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The roaring twenties. That is what they were called.
Exactly. The recessions in the 20s were very minor blips. The prosperity started to unravel late in the decade, but earlier, most people had jobs and were buying things like houses, cars, and radios.
A trade war benefits the net importer and hurts the net exporter. What is our balance of trade? Last information I had was we were running a trade deficit with 128 of our trading partners, but hat was several years ago.
Some things, you just can't print, propagate, or fake. Like real, legitimate economic growth, prosperity, rising standards of living...
Manipulation got us this far.
A better answer...
The trick is to set up the regulatory system so that growth happens where it is productive, where it leads to real standard of living going up, etc.
Currently the velocity of money is dropping like a rock. The last time it dropped like this was in the 1930's. Printing money to balance the falling velocity is a tricky game. Where to get the money moving and how to get it moving. Negative interest rates on one hand or upping the minimum wage on the other.
The trick is to set up the regulatory system so that growth happens where it is productive, where it leads to real standard of living going up, etc.
Precisely. Tech, invention, and innovation are what drive productivity and living standards. You support those activities, provide a stable playing field, and spread the wealth. Prosperity.
Precisely. Tech, invention, and innovation are what drive productivity and living standards. You support those activities, provide a stable playing field, and spread the wealth. Prosperity.
It is the nature of the top or a part of the top to grow at the expense of everyone else. Constraining the growth of this part a bit does everyone some good. Spread the wealth, We've spread our jobs all over the planet, let us spread our pay as well.
Consumer capitalism requires that productivity gains are shared. Eventually. Productivity gains have been going to only a tiny fraction since ~1980. If you go back far enough you can see that imbalances between wages and productivity built up until the '29 crisis, and from then til the '70s it was corrected. Since then we've had an unprecedented nearly flat wage while productivity and GDP/capita have kept rising at the 200 year normal pace.
So you may expect a long period of "correction" to happen again. But it isn't, and I don't believe it will. The paradigm since 1980 has been deficit trade (globalization), and debt escalation to fill the consumption hole. By now all the big corporations have a large global presence, and they no longer care about US consumers, but rather global consumption. The developing world is the low hanging fruit. Screw the US public.
Fixing our problems is no-brainer easy. The issue is that the solutions involve changes that do not fit in with our overlords' plans, and so they won't happen. None of this would have happened in the first place if the people running things cared about the US public. All these policies have given us is a load of debt and flat wages.
Extremely well said. Thanks & respect, I appreciate.
The more recent global financial imbroglio is more evidence that, as you've noted, the folks running things have been indifferent to the US public since the 1980s & with the momentum building ever since. Adding insult to injury, the 'bailouts' went to servicing debts escalated to fill the consumption hole.
Too big to fail? Too big to care.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rruff
If you want to figure out what will happen, ponder the steps that will result in the super rich being able to keep getting richer. I doubt they want a massive crisis since I don't see how they'd profit from it collectively. And they *have* been acting collectively since ~1980.
More likely we'll keep stumbling along until AI makes consumer-capitalism obsolete.
More agreement here. They've been acting collectively since 1980s & have been dividing the rest of us, by creating false dichotomies. Thus divided, we've become a very easy conquest.
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