Capitalism in Intensive Care: Notes from a World Too Busy Buying Itself

The global economy today sits like an aging monarch in a glass ICU, draped in silk hospital gowns woven from speculation and denial. Tubes of liquidity drip-feed borrowed time into a system allergic to introspection, while its caretakers—central banks, financial institutions, and think tanks—applaud the twitching of GDP as if it were a sign of vitality rather than convulsion. The prognosis? Complicated. The diagnosis? A civilization obsessed with consumption, terminally ill with its own success.

Take the United States—architect of the neoliberal imagination—as an instructive case. Once the exporter of both industrial goods and cultural hegemony, it now sells volatility repackaged as stability. The Federal Reserve, high priest in the temple of market fundamentalism, tweaks interest rates with the divine ambivalence of a demiurge. One basis point up, and Wall Street shudders; one down, and Main Street gasps for breath. We call it “monetary policy,” but the spectacle is closer to economic theatre—complete with sacred rituals (FOMC meetings), ambiguous prophecies (forward guidance), and audience participation (consumer sentiment indices).

Meanwhile, China, long branded as the “workshop of the world,” confronts its own capitalist contradiction. Having climbed the ladder of industrialization at breakneck speed, it now finds the rungs beneath it dissolving. A real estate sector swollen by speculative euphoria has metastasized into systemic risk, propped up by ghost cities and ghost numbers. Its growth narrative—once fueled by concrete and cheap labor—is now haunted by diminishing returns and demographic decline. The dragon is tired, and the smoke from its nostrils is debt, not fire.

In Europe, the dream of integration has curdled into a slow-moving anxiety spiral. The continent, once united by post-war ideals and Schumanesque visions, now shares a common language only in inflation data and bond yield spreads. Climate goals, industrial subsidies, and digital transition plans clutter policy papers like desperate decorations on a crumbling façade. Yet, amid austerity fatigue and energy crises, the essentials endure: cheese, wine, and bureaucracy—pillars of continuity in a house trembling from within.

As for the so-called “emerging markets,” they remain suspended in a liminal state—perpetually on the verge of emergence, yet never quite invited to arrive. Their economic identities are defined less by autonomy than by exposure: to commodity shocks, to dollar cycles, to geopolitical spasms beyond their control. Inflation running in double digits is rebranded as “resilience,” and capital flight is spun as “portfolio rebalancing.” The reality is far grimmer: sovereignty eroded by debt, development shackled by conditionalities, and futures mortgaged in currencies not their own.

Technology, the great secular religion of the 21st century, promises transcendence while reinforcing the old hierarchies in new code. Artificial Intelligence writes poetry, automates empathy, and arbitrages stock markets before humans can blink. And yet, the same system cannot guarantee affordable housing, equitable healthcare, or dignified work. The digital economy, for all its buzzwords and broadband, floats on infrastructure both physical and ideological—much of which remains precariously maintained in the Global South. Still, tech unicorns gallop toward IPOs, bleeding money but brimming with hype, their valuations anchored not in earnings, but in narrative alchemy.

What we are witnessing, then, is not merely an economic crisis, but a metaphysical one: the erosion of meaning in the metrics we’ve deified. Productivity no longer measures creation, but exploitation; growth no longer implies well-being, but extraction. We have built an economic system that rewards speed over substance, opacity over transparency, and spectacle over structure. It is less a market than a masquerade, where the language of economics has been weaponized into obfuscation.

And yet, amid this global absurdity, one constant remains: when collapse looms and sacrifice is demanded, it is always the least culpable who are asked to pay. The gig worker, the indebted student, the displaced farmer, the informal vendor—they are summoned to balance the books etched in someone else’s ink. For them, capitalism is not in intensive care. It is the intensive care: a permanent emergency in which survival itself becomes a full-time hustle.

So let us call it what it is—not a system in crisis, but a crisis masquerading as a system. One that sells illusions wholesale and then charges rent for believing them. As long as dopamine remains more accessible than dignity, the market will thrive—even as the world it inhabits slowly forgets how to breathe.