Comment by trilogic
21 hours ago
What is different this time? Maybe:
1 Online shopping market in the range of 5 trillions 2 Electricity and energy price raise 3 Impossibility to lower interest rates 4 Tech market also in the range of multi Trillions 5 Global education and power expansion ...
Meaning that a % of all this money flow goes private pockets destroying medium class, which gets poorer.
It is like a memory leak that keeps sucking resources while growing exponentially until the system crashes. The real question for an economist is how much ram has the system and how much the memory has leaked?
This Legendary site is interesting: https://usdebtclock.org/index.html Especially when combined it´s data with AI.
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.
>and you have to create constant pressure to ensure that stored wealth is best re-invested in the economy at large
I have no idea if this is true (I've asked economists-in-training, they say they'll get back to me), but I've read that the huge increases in tax rates on high income during the war was less to generate revenue (tho more revenue was certainly a need - there was also a growing focus on growing the number of people who paid taxes, which prior had been quite small), but more to ensure profits were not realized and instead kept invested in the economy and the war machine.
A kind of practical "hodl" to keep the wartime economy stock with reinvestment - or really to discourage removing money from industrial investment - to benefit the war-time economy.
Would like links to things to learn more about this line of reasoning.
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?
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Isn’t hoarded wealth a no-op? It just reduces the supply of whatever they are hoarding.
Would the people benefit from redistributing the things they are hoarding? Corporate stock that pays little to no dividends, mainly? It’s not like they are hoarding wheat. I don’t really get what people think will happen if we redistribute the stored wealth.
All wealth is, is a claim to direct labor and materials, the magnitude of which is relative to the total amount of wealth competing to direct those at present. If some portion of the wealth is locked away, the labor and materials are still being deployed, just the total pool of wealth competing to direct them is smaller than it would be otherwise. Unlocking wealth does not actually bring more stuff into existence.
Now, it could redirect labor and materials used to built yachts or luxury homes into more practical goods. But my impression is that the labor and materials used for those things are minuscule compared to the overall economy, and most of the wealth of the very wealthy is not actually used for those sorts of things.
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Big problems are solved by years of investment and good decision making.
Unfortunately, going after causes or correcting symptom in any kind of hurry acts as a massive destabilizer at exactly the moment systemic destabilization provides the motive/momentum for taking action.
Hard course corrections at critical pressure, in a complex system, is a value destroying reset.
Companies can do this. Mass layoffs, capitalization sell off, etc. And then recover over time, because the rest of the economy around them is mores stable and the pain gets diluted. Entire countries doing this doesn't work out so well.
But it would appear, that may be the path we are most likely to take.