2016 Economic Crisis Thread - Duck and Cover?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > 2016 Economic Crisis Thread - Duck and Cover?

Will the global economy implode in 2016?
	We're hosed - I have stocked up on canned goods
	My private security guards will shoot the paupers
	We'll be good or at least coast along
	I have no earthly clue

[Edit Poll (moderators only)]

View Results

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

I'm gonna ask something dumb: the DOW and NASDAQ and all that have been hitting records after Trump's election, and people are saying that means Trump is good for the economy. However, I don't really understand how we go from high DOW and NASDAQ to "everyone has jobs and money now". I also don't see how Trump himself is what caused the market changes. How does this matter and why is it happening?

# ¿ Dec 1, 2016 19:39

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 20, 2024 00:42

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

I had a (pretty uneducated) thought. If we do see another crash and depression, does that present an opportunity to buy up a bunch of cheap stock, or is that inadvisable? If everyone has the same idea, won't that cause stock prices to rise back up?

# ¿ Dec 31, 2016 04:44

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

Beowulfs_Ghost posted:

The problem is, some of that stock can become worthless is the company fails entirely.

In the near future, the companies that get bailed out are going to be at the whims of Trump and his friends. I guess it depends on how sure you are in buying the stocks of companies that Trump and friends favor.

NewForumSoftware posted:

Baron Rothschild, an 18th century British nobleman and member of the Rothschild banking family, is credited with saying that "The time to buy is when there's blood in the streets."

I think I'm gonna find some other way to make a living/save up for retirement and stuff.

edit: I also just can't really see a genuine, reliable way to make more than marginal profit off of the stock market without both a major crash and a whole bunch of luck. Honestly, it really terrifies me that we have things like the 401k that play with our futures based on the stock market - if there's a crash, there's a LOT of people that suddenly don't have the money to continue living past 65. How could anyone think this is a good idea?

Pollyanna fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Dec 31, 2016

# ¿ Dec 31, 2016 16:07

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

And yet another reason why I see really, really bad things on the horizon for us. Jesus.

edit: This makes me worry about what I'm gonna do for the future/my retirement/etc. gently caress it, socialism all the way. I think this is the point where people start getting politically antsy and pushy, so...welp, guess I know where that's going.

Pollyanna fucked around with this message at 21:26 on Dec 31, 2016

# ¿ Dec 31, 2016 21:16

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

MiddleOne posted:

Because just like you built the amount incrementally you will be draining the amount incrementally. Crashes and downturns don't really hold as much a sway when you're diversified across both stock markets and asset classes. You can just eat the small short-term loss because you will be dead in 20 years.

What? All you really need is time. A dead person could be a successful long-term investor given a couple of decades and a steady income. This is doubly true in the age of index funds were some lovely investor can't take your money and gamble it away on the derivatives market or whatever to earn himself a bonus.

What you cannot make without luck, insider trading or a crash is massive short-term gains.

I guess I don't quite understand how this all works. If this is the system we have to work with, I might as well figure out how to game it as much as possible...

Proud Christian Mom posted:

Thanks to 40 years of stagnant wages people are increasingly reliant on stock-based retirement packages. Of couse these are the same companies that have kept wages low and routinely fire thousands to appease the quarterly Wall Street gods so basically people can't win. Their retirement is directly at odds with their current employment.

... but this still isn't something we can keep up long-term. Honestly, we should be moving away from this crazy bullshit and towards something better.

# ¿ Dec 31, 2016 21:38

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

The end result of all this is that those white middle-upper class professionals won't have anyone to take care of them in their old age since their children will be too busy and poor to support them. This ends in tragedy for all involved.

# ¿ Jan 1, 2017 01:32

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

I don't care about the marginal growths and thingies and whatever, all I know is top 1% bottom 99% etc etc Bernie was right. Anything that evens out the inequality and makes it so that we aren't amazingly hosed would be great.

# ¿ Jan 1, 2017 02:08

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

New Year's Resolution: figure out how to make money off our hosed up system.

# ¿ Jan 1, 2017 06:19

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

Doc Hawkins posted:

Relax, we're developers. As capital continues to slosh around in search of returns, and people become more and more normalized to doing things online, the livelihood for lucky assholes like us almost assured. Heavily diversified after tax accounts are still a good option for people who can trust their own salaries.

The real problem is all the people who don't have that choice, who we can help through joint political action! And like, running free neighborhood breakfasts.

e: first draft sounded complacent, even smug, and that's not how i feel

Maybe, but I see the tech bubble collapsing soon. VCs are getting pissed that there are less and less unicorns out there and startups tend to fail a lot more often now. They've lost their luster and although software engineering is always going to be in demand in some way, I don't see it going on the up n up and instead see stagnation coming up. We'll see, I guess.

# ¿ Jan 1, 2017 15:28

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

ToxicSlurpee posted:

Frequently the plans are utterly misleading as well. At work we had an HR guy come around and show us the math on the plans. Turns out the most expensive one loving sucked and the cheapest one with the highest out of pocket maximum was actually the best deal, especially if something catastrophic happened to you.

The difference wasn't small, either; the "best" one was like $150 a month. The cheapest is $13.

Is this a general rule? Should I always go with the lower-cost one?

# ¿ Jan 4, 2017 04:56

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

ToxicSlurpee posted:

Even though tech is growing the amount of money being thrown at it is absolutely absurd. People are piling massive amounts of cash on basically any startup hoping that they'll get on the ground floor of the next Google or Microsoft. Tech will do fine but tech investment is bubbling.

Everybody needs technology these days so it won't be a disaster like a massive housing bubble but the financial sector is inflating everything it can get its blood funnel in right now in a desperate attempt to have exponential growth forever. They're failing and tech is pretty much the only thing that potentially has insane returns. Instead we get things like Theranos and Uber.

Welp, as long as I can still hold a job as a programmer... :pray:

# ¿ Jan 25, 2017 04:02

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

ToxicSlurpee posted:

You'll be fine until computers can program themselves. There's a massive shortage of programmers worldwide and even if the tech sector has an exploding bubble...well fact is every company will still need a website, the data will still need scienced, and somebody will still have to code the next Call of Halostrike Warfare 37: Now Even More Modern.

When computers can program themselves either we're all hosed or we get a Star Trek utopia.

True. By the time we get to that last part, we're probably turbofucked, and it'll be a ways off anyway.

Rime posted:

You seen the number of no-nothing code-illiterate imbeciles being pumped out by "bootcamps"? Specialized programming ain't dying, but the industry has taken the attitude that if it can't import slaves from India to drive down wages - it'll just manufacture an artificial glut of developers itself to achieve the same.

This too, though. I would actually argue that there's a surplus of developers out there, and the jobs that are available boil down to Rails monkey stuff as opposed to actually interesting stuff like systems programming and architecture. And those monkey jobs aren't going to last as companies go under.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2017 14:07

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 20, 2024 00:42

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

Nice piece of fish posted:

This. I've seen all sorts of arguments for why the super-rich deserve and have a right to enjoy their vast fortunes, but I find none of them convincing.

Millionaires I can live with. But billions? In private hands? As the Koch brothers among others have so thorougly demonstrated, a concentration of wealth is a concentration of power, and is undemocratic in its very nature.

I also don't believe that the super-rich 1% deserve what they have. After all, did they work for it? Can they have worked for it? Given the average worker's wage in the industrialized world, how many wage-units does the income of the super-rich represent? Is it possible or even fair that a person should be paid that amound when no individual human effort can possibly be worth this amount? Doctors, for instance, are higly paid because their personal efforts literally save lives. And the efforts of the super-rich supercede that? I can't believe that they do.

But what about rights, property rights etc?

Well, all that's being accomplished with the current approach is to let the super-rich gain a massive advantage from the societal contract, dispropotionately profiting from - and disproportionally affecting the politics of - a society that gets proportionally very little in return. It's very simple, you can only be super-rich if you do not contribute your fair share. So, what is "fair"? A balance of needs and considerations: Hundreds of thousands of poor people's needs towards food security, healthcare, housing and general living costs vs. a Trump or any of his cronies need for another golden toilet or useless luxury. It really does boil down to this, because in its essence any approach to rights and principles in life should fundamentally be pragmatic and not ideological.

What do I mean by pragmatism? Simple reason. It's pragmatically a horrible idea for society to discriminate based on race and gender, while ideologically you can justify all kinds of things. In a pragmatic sense, in a real sense, the super-rich are a new nobility: Laws do not apply to them equally, they live in massive comfort and mostly hereditary wealth (wealth that is inherited is easily utilized to increase wealth, tilting the scales disproportionally in their favour) and even sneer at the common people with the same contempt as the famous french aristocrats - and to paraphrase the great and late George Carlin: Please don't delude yourself into thinking that the 1% have anything but utter utter contempt for you.

In closing, gently caress the 1%, take everything they have for their role in taking everything they can from the 99%, and bear in mind the words of Mark Blyth: The Hamptons are not a defensible position. Money won't save them if the people start demanding fairness and egalitarian access to income, and our current trajectory will get us to that place. Soon.

This has been my rant, thank you for reading.

May I introduce you to a little something called democratic socialism?

# ¿ Feb 25, 2017 17:10

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > 2016 Economic Crisis Thread - Duck and Cover?