the “uncertainty” of the American consumer. The American consumer is indeed an uncertain creature, mostly because they are currently a walking collection of unpaid medical bills and maxed-out credit cards held together by the thin thread of a “resilient labor market” that offers nothing but gig-work and despair. The banks see the delinquency rates rising, the credit card balances swelling, and they realize the music is slowing down. They’ve already sold the chairs, and now they have nowhere to sit.

What we are witnessing is the necrotic stage of late-stage extraction. The bankers are riding high on the fumes of a debt-fueled frenzy, yet they are shivering. They are looking at the empty office buildings of San Francisco and New York—monuments to a pre-digital civilization—and realizing that those billion-dollar loans are about as valuable as a used NFT. They are terrified of the “higher for longer” interest rate environment because it forces them to acknowledge that the last decade of prosperity was a hallucination induced by cheap credit. It is almost poetic. The very people who engineered a system designed to be “too big to fail” are now terrified that it might actually be “too bloated to float.” They whine about capital requirements, claiming that if they are forced to hold more of their own money, they won't be able to lend it to the “real economy.” It’s the classic protection racket: “Nice economy you have here, shame if someone stopped providing the liquidity that we hijacked in the first place.”

In the end, their worry is our only source of entertainment. Whether the “soft landing” happens or we crater into a new Great Depression, the result for the average person is the same: you will pay more, you will own less, and you will be told it’s for your own good. The bankers will keep their bonuses, the politicians will keep their seats, and the cycle of intellectual and fiscal bankruptcy will continue its dreary rotation. I’d offer a solution, but that would imply I believe there’s a version of this species worth saving. Instead, I’ll just watch them sweat in their bespoke suits, clutching their balance sheets like holy relics as the tide goes out, revealing exactly how many of them have been swimming naked this entire time.