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There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

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Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#41

Post by freeone3000 »

wayoutthere wrote: post #23

The “woe is me, how do I know how to invest?” drivel in this article is solved by a sufficiently diversified portfolio. The article even admits that these shenanigans have no impact on the larger market — so invest there. If you want to take on more risk, great — but with great risk comes lots of market manipulation. The wider public is now learning what every MBA is taught in investment theory classes: investing is…

>the system is broken and they’re cheating like crazy

You can still make money off that -- the stock market is baccarat, not poker, and you can make money off betting on whoever cheats best, or fastest, or whose manipulation you think will win. The strategy is difficult but not impossible.

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#42

Post by RugnirViking »

roenxi wrote: post #36
AlexandrB wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't something feel wrong about the post 2008 "boom"? Theoretically the economy is doing great but you have constant social upheaval, a generation where many are still living with their parents, and the need for constant central bank stimulus in the form of cheap credit. I sometimes wonder if we've managed to mask the real state of the economy by pumping the metrics to make it look like it's fine.

Add to that the collapse in wage growth and the conspicuous difference in the rate of improvement in Asia vs in America. The World Bank says [0] the US GDP per capita has more than doubled since 1996. In real terms. Computers have been a big boost, but it seems a tough sell that the US population has actually seen a real doubling in that time. That is saying a dude with a house in 1996 is a dude with 2 houses now. Is…

> Is that arguably true? Where is the stuff?

In the hands of increasingly few people, namely tech billionaires. Amazon for example is worth more than all but 18 of the entire world's sovereign nations' respective GDP.

The economy has grown tremendously, in measurable terms, but that growth has almost exclusively gone to the 0.1%

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#43

Post by sjg007 »

diamondhandle wrote: post #26

Our job in life is to engage in value creation. When money is decoupled from value creation, your long-term bet is that it will lose its value, as value creation is what actually matters in the “real” world. This is also why “crypto” (the asset class, not technology) is so corrosive, because it makes people who have done approximately nothing to create value in society, but who’ve enjoyed a massive boost in monetary…

I mean the crypto folks bought in at the right time? It's like finding oil under your land. For some reason you bought into it and that's takes some type of skill.

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#44

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

diamondhandle wrote: post #26

Our job in life is to engage in value creation. When money is decoupled from value creation, your long-term bet is that it will lose its value, as value creation is what actually matters in the “real” world. This is also why “crypto” (the asset class, not technology) is so corrosive, because it makes people who have done approximately nothing to create value in society, but who’ve enjoyed a massive boost in monetary…

> because it makes people who have done approximately nothing to create value in society, but who’ve enjoyed a massive boost in monetary value, think they’ve “won” or accomplished something real. This doesn’t work long term, and will eventually collapse on itself like all false religions.

Explain to me the value of Daddy's Money and Landlords. No, seriously, tell me about it.

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#45

Post by sauwan »

AlexandrB wrote: post #21
paulpauper wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

then how come the US economy boomed after 2009 in spite of unprecedented stimulus and other programs. Not saying that the programs caused the expansion, but it did not seem to hurt it either. Everyone who said that the printing would cause inflation, a repeat crisis, recession, or other problems, were wrong.

Doesn't something feel wrong about the post 2008 "boom"? Theoretically the economy is doing great but you have constant social upheaval, a generation where many are still living with their parents, and the need for constant central bank stimulus in the form of cheap credit. I sometimes wonder if we've managed to mask the real state of the economy by pumping the metrics to make it look like it's fine.

Many economists argue that the 2008 stimulus didn't do enough, and that where it did provide stimulus it was applied at the wrong places (towards the top rather than the bottom). That's why we're seeing this response to the current situation.

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#46

Post by api »

sauwan wrote: post #45
AlexandrB wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't something feel wrong about the post 2008 "boom"? Theoretically the economy is doing great but you have constant social upheaval, a generation where many are still living with their parents, and the need for constant central bank stimulus in the form of cheap credit. I sometimes wonder if we've managed to mask the real state of the economy by pumping the metrics to make it look like it's fine.

Many economists argue that the 2008 stimulus didn't do enough, and that where it did provide stimulus it was applied at the wrong places (towards the top rather than the bottom). That's why we're seeing this response to the current situation.

If you are going to do stimulus, the way we are doing it now is better. Even better still would be to drop money from helicopters.

There's an argument to be made that we have done too much over the past ~10 years and are risking significant inflation, but that's a separate argument and it's hard to say what else we could have done that would have been better. Inflationary blowoff is usually less painful than deflationary depression, but neither is good. Policy is often an exercise in choosing the least awful option.

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#47

Post by i_haz_rabies »

diamondhandle wrote: post #26

Our job in life is to engage in value creation. When money is decoupled from value creation, your long-term bet is that it will lose its value, as value creation is what actually matters in the “real” world. This is also why “crypto” (the asset class, not technology) is so corrosive, because it makes people who have done approximately nothing to create value in society, but who’ve enjoyed a massive boost in monetary…

What skills can you guarantee (or at least say with high confidence) will be valuable in 20 years? I can't really think of any except maybe "soft skills" and whatever skills allow you to build a large network.

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#48

Post by drewcoo »

The difference between finance and gambling is largely class. The things we call finance and gambling today both trace back to gambling/insurance in Venice a few centuries ago. They've diverged over time to reflect society and now Vegas is low brow and Wall Street is peopled with suits. If finance has been reduced to gambling, it just means that class boundaries are being broken down. In the cases listed, broken down by technology.

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#49

Post by gruez »

makomk wrote: post #33
paulpauper wrote: post #11

>If crisis had opened the door to a new way of thinking about money, the checks closed the door on the old: Gone was an understanding of money as a scarce, quasi-natural resource to be managed disinterestedly by apolitical experts. The question was: What was replacing it? Would MMT’s chartalist view of money as a tool of state power prevail? (The undeniable success of the pandemic cash drop seemed to be a point in it…

Remember, CPI is just the average of a particular basket of goods weighted in a particular way - it doesn't necessarily represent the real levels of inflation people will see. I know for example that here in the UK, the low figures were the result of price increases in things people were actually buying like food, computers, cars, holiday stays when we weren't locked down, etc being counterbalanced by lower increases…

>I know for example that here in the UK, the low figures were the result of price increases in things people were actually buying like food, computers, cars, holiday stays when we weren't locked down, etc being counterbalanced by lower increases or even decreases in things they weren't buying as much anymore like clothes.

Source? Maybe uk is different but that claim isn't consistent with the CPI figures coming from the BLS. In your list of things food makes up the biggest part, and it's only up 3.5% YOY. Computers is actually down 3.2%. New cars/trucks is only up 1.5%. Used cars/trucks is up 9.4%, but that only makes up 2.71% of the basket.

https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/supplemental-files/cpi-u-2021...

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#50

Post by Dracophoenix »

diamondhandle wrote: post #26

Our job in life is to engage in value creation. When money is decoupled from value creation, your long-term bet is that it will lose its value, as value creation is what actually matters in the “real” world. This is also why “crypto” (the asset class, not technology) is so corrosive, because it makes people who have done approximately nothing to create value in society, but who’ve enjoyed a massive boost in monetary…

The same could be said of the US Dollar (or anything really). All value is speculative until proven and changes in those speculations can't be stopped. What's worse in the Dollar's case vis a vis crypto is that the divorce between "real" value and "created" value is determined by a tiny group of institutional bankers and their government liaisons. Reality, much less work ethic, won't change their minds. If you think that crypto is akin to a religious sect, then the Fed is a financial Vatican slowly collapsing in its importance while denying it all the same. Rid yourself of the fallacy that holding on to value is hoarding lest you believe that what one does with one's wealth should be determined by others.
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