What a contradictory title, please allow me to explain.

This article is a response to Owain William's thought-provoking blogpost, Has the Umbraco Community lost its Spark?

While I understand where Owain is coming from and I too feel the change, I'd like to set up a defense: It's not Umbraco, and it's not the community.

So what has changed?

We're all grinding harder just to tread water, trying our best to cling to the standard of living we once took for granted. Less time for Discord banter, fewer swag selfies on Umbraco Tees Day, but unfortunately, the malfunction doesn't stop there.

While I agree with Owain, I just can't stand this characterization of the Umbraco community. This despair (dramatic?) is all over the place. I have seen video after video show up on my YouTube feed lamenting the zombification and decline of the community over the last few years.

In one, the host described a recent trip to the Kentucky Derby where he was shocked at the low attendance, the lack of inebriation of those who did attend, and at the relatively disconnected feeling of the entire event—a sharp contrast against the years of decades of the past.

I have never been, but I feel it too. Christmases, thanksgivings, halloweens, independence days, none of these feel the same lately. Hell, shopping malls barely bother with holiday displays or Black Friday sales anymore, and it doesn't seem to matter because no one has the time to enjoy them anyway. These occasions now blend into any other day, and I feel horrible for this generation of children being deprived of the same joy I had.

People are so eager to blame this zombification on smartphone usage, but that's such a lazy analysis and so far off the mark that it makes my skin crawl.

In this response, I'll walk you through how we are being slowly and invisibly suffocated by compounding financialization of every segment of our economy. It's crept in over decades, draining joy from what we love, bit by bit.

You probably haven't heard this story before. I'll admit up front: this is going to be contrarian and politically incorrect, but I promise to do my best to be truthful and objective.

The 2008 crisis wasn't fixed; it was papered over. Politicians bailed out arrogant and irresponsible bankers in a now familiar pattern of "socialism for corporations, capitalism for the rest."

The "fix" for the 2008 crisis was to pretend the whole thing never happened: reinflate the asset bubbles, but with stricter rules this time. This kicked off the funny-money era, but bad policy can be traced back further, to 1971, when we ditched the gold standard, a Bretton Woods/post-WWII holdover, to cover the costs of the Vietnam War.

Through the 2010s, every hiccup or slowdown triggered Fed rate cuts, plunging us deeper into a ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) environment. We had historic low interest rates on everything, and money was inexpensive. Each rate cut did in fact stimulate economic activity and kept the economy from actually, finally, correcting. You likely observed this in your own life with residential home mortgages, or in the news with historic investment banking deals.

Analysts gawked at the unprecedented depravity of this tactic, which was a decisive turn from what is considered conventional and sound monetary policy. Trillions of dollars were printed out of thin air, also known as QE (quantitative easing), which debased the US dollar. These analysts were predicting bubble-pop events for years, none of which materialized, as rounds of QE always stymied typical recession indicators.

Still, the dollar's status was protected, as it held strong as reserve king in petrodollar trades (buying and selling oil), and foreign Treasury hoarding (foreign countries buying our debt). Or to put it another way, by being "the least dirtiest toilet paper" around.

This strategy worked for about a decade, until September 2019's repo crisis. Liquidity vanished, rates spiked to 10%. Banks swapped assets (consumer mortgages, consumer auto loans) for quick injections of cash from the FED to avoid collapse. The trigger still isn't clear, but most believe it to be a combination of regulatory scars, reserve shortages, and second-order pain from Trump's 2018 tariffs, which sparked a mini-recession in manufacturing. By September 2019, the runway for more QE had run out. Interest rates couldn't be cut any further. The roosters were coming home to roost.

This should have triggered a crash, or "correction," but just months later the world was thrown into COVID chaos, while spending bills were quickly passed to inject liquidity into the financial system and stimulate the economy, in the range of trillions of dollars. This effectively masked the repo crisis but kicked off an insidious cycle of inflation, which has since transformed into "stagflation."

In a "stagflation" scenario, prices remain high, even as demand drops. This irrational, but very real phenomenon runs contrary to Econ 101, which tells us that as the cost of goods rises, demand drops (and vice versa). There's no real way to handle this scenario, as an individual, except to hold hard assets (real estate, gold), invest (and hope the market doesn't pop), or find ways to hustle harder and make more money. Financial institutions don't really have an answer for addressing stagflation, either, except to play shell games increasing and decreasing interest rates in a desperate attempt to try and keep the circus going.

Just last week (October 2025), the repo market went haywire again as banks struggled with liquidity issues, speculated to be triggered by the current longest-ever historical US government shutdown.

There are two ways to solve this stagflation problem, and politicians are now facing a decision cliff: keep printing money and let inflation rip, or let an excruciating but proper correction hit (now delayed by well over a decade), with the upside that we return to a valuable economy and sound monetary policy.

Take your best guess on which they'll pick.

We're all now working harder to maintain the standard of living we're used to, we have less time and means to participate in communities, Umbraco, or otherwise. Our employers tighten down on austerity, the cost of living increases, layoffs continue to accelerate across the industry, exacerbating these conditions and ultimately creating a chilling effect.

And then one day, all of a sudden, you're just tired. Real, fucking, tired.

Kudos to Owain for spotting this, but it's not just the Umbraco community. The broader financialization of our economy means this broken system applies to every facet of your life, even your Chipotle burritos.

This isn't a failure of the Umbraco community not showing up, or of Umbraco not investing enough, or of the devrel team not working hard enough. (How many festivals and community meetups have been re-ignited in the last few years? phew!) I'd actually argue that Umbraco and festival committees seem to be doing more than I can ever remember.

What we're all feeling is the endgame of an economic warzone so ugly that no politician would dare be honest about it.

Inflation is silently stealing our lives, breaking our spirits, destroying our communities. Make no mistake: you're living in dystopia.