Not sure if you’ve ever seen the 2009 documentary Collapse with the late Michael Ruppert but it’s a worthwhile watch and he has an insightful comment at the 37 minute mark that goes:

We live in an infinite growth paradigm which requires growth forever. It’s not that Bernie Madoff was a pyramid scheme or Stanford was a pyramid scheme, the whole economy is a pyramid scheme. The whole global economy cannot be sustained; it requires infinite growth. But infinite growth collides with finite energy. First law of thermodynamics: energy can neither be created nor destroyed. The second law: energy converts only in one direction, from usable to unusable; that’s called the law of entropy — things break down, and in every energy transaction some energy is always lost. So, you have finite energy and you have a financial paradigm which demands infinite growth and we are at the point in human history where the infinite growth paradigm collides with something that is more powerful than money.