On April 16, 2007, the American novelist Cormac McCarthy was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Road. The Road is an unbearably painful tale of a father and son, among the last survivors on the planet, traveling an American landscape that has been rendered a post-apocalyptic charnel house by a nuclear conflagration. Their love is that last fragment of human feeling remaining in a world destroyed by hatred and war. Technologically advanced man has left behind a gray and ruined landscape. When men of good will do not stand up and fight the forces of evil, stupidity, and complacency, it leaves the world looking like this:

In those first years the roads were peopled with refugees shrouded up in their clothing. Wearing masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators. Their barrows heaped with shoddy. Towing wagons or carts. Their eyes bright in their skulls. Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland. The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.¹

Two and a half years later, in December 2009, the film version of the novel was released. In bringing this bleak and complex novel to film, the producers reportedly had a difficult time identifying shooting locations. In the end, however, they didn’t have to travel far from the American heartland. Most of the film was shot near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As one of the film’s producers explained to Rolling Stone magazine, Pennsylvania was chosen because “it offered such a pleasing array of post-apocalyptic scenery: deserted coalfields, run-down parts of Pittsburgh, windswept dunes.”² Today, scenes like this can be found throughout the Middle East, the Ukraine, and Africa where war rages out of the sight of affluent and narcissistic Westerners who can’t see beyond the selfies on their iPhones.

Half a decade after the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, markets have recovered on the back of trillions of dollars of debt that were created out of thin air to superficially heal them. As is typical of the recoveries that follow debt crises, economic growth has been disappointing. A small elite flourished while the politically disenfranchised fell further behind. The political and economic elite keeps trying to preserve the system that favors them at the expense of everyone else. But it is increasingly obvious that this system, which is based on debt rather than equity and favors speculation rather than productive investment, is unsustainable. At home, new entitlements were created and the eligibility requirements of old entitlements were lowered to create a culture of dependency, resentment, and division. The only way to pay for this culture is higher taxes on the most productive members of society. Regulatory efforts to strengthen the financial system missed the mark and left a more fragile and concentrated financial system in their wake. Powerful financial interests were able to derail meaningful derivatives reforms and academic economists were able to steer monetary policy into a trap. The economy’s DNA, the U.S. tax system, continues to create incentives for U.S. businesses to move their most valuable assets abroad and for individuals and corporations to borrow as much money as possible, creating a debt-financed economy that sooner or later will collapse under its own weight. Policy could not be more misguided if it were plotted by our enemies.

The U.S. economy is far more fragile than it appears on the surface because it is built on a foundation of debt that is sapping intellectual and financial capital away from productive uses. As a result of Dodd-Frank, the financial system is populated by a smaller number of “too big to save” institutions that are nominally less leveraged than they were in 2007 but sit on top of hundreds of trillions of dollars of derivatives contracts that have the potential to blow up the global financial system in the blink of an eye. Only hubris or denial allows the individuals who manage these institutions and the officials who regulate them to deny the risk posed by these instruments of mass financial destruction. As investors smugly cling for dear life to their inflated 401K statements, they should pray that their delusions about the state of the world can persist in the face of the risks that are building under the surface. But when their investments melt away in their hands, so will their delusions.

The situation is particularly unsustainable in a world where America has abandoned its global leadership role and created a vacuum for its enemies to pose existential threats to itself and its allies. The world is a much more dangerous place today than during the financial crisis. Noxious forces that were festering for years in the Middle East, Asia, and Eastern Europe/Russia burst out into the open at the first sign of American weakness. The Obama administration’s failed foreign policy allowed these forces to destabilize the world.

In 2008, the world wasn’t facing the threat of ISIS, America wasn’t dealing with homegrown terrorism, Iran was much farther away from achieving nuclear capability, Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen were stable, Russia hadn’t invaded Ukraine, and China wasn’t aggressively asserting itself in the South China Sea. Today, all of these problems pose serious threats to global and economic stability and the Obama administration has fumbled its handling of every single one of them. While such threats are complex and were in the process of formation long ago, the weak and incompetent American response to them rendered them a clear and present danger.

The media and political elite play a central role in perpetuating these threats. Rather than speak the truth, these groups promote narratives about the state of the world that are superficial, self-serving, and often simply false. On the day that the Senate was voting on the Iran nuclear deal, the most important foreign policy issue in years, the media was focused on an inconsequential personal remark one presidential candidate made about another, a typical example of how the media trivializes the news. The lack of critical thinking applied by most of the media to the work of the Federal Reserve and the foreign policy of the Obama administration gives journalism a bad name and constitutes a profound betrayal of the public. Perhaps it is too much to expect journalists to be experts in the underlying subject matter they are covering, particularly in the financial area where the subject matter requires a modicum of expertise, but then they shouldn’t pretend to know what they are talking about. New media blurs the lines between journalism and analysis to the point where too many uninformed people are offering opinions that are treated as authoritative when they are nothing of the sort. When the media fails to take a critical stance toward authority figures, it allows an institution like the Federal Reserve to retain credibility far longer than it deserves. A more informed and critical media might go a long way to improving policy in this country. At the risk of sounding idealistic, I hope there is a market for an informed media in the years ahead; for the most part, we don’t have one now.

It should not seem odd to conclude a book on finance with a discussion of the work of Cormac McCarthy. Careful readers of the preceding pages should not find the appearance of one of our greatest living novelists jarring at all. The Committee to Destroy the World maintained from the beginning that finance should draw as much from art as science and is intended to serve a larger purpose in the world than a merely economic one. Capital is the lifeblood of society, making it possible for people to eat and be sheltered and learn and heal. Only after people fill these needs can they begin to appreciate the beauty and love that life offers instead of focusing on its struggle and pain. If there is passion in this book, it is because I believe that the forces responsible for the death of capital, if successful, will extinguish the best hope for mankind to move forward and meet the challenges of the future. Those challenges are growing because our leaders are failing. I, for one, will not allow that to happen without speaking out.

Look around at our culture and society. We must be nearing the end of things, the end of something. We are on an unsustainable path of debt and delusion. Debt is growing much faster than the economy. We celebrate when our federal deficit drops—drops—to half a trillion dollars a year! Our inner cities are more violent than ever but the mainstream media is afraid to admit that much of the violence is blacks killing other blacks because that irrefutable fact offends the sensibilities of progressives who have failed for more than 50 years to develop solutions to the underlying causes of black-on-black violence. Mass shootings occur around the country on a weekly basis while our politicians cower in fear of the bullies at the NRA, an organization that twists the meaning the Second Amendment to allow the mentally ill to gain easy access to guns, private parties to sell guns without conducting a background check, and overgrown children to purchase weapons of war. Our education system has been hijacked by teachers unions run by incompetents and the forces of political correctness who are destroying our universities in the name of protecting students’ feelings from the very intellectual and moral challenges that are the gravamen of liberal education. Government intrusion and technology are debauching privacy and eradicating individual integrity and autonomy. The stock market may have recovered and the economy climbed out of recession, but life in America and around the world fell apart before our very eyes.

Regardless of the narcissism of technology, which is reinforced by breathless and uncritical media coverage, Facebook and Apple are not going to save us if we don’t get a lot smarter, a lot tougher, and a lot more courageous in standing up to the forces of political correctness, narcissism, and short-term thinking. Mr. McCarthy could have been writing the coda for our last days when he wrote in the voice of the father in The Road: “No list of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So he whispered to the boy. I have you.”³ The father perishes in McCarthy’s tale, and the son is left to carry on without him. While bereft, the son is fortified by the memory of his father’s love and the words that they shared as they struggled on the road together, trying to survive the wreckage that other men wrought.

We too have been abandoned by our leaders. They fail and betray us at every turn. We cannot count on anybody else to save us. We are going to have to save ourselves.

Seven years ago, it was not too late to make the necessary changes to stabilize our financial system against instability, avarice, and stupidity. It is still not too late but time is running out, particularly with respect to the uncontrollable debt burdens that are suffocating economic growth. In the novelist’s words: “There is no later. This is later.” At the heart of every discussion about finance lies a simple truth: Without a functioning and stable economy, civilization will ultimately fall into barbarism and chaos. That is the undeniable and redundant lesson of history.

The Jewish-German philosopher Walter Benjamin, who committed suicide at the Spanish border in 1940 rather than surrender to the Nazis, set a very high standard for critical thought when he wrote the following: “In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it….Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.”⁴ In 2008, we met the enemy—and that enemy was us. We survived that crisis (barely) by printing trillions of dollars of debt, but that just delayed the day of reckoning because we failed to take the steps necessary to set the global economy on a sustainable growth trajectory. And while we were failing to fix our economy and remaining our own worst enemies, new enemies materialized out of the turmoil that was boiling under the surface of the Middle East, Asia, and Eastern Europe. These blood enemies now pose a direct threat to both the dead and the living and wishing them away with phony treaties that aren’t worth the paper they are written on leaves the world on the brink of new conflicts that can’t be extinguished by the printing presses of central banks or the arrogant delusions of former community organizers.

It is the undeniable lesson of history that the human species requires economic well-being in order to keep from destroying itself. The competition for scarce energy and water resources is intensifying among the great powers but the losers will be those whose economies are most heavily impaired by debt and demographics. The most compelling reason to build a robust financial system—for pragmatists as well as moralists—is to ensure that society continues to move forward in a manner that improves human life on this planet for all people, not just a small elite that continues to fool itself into believing that it will be able to defend itself against the leagues of sufferers when they rush the ramparts.

This book has harsh words for many of the established ideas and institutions that control the world’s capital. These words are deeply felt but offered in the spirit of the great Romantic poet William Blake’s adage, “Opposition is true friendship.” But make no mistake. We must loudly condemn and challenge business and political leaders who put their own interests before those of our country and its citizens. We are appeasing our enemies abroad and creating a culture of debt and dependency at home. We cling to faulty financial theories, invest in unproductive strategies that enrich money managers but impoverish investors, and refuse to adopt the pro-growth monetary and fiscal policies so desperately needed to enhance the quality of human life on our planet. Karl Marx never wrote what comes in history’s third act, after tragedy and farce. We still have a chance to write that it ends in triumph if we start taking bold action now. But we are running out of time.