I think it's a silly conspiracy, but, even if it were, this kind of supression would not be possible to be done by the corporations themselves. They're simply too big and too incompetent because of the org overhead to orchestrate such a thing. The state being co opted on the other hand might be capable of doing this on their behalf. I could believe that. (but I don't it's just silly)

Another hypothesis:

Also on the front page right now is something about postmodernist deconstruction, where it's asserted that decades of academics talking to academics for validation have created an inbred dialect of jargon which is incomprehensible to almost everyone and doesn't mean a whole lot (though it does have meaning). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46405288

Could it not simply be that the control structures of our economy also spent too long chasing validation from each other, developing an inbred language and inbred success metrics, instead of objectively-measured value creation?

In fact globally-recognized money forces even people who recognize this is a bad system to still participate in it and chase inbred success metrics instead of actual value creation. It turns subjective metrics into actual wealth. It doesn't matter that you created a semiconductor fab in your garage - the person who convinced the right people they were about to create AGI got a lot more money - enough to buy a real semiconductor fab.

The other parallel to what you describe is that the shift of populations from rural, agricultural areas to citys, is over in the west, no more strong healthy polite civilised people with strong work ethics, who knew that hard work would pay off, and they could have a house and 3 or 4 kids and buy a bunch of the shiny stuff in the magazines and there kids could go to college, work at the plant and get a gold watch, precisely what my grandfather did, and millions of others. But starting in the 1980's there were not enough men to do those jobs, so those plants were offshored to cheap plentiful labour countrys. But there were still enough farm boys to take the higher payed jobs IN the citys, and do trade work, but the wealth dwindled, and there kids have zero interest in busting there knuckles, and so skilled, self starting,enthusiastic,labour, is gone. My personal experience is that I will show up to do an estimate for something for a larger company, and before I can even get to look at it, they are suggesting that I "could get on with them" Many franchise companys ,"franchisese"?, are from familys that used to own and operate companys in the same business, under there own names, but those situations are now also gone, with very very few people growing up in the family business anymore. So it's down to money people and advertisers, trying to puppet clueless jobby job kids into running serious businesses for nothing. what could go wrong?

Yup

Evidently, the requirement for democracy in the US to survive is for the people who failed to vote for the only viable alternative to Trumpism must feel the suffering they are happy to visit on others, and so recognize that voting for "my team" incompetence is a bad idea.

The suffering is only beginning. It takes an insanely long time for large systems to show effects of bad decisions. Usually the party that has wrecked the economy in every presidency for the last 50 years benefits from the lag and the party of recovery gets blamed, putting the wrecking party back in power. Perhaps this round of the wrecking party will be too effective, and blame will go where it belongs.

Claire's was mentioned as one of the bankruptcies, and surely their business model would have been affected by tariffs

So you reach back to 2022 for the problems cited in 2025? I guess nothing else happened this year that could affect the economy. Nope, nothing.

Couple of other contributions:

Tariffs all over the place.

Many billions going into AI data centers leaving less for normal businesses.