Almost all of the demand for oil that suddenly pushed prices up was speculative demand. People began to speculate not only in stocks and bonds and real estate, but also in commodities. The market went up for old tankers, which were used simply to store oil in. A lot of the oil was simply being stored for trading, not used.

More and more money is being extracted from of the production and consumption economy to pay the FIRE sector. That's what causes debt deflation and shrinks markets. If you pay the banks, you have less to spend on goods and services.

If bankers can push the loans and make more profits for the bank, they get paid higher bonuses. They often also get stock options. If the bank goes under, they get to keep all of these salaries and options - and the government will bail out the bank. These guys will take their money and run, which is pretty much what they're doing now.

We're living in a world that's divided into two economies: the economy of the 1%, and the economy of the bottom 99%. I guess you could be more "centrist" and say the top 10% versus the bottom 90%. But there's definitely a stratification at work here.

When you say "paying the banks," what they really mean is paying the bank bondholders. They are basically the One Percent.

The most serious problems lie in the financial sphere, where the economy's debt overhead has grown more rapidly than the 'real' economy's ability to carry this debt. [...] The essence of the global financial bubble is that savings are diverted to inflate the stock market, bond market and real estate prices rather than to build new factories and employ more labor.

The result of this anti-classical revolution you had just before World War I was that today, almost all the economic growth in the last decade has gone to the One Percent. It's gone to Wall Street, to real estate.