|
When China has its coming implosion and damages the world economy expect to hear a bit of "we need a world government to make sure this doesn't happen, people are literally dying because of greed" and a cacophony of "PROTECTIVE TARIFFS!!! ISOLATIONISM!!! TRADE IS BAD!!! GLOBALIZATION IS AWFUL!!! XENOPHOBIA HATE HATE HATE THE CHINESE ARE AWFUL AND DID THIS ON PURPOSE ALSO IRAN IS INVOLVED SOMEHOW!!!" Meanwhile those 62 people that effectively own everything are going to mysteriously and suddenly own more while money they touched just happens to find its way into the pockets of people that find reasons to justify austerity.
|
# ¿ Jan 21, 2016 20:13 |
|
|
# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 09:57 |
|
Helsing posted:That assumes that some kind of left liberal reformism is the only solution to the crisis. I find that plausible from an ethical standpoint but not necessarily an economic one. Could be that some authoritarian political system will stumble onto a workable economic formula for the 21st century. Stranger things have happened. One of the big contradictions of it all is that poo poo is only going to get worse until governments start running into the banks and cracking heads.
|
# ¿ Jan 21, 2016 23:16 |
|
District Selectman posted:Yeah, if people under 50 could learn how to manufacture astrospace things, that would be cool. Old boomers keep retiring and dying. Literally everyone I worked with at NASA ~one year ago~ has retired or died. If you want a job forever, you just need to learn how to make space stuff and you're golden, I promise. Competency is barely a requirement anymore. Where do you go to make space things? I'm a CS major and would really be interested in writing programs for space things. Space is cool and good and I want to go there.
|
# ¿ Jan 22, 2016 16:21 |
|
Paradoxish posted:The real reason that China is a bit of a red herring is that the cause of the next recession doesn't really matter. They happen as just a normal part of the economic cycle, so if it's not China or cratering oil prices then it'll be something else that eventually slows growth. The problem isn't that we may or may not be going into another recession, it's that none of the structural issues from the 2008 crisis were dealt with and the global economy is fragile as gently caress as a result. Any sort of slow down in the near term is going to hit a lot of people very hard, and a slow down is inevitable even without anything disastrous happening. There's a reason the ECB responded to panic in the stock market with, effectively, "we will do literally anything." One of the issues there is that any downturn at all is going to hammer people that never quit getting hammered even harder. This is especially in light of the fact that the stock market, investors, and the rich are just demanding bigger returns every year on absolutely everything no matter what. They're squeezing harder and harder. This is going to make any downturn that happens even worse. Aside from that Wall Street never got over its gambling addiction and is looking for new ways to make huge bets while shuffling the losses onto everybody else. Meanwhile poverty is still on the rise, main street is suffering, the middle class is shrinking, and a tiny handful of people is owning more and more. The biggest issue right now isn't the cycle of up and down. You can plan for that and make policies to assuage the worst of the problems. That's kind of the point of social safety nets. "Oh hey the last recession eliminated your job? It's cool brah we got you covered until you get yourself a new one." The super rich don't want that to happen because somebody getting a paycheck but not working isn't making them profit which slows down the blood funnel.
|
# ¿ Jan 23, 2016 08:56 |
|
Employments numbers are talked about a lot because that matters a gently caress ton to most people. As we saw during the down turn your average working stiffs just don't have the resources to survive for tremendously long if their job goes away. If the "literally the number of jobs that exist currently" number goes down that fucks over a ton of people. It gets especially touchy in this environment of "we must cut funding to everything, all the time, forever" and shrinking benefits to encourage people to go find work. It matters because if the number of jobs is low then the people who control said jobs can control everybody else while keeping costs down. It's also problematic as the savings of everybody but the rich have been making GBS threads out while debt is piling up. The obscenely rich are sitting on trillions of dollars worldwide and they aren't sharing so the rest of us have to live as best we can on the leftovers, which the obscenely rich are hoarding and also not sharing.
|
# ¿ Jan 29, 2016 22:47 |
|
No I got the point it's just that that's brought up a lot because that's what every that isn't rich cares about; whether or not I'll have a job this year. CEO McRichpants isn't going to go hungry but his secretary's kids might starve if that job vanishes.
|
# ¿ Jan 29, 2016 23:45 |
|
Ardennes posted:A major problem for the US at this point is that almost every major economy has seen already significant devaluations, it is going to be nearly impossible to push a weak dollar policy. Of course, a real fiscal policy is now impossible. QE may cushion the fall a bit, but there is little evidence that loose monetary policy is actually enough to address looming structural issues with the US economy. One of the biggest issues is money circulation. You can stimulate an economy by dumping raw capital into it. You can seriously just spend your way out of a recession. A bit of inflation happens but inflation is generally impossible to avoid entirely. A healthy economy also tends to have a low level of inflation anyway. Once money gets moving around it improves for everybody. Right now money has a low velocity. A dollar isn't just a single dollar; if I give you a dollar for a sandwich you're going to take that dollar and spend it on something else. Too much saving is actually bad for the economy which is also why having public retirement funds and safety nets is a good thing. If you create a system where everybody needs to have multiple years of savings just to survive you have a lot of money sitting around doing nothing which is an issue. Which is another reason why a functional banking system is nice; to you that money is sitting there waiting for you but the bank gets to invest it. Anyway as it stands money doesn't have enough velocity because the super rich are sitting on absurd amounts of it while using their money, power, and influence to prevent Keynsian economics. They're furiously worshiping economic policies that are at this point well known to not work at all. They have their fingers in everything and have it set up that they can't lose. You saw this in the Great Recession; their gambles paid off? loving right, more money! Their gambles failed? They had passed off the liability already and bought insurance against it failing so loving right, more money! The blood funnel just constantly sucks money out of the economy and then sits on it. Money has no movement other than "out."
|
# ¿ Jan 30, 2016 17:36 |
|
rscott posted:I think he's talking about the estimated $10-20 trillion parked in off shore accounts not really doing anything at all, even ignoring the effects that has on the value of the dollar through monetary velocity, the $2-3 trillion dollars in government revenue that could be reasonably expected to be recovered of that money through taxes is not insignificant when it comes to the world's overall economic growth. That's exactly what I was talking about. Demand, as it turns out, is what drives an economy and as it stands worldwide demand is crapping out because people can't afford to buy much. When you have that much money being pulled out of the system and used to pull more money out of the system you have massive numbers of people who can't afford to much, if anything. With rising rent prices, rising cost of living, and stagnating wages the economy can't make any sort of meaningful improvements. Then you consider other things like the over $1 trillion and you've created a perfect economic poo poo storm. Now you have billions of frustrated, angry people in the world. The world's right wing political movements are seeing that and going "it's those people who aren't like us! Let's get them!"
|
# ¿ Jan 30, 2016 19:57 |
|
My Imaginary GF posted:Of course its doing something: its being invested and producing economic growth. The Cayman Islands are more safe than America because there it can be hidden and not taxed.
|
# ¿ Jan 30, 2016 21:20 |
|
ocrumsprug posted:Sorry if this is off topic. The big change that needs to happen is that central banks need to quit handing free money to the rich like it will help. The tiny/non-existent interest rates haven't done much other than hand free money to people who already don't need it. The big issue is where the money is being sent.
|
# ¿ Jan 31, 2016 17:39 |
|
side_burned posted:Is there any chance real-estate prices will see a contraction the way oil prices have? That's something I tell myself I want to see happen, but just like cheap gas I imagine there would some very undesirable consequences that would come with that. Probably. Real estate is a bubble again. Everybody wants the price of their land to go higher and higher all the time and people are opposing high-density development to drive their home values up.
|
# ¿ Feb 11, 2016 05:47 |
|
feedmegin posted:Trouble is, when the housing market does crash a lot of people will just deny reality and refuse to sell rather than allow their homes to ~drop in value~. It's not like most people (baby boomers/retirees especially) need to move house so they can just hang on indefinitely. Then when pappap dies and the kids have to figure out what to do with the house...then what? The housing situation in America is just completely loving insane. A lot of banks just really, really don't want to sign home loans anymore and millenials are too buried in student debt and lovely wages to buy. There are also several empty houses for every person who doesn't own a house. A poo poo load of houses are just owned by somebody but nobody is using them because nobody is buying/they ask too high a price so they don't lose money/it's in a place nobody wants to live anyway. Plus if a person gets a new job in a far off land they want but they have a house to get rid of...then what?
|
# ¿ Feb 11, 2016 12:40 |
|
Freezer posted:Well, that's just the chickens coming home to roost, isn't it? Turns out that if you create a generation of underpaid debtors with no sense of job/economic security, they will be hesitant to take 30 year gambles on overpriced assets. People buying poo poo is also what drives demand. Now that the rich has everybody's money they have no customers. People keep targeting the millenial market and asking "why can't we get them to buy anything?" without realizing that the answer is "they can't loving afford anything."
|
# ¿ Feb 11, 2016 17:43 |
|
MikeCrotch posted:Wasn't there a study done recently which was basically "Millenials Now Buying poo poo Because Their Average Salaries Have Gone Up", proving wrong all the marketers who thought the key to cracking the The funniest (and saddest) thing was that marketers apparently decided that millenials wanted overpriced garbage with flowery words. What millenials actually want is loving jobs. That and for their student loans to go away. Their average salaries have been creeping upward among those that managed to get jobs but with stagnating wages, piles of student debt, and rising living costs they still can't afford as much as their parents. A lot of it I think is the assumption that because millenials don't have kids and work fewer hours (because fewer of them have jobs) they're a bunch of self-absorbed prats that have to have their egos stroked and offered only the finest organic ingredients. The marketers in general are just plain missing why millenial wallets aren't flying open and vomiting cash everywhere.
|
# ¿ Feb 11, 2016 18:54 |
|
shrike82 posted:tbf, you're from Spain where basically no one works. It's true, though; millenials have been getting financially hosed and it's making them more cautious. It's also easy to see how much of a nasty bubble real estate is right now. Millenials also just plain don't have the job security needed to buy a house. They expect to change jobs within a few years so how the hell can they put down roots? Youth unemployment was also mentioned; when you look at the like 16 to 24 age bracket unemployment and underemployment are absolutely massive. It also doesn't help that college graduates just aren't finding jobs. Those that do actually win the game, find a good job, and get their loans to go away also are highly like to have at least a dozen friends who aren't doing that well and think "that could be me." Given how much information is available on the internet and how common knowledge the fuckery that led to the meltdown have become it's no wonder millenials aren't borrowing every cent they can and spending, spending, spending! They know full well their job is probably not a career and the company they work for will throw them out at the slightest provocation and are padding themselves financially because of it. This generation got screwed unbelievably hard and they know it. They're far more financially cynical.
|
# ¿ Feb 11, 2016 20:23 |
|
Akileese posted:Something my wife brought up that I never thought of (in regards to millennials not buying things like cars and mortages) is that the millennials that can afford to buy houses don't need a mortage as they're inheriting the houses from their baby boomer parents. Obviously inheritance of things like houses has always been a thing and I don't pretend to know nearly enough about the history of economics to know the effects of things like mortages in the 40s and 50s but I imagine it's possible this is playing a somewhat small part? Plus as others have said, for many millennials, their first exposure to adulthood was the financial crash of '08, which made of lot of them very wary. The 40's and 50's were a bizarre time because humanity as a whole doesn't tend to live in single-family dwellings. Apartments and communal living is pretty much the norm. The other side of millenials not buying homes is that they're increasingly moving to the cities where renting an apartment is the norm. The other big difference is there is a gently caress load more people now than 60 years ago. Putting everybody in a house is a god awfully inefficient use of land. When there were fewer people it isn't a huge deal but now we're seeing the nasty, nasty effects of urban sprawl. Living in the suburbs is just asking to deal with nonstop traffic nightmares and commutes that take unreasonable amounts of time. Millenials are increasingly going "meh, gently caress this I'm getting an apartment three miles from work and riding the bus." Once again it's a scale thing; suburbs just can't handle the amount of people we need them to now. Plus millenials are more likely to be environmentally conscious in their behavior. Commuting 60 minutes each way in a huge SUV is...not friendly to the rock we live on.
|
# ¿ Feb 11, 2016 20:32 |
|
shrike82 posted:I dunno ToxicSlurpee. A lot of the stuff you're saying seems to be normative rather than descriptive. Not really; just pointing out that millenials are cutting back on their consumption compared to their parents out of necessity. For better or for worse millenials have it worse than their parents, overall. Some are doing extremely well (STEM people, for example) but a larger chunk of them is getting hammered right in their collective dicks in every way possible. The other side of it is that I wanted to point out that commuting in a car from the suburbs has gotten terrible. Our infrastructure is crumbling for one and just isn't designed to handle the volume. Often it was designed 50 to 100 years ago and never updated. Now we have a political system rabidly opposed to any government spending at all preventing even maintaining it properly so it's falling apart, which just compounds the load problems. Retired/retiring boomers don't see much reason to move but also can't afford to because their homes won't sell, especially not for the prices they want. Younger people, who have fewer things tying them down to specific locations, can move but also don't have much choice but to rent. The net result is less consumption but why it's happening can be argued to be awful. Lacrosse posted:That'll be my only shot at home ownership once the global elite buy everything up as investments (and then let them sit empty and rot). And this just makes it worse. The number of empty houses in America is completely obscene; coupled with increasing rent for just that same reason and it's just plain more expensive to survive at all.
|
# ¿ Feb 12, 2016 02:57 |
|
One of the big issues with the housing market is that developers always think "what will make me the most money?" and luxury *thing* is what they tend to go to. This is why you have so drat many empty McMansions in America right now. The target market is always suburban white people with money. It also doesn't help that people living in areas where stuff that gets developed absolutely do not want low-income or affordable housing to go up because those people come with it.
|
# ¿ Feb 12, 2016 22:27 |
|
Brannock posted:Trying to outrace demand by building new supply seems like a losing proposition unless you address the population growth issues. America has added about 70 million people since 1990. All told we could easily house everybody that just can't happen because SOCIALISM . If you look at just houses there are like 6 empty houses for every homeless person. Apartments are basically never 100% full either but there's just this massive disconnect between development, where development needs to happen, where development is happening, and who it is targeting. The biggest issue is this "homes are an investment" thing though that connects to problems happening in America overall. Something only has value if you put money in one end and get more money out the other. Treating houses that way is stupid; homes are where you live.
|
# ¿ Feb 13, 2016 00:29 |
|
Cicero posted:It's almost like businesses will do what makes them the most money, and if you can only create a small number of new units due to zoning, of course you're gonna target the high end. Why wouldn't you? It's like if you said Toyota could only produce 10,000 cars a year and then acting surprised that they chose to only make Lexuses. Except the developers are frequently shooting themselves in the foot by creating entire developments of stuff nobody in the area can afford. Hence mentioning the McMansions. There are places where entire neighborhoods of fancy houses are just sitting empty because they are crappily built, overpriced giant houses nobody wants. Then they're whining "we gotta make our money!!!!" It'd be like if Toyota only made 10,000 cars a year but asked $1,000,000 for each of them. How many would they sell? It's strange because the same social class that's demanding bigger profit margins and exponential growth is loving it up for everybody else and now wondering how they can keep the growth up. They can't and the housing market is a prime example of that.
|
# ¿ Feb 13, 2016 00:43 |
|
Cicero posted:Source on developers constantly building McMansions that nobody wants to buy? I know that around the great recession that happened as demand for these dumb exurban developments basically evaporated overnight, but when they were still building them it did seem like the demand would be there. No but those areas are not the rest of the country and have their own problems. Last I heard those are full of demand shooting upward but supply stagnating because of NIMBYism and FYGMism. Pretty sure that's already been talked to as much as it can in this thread, though; not much you can do when nobody wants to let high-density housing anywhere near them.
|
# ¿ Feb 13, 2016 01:20 |
|
Admiral101 posted:Having too many people who want to live in the same area drives higher prices. There is no real solution to this outside of increasing supply via larger buildings with smaller apartments. Or are you intending to propose insanity like rent caps? One of the major reasons people want to move to the Bay Area is that there's a poo poo load of high paying tech jobs there and said techies end up driving a lot of demand. Tech giants offer tons of perks and that requires manpower, which creates jobs in the area. Plus that's been an urban area for quite a long time so you have a lot of families with a century of roots in the area. The other big issue is that when cost of living gets too high it can become impossible to move out. Unless you get a job offering relocation expenses you have to foot the bill for that yourself. A lot of the rest of the country is completely in the shitter. Sure you could move to, say, Pennsylvania which has a low cost of living but...why would you? Not a ton of jobs here. Pittsburgh is growing again but really like a third of the city is still 100% abandoned. Why willingly move into the Rust Belt?
|
# ¿ Feb 13, 2016 12:52 |
|
Cicero posted:Oh look: Good luck getting those zoning regulations loosened. One of the biggest issues, which gets said repeatedly, is rabid opposition to high-density construction. Yeah you can put up apartments quickly but, well, where do you build them? Every potential location has some excuse or another. It would block my view! I don't want those people in my neighborhood! Low-income housing increases crime rates! My land value would go down! I can't sell this house, it's been in the family for 150 years!
|
# ¿ Feb 14, 2016 00:39 |
|
Josh Lyman posted:Isn't some substantial portion of San Francisco real estate owned by vulture investors who rent it out on AirBnB? Yyyyup. San Francisco's real estate situation is basically a perfect poo poo storm right now in a bajillion different ways. The people who actually own all the land and buildings love it because they can just raise the rent every year and watch their land values go up for no effort beyond "all development is evil, we must destroy it at all costs."
|
# ¿ Apr 3, 2016 09:07 |
|
The other real snag is that cost of living is going up. Everybody but upper middle and higher is getting hosed in basically every economic way you can think of.
|
# ¿ Aug 11, 2016 17:49 |
|
Paradoxish posted:Yes and no. There was real, sustained wage growth at the very tail end of the 90s, for example. The crazy amounts of inflation that were happening in the late 70s also make the picture a lot muddier, because the high wage growth during that period wasn't actually keeping up with inflation at all. Just looking at wage growth alone makes it seem like it went off a cliff in the 80s, but that's only because wages weren't compensating for out of control inflation. Meanwhile colleges are panicking because everybody hates them now and the student debt crisis is, you know, a crisis. It's a very, very real problem when the people that do get those fancy jobs with decent pay thanks to a college education still live in poverty because of how much it costs them to pay it off. It gets even worse when you realize how badly consumer spending has been damaged by people who didn't find good jobs after paying the price tag for one. Try paying $70,000 of student loans when you make $8.50 an hour and are never, ever allowed to have 40 hours a week. A lot of these issues come together into a ticking time bomb, really; it's horrifying that the people buying politicians in America have an attitude of "meh, ignore it. It'll go away on its own. Hey, you think we can make me another billion this year?"
|
# ¿ Aug 11, 2016 23:37 |
|
tsa posted:People with fancy jobs don't graduate with much loan debt on average, and what debt they do have is easily payable with said fancy job. It's the loving rent / house prices where those jobs are that will kill you, not a couple hundo a month. I don't know of anyone like you are talking about beyond your occasional outlier. The problem is most people don't have what it takes to succeed in programs that lead to fancy jobs, or choose majors where there are no jobs, or only take a couple years of college and fail out. I think you're overstating it though, there are lots of programs that are now available to assist in paying off / eliminating the debt completely that weren't there just 10 years ago. We have some ways to go and definitely need some new legislation but no it's not a time bomb in any sort of sense. There is over a trillion dollars of student debt in America. Trillion. With a T.
|
# ¿ Aug 12, 2016 02:13 |
|
icantfindaname posted:I mean, to be fair nobody really has any concrete idea of how to fix the wage growth inequality problem, but I do think it's reasonable to expect a party nominally working for the economic interests of the majority of the public to act like they give even a single gently caress about the problem. You really can't say that for the people in charge of liberalism today Put regulations back on the banks. Increase minimum wage to where it should be. Tax the rich as heavily as they used to be taxed. Really, the entire reason is that banks managed to rig the game.
|
# ¿ Aug 12, 2016 23:05 |
|
Ardennes posted:I wanted to add, neither Mincome or a GMI is that useful of a proposal when you have strict budget restrictions in the first place as well as spiraling costs for necessary public goods. Not only is there not the funding or either program but the costs of education, housing and health care can and almost certainly eat up intended good of the program (or greatly balloon the costs). Which is really a good argument in favor of the government getting more control in the situation. What we're seeing overall right now is the horrible failure of American capitalism. Ironically enough it worked best when the government regulated the hell out of it.
|
# ¿ Aug 13, 2016 01:41 |
|
Ytlaya posted:I find that usually if you bring this up, conservatives (and many liberals as well) will say something along the lines of "well I'm also against corporate welfare." I'm sure it's just a total coincidence that 99.9% of what they talk and complain about is welfare for the poor. In the case of Republicans they'll typically say that subsidies don't count because they're paying the business to do something. It's fine to pay somebody to do something (unless it's the government hiring employees for their agencies, of course) but it's wrong to pay somebody to do nothing.
|
# ¿ Aug 18, 2016 02:34 |
|
One of the biggest problems is that the super duper ultra rich have their hands on most of the world's levers and real solutions involve them sharing more of the pie. They hate that.
|
# ¿ Aug 19, 2016 00:12 |
|
e_angst posted:So wait, the endgame of the very system that tore down feudalism is to transition back into feudalism? Capitalism the way people claim it works now does not exist and never has. What has actually existed is economic imperialism.
|
# ¿ Aug 19, 2016 17:54 |
|
Ynglaur posted:Counterpoint: in industries with low margins and high labor costs (e.g. fast food, grocery stores) it could result in very swift price increases. If you think fast food has bad margins I have bad news for you. If memory serves a lot of it is "franchise fees" which basically means every McDonald's is required to pay a large bag of money to the company every year just to exist. The other thing is that across the board in like every American business executives and their nepotosmed in relatives are ridiculously overpaid, which is an expense on the books. Well gawrsh, I'd just love to not pay starvation wages but my son saw the boat I keep my boats on and wants one too. Consider things like the fact that the guy who owns papa John's owns so many cars he has a multi floor garage with a car elevator. It's Hollywood accounting top to bottom.
|
# ¿ Aug 19, 2016 18:18 |
|
Ardennes posted:Minimum wage increases may indeed cause price increases, but then there is the question of what else do you at this point? A minimum wage is on of the few ways to adjust income levels that local governments in the US has and in all honesty, prices have increased since 2009. If you don't raise the minimum wage, you are effectively allow it to decline in real terms. Education isn't necessarily going to be an answer and neither is labor mobility (both are supply side fixes anyway). An a GMI/Mincome in the US is completely pie in the sky, hell it is near impossible to raise food stamp funding at this point either. The problem is that people frequently argue that any minimum wage increase at all will like triple the cost of a big mac when really even $15/hour will make them a few cents more expensive at most. Definitely not the economy-ending doom and gloom that people scream about. Which is why it's so god awful that people are arguing against paying a living wage; as has been said time and time again wages are stagnating, production is up, and spending power is down. Instead of the awesome utopia we were promised 30 years ago we're being shoved into a horrifying pit of poverty. It goes back to what I was saying before, really; even though Democrats at least pay lip service to things like income inequality the simple fact is that money buys elections in America. Neither party is going to go against the people with money simply because they're the ones that make the decisions. What they've decided on is not fixing problems but voting themselves more money because gently caress you.
|
# ¿ Aug 19, 2016 23:47 |
|
Ardennes posted:To be perfectly honest, I don't think anything is going to really change unless there is a internal or external threat to the way business is done. Putin's alliance with the populist right seems the closest thing to a challenge but even then it is still very much embedded in very much the same economic system as the rest of the world and doesn't offer any realistic long term alternative. The internal challenge is already brewing; as wages stagnate and more and more people end up being poor (at this point a majority of Americans are considered "poor") the middle class is going to contract. With white people increasingly becoming not a majority (and, well, more white people being poor) they can't just vote themselves above everybody else anymore, which means the rich can't use racism to divide the nation. They'll have to find something else (which is why I think they've thrown so much money into the GOP, really). However, things are bad enough for enough people that it's going to get very, very hard to keep doing that for long. One of the reasons pre-80's America actually worked was because enough people were doing well enough that they weren't willing to rock the boat all that much. As more and more Americans struggle harder and harder just to get by you can bet your rear end they're going to start rocking.
|
# ¿ Aug 20, 2016 00:19 |
|
BarbarianElephant posted:Markets like a Republican. That's all there is to it. Seems odd since it's generally Democrats that grow the economy. Yeah but Republicans lower my taxes right now! I demand instant gratification. We must have exponential growth! We must have the biggest growth possible this quarter at any cost. Inflate that bubble and then whine and blame Democrats when it pops.
|
# ¿ Dec 2, 2016 02:59 |
|
cheese posted:Everything is fine guys, its totally fine! This a sane and good thing, and the world economy is totally healthy! Probably. The super rich in the financial sector basically built a house of cards; an enormous one that was badly planned and erected on uneven ground near a fault line. Now, the rational answer is to carefully tear parts of it down, rearrange some things, and build up the foundation and, you know, actually use solid loving building materials but their only response has been "but then we'll lose our awesome house of cards! The only real answer is to make it even bigger and less stable." The world economy is a disaster waiting to happen but all of the right wing think tanks are vomiting praise of austerity politics and tax cuts on the rich which are, of course, accomplishing nothing but making a larger, less stable house of cards. If we don't have another Great Depression-level economic event I'll be surprised. Basically what's happening is capitalism is breaking down but nobody with money and power wants to get rid of it.
|
# ¿ Dec 6, 2016 01:16 |
|
Proud Christian Mom posted:You don't stop playing the game when you keep winning especially if you won't actually face any consequences of the entire thing collapsing. You can only impoverish and starve the non-rich so hard for so long before the pitchforks and torches come out.
|
# ¿ Dec 6, 2016 04:27 |
|
Freezer posted:Meanwhile, US stock markets hit another all time high. There's something weird going on here. Trump promised to drastically cut taxes on the rich which makes rich person income sources sexier. Trump also basically promised to openly pillage the government to give money to the rich. I imagine people are buying everything they can get their hands on in anything that could benefit from that. Apparently stuff like private prison stocks shot up like 40% almost overnight. Other people are buying because they think trump will actually massively grow the economy or bring work back to America. It's all still a bubbly house of cards ready to crash.
|
# ¿ Dec 7, 2016 22:34 |
|
|
# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 09:57 |
|
shrike82 posted:Lol at the people moving the goal posts from a recession is imminent to a recession will take place at some point in the future. Trump is pretty likely to cause untold economic woes to Main St. In the short term Wall St. and K St. will do just fine; they'll see pretty big gains. There are more jobs now than when the Great Recession hit sure but most of them suck. Wages are absolutely stagnant and more and more jobs are being automated away. Trump is going to build a flimsy house of cards on top of the house of cards that is the economy right now. poo poo will get bad. Whether it happens sooner or later is yet to be seen.
|
# ¿ Dec 8, 2016 03:23 |