231–240 of 898 posts
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Why did it dip in the first place then? Within the first few weeks of Covid19 the circuit breakers were dripped many times, if the market is so forward looking, what happened then?
The market is only wrong when it goes down, it seems.
The general public is much more interested in why their 401k disappeared than they are interested in reading articles about crazy P/E ratios in bull markets.
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Sorry I’m not sure I understand the point you are making. Most models have the numbers of Americans living in poverty or lower class as above 50% of the US population. It’s unlikely if even what they term “lower-middle class” owns real estate.
Any model describing the median American as “lower class” is being unreasonable. Most Americans - not all, but most - live a comfortable life.
Even these[0] models have it at >=50% and they are at least 15 years old, and disparity has only increased since then.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
> And as has often been the case in recent years, investors find themselves faced with few attractive alternatives if they opt out of betting on stocks. The problem is so familiar it has its own acronym: TINA, or There Is No Alternative to stocks. Cash: Gets eaten away by inflation. Although the CPI doesn't indicate high inflation it only measures consumer goods. Inflation is there in the price of investments. If you…
Faith in humanity: buy stocks. No faith in humanity: buy gold. Large cap stocks are to some degree an international investment. REITs: well they are down, maybe more of an opportunity if only because the good stocks are so high.
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At the current death rate, we're on track to reach 200k dead by early July. And that's only the deaths that are being counted. There is a substantial increase in overall mortality beyond the year to year average, beyond the confirmed Covid deaths. Considering that this disease is causing pulmonary embolisms, strokes, heart attacks, and other manifestations of out of control clotting even in healthy young people, we m…
There are considerable financial incentives to "fudge the numbers" regarding corona. It's to the point where if someone has a stroke, and he has corona, it will be counted as a "corona death".
1 - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
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I feel like there is a decade of guillotines in the future that they are either not seeing or are looking way past. But then I've always been cynical about the growing divide between the uber-wealthy and the other 99% of this country.
Guillotines might have worked well in the past, but with modern weapons and technology, you can use a much smaller portion of the population to suppress a much larger portion of the population. You can pay 10% of the population well enough that they support the top 0.01%, and the top 10% can pay the next 20% to 30% well enough or provide a sufficient probability to move up (or illusion) that they are incentivized to…
As for how things are bad for the regular joe or jane while stocks go up; companies could literally enslave a good chunk of the population and still be profitable, meriting a high stock price - moreso, even. There's prior art here. High stock prices can be an indication that companies are just really good at extracting the wealth produced by labour.
The stock market looks to the future while common economic indicators like GDP and unemployment rates look to the recent past.
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I'm surprised the average Americans (the 90%) don't get that they are providing insurance to the 86% wealth of the top 10%, but get almost none of the gains.
> I'm surprised the average Americans (the 90%) don't get that they are providing insurance to the 86% wealth of the top 10%, but get almost none of the gains. Are you so sure that they don't get this? I guess that many do understand it and either would like a much more inequality-reducing tax structure, or envision themselves as (somehow!) becoming part of the top 10%.
I don't disagree with you but want to add some insight to this... My entire life I've been told the lie that if I "just work harder" I can be rich etc. Most of America thinks about themselves in this same way, and it's taken me years of traditional employment + risky startup opportunities to realize that no, success is not guaranteed if you "just work hard"... Honestly you just get nailed with the majority of work as an IC who's trying to crank it out vs. your peers who are off having "dev beers" at the trendy bar down the road.
The peers that I see that are "well off" often had huge monetary injections from their parents in either fully-paid education, first houses, vehicles, incestuous "investments" in their business, etc. Now, those same people that had everything handed to them on a silver platter are invested, some own rental properties, etc. to the point that they can choose not to work for long periods of time to just collect dividends/rent. Funny part - they still define themselves as people who have pulled themselves up by the bootstraps!
So yea - in the US we have a really unhealthy view/mentality around success and ignore the fact that the IT'S THE EXCEPTION for someone to truly "pull themselves up by the bootstraps" into any sort of significant wealth. Truth is most "rich" people had an incredible amount of external financial support and stability to get themselves there and maintain it.
Bring the downvotes, because you're darn tootin' I'm bitter about all of this.
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I'm surprised the average Americans (the 90%) don't get that they are providing insurance to the 86% wealth of the top 10%, but get almost none of the gains.
This is not at all the situation. Reality is the 1% (wealth) making the 10% (income) pay for the 90% (both) to support their investments with consumption and debt.
But if you prefer to lick the boots of our plutocratic overlords, feel free
I work at a big tech company. One of the big realizations we've made is that WFH is not killing our productivity - it may actually be increasing it. If that is widely true, it has huge implications, and points towards an enormous amount of value that can be unlocked, by allowing professionals to work wherever they want (presumably in lower CoL locales). This article indicates that the housing crisis costs the US econ…
My PC is in my living room and I'm on it, in the same seat, at the same desk, using the same monitor as I use for work, typing to you here on a Sunday afternoon. Tomorrow at 8:30 am I will be here, too. And I was here for hours reading the news and trying to find a couch online.
I can't wait NOT to WFH. I hate it. The option to do so is great, though -- maybe one Friday out of every two I will start to do it.