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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%

#731

Post by MrMan »

deelowe wrote: post #547
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…

We're entering a potentially deflationary period. An aging demographic and technology create deflarionary pressure as people leave the workforce and technology improved efficiency. The Fed wants to create inflation. We know what's going to happen over time by observing germany and japan.

We need more immigration it will have at least a temporary salutary effect on our underlying demographic issues. It’s weird to me that no arguments ever seem to reach the mainstream these days that population growth achieved by mass immigration worked for the Americas before ( and by worked I mean in a narrow economic sense it was attended by many bad problems )

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

#732

Post by [deleted] »

WalterBright wrote: post #586
pembrook wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have nothing against you personally. I'm just refuting your idea that Fed actions from the 2010s are responsible for wealth inequality that has been rising since the 1970s. So how do you explain everything that happened on the wealth inequality front from the 1970s up to the financial crisis of 2009? I don't agree with everything in the original article either, but many of the points it made are correct.

> how do you explain everything that happened on the wealth inequality front from the 1970s up to the financial crisis of 2009? In one word: computers. In tsunami after tsunami from 1975 to the present, computers have revolutionized everything we do. I remember one tsunami in 1975, when slide rules in September were $125 and by December they were $5 and in January they disappeared. The calculator had arrived. In 1980…

[deleted]

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

#733

Post by lasagnaphil »

Dma54rhs wrote: post #322
stjohnswarts wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correction: The 1% have manipulated the government to have obviously unfair political policies. They control advertising, media, and the government. I do blaim the rich, and it's from first principles. The only thing that ever puts a dent in it is grass roots efforts like BLM, unions, etc. We tried the gold standard, it is also a failure.

BLM was far from grassroots, Mueller investigation revealed us how it was propped up by Russian trolls. Heck they ran their biggest social media pages.

From what I’ve seen over various parts of the Internet, BLM’s pretty complicated. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a combination of actual people fed up with their neighborhood’s policing and wrecking shit up, along with some progressives who wanted the protest to be peaceful and instead hoped for policy-wide changes (through electorialism) from this, along with neoliberal shills (corporations and mainstream politicians) who wanted to co-opt it as a peaceful liberal protest and gain social prestige/status/clout without doing anything substantial. And maybe some Russians thought this was quite hilarious and tried to make the tensions a bit higher (by the way, can you provide a reliable link/source for the BLM Russian involvement thing, since it seems a bit dubious and the liberal establishment has developed a bad habit of blaming everything at Russia?)

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

#735

Post by jay_kyburz »

cromwellian wrote: post #652
throwaway9870 wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As opposed to having the government do what? Have a great COVID response? Have a coherent industrial policy? Have great fiscal management? Have financial integrity? Grant monopolies to service provides (ahem Comcast) instead of building proper infrastructure? Not building sufficient electrical infrastructure? Enticing poor young people to make terrible money decisions relative to school and then saddling them with no…

> Moderna created a vaccine in less than a day. Moderna benefited immensely from decades of publicly funded research as does most of Pharma, as well as direct aid from Emory University, NIAID, etc Look, if you believe the market works as the best mechanism for allocating goods and services, then you've also got to believe it won't work properly if prices are distorted, otherwise Garbage In, Garbage Out. If a firm is…

Great post! Thanks for taking the time to write it. It's a shame its so far down the page!

I do believe in capitalism, and I _am_ in favor of strongly policing the system so that it's fair for everybody. Some call it "big government"

a bit off topic, but it really bugs me when people talk about government like its some big external hostile force. It's our collective power, we should take ownership of it. If its not working that's our problem.

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

#736

Post by MrMan »

willcipriano wrote: post #628
chii wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> buy their own stock with debt? why not? What's wrong with altering a company's capital structure to be more efficient? Stocks have a cost (aka, cost of equity), just like debt. Sometimes, cost of equity is higher than cost of debt (aka, the interest rate). Sometimes, the cost of debt is higher than cost of equity. This is determined by the general market conditions and economic environment. A company may find itsel…

If the firm instead took out loans to pay out dividends would you feel differently? Now what if they did it every year at a increasing pace to the point where it's expected that firms take on debt to support ever larger dividends? That bubble pops eventually and is what I see happening with buybacks.

I am pretty sophisticated in terms of my acceptance of modern finance but I am a heels-dug-in naysayer when it comes to buybacks. I hate them and I think they are evil. But what can you do

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

#737

Post by MrMan »

willcipriano wrote: post #525
wyre wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think the average person really knows how stocks work and isn’t even aware firms are able to buyback stock with debt.

How many knew about CDOs before The Big Short?

Or how to run a baseball team before Moneyball

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

#738

Post by Gustomaximus »

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…

> 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.

I dont feel that's a mass read category. But go to the mass right news you wont see much on inequality at all (obviously you do on the left). Right news like Fox tends to be more about taxes taking your hard work away type rhetoric. And the 'bigger pie' arguement which sounds great but lacks practical application.

> The minute inflation starts creeping up, the federal reserve will have to increase interest rates and cut off the money printer. In an instant, wealth inequality will start shifting the other direction, and valuations will fall.

Really? My understanding is inflation tends to bring wealth inequality on the other end. People who own assets see these protected from value erosion while wages tend to get eroded.

I believe if you want to reduce wealth inequality you need many things but the core is around 1) strong progressive taxation, 2) market regulation to stop monopolistic and similar behaviour and 3) employee protection/regulation to allow workers to have some teeth in the wage negotiations.

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

#739

Post by MrMan »

clairity wrote: post #461
nostrademons wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard (from finance professionals) that big elephant in the room is corporate debt. Corporations need to roll over their debt when it comes due, and a fair amount of it is short-term paper. If interest rates rise, that debt will become a lot more expensive, which will make many of the more marginal companies insolvent. Not software companies, which are sitting on hoards of cash, but all of the ordinary manufactu…

large institutions going bankrupt doesn't mean millions of americans will be thrown out of work. that's a boogeyman used by economists to short-circuit that line of thinking because it threatens moneyed interests. the value of those businesses remains and they'll be quickly bought up and revitalized by excess capital looking for returns (part of the problem is concentrated wealth that doesn’t know what to do with its…

This!

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

#740

Post by [deleted] »

railsgirls112 wrote: post #713
lotsofpulp wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can one thousand people build the same amount as one million people? No. They can’t even build 1/1000th as much. Except that is one of the root causes for wealth/income disparity. A few thousand software developers can and did obviate maybe million+ secretaries, travel agents, book sellers, retail middlemen, map makers, camera manufacturers, advertisers etc. The reason tech companies have such high profits per empl…

> A few thousand software developers can and did obviate maybe million+ secretaries, travel agents, book sellers, retail middlemen, map makers, camera manufacturers, advertisers etc. Your point isn't necessarily wrong, but it's worth pointing out how that came to be. Said software developers did not appear out of thin air, they were raised and educated by society and have inherited technology unprecedented in scale a…

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