Wealth & Money Quote by Craig Bruce

Bruce builds a trap out of plainspoken logic: a recession as a closed loop, a snake eating its own tail. The power isn’t in originality (anyone who’s lived through a downturn recognizes the pattern) but in how the repetition mimics the experience of economic stagnation. Each “Why” pretends we’re moving toward a root cause; instead, we keep arriving back at the same human fact: people can’t spend because they can’t earn, and they can’t earn because no one spends. It’s a rhetorical treadmill that makes frustration feel inevitable.

The specific intent reads as a jab at simplistic, moralizing explanations for unemployment. Rather than treating joblessness as personal failure or laziness, Bruce frames it as a system-level coordination problem: demand collapses, businesses pull back, workers lose income, demand collapses again. The subtext is quietly political. If the problem is circular, the solution can’t be individual “responsibility” alone; it requires an outside force to break the loop, whether that’s public spending, credit expansion, wage support, or some other intervention that injects purchasing power.

Context matters, too. Coming from a contemporary writer (not an economist), the quote functions like a street-level Keynesianism: intuitive, impatient with technocratic obfuscation, designed to be repeated. It turns macroeconomics into a conversational chain, making a structural critique feel like common sense. The punch is that the “reason” is never a single villain; it’s the system’s feedback mechanism doing exactly what it does, until someone interrupts it.