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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%

#771

Post by throwaway789394 »

norswap wrote: post #645
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…

I don't wish it on you, but imagine that the fed stops propping up the financial markets though QE. "Irresponsibly over-leveraged and nearly bankrupted banks and corporations", allowed to crash and burn. If this happens, everybody will be worse off - rich & poor alike, but the poor will pay the brunt of the cost. Except this time it won't be just "taxpayer money" that is on the line. Consider it is possible for the f…

“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around(these banks) will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.” Thomas Jefferson

Maybe the system is working exactly as intended. This is a feature not a bug

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

#773

Post by WalterBright »

kamaal wrote: post #741
undefined1 wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or early enough $1,000 invested in AMZN is now worth over $1M. or $10 in Bitcoin would have done the trick.

The thing is there are were a lot of dot coms back then and no one really knew which one would have been the next Amazon. The entire push behind diversifying one's income is to ensure that people who don't have lots of $1000's to spare don't lose $1000s investing it behind few stocks. If you know the future. Tells us a few stocks where investing $1000 today would give you a million in 2 decades.

If you invest $1000 per year at 7%, you'll have $45,000 after 20 years. After 40 years (age 25 to 65), $215,000.

https://www.calculator.net/investment-calculator.html

For $5,000 per year, you'll have $1,073,000 after 40 years.

7% is the average stock market return, adjusted for inflation.

If you invest $0.00, you'll have $0.00 after 40 years.

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

#774

Post by CRConrad »

8bitsrule wrote: post #721
BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I note that the Nobel Prize in Economics was created by funding from a banker. 'Mainstream economists' have certainly not 'conferred the greatest benefit on mankind' nor has 'trickle-down' lifted all boats ... only the boats in the marina. As ye sow ...

By a National Bank actually, Sweden's “Fed”; not any private bank or banker.

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

#775

Post by [deleted] »

mike00632 wrote: post #723
undefined1 wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or early enough $1,000 invested in AMZN is now worth over $1M. or $10 in Bitcoin would have done the trick.

A lot of people did invest early in tech stocks... Pets.com, Webvan, Boo.com. And then there is crypto: "144 ICOs Launched During 2017 Failed Last Year" https://news.bitcoin.com/144-icos-2017-failed/ Do I really need to illustrate how dumb it is, the idea that the stock market and cryptocurrency are the cure to poverty?

[deleted]

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

#776

Post by unishark »

parasubvert wrote: post #697
jokethrowaway wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Peter Schiff has been wrong consistently for 15+ years. Why do you think his theory explains anything?

That's rather extreme. If he always predicts gloom and doom sometimes he will be right. Especially within the last 15 years. Wasn't he predicting the last financial crash for a couple years before it happened?

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

#777

Post by chii »

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…

> they were raised and educated by society and have inherited technology unprecedented in scale and influence.

any this opportunity was available to "everyone" in society. its just that only some chose to take it early on, and reaped the proportionate reward to having taken it on early (not knowing that it would lead to this end result). Now that it is known that tech is high pay, people now naively claim that it's unfair, and that the tech jobs should "pay" for this inequality of outcome.

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

#778

Post by arvinsim »

wernercd wrote: post #711
newacct583 wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're angry because it feels like everybody is getting rich and you aren't. This is uncharitable. In fact most middle class folks who sign on to this frame are motivated by basic ideas like justice and fairness. Realistically policies designed to address wealth inequality are going to make very little difference to anyone here making a typical engineering salary. It's easy to sign on to "a rising tide lifts all bo…

The problem is that more people are middle class+ than ever... so while you complain of "decades of waiting" the fact remains that all boats ARE rising. The only difference is that you now have a direct connection to the few that have risen faster - there have always been those people. But you now see them. They are still the 1% but they are in your face like never before. "it's time to try something else" What else…

IMO Capitalism is not sustainable.

And if this the best system that mankind can come up with, then the future looks bleak.

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

#779

Post by _qwfv »

hnick wrote: post #451
_qwfv wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marx presented this idea back in the 1860s. He phrased it a little differently and built the idea up from the idea of exchanging commodities. In Marx's text, he discusses the history of commodity exchange, how people usually exchanged Commodities for Money which they exchanged back into other Commodities they needed. (E.g. I'll sell you my wool for coin, which I can use to buy food.) He called this CMC exchange. (Com…

> why turn your money into commodities and back into money if you weren't going to get more money as a result I'm guessing this is oversimplified, but I haven't read the book. Otherwise, the simple fact is no trade in business is guaranteed, there will be plenty of such exchanges that lose money due to speculation. At the very least your buyer could pull out or go bankrupt before finalising the sale resulting in a fi…

Right, Marx is saying "why would someone do those exchanges unless you broadly believed you'd get a positive return."

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

#780

Post by chii »

MrMan wrote: post #736
willcipriano wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> But what can you do

you can try to convince people that buybacks are evil, and if enough concensus is reached, it will be outlawed.

The problem is that there's no good evidence that it's evil in the general case, and it's hard to convince large portions of shareholders that it is.

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