recessions go against their needs.
Not if they're trying to destroy a nation's economy as part of a long range plan.
In order to understand, one has to look at things from the point of view of the financier of government. Every time there is a war - he and his friends lend to both sides. They then must "manage" the end of the war politically - so both sides pay back all their loans. When the war is over, their is reconstruction - which requires also more government borrowing.
The more political influence the financier of government has, the more they can cause government to spend and borrow, which earns them more money.
How could a financial downturn be used ? It provides a public appetite for more financial regulation. Financial regulation is politically sheparded through the legislature to come out helping big finance and hurting their smaller competitors.
Larry Fink of BlackRock recently said "markets love totalitarian markets".
Fink Link
Monopolists need to keep generating an ROI, which gets extremely difficult as market share gets near 100%. Decent business folks break up their companies (for real) and do not keep trying to flog higher real unit prices out of their customers using the backing of the government. Monopolists seek to stamp out all competition; the best outcome they see is actually making their enterprise the official enterprise of the state and thus eliminating all their competition.
I could not understand this up until recently because I never thought about it from the monopolist's point of view, I was thinking from a small business person's point of view, where a thriving, fair and competitive market is a great thing.
Wall Street has never had a problem with Communism; they just kept it out of the press.