Upvoted and agreed. But I think the US financial collapse has more to do with:

∙	Short-term incentives — businesses chasing next quarter while ignoring the long game. CEO tenure averages around 7 years, but comp structures reward short-term predictability over long-term health. Make the number go up, cash out, someone else’s problem.
∙	Crushing debt — not “insolvency” in the household sense, since the US prints its own currency, but debt-to-GDP at ~120% and interest payments consuming an increasing share of federal revenue creates real risks: inflation, dollar credibility erosion, and crowding out actual investment.
∙	No savings cushion — ~57% of Americans can’t cover a $1,000 emergency. That’s not a recession risk, that’s a detonator.

Empires don’t fall suddenly — they transform. The Roman Empire never really “ended”; the eastern half ran unbroken from Constantinople for nearly a thousand years after Rome’s western collapse. The threat isn’t a single dramatic crash. It’s a long, slow institutional rot that’s already underway.m