In this afternoon live, I zoom out from the headline chaos around Venezuela to focus on a warning sign closer to home: the quiet collapse of small businesses across the U.S. Using reporting highlighted by Ron Filipkowski, I walk through new data showing a sharp rise in Subchapter 5 bankruptcies—filings that apply almost exclusively to mom-and-pop shops, local restaurants, and small retailers. The numbers themselves matter, but the acceleration matters more. This isn’t theoretical economics; it’s showing up on Main Street.
I connect the data to lived experience—local hobby shops disappearing, restaurant owners openly panicking, and once-affordable goods becoming absurdly expensive. Tariffs, especially broad and poorly designed ones, are hitting the smallest players first because they don’t have the leverage or capital buffers of large corporations. While gas prices fluctuate for unrelated reasons, the cost of everything else keeps climbing, and small businesses are absorbing the shock until they simply can’t anymore.
I also talk through the dangerous psychology of delayed consequences: how economic damage hits the “little guys” first, then creeps upward. We’ve seen this movie before after COVID. My deeper fear is that repeated shocks, layered on incompetence, push the U.S. toward the kind of instability we usually associate with places like Venezuela or Argentina. This live is about recognizing the warning signs before pretending they’re normal becomes irreversible.
