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?
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:
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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?