The day one of those companies finally gets busted for cooking the books super hard is going to result in thousands of working class people dying due to having their whole shit just wiped the fuck out, and that's insane.
No one in the US will go under until it’s obvious they have lost their “leadership” role to everyone and become a regular country. Unfortunately that means probably after they lose a war against a major power if history is any guide.
I mean, working class people lose their ass every single time the economy shits the bed because all the costs are just spread out onto the people. I think it's very nearly at a point where a significant number of major American companies are getting dangerously close to the worldcom-tyco-peregrine-enron zone in terms of "creative accounting." I think the economy is also in a volatile enough state (which shows no signs of improving anytime soon) that a big company having an accounting scandal in the next couple of years leading to a huge crash.
yeah corporate debt is still at record levels. During covid it was a worry but the Federal Reserve deployed the money printer. That can only work for so long though sooo.... :soviet-hmm:
Am I correct in thinking that the Fed printing money to cover stock losses at the beginning of the pandemic was literally them shoveling porky money on the promise that the working class would pay for it eventually?
basically. The cost of the money printer is inflation which now eats about 5% of everyone's money each year now. (Used to be ~2%) Wages have been depressed forever so it really crunches on workers and of course businesses got all the free money to cover any losses. Small silver lining is that debt becomes cheaper with higher inflation, unless you have some bullshit adjustable rate debt, but otherwise workers could maybe benefit that way.
The first thing any serious “reform” candidate would do would be to force the rich to buy government bonds extremely hard and then crank the money printer hard. It would be very unfortunate for the people in the short term, but it would kill the massive class divide after inflation stabilized. There are a few historical examples of countries doing this and doing pretty well afterwards even within a capitalist framework.
Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security but [also] at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth.
Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become "profiteers," who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting removed into a gamble and a lottery.
Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.
Six of one, half a dozen of the other. There's like a hundred different possibilities all racing each other to blow everything up one after another. It's all gonna go boom one of these days, and it's gonna be really bad.
is it really gonna stop working though? Sure inflation is up (though probably more shortages and pandemic costs than anything else) but is there really anything else that prevents them from running the printer forever apart from ideology?
Since the neoliberal era began in the 70s, there's been one of these roughly every 10 years, usually near turnover of the new decade, and it used to be that the west's crisis was preceded a few years by one in Asia, but now they're just global.
The first energy crisis in 1973,
The '79 energy crisis that continued into the 80s,
The Japanese Asset Price bubble and the Early 90s recession,
The Asian financial crisis and the Dot-com bubble bursting,
The global late 2000s crisis,
Since the initial crash in 2020, the world's governments have basically just been sticking band-aid after band-aid over everything while sticking their fingers in their ears and going "lalalalala" which has somehow to date prevented it from fully crashing. As soon as they run out of steam on that, shit's going to hit the fan.
You literally cant explain to people that cyclic decadal crises arent a feature of human existance, they totally stem from capitalism. Capitalist realism is so baked in that people cannot conceive of any alternative that's better - even something as simple as imagine a future where growth is more controlled and there arent crashes all the time that wipe out your savings and kick you out of a job.
And every time it happens, people believe that it can never happen again. I remember people in '07 and early '08 once the instability had already started rearing its head saying "no no, that could never happen again! They passed Sarbanes-Oxley so businesses won't get overvalued or pop, besides we were hardly affected here in Canada!" and then wham, wow, it happened again!
Per my parents, people were equally shocked that the early 90s recession happened, and the recovery from that recession was just the dot-com bubble which went on to pop in the 2000s and the beginnings of the housing bubble which went off in the US in '08 and is still rising here in CA.
The day one of those companies finally gets busted for cooking the books super hard is going to result in thousands of working class people dying due to having their whole shit just wiped the fuck out, and that's insane.
deleted by creator
No one in the US will go under until it’s obvious they have lost their “leadership” role to everyone and become a regular country. Unfortunately that means probably after they lose a war against a major power if history is any guide.
I mean, working class people lose their ass every single time the economy shits the bed because all the costs are just spread out onto the people. I think it's very nearly at a point where a significant number of major American companies are getting dangerously close to the worldcom-tyco-peregrine-enron zone in terms of "creative accounting." I think the economy is also in a volatile enough state (which shows no signs of improving anytime soon) that a big company having an accounting scandal in the next couple of years leading to a huge crash.
yeah corporate debt is still at record levels. During covid it was a worry but the Federal Reserve deployed the money printer. That can only work for so long though sooo.... :soviet-hmm:
Am I correct in thinking that the Fed printing money to cover stock losses at the beginning of the pandemic was literally them shoveling porky money on the promise that the working class would pay for it eventually?
basically. The cost of the money printer is inflation which now eats about 5% of everyone's money each year now. (Used to be ~2%) Wages have been depressed forever so it really crunches on workers and of course businesses got all the free money to cover any losses. Small silver lining is that debt becomes cheaper with higher inflation, unless you have some bullshit adjustable rate debt, but otherwise workers could maybe benefit that way.
The first thing any serious “reform” candidate would do would be to force the rich to buy government bonds extremely hard and then crank the money printer hard. It would be very unfortunate for the people in the short term, but it would kill the massive class divide after inflation stabilized. There are a few historical examples of countries doing this and doing pretty well afterwards even within a capitalist framework.
-John Maynard Keynes
Six of one, half a dozen of the other. There's like a hundred different possibilities all racing each other to blow everything up one after another. It's all gonna go boom one of these days, and it's gonna be really bad.
I know it's gonna suck for so many people but it also seems like it will be one of those weeks where decades happen :sicko-yes: :dumpster-fire:
deleted by creator
What if I told you that you could have both?
😳
We need to learn from the Iranian Revolution and be the most-organized band of assholes or else we're gonna get purged.
is it really gonna stop working though? Sure inflation is up (though probably more shortages and pandemic costs than anything else) but is there really anything else that prevents them from running the printer forever apart from ideology?
I don't think that will ever happen again. The wheels almost came off in 2008. They still just bail out who ever they can.
Since the neoliberal era began in the 70s, there's been one of these roughly every 10 years, usually near turnover of the new decade, and it used to be that the west's crisis was preceded a few years by one in Asia, but now they're just global.
The first energy crisis in 1973,
The '79 energy crisis that continued into the 80s,
The Japanese Asset Price bubble and the Early 90s recession,
The Asian financial crisis and the Dot-com bubble bursting,
The global late 2000s crisis,
Since the initial crash in 2020, the world's governments have basically just been sticking band-aid after band-aid over everything while sticking their fingers in their ears and going "lalalalala" which has somehow to date prevented it from fully crashing. As soon as they run out of steam on that, shit's going to hit the fan.
There was the 2001 economic crash after 9/11. Bush literally telling people to buy hamburders to be patriotic.
Yeah, that kinda fits in with the Dot-com bubble in the early 2000s, this shit really is just like every 7-10 years that everything explodes.
Sure my house collapses with me inside every 7 years but every time after I rebuild it exactly the same way it turns out fine for six
You literally cant explain to people that cyclic decadal crises arent a feature of human existance, they totally stem from capitalism. Capitalist realism is so baked in that people cannot conceive of any alternative that's better - even something as simple as imagine a future where growth is more controlled and there arent crashes all the time that wipe out your savings and kick you out of a job.
And every time it happens, people believe that it can never happen again. I remember people in '07 and early '08 once the instability had already started rearing its head saying "no no, that could never happen again! They passed Sarbanes-Oxley so businesses won't get overvalued or pop, besides we were hardly affected here in Canada!" and then wham, wow, it happened again!
Per my parents, people were equally shocked that the early 90s recession happened, and the recovery from that recession was just the dot-com bubble which went on to pop in the 2000s and the beginnings of the housing bubble which went off in the US in '08 and is still rising here in CA.