Henry Ford wasn't a good person. He was a rabid antisemite. But even he knew that he wouldn't be able to sell cars indefinitely if people couldn't afford to buy them, so he raised wages. The bosses, as a class, no longer have to do this. They can make enough fake money out of debt to keep their businesses alive. So that's what they're doing.

All this means we get artificial mediocre prosperity that is contingent on their piles of money getting bigger (i.e., all economic growth, meager as it has been, goes to them). And we know that they are willing to crash everything (or, to give an example that has actually happened, make lots of people sick with Covid-19) to keep themselves in charge and their piles of money growing bigger.

If the consumer debt game ended for some reason, the whole system would collapse immediately.