This has always interested me, on an explorer’s level, the ruins of the plants have always really stuck in my mind. Growing up, it was always spoken of in the context of “US automakers couldn’t keep up with changing trends and they just lost it all” but that’s not true at all. Almost all of the companies involved with these types of abandonments are doing great, in fact, better than ever. When things really did get dire for US automakers during the recession around 2009, the goverment simply bailed them out with tax dollars.
An excerpt from the video: “It’s the excess of Capitalism. In some ways, people thought this was the failure of Capitalism but we could also see it as the success of Capitalism. The automobile industries got away like bandits. They got out of there, they took the money and left. They left the mess, they left a working class and a deteriorating environment for someone else to clean up.”
As an older person now, I wonder how many more of these export moves can occur in industries before the people expected to buy the imported product can no longer afford to.
There’s one crucial link missing in your assessment: economies are in shambles mostly because of that infinitesimal fraction of humanity’s efforts to hoard the wealth.
And note that I said wealth, not money: those are two completely separate things. Many of those billionaires have a lot more dollars than actual wealth.
Dollars only represent wealth insofar as they can be used for exploitation.