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Yuli Ban
Nov 22, 2016

Bot
I've collected a whole little library of links detailing that there's something rotten about the economy right now. The most shocking thing I found out, actually, was that everything we're seeing today on the stock market happened in 1999 and 2000. Some people on the board might be too young to remember when the Dow first hit 10,000. That was a big loving deal. And everyone was saying that we were in a bull market to end all bull markets, that we had entered the End of History and the 1997 recession, a very very mild one, was the "last one ever". And then the Dot-Com Bubble burst.

What's frightening is that the US economy was genuinely healthy at that time. The budget was balanced, debt was under control, and there were definitely no emergency measures in place to make sure the global economy didn't collapse. Around that same time, there were big economic collapses in Russia and East Asia, collapses that simply did not affect America at all. The '90s were Apex Americana, the point at which American hegemony was most unchallenged.

Compare to today, after 8 years of Obummer's zombie economic policies and 10 years after Dubya nearly led us to the Apocalypse. They don't tell you this on the news, but it's information you can easily find out just by looking on government websites. Not conspiracy websites, not wingnut "this chalk triangle in the street is evidence of the Crypto-Jewish Illuminati plot to control the omniverse" places, but genuine government websites. Despite the fact that the Great Recession ended in 2009 (officially; 2011 technically), the economy is structured as if we're still deep in recession. So deep that you'd think we were borderline in a depression. But supposedly we're in the middle of an 8-year long bull market. Dow's hit 20,000 due to the Trump Bump; unemployment's at 4.8%, thanks Obama; our economies are on a neverending upward trot to eternal greatness.
If that's the case, why are interest rates so low? Why have they only been raised twice in nine years? Why is the bond market crashing? Why are people pushing away American credit? Why are we still talking about bailing out banks (though to be fair, that's mostly an Italian problem right now)?

Hmm.


Something's not right. I bet Trump's most ardent Trumpettes will be the first to say "It's not gonna happen" or, at the very least, "It won't be so bad". If Clinton had won, Clintonoids would be screaming that Obama's era was the greatest period of economic expansion since the '50s and that the Great American Boom was going to accelerate under a second Clinton.
Seriously, it smells like poo poo in here. Not only that, but we can literally see the big, oily turd on the floor over there. Don't tell us it's not there or that it doesn't smell that bad. And there's a huge whale sitting outside, rear end in a top hat to the open window, and whose bowels are gurgling furiously. Something awful is about to happen. I'd rather get out of here while I still can and watch from a good, safe distance.
It's not a recession— it's a depression. Not necessarily on par with '29, but perhaps like '93. The old gay '93, that is, not the grungy one.

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sitchensis
Mar 4, 2009

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bJFa9tGSVs

Calibanibal
Aug 25, 2015

Yes OP i will buy your gold bullion, sign me up. do i just PM my credit card info or...?

N. Senada
May 17, 2011

My kidneys are busted
Bloated whale carcasses, in my economic stagnation? Thanks for the heads up OP!

got any sevens
Feb 9, 2013

by Cyrano4747
Yeah we're hosed, I saw it coming 5 years ago. Look out for number 1, the system's goin down in flames.

Quorum
Sep 24, 2014

REMIND ME AGAIN HOW THE LITTLE HORSE-SHAPED ONES MOVE?
If the American economy collapses on a scale akin to the Panic of 1893 or the Great Depression there will be no safe place, OP. Something is true now that was not then: the American economy is the lynchpin of the global economy, and if we burn, everyone else does, too.

Following the catastrophic realignment, this would likely no longer be the case, but the damage would be done. Of course, if history is any guide the us will have its New New Deal (and probably a nice healthy World War III), too.

Venomous
Nov 7, 2011





Quorum posted:

Of course, if history is any guide the us will have its New New Deal

the Democratic Party hasn't supported any form of left-wing or even centrist economics for at least 20 years + any attempts at economic reform in that direction would still be stonewalled by the GOP

the US is going to turn fascist, and the world will follow in its footsteps

e: I mean back in the 20s/30s there was afaik a p huge Keynesian or otherwise left-liberal contingent in the Democrats which supported the New Deal, but that's not been the case since the Bush administration at the very least. The Obama administration didn't exactly destroy the neoliberal consensus in the same way that the New Deal discredited laissez-faire economics for half a century

Venomous fucked around with this message at 11:13 on Apr 11, 2017

Ardennes
May 12, 2002

Venomous posted:

the Democratic Party hasn't supported any form of left-wing or even centrist economics for at least 20 years + any attempts at economic reform in that direction would still be stonewalled by the GOP

the US is going to turn fascist, and the world will follow in its footsteps

e: I mean back in the 20s/30s there was afaik a p huge Keynesian or otherwise left-liberal contingent in the Democrats which supported the New Deal, but that's not been the case since the Bush administration at the very least. The Obama administration didn't exactly destroy the neoliberal consensus in the same way that the New Deal discredited laissez-faire economics for half a century

I would say "largely embraced" rather then "didn't exactly destroy," at best Obama allowed some very mild Keynesianism in the first term and largely became a deficit hawk after that (that "grand bargain" always slipped through his hands).

I think we may get a slightly shift to the center at the beginning of a crisis with the hope that the Democrats (or similar parties elsewhere) can fix the problem and then it will immediately start to get worse after that.

Granted, I think we are still very much still in a relative "sunny" period of growth, but employment data should give us a good idea where we are going in 2 years. U6 is the best it has been since 2007, a year before the great recession.

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AceOfFlames
Oct 9, 2012

We already have a thread for this:

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3761067

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