Maybe "suck" is more accurate.

But it is nothing new. Look through history and see the never-ending cycle of booms and busts, Depressions, Recessions, Panics, Bubbles, every age has had them, the names change but the causes and results are always the same. There have been so many they even have to be identified by year, like hurricanes. Just do a Google on "the panic of" to see a list of the prominent ones of just the 19th century. Of course, they were a lot more frequent and severe before 1929 when the government finally started regulating things. But we still get them, and there's no guarantee that we won't get another really catastrophic one in the future.

Why one year can be the height of prosperity, and the next a financial collapse, remains a mystery. After all, the farms, factories and mines don't disappear. The natural resources are still there. The skilled workers don't disappear. Nothing changes except that the internal automatic regulatory apparatus fails. Economists claim they know why, but they can't agree how, and most of them have an ideological axe to grind anyway so I don't trust them. People who make a living forecasting the system and working for it have no incentive to come out and declare that it is fundamentally unstable.

The problem is money. Money was invented in order to keep score, it represented a means of comparing the relative values of totally dissimilar commodities and as such it serves a useful purpose. But eventually money becomes an end in itself, and men in suits dealing with it all the time tend to forget the source of all wealth is human labor and the resources of the earth. Everything else is just stamp collecting.