"I had predicted the actual meltdown for September of 2015, but I guess this is pretty close. I wonder how this will affect my life, if at all." If you predicted it, then it should at least make you rich? :)
Yeah, it should. He should have known to short-sell pretty much everything if he really predicted it. I remind everybody that it takes no money to short sell. If you really think everything is gonna tank, do it. Put your skin in the game.
Note well, however: This is almost always terrible financial advice. Don't do it unless you're prepared to be bankrupt if you're wrong.
Someone really bit the dust this morning in ETF land. Lots of US ETFs were down 10,20,30% and were halted due to circuit breakers. There is some quant/market-making firm out there that is really paying for this today.
Could one make a bot to make money off crashes like these (like gp post suggested). It would seem circuit breakers would limit that possibility, and also, didn't they revert trades in the past during such flash crashes as well?
Yes - if you have better information than everyone else - or at least can extrapolate where the fair value of products are based on where other things are trading - then you would be able to make a bunch of money. On the other hand - many of these names kept flipping their circuit breakers on and off. So, not much volume may have traded at these "wrong" prices. I was expecting a lot of CEE (Clearly Erroneous Executions) to be raised this morning in all these ETFs - but I haven't seen it yet.
We were also in uncharted territory when the stock market collapsed in 1929. The market had never crashed like that before. The market had also never crashed like 2000 because the internet tech sector had never existed like that before. The market had also never crashed like in 2008 because home loans had never been so lax in terms of lending such highly-leveraged loans to such low quality lenders. Every new crash li…
The crash (or correction) of 2015 might be because of student loans & labor participation rates of recent graduates. The load is such that many of them could not grow into the consumer role to the degree that the economy needed of them in order to grow. And reducing growth/recovery even further, stagnant wages further hold back consumption. 2008 and 2015 are economic events which feel to me like they're based in ineq…
"Second, those fluctuations will be unwittingly used as a Rorschach test by everyone with a political axe to grind."
Interest rates are nominal; they only matter relative to some equilibrium. The equilibrium interest rate is somewhere close to zero.
On earth, a zero interest rate indicates a sick or at least stalled economy. The rate cannot be held at zero for much longer without risking a deeper debt via evermore unhealthy credit expansion, yet the consequences of raising it, even a little, will likely crush global markets as investors react etc. There is no question this economy is quite sick and has been breathing with aid of the Fed's iron lung so long that…
The real-nominal confusion again. Zero interest rates wouldn't indicate a stalled economy if deflation was at 4%. They would be a terrible thing if inflation was high. Neither is true right now, though.
Actually, I think it's fair to point out that the sophistication of the financial markets, vis-a-vis fiat currency, drastically outstrips the capabilities of regulators and financial decision makers to comprehend and/or manage with any believable outcome.
It's less fair, though, to say, "Nobody knows with what will happen next, therefore X will happen next," as the grandparent did. Surrounding the argument from uncertainty with a few popular talking points doesn't make it any less fallacious.
I see the grandparent as pointing out Cause-and-Effect more than one of uncertainty, or simply dismissing volatility as media-fodder "political gamesmanship" as your response seemed to imply. I think there is a significant amount of visible actions and structures in global and US finance which indicate that yes, we have entered into conditions that refuse to abide by 'traditional thinking' on how to solve problems. Thus, I agree with the initial postulation that it is appropriate to be fearful of the conditions at present, built up over many years of other decisions, which may not be solvable by the same actors thus far.
> even the premise of index buying requires some smart timing Or just investing a regular amount of new money on a regular schedule, which will even out the timing issues.
Which underscores the value of starting to save for retirement in your 20s...
The crash (or correction) of 2015 might be because of student loans & labor participation rates of recent graduates. The load is such that many of them could not grow into the consumer role to the degree that the economy needed of them in order to grow. And reducing growth/recovery even further, stagnant wages further hold back consumption. 2008 and 2015 are economic events which feel to me like they're based in ineq…
"Second, those fluctuations will be unwittingly used as a Rorschach test by everyone with a political axe to grind." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10110809
The difficult part of arguing economics is that it's a feedback loop - not even a clean loop but a messy cyclic network. One can point a myriad of direct relationships between elements of the network which are true, yet completely miss why the overall network is moving one way or another. It's not just political axe's being ground (and dismissing arguments as political is itself political), but schools of economic theory and social values. If we actually knew what to concentrate on as the root drivers of crashes - we wouldn't have crashes.
Also of note: US worker demographics do not substantiate the narrative that a recovery is going on. Jobs added are typically in the service industry, and a large percentage of those are part-time situations. Also the only age group that has added jobs since 2008 is the 55 and up cohort, which only further punishes the under-employed youth with significant student loan / other debt burdens and stalls the general progr…
We will retire and the Fed will end up bailing out the IOUs on the SS trust fund. This is not a problem so long as it's done once. All SS money ends up strengthening the metric formerly known as M3, so it'll work out just fine. The problem is the closely-held belief that There Must Be Suffering or we're not being responsible adults. The economy has been liquidity constrained ( outside of bubbles ) since 1980, with th…
Look, even if the Baby Boomer cohort does retire and even if Social Security was funded properly, that leaves the stunning inflation of medical costs and significantly longer-than-forecasted life span of that population as yet one more entitlement economic choke-point that creates problems. There's also the closely held belief that "I paid into this system and I'm going to get everything I deserve!" which doesn't jibe with the decades of voting for people who mis-managed the finances. I don't forsee SS/entitlements "working out fine" barring drastic changes, such as collecting large swaths of destitute and poor Senior Citizens, busing them out to some reservation with centralized health care, and calling it a day.
Let's say all the wealth in the world, minus a few percent, belonged to 400 people. Can you think of some ways that would wreak havoc on the economy, even without triggering a "proletarian revolution?"
No, because an economic crisis is a fall in economic output. The point is that "undesirable wealth distribution" is not what an economic crisis is. If 400 people controlled everything, the world wouldn't be a great place to live, but the economy would probably be more stable.
I don't recall high Gini coefficients being associated with economic stability. The massive reduction in marginal utility from most people focusing only on immediate consumption, coupled with the massive oligopolism and centralization leading to price distortions -- those alone don't imply economic stability to me. An extreme oligopoly would likely imply civil unrest, so all else would suffer.