The United States economy was not performing well before the pandemic. That country's approach relied on profit maximization, which had been becoming inadequate for years now. The same approach was used in the 2009 swine flu outbreak, which was not a pandemic due to the low amount of confirmed deaths. Maximization of profits is how the European-American capitalist system operates. Australia had a similar system that collapsed in 1990 which triggered Australia's last recession prior to the pandemic in 1991. New Zealand had the same system as Australia until 2000, when the dot-com bubble crash that led to the 2001 recession caused Helen Clark to institute economic reforms that would prevent the country from experiencing a situation that was similar to that in North American and Europe with regards to the pandemic. Anyway the European-American private capitalist system had its first phase of collapse in 2008 and this led to the European sovereign debt crisis of 2010-2017 (the USA did not experience it until September 2019, when the Federal Reserve was forced to bail out the repo market six years after budget sequestration). Both the fiscal cliff and the sovereign debt crisis were resolved using austerity programs that led to the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump in 2016, as we as the election of similar populist leaders around North America, South America, Europe, and Africa between 2017 and 2019; the Chilean constitutional referendum of 2020 also happened as a result of similar austerity issues in Chile.