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Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon

wilsoniumite.com

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Re: Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon

#321
post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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I agree that the Democratic party has fumbled the ball (over and over) and deserves a lot of blame for where we are now, but all of the trans talk in 2024 was driven entirely by the right. The Democratic party wasn't talking about trans people in 2024 (if anything the Democratic campaign was conspicuously avoiding the conversation entirely). The trans "debate" that people remember from that time period was driven ent…

2024 Democratic platform [1] word counts:

  men:         4
  woman/women: 86
  gay:         3
  transgender: 8
They slit their own throats by ignoring half of the voting population.

[1] https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/FINAL-MASTE...

Re: Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can couch it in tech metaphors but there is a clear path forward and it involves eating a certain class of people

You don't have to eat them. You just have to erect significant barriers to hoarding wealth, particularly in off shore devices, and you have to create constant pressure to ensure that stored wealth is best re-invested in the economy at large. These aren't even hard problems. Until you meet someone in Congress. Then it suddenly seems hopeless.

ensure that stored wealth is best re-invested in the economy at large

Pretty sure the vast, vast bulk of wealth held by the richest US households is indeed “reinvested in the economy at large”.

Where do you think it is instead?

Re: Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon

#323
post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does the capital have to go anywhere? People just bid less and less for the same assets and prices go down. Margin calls happen and increase seller volume, prices go down further. And so on. I'm not saying all this will happen. Just that capital doesn't have to "go" anywhere for a crash to occur.

> Why does the capital have to go anywhere? People just bid less and less for the same assets and prices go down. So the law of supply and demand just magically reverses itself?

Market cap doesn’t equal liquidity. If everyone wants out of an asset, and no one wants it, supply exceeds demand and the price crashes.

Re: Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon

#325
post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I agree that the Democratic party has fumbled the ball (over and over) and deserves a lot of blame for where we are now, but all of the trans talk in 2024 was driven entirely by the right. The Democratic party wasn't talking about trans people in 2024 (if anything the Democratic campaign was conspicuously avoiding the conversation entirely). The trans "debate" that people remember from that time period was driven ent…

[flagged]

Re: Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon

#326

This long read by Grant Williams really helped put everything into context. https://www.epsilontheory.com/there-can-be-only-two/

A lot of us don't have time for all the long reads, podcasts, or in-depth videos posted in the discussion here. Able to provide a summary for us that expresses your general point? Those interested can then use your link to learn more.

[deleted]

Re: Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon

#327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you clarify the question? When everything's going up, it's definitionally not a crash; do you mean something like "where are people going to flee to now/soon, in anticipation of a crash, given how buoyant everything is"?

That exodus is what crash is. Yes. My question is where "they" are going flee to in anticipation of the crash to actually make the crash happen.

The banks will start to pull back on AI financing because their risk calculations are going up. That will make the news and people will sell their AI stocks and just put cash in a money market fund or something. Stock price decline confirms the bank’s calculations and now they def. aren’t lending to AI companies. That makes the news and now people are really selling their AI stocks which drives the price down further. The banks react again…

In 2008/9 people became paranoid there was nowhere safe to go and that really screwed things up on top of everything happening in the stock market.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/09/money-mar...

Re: Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rest of the Republican Party is completely devoid of charisma, especially the kind that drew so many voters to Trump. There is no drop-in replacement. Lots of money will be spent trying to manufacture a replacement, though. That will be fun to watch. If you thought the last-minute rally around Kamala was tough to watch…

Can't all that be solved by posting ICE guards around all polling stations?

There's no law of nature that proves democracy can't be overthrown, but ICE is currently struggling against popular resistance to merely enforce immigration law in a single medium-sized city. Right now there's not much indication they have either the desire or operational capacity to pull off nationwide voter suppression. (And a number of special elections over the past year have defeated regime-backed candidates without ICE involvement.)

Re: Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon

#329
post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That number has been dropping by a percent every year for USD over the last 10 years. It used to be 65% USD in 2015

Sure, and in 1992 it was 46%, and in 2000 it was 71% and in 2013 it was 61%. USD foreign exchange reserves have definitely declined from their peak, but by “declined” we’re talking about going from “overwhelmingly dominant” to “merely dominant” to potentially in a few years “equal to every other foreign currency reserve in the world combined”, and maybe USD foreign exchange reserves will decline even further beyond t…

There's some major historical events here. It's not just random movement. Here is a sort of visualization of key points and the USD share of global reserves with the events attached. The number in percent is the USD share of global reserves.

1970 (85%) - Up until 1971 [1] the USD was backed by gold by the Bretton Woods system. Other countries could trade USD in for gold at a fixed rate and in exchange would peg their currencies to the USD and trade in the USD. The idea was to prevent the US from ever being able to exploit their power in this system because if we printed too many dollars other countries could just hoover those dollars up on the cheap, convert them to gold, and make a bunch of money. Nonetheless we did print excessive amounts of money and abuse the power this system was granting us. So France dutifully hoovered up those dollars and made a gold call. We said 'nah', defaulted on our debts, and withdrew from Bretton Woods. This led to the famous quote from Nixon's Secretary of the Treasury: "The dollar is our currency, but it's your problem."

1990 (47%) - Following those events, the USD began seeing rapid inflation, and other countries were rapidly dropping the dollar. This 'peaked' around 1990. But then in 1991 the USSR collapsed. This not only left the US as the undisputed and sole 'king' of the world, but also led to these former nations beginning to dollarize once the dust had settled. The USD suddenly again starts to see mass adoption.

2001 (72%) - The adoption reaches its peak in 2001. At this point not only was there the dotcom bubble, but the world order begins clearly shifting with China and Russia developing increasingly rapidly and looking to become viable world powers once again. And there's been a gradual process of de-dollarization since then declining to where it is today to less than 57% and very much trending to where we were right before the USSR collapsed.

2025 (57%) - Where we are today. We're very much trending towards 1990, only 10 points away, which is the level when everybody was dumping the USD, the US economy was shaky at best, and there was another major superpower in the world and nobody was quite sure who would 'win.' This is far more significant than 'random noise' you're implying.

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I am leaving out plenty of relevant happenings including the transition to the petro dollar, South American economic crisis, and so on - but these only contribute to eras I think, while the above are the main drivers.

[1] - https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

Re: Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon

#330
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Should the US become an unfriendly power to the rest of the western world, it will find the demand for its currency plummeting, which I don't want to outline is a big issue. Right now this is much more of a maybe, possibly, eventually, over a long enough time horizon. As of the end of 2025, USD still made up 57% of foreign reserves vs 20% for the Euro and 3% for the Chinese renminbi. Nearly all commodities are stil…

The international "rules-based order" is a good idea when most nations play by the rules most of the time, and when the most powerful at least pretend to follow the same rules as everyone else. A world order based on rules makes it possible to live at a much higher level of abstraction. Abstractions like rule of law, democracy, government currencies and stock exchanges are intangible and imaginary. They're mostly jus…

The US has played by different rules, might makes right, in the western hemisphere for a long time.

Screwing around with Greenland shit, on the other hand, seems riskier.

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