they fucked up by only channeling the profits to the top 0.1%, and throwing crumbs to the boomers.
if they had shared slightly bigger crumbs (like, 10% bigger) with the boomers and normal-sized crumbs with the rest of us, disaster would have been averted.
if they shared enough crumbs to also filter to other countries, and made elites in other countries share power and wealth with their own citizens sufficient for normal development, then we could actually have a good world!
that's the crazy part to me. if the .01% ghouls gave up even a quarter or 1/3 of their wealth, they would still have more money than any 100 people could spend in a lifetime, with compounding interest indefinitely, as well as enough power to dictate the course of the global system.
but their demonic greed is so overwhelming and overriding that it failed to allow them to give even those crumbs to the people below them, and in doing so it sealed their fate by causing them to create an inherently unstable system (eg, the bretton woods institutions, the UN, and later the plaza accords and EU). which was then hollowed out further by greed over the last 30 years
even post-9/11 it wasn't too late to save the system. all they had to do was share a little bit of the power. the anti-globalization movement could have easily been turned into something resembling Lynn Forester de Rothschild and Mark Carney's "Inclusive Capitalism." and made everyone happy, while maintaining the structures of power intact.
but no. no, they had to go and fuck it up for everybody, because they have demons in their brains.