The acute capitalist crisis of 2008 has in the years since developed into a chronic complaint, to be managed but not overcome. In wealthy countries, ultra-low interest rates prop up consumer spending and, for investors, inflate the value of stocks, bonds, and other paper or digital assets. Swollen private portfolios induce luxury spending, and the size of the resulting wealth effect, as Alan Greenspan liked to call it, does a lot to determine what volume of crumbs spills from the banquet table in the form of worker’s wages. Because the rich spend a smaller proportion of their income than others, asset-price Keynesianism, as it has been called, is an inefficient way to inject demand into an economy. But the method has its allure: what could suit the rich better than rapidly rising prices for what they have to sell – namely, financial assets – while prices of the ordinary goods and services that they buy fall short of even the 2 per cent annual increase sought by central bankers as a minimum rate of inflation? To purchase the results of toil with the weightless gyrations of fictitious capital is a good bargain.

From time to time, uncoordinated sightings of real conditions emerged in candidate Trump’s unscripted monologues, in allusions to the parlous state of American infrastructure or the diminished life chances of rural whites

the symbolic force of Clinton’s campaign was vitiated by its political timidity

seems almost picayune compared to the other damage he threatens

This strangely socialistic subvention to neoliberalism not only encourages rural voters in the fantasy that they are rugged individualists uncontaminated by handouts, but jeapordises what little the US possesses in the way of social democracy