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Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon

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

#581

Post by YZF »

direwolf20 wrote: post #528
YZF wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

International law was and is also a fiction. We have various conventions and agreements. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_law "In the 1940s through the 1970s, the dissolution of the Soviet bloc and decolonisation across the world resulted in the establishment of scores of newly independent states.[67] As these former colonies became their own states, they adopted European views of international law.[68] A…

All law was and is a fiction. Nothing can stop a murderer murdering you.

Well, try. I'm joking- don't.

Laws are enforced by sovereign countries that have police and courts etc. "International law" has "laws" (well very few if any) with no sovereignty. That's what makes it fiction. It's just newspeak to make people think that there are laws that exist outside the system of countries, and there aren't, at least no binding ones that countries can't and don't override. That's not a law.

Ofcourse laws, like any other human constructs, are invented by us and don't have independent existence.

When I drive to work here in Canada the "international police" stopping me for violating the "international traffic laws" is really not a concern.

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

#582

Post by panarky »

tonfa wrote: post #571
xivzgrev wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the rise in index funds is a bubble on its own? It's massive and increasing amounts of money that is not price sensitive and keeps growing. There's an underlying bubble message: "the stock market always bounces back, so keep plowing your money into it even when it's down". Apparently passive funds are 60% of mutual funds / ETFs now https://www.avantisinvestors.com/avantis-insights/has-passiv... Even more insi…

I don't even think it's about active vs. passive index funds. Even if people were to do active bets on equity, what matters is the amount of money flowing in the asset class, so as long as there's an infinite stream of long investments into equity (due to 401k, etc.), the prices will rise. You'd need people to actively balance their allocation between asset classes rather than stock X vs Y to counter those equity bub…

If equities are "too big to fail" then governments will do everything in their power to ensure prices continue to go up.

If the right price for equities is 30% of their current value, and if achieving that price means the regime will fall in the next election (or sooner due to civil disorder), then the regime will not allow that to happen.

A regime that controls its own currency has nearly unlimited power to prop up whatever asset classes it wants to, from bonds to equities to housing.

Doing that has consequences like inflation which people don't like, and could cause them to vote the bastards out. But the regime could also print even more money for direct deposits into voters' bank accounts before an election.

So it seems like equities have limited downside until there's a regime change.

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

#583

Post by neilwilson »

ajross wrote: post #236
robinsoncrusue wrote: post #171

The question is there is no other place for money to go. Liquidity is still in abundance and no other market can capture that liquidity. Eurozone is a total mess, ECB is doing one reckless thing after another which will inevitably lead to Germany leaving Eurozone at some point. Japan market is a joke, Asia and emerging market has huge governance issues. Bond market has penalized the investors and only more pain is in…

> Liquidity is still in abundance and no other market can capture that liquidity. I don't know what that means? Market crashes are changes in speculative value, they don't care about counting literal amounts of currency. Selling US securities doesn't require that the resulting "liquidity" move anywhere else, just that the owner prefers to see a cash balance to a stock certificate or whatever. Basically this point see…

But importantly the person buying the stock certificate etc preferred to see that rather than a cash balance.

For every seller there has to be a buyer.

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

#584

Post by shimman »

twoodfin wrote: post #500
shimman wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supporting companies that profit off of misery, reduce human meaningfulness, those that innovate the surveillance state; why is it so hard to support policies like giving US school children free breakfast + lunch, medicare for all, public housing, universal childcare, federally mandated paid time off, universal higher education + vocational training, and a public jobs program (all things that have 70-90% voter approv…

I dunno, I love my iPhone, especially when I use it to take photos of my kids. Amazon is pretty great, too. Also schoolchildren in my state have had free school breakfast & lunch since Covid.

Yes and you should care about the world your children are inheriting. What happens after you die? What happens if they get injured and can no longer work? What happens if they lose their job and can't afford their rent? What happens when it turns out they aren't as capable as you thought and require assistance to simply navigate the world?

This is the problem with people like you, you simply lost your humanity because you care more about trinkets than literally shaping a better world for your children.

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

#585

Post by YZF »

cjfd wrote: post #452
YZF wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_international_order "The nature of the LIO, as well as its very existence, has been debated by scholars." Nobody is throwing anything away and that thing you think they're throwing away didn't really exist.

Whether or not a 'LIO' exists is not that interesting to me. What is interesting is what actually exists and what has happened in history. What actually exists is an enormous shock after, for instance, world war one where the question arose how it is possible that basically an entire generation of young men was slaughtered. E.g., every small village in France has a memorial of the fallen soldiers during world war one…

I'm not sure how this relates to the discussion.

I agree most countries, certainly western countries, have realized that waging the kind of wars like WW-I and WW-II is not a good idea. But there have been a lot of war and killing anyways since the world wars and there have been a lot of new borders redrawn and countries formed. In more recent times we have Putin invading Ukraine and the general instability of the post cold war Eastern Europe.

So the calculus has changed for many reasons. But "new order" is not one of them. The so called new order was a result of the calculus changing, not the other way around. Countries fight for power in other ways and other societal changes also influence their decisions. I.e. you are confusing cause and effect. Now we have different dynamics, not a collapse of world order, things have shifted very slightly. "The end of the world as we know it" gets a lot of clicks on social media but it's not like we're suddenly having WW-I all over again and it's not like that order you thought was absolute really was. It's just that's how the alignment of interests landed.

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

#586

Post by dash2 »

panarky wrote: post #582
tonfa wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even think it's about active vs. passive index funds. Even if people were to do active bets on equity, what matters is the amount of money flowing in the asset class, so as long as there's an infinite stream of long investments into equity (due to 401k, etc.), the prices will rise. You'd need people to actively balance their allocation between asset classes rather than stock X vs Y to counter those equity bub…

If equities are "too big to fail" then governments will do everything in their power to ensure prices continue to go up. If the right price for equities is 30% of their current value, and if achieving that price means the regime will fall in the next election (or sooner due to civil disorder), then the regime will not allow that to happen. A regime that controls its own currency has nearly unlimited power to prop up…

In theory this could be true. Is the US government actually doing anything specifically to prop up equity values?

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

#588

Post by ks2048 »

If you just do very crude pattern matching on the first chart he shows - it is warped by the (intentional?) way he drew orange overlay lines.

The slope in 2024 and 2025 (the data that we already have) is much lower than the orange line drawn.

Following the real visual trend, the next peak would be maybe another 5-10 years in the future. (Not that this is a good way to predict the future, as also stated in the article, "not very scientific").

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

#589

Post by dash2 »

xanthor wrote: post #471
raincole wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The looming US debt is also a great question - a lot of economists have argued that since most US debt is good. It's mostly in forms of treasuries purchased in USD that pay in USD - this means the indebtedness creates a huge amount of dollars abroad that foreigners have to then spend on US services, driving demand. You got it wrong (I'm sure most economists don't get it wrong and you just misread/misquote). USD is…

The US has pointed and fired guns at other countries for moving away from US treasuries, but alternative justifications are produced to reassure our domestic population that it’s really because the foreign leader is a very bad guy.

Which countries?

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

#590

Post by YZF »

Propelloni wrote: post #548
JPLeRouzic wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I acknowledge that the 20th century was marked by much bloodshed, but this wasn't limited to the world wars and it continues violently into the 21st century. If the world is governed by rules, why does the United States maintain a considerable number of military bases around the world, far exceeding the total number of military bases of all other countries combined? Why is the American military budget so much higher…

> If the world is governed by rules, why does the United States maintain a considerable number of military bases around the world, far exceeding the total number of military bases of all other countries combined? It's the other way around. Rules are tools of peace. No peace, no rules. But if you want peace then you have to be ready to wage war. It's called deterrence and the EU is learning this just now, again. That'…

You're confusing rules with treaties, agreements, and balance of power.

Yes- When there is one super power in the world and it says if you don't behave a certain way we're gonna bomb the heck out of you, or boycott you, you get a certain behavior. Even then you might get some actors (like North Korea, or Iran, Yemen, Russia, China and more) that have no problem openly defying and challenging the super power to some extent.

When the balance shifts and you have other blocks with more power that feel comfortable in defying that super power (like China or Russia today) then you see that changing.

There are no "absolute" rules. There are power dynamics, countries, interests, politics. Rules can exist only within a structure that can enforce them, like a country.

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