The hope is that a crash would lead to fire sale prices, and as for power, you may not need to run your system 24x7 depending on your use case.

As the other comment answered, if a crash materializes like the ones before (dotcom bubble, crypto crash, etc) you'd be able to get a lor of ram and a couple of high end GPUs (5090, 4090 and the like) for a grand or two. With that you can a pretty beefy model locally.