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America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

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Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#681

Post by natenthe »

BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #668
natenthe wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Mainstream actually educated economists are right, not people hyperventilating about money printing." The thesis of your post is literally a fallacious argument - the argument from authority. The textbook definition. Yes, the "experts" are always right, like the experts that ran LTCM, the hedge fund run by rocket scientists that crashed the economy (until being bailed out by the Fed) /s I would go on with more examp…

ouch burned... except that it isn't the thesis of my post, I just started it by hooking into your argument about education.

I didn't make an argument about education. I made a comment referencing mass financial and economic illiteracy in America.

An economic theory is not right or wrong, good or bad, or otherwise based what the "educated, mainstream experts" believe. The history of human knowledge is essentially a history of paradigms (sometimes temporarily useful) being proven completely wrong, with some non-mainstream ideas being proven right. QE and mainstream economics, in my opinion, will turn out the same way, and end up causing the destruction of arguably the wealthiest nation in human history.

It's only a "burn" if you actually think it's a legit argument. I was just pointing out that it is not.

"One of the great commandments of science is, "Mistrust arguments from authority." ... Too many such arguments have proved too painfully wrong. Authorities must prove their contentions like everybody else." - Carl Sagan

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#682

Post by jokethrowaway »

BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #520
pembrook wrote: post #480

> It amazes me why most people do not grasp this. I think it is lack of education. Huh? Literally everybody grasps this. This is the most widely parroted mainstream narrative about the economy right now on the internet. Hell, you can't throw a rock at the Wall Street Journal (conservative) or the New York Times (liberal) without hitting a sentence that mentions wealth inequality brought on by fed policy. For further…

Exactly. Mainstream actually educated economists are right, not people hyperventilating about money printing. On top of what you said about the effect of printing making valuations high, only temporarily and only on paper, the opposite lack of printing, is actual redistribution towards the rich in a much more real and persistent way. Insufficiently inflationary money can be used as a way for the rich to withdraw from…

While I agree with you on inflation, I disagree that mainstream (Keynesian) economists are in the right. I'm with Peter Schiff on this one.

The crises we're getting are the price to pay for government interference in a self regulating market.

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#683

Post by themacguffinman »

arrosenberg wrote: post #284
shireboy wrote: post #127

I'm definitely not 1%, and sympathize with/understand somewhat some of these claims. Bail-outs and unchecked government spending or borrowing from future generations worry me. However I'm also pretty aggressive at investing. I feel like in general my retirement and taxable investing has benefitted me financially, though I'm solidly middle class. I feel (with data to back me up) like I'm upwardly mobile, though still…

Your freedom is pretty narrow in scope though. Amazon has so much market power, and regulators are so weakened that instead of the government setting the boundaries, billionaires and PE are with financial weapons. Yeah, you can go pop a Shopify store open whenever you want, but if you want to succeed you are going to see a lot of Bezos-built barriers to climb. Further, do we have "greater access to markets" and is th…

> but if you want to succeed you are going to see a lot of Bezos-built barriers to climb.

Like what, though? How is Amazon unfairly stopping indie stores from succeeding?

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#684

Post by Sophistifunk »

kaishiro wrote: post #655
buzzert wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably the "other nations" are the tiny island nations (New Zealand, Singapore) who implemented extremely strict measures to re-open sooner. An extremely unfair comparison, in my opinion, considering the population difference, physical location, and trade obligations of the US and other countries in the EU.

Is Australia a "tiny island nation"?

Pretty much, we just happen to be on a big (empty) island.

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#685

Post by natenthe »

pembrook wrote: post #608
jkhdigital wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the point. The Fed essentially gained complete control over the value of the dollar once Nixon severed it from gold in the early 70s. Easy monetary policy has been the norm since the 1990s.

You only need to go back as far as the 2000s to see interest rates of 6+ percent. I'm not sure anyone would consider that "easy monetary policy." Also, you do know that inflation and boom-and-bust cycles still happened while we were on the gold standard right?

Business cycles and asset inflation are different. Business cycles are natural to capital markets, asset inflation is caused by massive artificial injections of money (a la quantitative easing).

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#686

Post by TrinaryWorksToo »

WalterBright wrote: post #666
TrinaryWorksToo wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and those smart enough to have invested in them. Correction: Wealthy enough to be able to invest in them.

Robinhood has conclusively shown in the last month that ordinary Americans, even poor ones, have access to investing in stocks. This includes access to margin and sophisticated options trading.

Access does not mean they have $10k to invest.

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#687

Post by mistermann »

evo_9 wrote: post #609
pembrook wrote: post #480

> It amazes me why most people do not grasp this. I think it is lack of education. Huh? Literally everybody grasps this. This is the most widely parroted mainstream narrative about the economy right now on the internet. Hell, you can't throw a rock at the Wall Street Journal (conservative) or the New York Times (liberal) without hitting a sentence that mentions wealth inequality brought on by fed policy. For further…

No, 100% for sure everyone does not know or understand this. Most of my family are clueless about this stuff; do you think Fox News - their and many peoples only news source - are sharing that bit of insight with their audience?

I've seen clips of Tucker Carlson talking about this sort of thing before. Not saying he's a righteous source of unbiased truth, but he's better than he often gets credit for imho.

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#688

Post by fat_pikachu »

tshaddox wrote: post #660
fat_pikachu wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The things that have seen large price increases are things that aren't scalable i.e. they still require the same amount of human input labor to produce Childcare is constrained by the fact that each childcare worker by law (for better or worse) can only look after so many children at once. This ratio varies by state but it's usually around 4 children per childcare worker. The result is that it has to be expensive bec…

I find it difficult to believe that the increase in university costs is significantly driven by increases in labor cost for the jobs actually related to delivering a university education. If anything I suspect there have been a significant decrease in the number of university employee-hours per student-credit-hour.

I'm not sure why it's difficult to believe. Universities are more than just faculty. In the past few decades, universities have become full service institutions that provide more than just education and have added an army of counselors and administrators.

see: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinesimon/2017/09/05/bureau...

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#689

Post by [deleted] »

natenthe wrote: post #57

Correction: The Fed's policies have taken $50T of wealth from the Bottom 90%. When you bail out irresponsibly over-leveraged and nearly bankrupted banks and corporations, and pay for those bailouts with tax-payer money, you steal from the poor and give to the rich. Most importantly, when the Fed decides to print money ad nauseam, they create massive asset inflation, which steals from the poor and gives to the rich. T…

[deleted]

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#690

Post by kaishiro »

Sophistifunk wrote: post #684
kaishiro wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Australia a "tiny island nation"?

Pretty much, we just happen to be on a big (empty) island.

After having lived through the lockdown in Melbourne myself, I think it's pretty unfair to the people here to suggest that the reason the cases are so low is because it's just "a big empty island", and not the result of the fairly hard lockdown that the people here had to endure.
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