In capitalism there exists what's called a Crisis of Overproduction. This is the real driving force of the boom-bust cycle. Industry produces too much supply, prices collapse, profits dwindle, and they conclude that the only way to bring profits back is to destroy excess supply and reestablish artificial scarcity.
They do this with employment too. As the supply of workers is actually limited, once full employment begins to arrive, wages naturally rise, as demand and supply reach parity, or demand exceeds supply. Rising wages cuts profit margins for the owners. So they move to fire people, blaming an adverse business environment. (There is an adverse business environment, they created it.)
The economic crisis is caused by the abundance of good things that would otherwise benefit society but not benefit capitalists. They manufacture the crisis to drive profit margins back up, and wages back down. Millions get laid off so that the rest can't negotiate for living wages. The crisis also has the effect that the smaller businesses can be swallowed up by the much more stable megacorporations that can survive the fallout.
In our current economic crisis, there's a third Crisis of Overproduction simultaneously. Overproduction of currency. The US flooded the market with trillions of dollars in freshly created currency, vastly increasing supply while demand was actually relatively flat/declining due to the pandemic shutting down or impacting big sectors of the economy. So we hit 10% inflation.
Their goal is to correct the excess supply of currency by increasing the cost of borrowing and decreasing the opportunity to borrow. (Borrowing creates currency at the moment the loan is issued). The Wall St presses explain this clearly when they say that the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates to slow down the economy. They also point out that recessions are opportunities for investors.
During these crises the big capitalists themselves rarely lose anything, they often profit off it as assets/capital are dumped by small investors and picked up by them. They consolidate their control with these crises. They take power away from the workers. And they squeeze us for every drop of dignity we have left before discarding us like trash.
Tldr; Overproduction leads to low profits, so capitalists manufacture a crisis to destroy this excess production, and excess currency, driving unemployment and contracting wages, so that their profit margins rise. It's a farce.