The Economic Collapse of 2026

The desire to reap unearned gains from the uplift in the value of monopoly assets — whether Bitcoin, intellectual property, gold, or most profoundly, land — lies at the heart of economic dysfunction. This pursuit of rent, not productive wealth, fuels cycles of greed that generate poverty, inequality, and instability. As Mason Gaffney argued in The Corruption of Economics (1994), speculative rent-seeking systematically diverts capital away from productive enterprise. Fred Harrison, in works such as Boom Bust (2005) and Ricardo’s Law (2006), has shown how this process drives property booms and busts with mechanical regularity, each cycle leaving widespread economic wreckage in its wake.

We are told a reassuring story: that investment in assets — stocks, pensions, or property — underpins prosperity and security. Yet this narrative conceals the truth. Much of what passes as “investment” is in fact malinvestment: wealth funnelled into speculative bets on monopoly rents rather than innovation, labour, or enterprise. The productive economy, which depends on creativity and work, is throttled, while monopoly holders grow rich by capturing unearned increments of land and resource values (Harrison, 1983; Gaffney, 2009).

This exposes a fundamental conundrum: how do we separate productive from speculative investment? And why is this distinction so absent from mainstream economic discourse? As both Gaffney and Harrison have emphasised, the silence is deliberate. It safeguards those who profit most from rent-seeking in land and other monopolies.

Georgist philosophy offers the resolution. By capturing unearned increments through land value taxation and similar mechanisms, the fuel of speculation would be extinguished. Windfall rents would return to the community that created them, while capital would be freed to flow into genuinely productive use. As Gaffney observed, taxing land values disciplines markets, corrects distortions, and allows enterprise and labour to receive their full reward.

The same dynamics are visible in wildlife conservation and rewilding. Just as land speculation distorts cities, so too do monopoly claims over land and resources distort ecological priorities. When land is treated as a speculative asset, conservation becomes hostage to private gain. Rewilding at its best, however, is a Georgist project: returning land to serve life — human and non-human — rather than speculation. Unless the monopoly problem is confronted, conservation too risks being captured by the same logic that destabilises our economies.

We are increasingly at risk of a major economic crash in 2026, and not for random reasons — precisely for all the structural forces outlined above. Harrison recently discussed in his video presentation how the inexorable buildup of debt, property speculation, and unchecked monopoly rent extraction presages a systemic collapse. As property markets overheat, land prices decouple further from fundamentals, and speculative bubbles swell, the vulnerability to a crash intensifies. The same concentration of capital in unproductive assets makes the financial system brittle. When the inevitable trigger comes — interest rate shock, credit crunch, or external shock — the system will buckle. The crash of 2026 won’t come from nowhere: it is the logical outcome of decades in which rent-seeking, malinvestment, and monopoly extraction have been allowed to dominate.

In both economics and ecology, the principle holds: progress should not be harvested as private rent for the few, but shared as common wealth for the flourishing of all.

References

• Gaffney, M. (1994). The Corruption of Economics. London: Shepheard-Walwyn.

• Gaffney, M. (2009). After the Crash: Designing a Depression-Free Economy. London: Shepheard-Walwyn.

• Harrison, F. (1983). The Power in the Land. London: Shepheard-Walwyn.

• Harrison, F. (2005). Boom Bust: House Prices, Banking and the Depression of 2010. London: Shepheard-Walwyn.

• Harrison, F. (2006). Ricardo’s Law: House Prices and the Great Tax Clawback Scam. London: Shepheard-Walwyn.

• Harrison, F. (2025?). “IS2n5WicoRo” [video lecture on impending property crash].