The Blame Game

As the inevitable economic disaster we’ve all been bracing for seems to finally be upon us, many business news outlets are scrambling to suss out a culprit. We spoke to some of our sources therein to gain insight on whose direction their blameful fingers are pointing.

The full names and workplaces of our sources have been omitted in order to protect their anonymity.

To start off with, we contacted a writer named Ali who is an insider at a certain business news site known for churning out engagement-bait articles with enraging, sharable headlines. Here’s what she had to say about what’s going on inside her publication:

“We’re under a lot of pressure to blame it on quiet quitting. Or quiet something. The ‘quiet’ stuff is our bread and butter over here. I think we’ve already laid out a lot of groundwork that quiet quitting and its many sub-buzzwords were already putting companies in financial peril, so we can always just build off that. It does get a little tricky to avoid referencing the articles that contradict the other articles, but honestly, we’re all used to that by now.”

As Ali gets her nose back to the grindstone to prove her worth for a company that will certainly pivot to AI as soon as the large language models suck just a little bit less, we also pivot to our friend at a more prestigious, albeit not above producing sleazy engagement-baity headlines, news source.

Remington (he told us to call him that, I don’t know why, his name is Ricky) is a reporter for a popular financial periodical we’ll refer to here as The Ball Skeet Gerbil. As he tells it, they’re talking a different approach:

“Oh, we’re definitely blaming this on Gen Z and Millennials. We didn’t even have to have a meeting about it. The second the news hit that the S&P was dropping we all knew we had to spin this to be about the younger generations’ work ethic, spending habits, pay expectations, that kind of stuff. I mean, just look at our primary demo. It’s all angry cranks ranting on Facebook and they eat the generational crap up!”

While Remington leaves us to work out how exactly he’ll make economic instability the fault of millennials eating too much avocado toast or zoomers refusing to breed, we turn our attention to our last friend and source in the business community.

Chris is a longtime contributor for a news site that primarily concerns itself with economics and those who closely study the economy. We’ll just go ahead and call it The Financialist.

“For us it’s all about work from home. And yes, they made me come into the office to tell me that. Every bad thing happening in the economy right now can be traced back to people leaving the office to work on a laptop next to their lavish swimming pools while cuddling their many cats. Wanna find how working from home is destroying the world economy? Well, I guess you’ll just have to read it for yourself when we post the article every few hours on the socials! And also because I haven’t figured out how to connect those two things yet. But we will! Rest assured that we will!”

Well, it looks like in the coming days and weeks we’ll have a plethora of hot takes to choose from with no shortage of blame for the working class whose fault all these outlets agree it obviously is. And while we seem to have all the major economic sacrificial lambs covered, we wondered if there was any angle we may be missing.

Just to see if they had anything new to add, we asked one business and tech blogger where they’d drop the blame for any oncoming economic storms.

“Where am I going to place the blame? How about exactly where it belongs: directly at the feet of the CEOs, particularly those who have come out of the management consulting sector, prioritize shareholder dividends above all else, and have the same perpetual-growth-at-all-costs business model as cancer, and produce nothing while burning money they took off hoodwinked investors and government subsidies. I don’t know, maybe blame them as they're the ones who got us into this mess.”

Nah, that seems a bit outlandish to us. Can you maybe name a group of people less likely to sue us for libel? We're really looking for something like “more children should have jobs” or “not enough people are working into their eighties”, something like that. Keep it snappy and maybe throw out a buzzword or two!

Yeah, he said we were “fuckin' ridiculous” and hung up on us. What an amateur.

Anyway, it looks like we have some reading to do if we ever want to know which goats to scape on during this financial doomsday. All we can say for certain right now is that while some industries may suffer, the business news media is sure to be cleaning up those delicious, profitable ad clicks!