I mean, (in my semi-informed opinion) it's going to crash within the next year anyway, certainly within the next 5, and he's certainly only accelerated how hard it will do so. I don't think "I'd...
I mean, (in my semi-informed opinion) it's going to crash within the next year anyway, certainly within the next 5, and he's certainly only accelerated how hard it will do so. I don't think "I'd like to have a competent leader in office instead" is a real argument for impeachment, but it certainly fuels the desire.
I agree, we are currently in a bubble and moving towards some sort of a slump/recession/crash. If it happens after he is impeached, he would play it off like it happened because he was impeached....
I agree, we are currently in a bubble and moving towards some sort of a slump/recession/crash.
If it happens after he is impeached, he would play it off like it happened because he was impeached. Same thing if a Democrat gets elected in 2020 and the crash happens after the election, he would blame the new president for it. The flip side of that is if the person elected in 2020 does manage to stabilize things and save us from Trump idiocracy than he would still claim the success as his own.
Trump has never held himself accountable and will just continue shifting blame when it suits him.
I've gotten so tired of the idiots who are fooled by that garbage... the same thing happened with Bush and Obama. The economic structure of our country alone is an argument against living in it on...
I've gotten so tired of the idiots who are fooled by that garbage... the same thing happened with Bush and Obama. The economic structure of our country alone is an argument against living in it on so many levels...
As someone who has a decent grasp of how economics works, the complexities of it are one of the primary reasons why I bear no hope for democratic society in its current form. Say what you will about the Chinese dictatorship, but their government stands quite a bit of a better chance of surviving the next 100 years than one who can't even decide if trickle-down works or not. Their people might not be able to openly protest, but at least their hospitals are properly funded...
What chances do you give a growing and wealthier Chinese people of not wanting big disruptive changes. It was the bourgeois class that started the French revolution and chances are China is...
What chances do you give a growing and wealthier Chinese people of not wanting big disruptive changes. It was the bourgeois class that started the French revolution and chances are China is heading in that direction as their own middle class grows.
And honestly taking America as somekind of gold standard of democracy is a bit silly. There are many other democratice countries that can fund hospitals.
The Chinese are very comfortable, though, especially when compared to their previous generations. The advent of cheap food, television, internet and other disposable entertainment has (among other...
The Chinese are very comfortable, though, especially when compared to their previous generations. The advent of cheap food, television, internet and other disposable entertainment has (among other things) been one of the primary attributors to our world society's apathy in general (in my opinion) and so long as the chinese government continues to provide a functioning society for most of its people, I dont see a future where theyll suddenly desire something better. As far as autocracy goes, after all, when its managed correctly its most certainly the most effective form of government.
It's one thing to look back at your grandparents' time, and see how your life is so much better than theirs. It's another thing to look at your contemporaneous rulers and elite, and see how their...
The Chinese are very comfortable, though, especially when compared to their previous generations.
It's one thing to look back at your grandparents' time, and see how your life is so much better than theirs. It's another thing to look at your contemporaneous rulers and elite, and see how their life is so much better than yours. It's that tension between today's haves and have-nots which fuels revolutions. If you increase someone's quality of life two-fold but increase your own quality of life a hundred-fold, the end result is that they'll see you living 50 times better than them and resent you for it.
Not buying the propaganda about how great China's dictatorship is. China is still going through an incredibly messy transition from agrarian to industrial economics, and there are about 400...
Not buying the propaganda about how great China's dictatorship is. China is still going through an incredibly messy transition from agrarian to industrial economics, and there are about 400 million people who would count as impoverished by any standard. They don't get good hospitals (https://equityhealthj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12939-017-0543-9), they get the brunt of urban pollution, water table depletion, deforestation, labor exploitation...
China is copying 19th century Gilded Age economic growth models, 20th century military nationalism, with 21st century social controls. It might work in the short term, but the geography of China's claimed territory and the diversity of its ethnicities have always made central control unstable.
No propaganda, you probably know more about this subject that I do. My point was that the chinese authoritarian government is still vastly better at affecting change then the american system by...
No propaganda, you probably know more about this subject that I do. My point was that the chinese authoritarian government is still vastly better at affecting change then the american system by its nature, and has continued to improve over the last decade.
Yup. The Chinese government is inarguably evil, but along entirely different axis from Western governments' traditional vices (corruption, colonialism). And they have no reason to change--they...
Yup. The Chinese government is inarguably evil, but along entirely different axis from Western governments' traditional vices (corruption, colonialism). And they have no reason to change--they have thousands of years of history to point to and call success. But China was always pointedly insular and mainly only oppressed themselves. A new China ascendant on the world stage seems unstoppable. And if they ever grow a conscience, maybe that's the best chance for human survival. I don't know.
Even without one, I think they're in a far better position to act in the interest of self-preservation than basically anyone else. Western powers have shown throughout history that they've been...
Even without one, I think they're in a far better position to act in the interest of self-preservation than basically anyone else. Western powers have shown throughout history that they've been more interested in comfortable stagnation and self destruction than progression and reform. I don't think China's government can say the same, since it's changed quite radically multiple times in the last couple of decades, and is shaped to change again to solve its environmental issues in the coming years.
China has more than enough of those "Western" vices, especially if you count the Tibet occupation, as well as Chinese neocolonialism in African countries (the British/American model of buying off...
China has more than enough of those "Western" vices, especially if you count the Tibet occupation, as well as Chinese neocolonialism in African countries (the British/American model of buying off the local elites so they'll ignore human and resource exploitation by foreign companies)... There's no sign of any insular focus in the current Chinese regime.
Most of the local nationalist propaganda is aimed at reclaiming the prestige and territorial reach of the Imperial past; I'm concerned that there will be a soft or hard take-back of Taiwan that brings major power military conflict with the U.S.
While we certainly wouldn't dream of importing their system of government here in Europe or the USA, I'd say there is ample room for arguments here. 1.4 ***b***illions citizens, 55 ethnic groups,...
The Chinese government is inarguably evil
While we certainly wouldn't dream of importing their system of government here in Europe or the USA, I'd say there is ample room for arguments here.
1.4 ***b***illions citizens, 55 ethnic groups, an advanced economy, no famines in the last fifty years, no civil war since 1949, no foreign war since 1979 ...
I'd say there are a couple of things the Chinese government is doing right.
Now, of course, we won't talk about human rights here.
{citation needed} Seriously, the question is interesting. We see a lot of thing about China. Their astronomical currency reserves. Their manufacturing prowess, the New Silk Road, their slow but...
their hospitals are properly funded
{citation needed}
Seriously, the question is interesting. We see a lot of thing about China. Their astronomical currency reserves. Their manufacturing prowess, the New Silk Road, their slow but steady conquest of Africa, the occasional report on laogai, and so on. But I don't remember reading anything at all about how they care for the health of their 1.4 billion citizen. This, indeed, seems a topic worth exploring.
As someone not too familiar with the markets, and also not a U.S. citizen, can you state why you believe we're in a bubble? I'm not disagreeing, obviously no one can predict the future, but I'd...
I agree, we are currently in a bubble and moving towards some sort of a slump/recession/crash.
As someone not too familiar with the markets, and also not a U.S. citizen, can you state why you believe we're in a bubble? I'm not disagreeing, obviously no one can predict the future, but I'd just like some clarification so I can get up to speed.
So, econ 100 (just for a backdrop): First, you should understand that marcroeconomics is cyclical (or a wavelength, a pendulumn, etc) like everything else. People save, then they spend, then they...
So, econ 100 (just for a backdrop): First, you should understand that marcroeconomics is cyclical (or a wavelength, a pendulumn, etc) like everything else. People save, then they spend, then they save, then they spend. The federal reserve regulates this with things like interest rates and the price of bonds, and a bunch of other small tools I won't get into.
In a perfect economy, we'd see about X (current theory: 5) years of expansion and X (current theory: 5) years of recession, both of which would trend towards the overall upward-facing line which is our economy's growth. It looks like this, except the entire picture might be tilted up 15 degrees depending on how quickly the economy is expanding. The peaks represent the most spend-y, expansionist part of the timeline - the troughs represent the most save-y, contracted parts.
An unexpected period of extreme expansion is a boom, and results in inflation as the line (the average growth of the economy) suddenly jumps up. An unexpected period of extreme contraction is a bust, and results in deflation as the line falls down. Booms are usually dictated by the discovery of new resources, market innovations, and so on - things that make the system dramatically more productive. Busts, as you can imagine, are typically determined by the opposite.
Unfortunately, we're greedy, so our economic wavelength doesn't look like that. It looks like this. It jumps all over the damn place. We basically only want the highs, but economies don't work like that, so the lows come all at once to make up for them, then we overcompensate and things jump back up, and crash again. As a result we get 5-7 years of expansion, 1 year of extremely harsh crashes, and 2-4 years of recovery.
So, from a theoretical viewpoint, you should now understand that a recession of SOME kind is inevitable because that's just how macroeconomics works, for a variety of reasons.
As far as why this one will be particularly horrendous, there's a boatload of reasons. Everything ranging from the rampant greed of today's shareholder's, to Trump's tax break, to the nearly complete deregulation of banks, to the conglomeration of wealth as a whole, to the U.S.'s insane deficit (which is about to outpace the GDP), to the steadily-increasing costs of oil (and energy by extension), to the incredible amounts of debt that Americans have accrued, to our impending freshwater crisis, to even seemingly-unrelated things like climate change... almost every major problem our society has become aware of in the last 20 years will be coming to a head in the next decade, and the societal wealth we should be using to combat these issues is sitting in the pockets of the .01%. By the time these issues are resolved in any sense, our world will be as unrecognizable 20 years from now as ours is to the world 20 years ago.
If you want to know what will START the crash, though, it will be greedy shareholders. Endless growth is not sustainable, and we've entered an economy where it's now the norm to not just make a profit, but make MORE profit, every year, or else the business fails - and doesn't just fail, but crashes basically overnight. Combine this with a dangerously monopolized marketplace, and as soon as the next recession begins (which will be kicked off by the Fed curbing the dollar's inflation over the next year), companies will no longer be able to sustain their over-year profit increases, the market will crash as investors bail, and we'll see everything come tumbling down.
It shouldn't be too much longer, there's an open merge request for it that I haven't had a chance to review yet. I've never really understood why people are so dependent on that feature though,...
It shouldn't be too much longer, there's an open merge request for it that I haven't had a chance to review yet.
I've never really understood why people are so dependent on that feature though, there are so many options available for saving a link to something. Browser bookmarks, bookmarking services, even just pasting them into a text file. Those methods are often even superior to the native saving feature because they have folders/categories/tags, searching, etc.
But then you're relying on a third-party service to remain up for the lifetime you'd want to reference the link, to keep the same content at that link, and for the author of the original comment...
But then you're relying on a third-party service to remain up for the lifetime you'd want to reference the link, to keep the same content at that link, and for the author of the original comment to not edit or remove it.
That's a risky game, even with Deimos' lofty goals behind Tildes.
you're welcome! I wish there was a way to insulate from it, which is what's missing from that post. Unfortunately, I haven't yet found a way. If you find anything talking about that particular...
you're welcome! I wish there was a way to insulate from it, which is what's missing from that post. Unfortunately, I haven't yet found a way. If you find anything talking about that particular point, I'd love to see it!
Let me also note that economic concentration of wealth makes matters worse, not better. In a recession, the very rich can turn off the taps of spending by shutting down their no longer profitable...
Let me also note that economic concentration of wealth makes matters worse, not better. In a recession, the very rich can turn off the taps of spending by shutting down their no longer profitable enterprises. They continue to live comfortably, but cause collapsing demand and employment, leaving a starving underclass. Eventually, even the lesser and aspiring rich go broke because their notional wealth was invested in shuttered enterprises via marketplace speculation - that wealth simply disappears.
This precipitous economic halt is very hard to return from without government debt-based spending to restart demand. Wars and industrial production for military demand are one way that can happen.
This is the model for the Great Depression following the 1929 market crash, and among the factors that brought about the Second World War.
If you have broadly distributed prosperity, everyone doesn't stop spending/start saving simultaneously. There's continued spending for basic needs which maintains a baseline of demand and keeps unemployment lower. Many suffer in a downturn cycle, but there's no utter collapse.
What can an individual do to insulate themselves from this sort of economic hardship? I'm about a year out of school, lot of school loans, but I have a software engineering job that pays pretty...
What can an individual do to insulate themselves from this sort of economic hardship? I'm about a year out of school, lot of school loans, but I have a software engineering job that pays pretty well. Any advice is really appreciated, I've been concerned about a recession for a while and just want to make sure I'm prepared.
in addition to what the other guy said (which is a lot of awesome advice), I'd say just make sure to stay conscious of your surroundings. Being the (metaphorical) first in line helps....
in addition to what the other guy said (which is a lot of awesome advice), I'd say just make sure to stay conscious of your surroundings. Being the (metaphorical) first in line helps. Unfortunately, most of the ways that you could have once insulated yourself from economic downturns have mostly disappeared. If you can get a guaranteed, long-term (5-10 year), high interest (>5%) savings account, that'd be another good way to make sure your money stays safe.
The only two other things I'd add are that 401ks can be a great boom but make sure you go with the right option when deciding on one. 401ks are funded by stock investments, spread out to ensure your savings basically grows as the economy itself grows. As far as I know, there has never been a 10-year period in the U.S. where the stock market has not grown by some amount, but you should always make sure it's as low-risk and sound an investment as possible.
Also, don't go into debt. Ever. Prioritize paying off your student loans so that they're done ASAP, and from that point on, debt (aside from, as the other guy said, credit cards that you pay off every month) is an absolute no-no unless it's a lifestyle-threatening cause. The amount of interest that credit cards charge month-over-month should actually be fucking illegal, it's just wrong. Loans aren't much better, in my opinion - owning your own house (or just renting an apartment you can afford) during a recession is a lot better than trying to make home payments while your wallet's getting tight.
I thought governments will print more money during a recession effectively giving them a larger portion of the pie - so increasing inflation or am I missing something.
An unexpected period of extreme contraction is a bust, and results in deflation
I thought governments will print more money during a recession effectively giving them a larger portion of the pie - so increasing inflation or am I missing something.
In practice, yes, thats often what happens, but its not wise or healthy to do so (in my opinion). Saturating the market with money that rapidly becomes worthless is what leads to hyperinflation. I...
In practice, yes, thats often what happens, but its not wise or healthy to do so (in my opinion). Saturating the market with money that rapidly becomes worthless is what leads to hyperinflation. I dont know if the US government does this or not, but I think it does so only in a very tightly controlled manner to help ease the effects of a recession - it wont help in a crash.
Its definitely one of the other tools that I referred to at the top of the post, but I'm not informed enough to know best practices for it.
Yeah it sucks living with too much inflation but the alternative is not much better. Greece using the euro did not have the ability to deflate it's currency and that is part of the reason they...
Yeah it sucks living with too much inflation but the alternative is not much better. Greece using the euro did not have the ability to deflate it's currency and that is part of the reason they where/are still in so much economic difficulty.
Iirc the US has been practicing quantitative easing for some time now.
Yeah, no argument against that, but I think it's an argument against both extremes. Deflation can be just as crippling as inflation, but inflation is also, at the least, tied to growth. The trick...
Yeah, no argument against that, but I think it's an argument against both extremes. Deflation can be just as crippling as inflation, but inflation is also, at the least, tied to growth. The trick is to have a trickle of it.
I'm living in Turkey. Our currency deflates faster than balloon in last 3 years. Though unorthodox economic policies and political instability, it feels great not to bound with Euro.
I'm living in Turkey. Our currency deflates faster than balloon in last 3 years. Though unorthodox economic policies and political instability, it feels great not to bound with Euro.
You can have hyperinflation without government attempts at "pump-priming" (making money more available) to restart demand after a recession. Printing money was the German response to post-World...
You can have hyperinflation without government attempts at "pump-priming" (making money more available) to restart demand after a recession.
Printing money was the German response to post-World War I debt. When that hyperinflation combined with further recession in the 1920's market crashes, they had worthless money and mass unemployment.
We know what happened next.
But hyperinflation will always be caused by the government printing money, wont it? Unless, say, the 1% were to all empty their bank vaults tomorrow, give everyone millions of dollars, and flood...
But hyperinflation will always be caused by the government printing money, wont it? Unless, say, the 1% were to all empty their bank vaults tomorrow, give everyone millions of dollars, and flood our economy with cash, the government overprinting money is intrinsic to hyperinflation.
I completely disagree, although I understand why you'd say that. Impeachment is not a further weapon in a popularity contest. Just because someone's doing something you don't approve of doesn't...
I completely disagree, although I understand why you'd say that. Impeachment is not a further weapon in a popularity contest. Just because someone's doing something you don't approve of doesn't mean they're wrong. Trump happens to be doing something provably wrong which most of us ALSO don't approve of, but that doesn't mean that's always the case.
A dangerous thought to be had when it once would've meant we could've voted a president out for being anti-slavery or pro-suffrage.
That's not what I am talking about though. I am talking about a vote of no confidence, Like if a leader was starting to show signs of dementia or a substance abuser and it interfered with their...
someone's doing something you don't approve of doesn't mean they're wrong.
That's not what I am talking about though. I am talking about a vote of no confidence, Like if a leader was starting to show signs of dementia or a substance abuser and it interfered with their office.
Then we'd have an even more reactionary political system than we do now. Obama would've been voted out after the ACA was passed if we had that in place.
Then we'd have an even more reactionary political system than we do now. Obama would've been voted out after the ACA was passed if we had that in place.
That's a very good point assuming that opposition to the ACA was not more than a vocal minority. Also the ACA was a huge handout to the health care companies so who is to say the (oft-misplaced)...
That's a very good point assuming that opposition to the ACA was not more than a vocal minority. Also the ACA was a huge handout to the health care companies so who is to say the (oft-misplaced) outrage isn't justified in the end?
In such an instance I can see why you would want an informed leader type calling the shots when people don't know what's good for them. But then doesn't that mean you end up with a defacto technocracy where a learned elite benevolently enacts policies on behalf of a population that doesn't understand why they need said policy?
To me it seems like there needs to be some expectation of rationality on the part of citizens. Or something. I don't know. I guess I am just struggling with the matter of is it better to have democracy or good policy -- in a theoretical sense, not really w/r/t ACA in particular.
I'm just just sick of all of the fucking bullshit. One of the most powerful nations on the planet is dominated by an intellectually bankrupt political party that is in turn dominated by a faction...
I'm just just sick of all of the fucking bullshit.
One of the most powerful nations on the planet is dominated by an intellectually bankrupt political party that is in turn dominated by a faction of religious nuts who honestly appear to be determined to bring about human extinction. This would be the premise of a fucking Japanese role-playing game if Trump were a white-haired bishounen instead of a bloated orange grotesquery.
So, since I can't just shove a giant fucking sword up Trump's ass and summon Satan all over his henchmen and fix things that way, I settle for voting Democrat, donating to the ACLU, and shitposting about how we ought to issue a sudo shutdown -h now command to capitalism.
I've been consuming a lot of socialist/anarchist media recently: presentations by yanis varoufakis, zizek slovoj, richard wolff, chomsky, chris hedges, cornel west. Some of those lean more towards...
I've been consuming a lot of socialist/anarchist media recently: presentations by yanis varoufakis, zizek slovoj, richard wolff, chomsky, chris hedges, cornel west. Some of those lean more towards anarchism than socialism and they all have different ideas about what's wrong with capitalism, how wrong it is, how to fix it, if it should be fixed.
I think the most compelling to me has been Richard Wolff's argument for democratically organized labor cooperatives and implementing legislation that is conducive to their formation. I'm curious if he is on your radar, what you think about his ideas.
Check out David Graebers Debt: The first 5000 years. It's an anthropologists take on debt(and money in general) and it's relationship to society through history.
Check out David Graebers Debt: The first 5000 years. It's an anthropologists take on debt(and money in general) and it's relationship to society through history.
100% seconding this. Debt, despite its less then exciting name, is a uniquely educational and eye opening book. You won't look at money or exchange the same way after reading it.
100% seconding this. Debt, despite its less then exciting name, is a uniquely educational and eye opening book. You won't look at money or exchange the same way after reading it.
I haven't read Richard Wolff yet, and I have no intention of watching that long-ass video since it doesn't come with a transcript, but I do like the idea of democratically organized labor...
I haven't read Richard Wolff yet, and I have no intention of watching that long-ass video since it doesn't come with a transcript, but I do like the idea of democratically organized labor cooperatives. However, I don't think we should wait for legislation. We should form them now, and let the ruling classes deal with their existence as a fait accompli instead of asking for permission.
He's not wrong. The market is due for a correction anyway and the market will certainly react to the nation's chief executive being on the chopping block. That doesn't mean we shouldn't...
He's not wrong. The market is due for a correction anyway and the market will certainly react to the nation's chief executive being on the chopping block.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't collectively do the right thing even if it's going to be painful if it's necessary.
Republicans have been using the threat of impeachment as a rallying cry to their base, saying "you gotta come to the polls because if you don't they'll impeach our man." Democrats in office,...
Republicans have been using the threat of impeachment as a rallying cry to their base, saying "you gotta come to the polls because if you don't they'll impeach our man." Democrats in office, surprisingly, haven't been talking as much about impeachment, but have been signalling that certain action could push them there (such as firing Robert Muller). The reason why seems simple: without 67 votes in the senate, which requires at least 15 republicans, it isn't happening.
This is a campaign rhetorical strategy, and one that might actually even be true (it's been how long since the market has corrected; how many months of uninterrupted job growth?). But it's hardly something I would give much attention to.
Trump isn't winning friends in the ruling class - he's broadly impaired the flow of below-market labor, both unskilled and skilled. The haphazard tariffs are nightmares of economic uncertainty for...
Trump isn't winning friends in the ruling class - he's broadly impaired the flow of below-market labor, both unskilled and skilled. The haphazard tariffs are nightmares of economic uncertainty for industries at every scale. The tax cuts, which were the greatest interest of the very wealthy, are already a done deal.
Impeaching Trump is likely to improve market stability... Pence has always had a more classically Republican economic agenda, and it's likely he'll roll back the tariff own-goal.
Not necessarily. The market crashing a given? Sure, but when? Because/if trump get's impeached? That depends a lot on whether or not pence would keep things as they are, or change things...
Not necessarily. The market crashing a given? Sure, but when? Because/if trump get's impeached? That depends a lot on whether or not pence would keep things as they are, or change things slowly/radically. Or it could just crash because it was going to do so anyways. I don't think anything really bad happened because of clinton's impeachment, so being impeached is not necessarily a death knell for the market.
Well I mean if it's truly expected to crash and known in advance I think people will be ready - making bets that profit from his leaving, so maybe lots of money changes hands but I don't think it...
Well I mean if it's truly expected to crash and known in advance I think people will be ready - making bets that profit from his leaving, so maybe lots of money changes hands but I don't think it will crash.
I mean, (in my semi-informed opinion) it's going to crash within the next year anyway, certainly within the next 5, and he's certainly only accelerated how hard it will do so. I don't think "I'd like to have a competent leader in office instead" is a real argument for impeachment, but it certainly fuels the desire.
I agree, we are currently in a bubble and moving towards some sort of a slump/recession/crash.
If it happens after he is impeached, he would play it off like it happened because he was impeached. Same thing if a Democrat gets elected in 2020 and the crash happens after the election, he would blame the new president for it. The flip side of that is if the person elected in 2020 does manage to stabilize things and save us from Trump idiocracy than he would still claim the success as his own.
Trump has never held himself accountable and will just continue shifting blame when it suits him.
I've gotten so tired of the idiots who are fooled by that garbage... the same thing happened with Bush and Obama. The economic structure of our country alone is an argument against living in it on so many levels...
As someone who has a decent grasp of how economics works, the complexities of it are one of the primary reasons why I bear no hope for democratic society in its current form. Say what you will about the Chinese dictatorship, but their government stands quite a bit of a better chance of surviving the next 100 years than one who can't even decide if trickle-down works or not. Their people might not be able to openly protest, but at least their hospitals are properly funded...
What chances do you give a growing and wealthier Chinese people of not wanting big disruptive changes. It was the bourgeois class that started the French revolution and chances are China is heading in that direction as their own middle class grows.
And honestly taking America as somekind of gold standard of democracy is a bit silly. There are many other democratice countries that can fund hospitals.
The French monarchy did not have machine learning powered social credit.
The Chinese are very comfortable, though, especially when compared to their previous generations. The advent of cheap food, television, internet and other disposable entertainment has (among other things) been one of the primary attributors to our world society's apathy in general (in my opinion) and so long as the chinese government continues to provide a functioning society for most of its people, I dont see a future where theyll suddenly desire something better. As far as autocracy goes, after all, when its managed correctly its most certainly the most effective form of government.
It's one thing to look back at your grandparents' time, and see how your life is so much better than theirs. It's another thing to look at your contemporaneous rulers and elite, and see how their life is so much better than yours. It's that tension between today's haves and have-nots which fuels revolutions. If you increase someone's quality of life two-fold but increase your own quality of life a hundred-fold, the end result is that they'll see you living 50 times better than them and resent you for it.
Not buying the propaganda about how great China's dictatorship is. China is still going through an incredibly messy transition from agrarian to industrial economics, and there are about 400 million people who would count as impoverished by any standard. They don't get good hospitals (https://equityhealthj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12939-017-0543-9), they get the brunt of urban pollution, water table depletion, deforestation, labor exploitation...
China is copying 19th century Gilded Age economic growth models, 20th century military nationalism, with 21st century social controls. It might work in the short term, but the geography of China's claimed territory and the diversity of its ethnicities have always made central control unstable.
No propaganda, you probably know more about this subject that I do. My point was that the chinese authoritarian government is still vastly better at affecting change then the american system by its nature, and has continued to improve over the last decade.
Change is simpler when you aren't held politically accountable for the outcome.
Yup. The Chinese government is inarguably evil, but along entirely different axis from Western governments' traditional vices (corruption, colonialism). And they have no reason to change--they have thousands of years of history to point to and call success. But China was always pointedly insular and mainly only oppressed themselves. A new China ascendant on the world stage seems unstoppable. And if they ever grow a conscience, maybe that's the best chance for human survival. I don't know.
Even without one, I think they're in a far better position to act in the interest of self-preservation than basically anyone else. Western powers have shown throughout history that they've been more interested in comfortable stagnation and self destruction than progression and reform. I don't think China's government can say the same, since it's changed quite radically multiple times in the last couple of decades, and is shaped to change again to solve its environmental issues in the coming years.
China has more than enough of those "Western" vices, especially if you count the Tibet occupation, as well as Chinese neocolonialism in African countries (the British/American model of buying off the local elites so they'll ignore human and resource exploitation by foreign companies)... There's no sign of any insular focus in the current Chinese regime.
Most of the local nationalist propaganda is aimed at reclaiming the prestige and territorial reach of the Imperial past; I'm concerned that there will be a soft or hard take-back of Taiwan that brings major power military conflict with the U.S.
While we certainly wouldn't dream of importing their system of government here in Europe or the USA, I'd say there is ample room for arguments here.
1.4 ***b***illions citizens, 55 ethnic groups, an advanced economy, no famines in the last fifty years, no civil war since 1949, no foreign war since 1979 ...
I'd say there are a couple of things the Chinese government is doing right.
Now, of course, we won't talk about human rights here.
{citation needed}
Seriously, the question is interesting. We see a lot of thing about China. Their astronomical currency reserves. Their manufacturing prowess, the New Silk Road, their slow but steady conquest of Africa, the occasional report on laogai, and so on. But I don't remember reading anything at all about how they care for the health of their 1.4 billion citizen. This, indeed, seems a topic worth exploring.
Chinese life expectancy is higher than U.S. according to WHO. I don't how data is collected because of... You know, China is a bit "unreliable"
As someone not too familiar with the markets, and also not a U.S. citizen, can you state why you believe we're in a bubble? I'm not disagreeing, obviously no one can predict the future, but I'd just like some clarification so I can get up to speed.
So, econ 100 (just for a backdrop): First, you should understand that marcroeconomics is cyclical (or a wavelength, a pendulumn, etc) like everything else. People save, then they spend, then they save, then they spend. The federal reserve regulates this with things like interest rates and the price of bonds, and a bunch of other small tools I won't get into.
In a perfect economy, we'd see about X (current theory: 5) years of expansion and X (current theory: 5) years of recession, both of which would trend towards the overall upward-facing line which is our economy's growth. It looks like this, except the entire picture might be tilted up 15 degrees depending on how quickly the economy is expanding. The peaks represent the most spend-y, expansionist part of the timeline - the troughs represent the most save-y, contracted parts.
An unexpected period of extreme expansion is a boom, and results in inflation as the line (the average growth of the economy) suddenly jumps up. An unexpected period of extreme contraction is a bust, and results in deflation as the line falls down. Booms are usually dictated by the discovery of new resources, market innovations, and so on - things that make the system dramatically more productive. Busts, as you can imagine, are typically determined by the opposite.
Unfortunately, we're greedy, so our economic wavelength doesn't look like that. It looks like this. It jumps all over the damn place. We basically only want the highs, but economies don't work like that, so the lows come all at once to make up for them, then we overcompensate and things jump back up, and crash again. As a result we get 5-7 years of expansion, 1 year of extremely harsh crashes, and 2-4 years of recovery.
So, from a theoretical viewpoint, you should now understand that a recession of SOME kind is inevitable because that's just how macroeconomics works, for a variety of reasons.
As far as why this one will be particularly horrendous, there's a boatload of reasons. Everything ranging from the rampant greed of today's shareholder's, to Trump's tax break, to the nearly complete deregulation of banks, to the conglomeration of wealth as a whole, to the U.S.'s insane deficit (which is about to outpace the GDP), to the steadily-increasing costs of oil (and energy by extension), to the incredible amounts of debt that Americans have accrued, to our impending freshwater crisis, to even seemingly-unrelated things like climate change... almost every major problem our society has become aware of in the last 20 years will be coming to a head in the next decade, and the societal wealth we should be using to combat these issues is sitting in the pockets of the .01%. By the time these issues are resolved in any sense, our world will be as unrecognizable 20 years from now as ours is to the world 20 years ago.
If you want to know what will START the crash, though, it will be greedy shareholders. Endless growth is not sustainable, and we've entered an economy where it's now the norm to not just make a profit, but make MORE profit, every year, or else the business fails - and doesn't just fail, but crashes basically overnight. Combine this with a dangerously monopolized marketplace, and as soon as the next recession begins (which will be kicked off by the Fed curbing the dollar's inflation over the next year), companies will no longer be able to sustain their over-year profit increases, the market will crash as investors bail, and we'll see everything come tumbling down.
.....aaaaaand now I suddenly miss the ability to save comments like on Reddit.
Great post, good job!
It shouldn't be too much longer, there's an open merge request for it that I haven't had a chance to review yet.
I've never really understood why people are so dependent on that feature though, there are so many options available for saving a link to something. Browser bookmarks, bookmarking services, even just pasting them into a text file. Those methods are often even superior to the native saving feature because they have folders/categories/tags, searching, etc.
People are lazy, easier to click on "save" below a comment and then never look at it again.
But then you're relying on a third-party service to remain up for the lifetime you'd want to reference the link, to keep the same content at that link, and for the author of the original comment to not edit or remove it.
That's a risky game, even with Deimos' lofty goals behind Tildes.
Well-formed response and easily understandable. Thanks!
you're welcome! I wish there was a way to insulate from it, which is what's missing from that post. Unfortunately, I haven't yet found a way. If you find anything talking about that particular point, I'd love to see it!
Let me also note that economic concentration of wealth makes matters worse, not better. In a recession, the very rich can turn off the taps of spending by shutting down their no longer profitable enterprises. They continue to live comfortably, but cause collapsing demand and employment, leaving a starving underclass. Eventually, even the lesser and aspiring rich go broke because their notional wealth was invested in shuttered enterprises via marketplace speculation - that wealth simply disappears.
This precipitous economic halt is very hard to return from without government debt-based spending to restart demand. Wars and industrial production for military demand are one way that can happen.
This is the model for the Great Depression following the 1929 market crash, and among the factors that brought about the Second World War.
If you have broadly distributed prosperity, everyone doesn't stop spending/start saving simultaneously. There's continued spending for basic needs which maintains a baseline of demand and keeps unemployment lower. Many suffer in a downturn cycle, but there's no utter collapse.
What can an individual do to insulate themselves from this sort of economic hardship? I'm about a year out of school, lot of school loans, but I have a software engineering job that pays pretty well. Any advice is really appreciated, I've been concerned about a recession for a while and just want to make sure I'm prepared.
Thank you for such a detailed post! Definitely helps alleviate some fears, and the advice is really appreciated!
in addition to what the other guy said (which is a lot of awesome advice), I'd say just make sure to stay conscious of your surroundings. Being the (metaphorical) first in line helps. Unfortunately, most of the ways that you could have once insulated yourself from economic downturns have mostly disappeared. If you can get a guaranteed, long-term (5-10 year), high interest (>5%) savings account, that'd be another good way to make sure your money stays safe.
The only two other things I'd add are that 401ks can be a great boom but make sure you go with the right option when deciding on one. 401ks are funded by stock investments, spread out to ensure your savings basically grows as the economy itself grows. As far as I know, there has never been a 10-year period in the U.S. where the stock market has not grown by some amount, but you should always make sure it's as low-risk and sound an investment as possible.
Also, don't go into debt. Ever. Prioritize paying off your student loans so that they're done ASAP, and from that point on, debt (aside from, as the other guy said, credit cards that you pay off every month) is an absolute no-no unless it's a lifestyle-threatening cause. The amount of interest that credit cards charge month-over-month should actually be fucking illegal, it's just wrong. Loans aren't much better, in my opinion - owning your own house (or just renting an apartment you can afford) during a recession is a lot better than trying to make home payments while your wallet's getting tight.
I thought governments will print more money during a recession effectively giving them a larger portion of the pie - so increasing inflation or am I missing something.
In practice, yes, thats often what happens, but its not wise or healthy to do so (in my opinion). Saturating the market with money that rapidly becomes worthless is what leads to hyperinflation. I dont know if the US government does this or not, but I think it does so only in a very tightly controlled manner to help ease the effects of a recession - it wont help in a crash.
Its definitely one of the other tools that I referred to at the top of the post, but I'm not informed enough to know best practices for it.
Yeah it sucks living with too much inflation but the alternative is not much better. Greece using the euro did not have the ability to deflate it's currency and that is part of the reason they where/are still in so much economic difficulty.
Iirc the US has been practicing quantitative easing for some time now.
Yeah, no argument against that, but I think it's an argument against both extremes. Deflation can be just as crippling as inflation, but inflation is also, at the least, tied to growth. The trick is to have a trickle of it.
I'm living in Turkey. Our currency deflates faster than balloon in last 3 years. Though unorthodox economic policies and political instability, it feels great not to bound with Euro.
You can have hyperinflation without government attempts at "pump-priming" (making money more available) to restart demand after a recession.
Printing money was the German response to post-World War I debt. When that hyperinflation combined with further recession in the 1920's market crashes, they had worthless money and mass unemployment.
We know what happened next.
But hyperinflation will always be caused by the government printing money, wont it? Unless, say, the 1% were to all empty their bank vaults tomorrow, give everyone millions of dollars, and flood our economy with cash, the government overprinting money is intrinsic to hyperinflation.
I am soooo not qualified to properly answer this for you.
But, this TED-Ed video is pretty helpful in understanding economic bubbles.
Here’s a decent article
The beautiful thing is, after he is impeached, nobody has to care what he does or doesn't say.
Well then it damn well should be. Seems nuts that we can't vote-of-no-confidence the president.
I completely disagree, although I understand why you'd say that. Impeachment is not a further weapon in a popularity contest. Just because someone's doing something you don't approve of doesn't mean they're wrong. Trump happens to be doing something provably wrong which most of us ALSO don't approve of, but that doesn't mean that's always the case.
A dangerous thought to be had when it once would've meant we could've voted a president out for being anti-slavery or pro-suffrage.
That's not what I am talking about though. I am talking about a vote of no confidence, Like if a leader was starting to show signs of dementia or a substance abuser and it interfered with their office.
Then we'd have an even more reactionary political system than we do now. Obama would've been voted out after the ACA was passed if we had that in place.
That's a very good point assuming that opposition to the ACA was not more than a vocal minority. Also the ACA was a huge handout to the health care companies so who is to say the (oft-misplaced) outrage isn't justified in the end?
In such an instance I can see why you would want an informed leader type calling the shots when people don't know what's good for them. But then doesn't that mean you end up with a defacto technocracy where a learned elite benevolently enacts policies on behalf of a population that doesn't understand why they need said policy?
To me it seems like there needs to be some expectation of rationality on the part of citizens. Or something. I don't know. I guess I am just struggling with the matter of is it better to have democracy or good policy -- in a theoretical sense, not really w/r/t ACA in particular.
But then so would have Bush in the run-up to the Iraq War or after the Supreme Court ruling re: Florida. Or even Reagan after S&L or Iran Contra.
Let's crash the economy. Permanently.
I like your style.
I'm just just sick of all of the fucking bullshit.
One of the most powerful nations on the planet is dominated by an intellectually bankrupt political party that is in turn dominated by a faction of religious nuts who honestly appear to be determined to bring about human extinction. This would be the premise of a fucking Japanese role-playing game if Trump were a white-haired bishounen instead of a bloated orange grotesquery.
So, since I can't just shove a giant fucking sword up Trump's ass and summon Satan all over his henchmen and fix things that way, I settle for voting Democrat, donating to the ACLU, and shitposting about how we ought to issue a
sudo shutdown -h nowcommand to capitalism.I like your style.
I've been consuming a lot of socialist/anarchist media recently: presentations by yanis varoufakis, zizek slovoj, richard wolff, chomsky, chris hedges, cornel west. Some of those lean more towards anarchism than socialism and they all have different ideas about what's wrong with capitalism, how wrong it is, how to fix it, if it should be fixed.
I think the most compelling to me has been Richard Wolff's argument for democratically organized labor cooperatives and implementing legislation that is conducive to their formation. I'm curious if he is on your radar, what you think about his ideas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXNrVaJJfHA
Check out David Graebers Debt: The first 5000 years. It's an anthropologists take on debt(and money in general) and it's relationship to society through history.
100% seconding this. Debt, despite its less then exciting name, is a uniquely educational and eye opening book. You won't look at money or exchange the same way after reading it.
I haven't read Richard Wolff yet, and I have no intention of watching that long-ass video since it doesn't come with a transcript, but I do like the idea of democratically organized labor cooperatives. However, I don't think we should wait for legislation. We should form them now, and let the ruling classes deal with their existence as a fait accompli instead of asking for permission.
That's happening in the U.S., in spite of the political process... just not quickly or broadly enough.
https://www.thenation.com/article/meet-the-radical-workers-cooperative-growing-in-the-heart-of-the-deep-south/
And the word we're dancing around for this model is syndicalism.
Why does it need to be permanent this time and what are we doing afterward to make things better?
He's not wrong. The market is due for a correction anyway and the market will certainly react to the nation's chief executive being on the chopping block.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't collectively do the right thing even if it's going to be painful if it's necessary.
Republicans have been using the threat of impeachment as a rallying cry to their base, saying "you gotta come to the polls because if you don't they'll impeach our man." Democrats in office, surprisingly, haven't been talking as much about impeachment, but have been signalling that certain action could push them there (such as firing Robert Muller). The reason why seems simple: without 67 votes in the senate, which requires at least 15 republicans, it isn't happening.
This is a campaign rhetorical strategy, and one that might actually even be true (it's been how long since the market has corrected; how many months of uninterrupted job growth?). But it's hardly something I would give much attention to.
Trump isn't winning friends in the ruling class - he's broadly impaired the flow of below-market labor, both unskilled and skilled. The haphazard tariffs are nightmares of economic uncertainty for industries at every scale. The tax cuts, which were the greatest interest of the very wealthy, are already a done deal.
Impeaching Trump is likely to improve market stability... Pence has always had a more classically Republican economic agenda, and it's likely he'll roll back the tariff own-goal.
Well that's a given regardless of how one sees Trump. Political stability is often a factor in market fluctuations.
Not necessarily. The market crashing a given? Sure, but when? Because/if trump get's impeached? That depends a lot on whether or not pence would keep things as they are, or change things slowly/radically. Or it could just crash because it was going to do so anyways. I don't think anything really bad happened because of clinton's impeachment, so being impeached is not necessarily a death knell for the market.
Well I mean if it's truly expected to crash and known in advance I think people will be ready - making bets that profit from his leaving, so maybe lots of money changes hands but I don't think it will crash.