The Permanent Emergency Economy: How Crises Became the World's Most Profitable Business Model

From pandemics to wars to inflation shocks, governments and corporations now operate inside a perpetual state of emergency — and the winners are those who learn how to monetize chaos. This investigation reveals how crisis‑driven economics reshaped global power, public trust, and the future of democracy.

On a Tuesday in Washington this year, the federal government renewed, without debate, without a floor vote, without so much as a press conference, five separate national emergencies — border security, cartels, fentanyl, tariffs on America’s own neighbours — that had been sitting on the books so long they’d started to feel less like emergencies and more like furniture. That same week, defence contractors posted some of the healthiest quarterly numbers in their corporate histories. Nobody connected the two events, because nobody was supposed to. That is the permanent emergency economy working exactly as designed: the crisis stays in the headline, and the money quietly changes hands in the footnote.

The United States currently has fifty-one active national emergencies. Ninety have been declared since Congress passed the National Emergencies Act in 1976, meant to rein in exactly this kind of executive improvisation, and more than half have simply never been allowed to expire. The oldest, signed by Jimmy Carter in November 1979 to freeze Iranian government assets after the Tehran hostage crisis, is still renewed every single year — a formality now older than most of the analysts who process the paperwork. The average declared emergency in America lasts 9.6 years. Twenty-five have lasted more than a decade. Read that again slowly, because the word “emergency” is doing a lot of unpaid overtime in that sentence.

This is not a bureaucratic curiosity. It is the permanent emergency economy in its purest legal form: a system in which the temporary, extraordinary powers designed for genuine catastrophe have become the ordinary operating procedure of the state, invoked and re-invoked not because the crisis persists but because the powers are useful and nobody with the authority to take them away has the will to do it. Congress can technically terminate a presidential emergency declaration. It has never once done so. Not under Reagan, not under Obama, not under either Trump administration, not under Biden, who used his own emergency authority to try cancelling six hundred billion dollars in student debt — a serious, decades-old problem dressed up, in a fit of executive convenience, as a sudden crisis requiring urgent unilateral action. One might, I suppose, argue that the ends justified the means. They usually do, right up until the next president uses the same lever for something considerably worse.

And the next president did. In February 2025, invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act — a law written for genuine national-security threats, not trade policy Donald Trump didn’t feel like taking to Congress — the administration declared that Canada, Mexico and long-standing trading relationships with virtually every country on earth constituted an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the United States. Tariffs followed. Lawsuits followed the tariffs. The emergency declaration, obviously, did not follow the lawsuits into oblivion; it got renewed, again, in January, because that’s what emergencies do now. They don’t end. They get filed.

The Architecture of Permanent Emergency

The genius of the permanent emergency economy — and genius is the correct word, in the same way it’s correct to call a well-executed heist ingenious even as you’re calling the police — is that it never announces itself as a system. Each crisis arrives looking like an aberration: unprecedented, unforeseeable, requiring us all to pull together. Then the money moves, quietly and with remarkable efficiency, from the public to a fairly short list of private hands, and by the time the crisis has technically passed, the transfer has already been normalized into the baseline. Nobody clawed it back. Nobody was expected to ask.

Who Profited From the Pandemic

Start with the pandemic, because it is the cleanest specimen on the table. Between March 2020 and the end of that year alone, the collective wealth of the world’s billionaires jumped by $3.9 trillion — the single largest surge Oxfam had ever recorded, bigger than the previous fourteen years combined. By November 2021, the world’s ten richest men had doubled their fortunes, a rate of roughly fifteen thousand dollars a second, while the World Bank was counting close to a hundred million people freshly pushed into extreme poverty. This was not, whatever the financial press wanted to call it, “market volatility.” It was central banks pumping trillions into asset markets to keep the economy from seizing up, and that public money finding its way, with the reliability of water running downhill, into the portfolios of people who were already rich enough to own the assets being inflated. The CEOs of Moderna and BioNTech became billionaires manufacturing a vaccine substantially financed by public research dollars, while fewer than one in a hundred people in low-income countries had received a single dose. Big Pharma did not lie about this. It didn’t have to. The system was built to reward it for behaving exactly as it did, and it behaved exactly as it was built to.

Here is the single-sentence version, the kind Murray’s editors keep telling him to cut and he keeps refusing to: the pandemic was a public health catastrophe and simultaneously the best year in the history of the modern billionaire class, and both of those sentences are true at once because the second one was never an accident.

The War Economy Never Ends

Then came the war economy, which is really just the pandemic economy wearing a different uniform. Global military spending hit $2.72 trillion in 2024 — the steepest year-on-year jump since the end of the Cold War — and the United States alone crossed $997 billion, roughly thirty-seven cents of every defence dollar spent on the planet. Between 2020 and 2024, five companies — Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman — split $771 billion in Pentagon contracts among themselves, more than double what Washington spent on diplomacy, development and humanitarian assistance combined over the same stretch. Legislation passed this past summer pushed U.S. military spending past the trillion-dollar mark for the first time, a threshold Congress crossed with roughly the ceremony of renewing a parking permit.

None of this is happening by accident, and none of it is happening without help. As of 2024, the arms industry employed 950 registered lobbyists in Washington — 220 more than in 2020 — working the armed services and appropriations committees with the patience of men who understand that the war never has to end, it just has to be perpetually about to get worse. Newer entrants like Anduril and Palantir, venture-funded and AI-flavoured, have muscled into the top hundred contractors on the promise of “innovation,” which in this context means the same wealth transfer with better branding and a Silicon Valley accent. The war doesn’t need to be won. It needs, structurally, to be ongoing — a renewable resource, harvested annually, with quarterly earnings calls.

Ellen Lord, who used to run acquisitions at the Pentagon before she went to work in the private sector, put it about as plainly as anyone in that world ever does: there’s more money now in the ties between the defence industry and private equity than in a career actually building weapons. Take a moment to appreciate the honesty of that. The people running the war machine are no longer pretending the point is winning wars. The point is the machine.

Greedflation and the Checkout-Line Class War

Back home, the same architecture runs on groceries. Corporate profits drove fifty-three percent of the inflation surge in the second and third quarters of 2023, according to the Groundwork Collaborative’s analysis of Commerce Department data — more than a third of all inflation since the pandemic began, in an economy where, for the four decades before Covid, profit margins had accounted for barely eleven percent of price increases. American grocery prices rose 23.5 percent between the end of 2019 and early 2024, comfortably outpacing the 18 percent increase in everything else, and corporate earnings calls from that same period are refreshingly candid on the subject, because the executives were talking to shareholders, not to the public, and they had no particular reason to lie to the room that pays their bonuses.

One might, in fairness, note that some economists — the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco among them — argue the greedflation thesis overstates its case, that markups tell a messier story than a single number can capture. Fine. Have that argument. But you will still, at the end of it, be standing in a grocery store paying $1.50 more for a loaf of bread than you should be, because Canadians already ran this experiment. Loblaw and its parent company George Weston fixed the price of bread across this country for fourteen years, from 2001 to 2015, until they got caught and eventually paid five hundred million dollars — the largest antitrust settlement in Canadian history — for a scheme Galen Weston described, with the sort of corporate remorse that costs nothing and changes nothing, as behaviour that “should never have happened.” It happened for fourteen years. It happened because it worked, and because getting caught was, on the balance sheet, still cheaper than not doing it. The pandemic didn’t invent price-gouging in this country. It just gave every grocer in Canada a supply-chain alibi to do openly what Loblaw had spent fourteen years doing in secret.

This is class war conducted through the checkout line, and the remarkable thing is how rarely anyone is required to use that phrase out loud.

The Historical Precedent They’d Rather You Forget

None of this is new, whatever the press releases would have you believe, and that is precisely the point Murray keeps having to make to people who should already know it. Naomi Klein spent an entire book describing how deliberately engineered disorientation — the shock of a coup, a hurricane, a currency collapse — has been used for half a century to push through economic policies that would never survive a functioning democratic debate. She was writing mostly about Pinochet’s Chile and Yeltsin’s Russia. She would recognize this decade instantly. The instrument hasn’t changed. Only the delivery mechanism has, and it has gotten smoother, faster, and considerably harder to see, because a national emergency renewed by press release generates less outrage than a general seizing a radio station.

It is worth remembering, too, that governments used to know how to claw the money back. After the Second World War, France taxed excessive wartime profiteering at a flat one hundred percent — not as a punitive gesture, but as a basic acknowledgment that fortunes made off collective catastrophe belong, in some meaningful part, to the collective that survived it. Iceland did something similar after 2008. The idea that windfall profits from a national or global emergency ought to be temporary, clawed back, redistributed, is not radical historical fringe thinking. It used to be standard policy in serious countries, including this one. What’s radical is the current arrangement, in which the emergency is permanent and the profits are permanent and the only thing anyone still calls temporary is the patience of the people paying for both.

How the Machine Sustains Itself

Here is what the permanent emergency economy actually requires to keep functioning, and it requires exactly three things. It requires a crisis frequent enough, or durable enough, that “getting back to normal” stops being a credible promise and starts being background noise nobody expects politicians to deliver on. It requires institutions — courts, regulators, legislatures — willing to treat emergency powers as a permanent feature of governance rather than the narrow, time-limited exception they were designed to be; Congress hasn’t terminated a single national emergency in the history of the Act that supposedly lets it. And it requires a press corps content to cover each new emergency as a discrete, isolated story — this war, this shortage, this outbreak — rather than as the fourth or fifth iteration of the identical extraction mechanism, because connecting those dots would mean admitting the crisis coverage itself has become part of the business model, generating the clicks and the ad revenue and the ratings that keep the emergency profitable for the people reporting on it too.

Take away any one of those three legs and the whole structure gets considerably harder to prop up. Which is, not coincidentally, exactly why none of the institutions positioned to remove one of those legs have shown the slightest appetite for doing it.

The Verdict

There is a version of this essay that ends by telling you it’s complicated, that reasonable people can disagree about the balance between security and liberty, growth and equity, emergency response and long-term planning. That version is a lie, and it is worth knowing exactly whose interests that lie serves. It is not complicated that fifty-one national emergencies currently sit on the books in a country not actually experiencing fifty-one simultaneous catastrophes. It is not complicated that five military contractors pocketed more public money over four years than the entire American diplomatic budget. It is not complicated that ten men doubled their fortunes while a hundred million people fell into poverty during the same eighteen months, and it is not complicated that a Canadian grocery chain spent fourteen years quietly overcharging this country for bread and called it, when caught, an unfortunate lapse in values.

What is complicated — deliberately, expensively, permanently complicated — is the architecture built to make sure nobody has to answer for any of it. That architecture has a name now. It’s the permanent emergency economy, and it does not require your belief to keep functioning. It only requires your exhaustion, your distraction, and your reasonable, decent, thoroughly weaponized assumption that eventually, someone in charge is going to declare the emergency over.

They won’t. There’s too much money in it staying exactly where it is.

The only remaining question is whether the rest of us intend to keep paying for a fire that certain very comfortable people have every financial incentive to keep burning — or whether we finally start asking, loudly and specifically and by name, who benefits every single time the sirens start again.