Wealth: Breaking the Future

Hyman Minsky, an economist who studied the fragility and collapse of financial systems, showed how finance is not neutral but recursive: price rises create collateral, collateral expands credit, and credit drives prices higher still. This acceleration does not move toward equilibrium but toward a critical inflection where reversal cascades through the system. Housing markets in Australia demonstrate this curvature: property ceases to be shelter and becomes instead a rotating axis of leverage, its value drawn less from use than from its position in the cycle. Wealth holds no absolute meaning; it is sustained only in relation, in contrast, in difference. Like a body in orbit, it derives stability from perpetual imbalance, from the tension of falling yet never arriving.

Costs displaced do not leave the system. They trace arcs across its surface until they strike the boundaries where displacement is no longer possible. Homelessness, climate breakdown, financial collapse—these are the points where deferred entropy returns, where the orbit tightens and the system must face itself. The same geometry governs language and, increasingly, technology. Each statement positions meaning, not as a final landing but as a trajectory, stabilised only through relational difference, with, to, and from other meanings. Artificial intelligence extends the same logic: trained on past expressions, it accelerates by recursive amplification, turning projected potential into collateral for further investment. Like housing or language, it binds itself temporarily by postponing contradiction, while multiplying externalities in energy use, labour displacement, and epistemic uncertainty. Wealth dynamics, narrative dynamics, and technological dynamics are not separate domains but variations of one structural orbit: systems that propagate by circulating cost and ambiguity, each stabilised only by the endless deferral of collapse, each tracing the curve of its own eventual return.