The stock market is edging toward extremes of Great Depression and dot-com eras

YoBuckStopsHere@lemmy.worldbanned from sitebanned from site to News@lemmy.world – 266 points –
The stock market is edging toward extremes of Great Depression and dot-com eras
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The stock market has been decoupled from the real economy for years. There are interests who want all of us to make sacrifices when the stock market goes down, but I don't agree with them.

Would Biden break an Occupy like Obama did?

Obama didn't need to break the occupy wall street moment. That moment was so unorganized that it broke itself.

The media had their role in it too by setting a 'tone' for the whole thing by treating it like a joke from the start and being sure to always interview the kookiest of people whenever they'd visit one of the encampments. Alternatively, conservative outlets like Fox would paint the protestors like a bunch of entitled freeloaders who just wanted to cause problems.

That clip of the wall street tycoons drinking champagne and laughing at the protesters.

They weren’t Wall Street tycoons. They were just people attending a wedding.

Why does this misinformation keep spreading?

Because, even though that specific photo wasn't about rich people laughing at the protests, you damn well know they all did just that. We just don't have pictures.

I get the symbolism. But calling something that it isn’t is just flat out disingenuous.

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I think that's because leftist movements with leaders get Fred Hampton'd.

The amount of figures within OWS and BLM that died under strange circumstances is pretty not comforting knowing the organizations who do things like that have near impunity and control of information.

Any sources on the many deaths under strange circumstances?

Feels like the false stories you hear about people that opened tutenchamuns grave.

6 in Ferguson, probably among the one that made more noise.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/puzzling-number-men-tied-ferguson-protests-have-died-n984261

OWS Demonstrator death here

https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20140811/upper-west-side/ows-demonstrator-found-dead-riverside-park-police-say

Another OWS demonstrator and community organizer

https://www.nydailynews.com/2021/09/23/friends-family-mourn-prominent-occupy-wall-street-protestor-and-nyc-community-organizer/

OWS Demonstrator, Author and powerful community force here, seems less suspicious than the others but also the person is more critical to the movement and had a sizeable reach in his capacity as an author and anthropologist.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/david-graeber-dies-59-occupy-wall-street/

I'd have to ignore a lot of history to consider it impossible for the same people who thought they could control minds with LSD and did put microphones inside Russian street cats to have a hand in this.

There an even older gentleman deeply affiliated with OWS who also passed but again that looks even less suspicious that David Graeber, like the scene is inherently less 'manipulatable' which is not to say its impossible. This is the pattern that a lot of people saw and discussed.

So 6 people in a span of 3 years in an area with a life expectancy of 56.

The two in the burned cars were the likeliest related to the protests and murdered, but it's much more likely to be some gang bullshit and not targeted at all.

Wikipedia says this about it:

As of March 2019, Ferguson protesters have continued to receive threats to their lives or wellbeing

The articles you posted mention this

The 2010 U.S. census showed that while people who live in wealthy and mostly white western St. Louis County can expect to live well into their 80s, life expectancy in parts of mostly black north St. Louis County reaches only into the 60s. Life expectancy in Kinloch, a few miles from Ferguson, is 56.

Forty-five of the county’s 60 homicide victims last year were black in a county where less than a quarter of the population is black, according to police statistics.

I don't think it's any conspiracy shenanigans going on and not government members that killed them suspiciously...long after the protests were over. It looks like a horrible place to live, especially for black people without any perspective for a future.

It smells like "I want to believe", not some deep state revenge after the fact.

It doesn't even look like a statistical anomaly that much if you take everything into account.

Here's a link to suicide rates in the US.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db464.pdf

I don't want to believe it, in fact if someone where to claim ALL of these were not accidents or had something to do with their protest involvement I would wholeheartedly find that ridiculously unlikely, but I remain open to the idea that one or more could be. I remember in an auto-bio from a black panther i read he said something along the lines of him not blaming the cops for breaking up his chapter, that would be giving them too much credit. I like that, I hope they're not some all powerful org that can just disappear who they want.

But then they do things like summary execution of a murder suspect without clearly announcing themselves, say they saw a gun flashed but they found the gun in his pocket. All because he shot (I guess technically allegedly) someone reported to be attacking protestors who happened to be part of a far right group that the police had deals with (they agreed to not execute a warrant on the groups leader). https://theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/01/exclusive-video-shows-portland-officers-made-deal-with-far-right-group-leader

So I fully believe that when the circumstances present themselves, sometimes, someone with the capacity to do something will take that opportunity. Didn't initially include this case because this is something that happened during an arrest, but if this particular instance wasn't a federal hit, nothing short of when they bombed a philly neighborhood block in 85 is. They have the means and unless we believe these federal organizations have changed without any real external pressure to do so, history says they have the will as well.

info about the arrest that was essentially an execution here. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/14/activist-portland-shooting-michael-reinoehl-police

Nah, you totally want to believe. You said this:

I'd have to ignore a lot of history to consider it impossible for the same people who thought they could control minds with LSD and did put microphones inside Russian street cats to have a hand in this.

How are these stupid agency projects of the past in any way related to supposed murders of rather random protestors that didnt have much influence anymore?

It just doesn't make any sense.

The protest leaders would just vanish during the protests without a trace, and maybe come back siding the government, and not die of suicide years later when they've long stopped being relevant.

An average life Expectancy of 56 years is some 3rd world country in civil war numbers. Burkina Faso is at 62 years for example. Somalia at 58, Chad 55.

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Occupy had no central leadership and nobody on earth seems to be able to accept orgs like that. Seems we've been conditioned to believe that everything must be run in a hierarchy.

If you were there you developed an appreciation for sanitation. I dropped off food a few times and it smelled horrific.

Some organization is a good thing.

Absolutely. Decades of “heros journey” formatted TV and movies does that.

The other side of that "hero" coin is whistleblowers in movies/TV who, in rl, are vilified beyond even the real criminals who tank the world's economy selling banded, illegally-authorized mortgages as good investments.

Yeah, sure, that's why they had the police beat up protesters and journalists.

You think police wouldn't have beat them up if they were organized?

If they were organized enough you'd just have a pile of dead cops when it was over

There's no organization that can take on the US police. They are backed up by the national guard. The national guard, historically, has demonstrated a willingness to shoot protesters.

No, you'd have one dead cop and every protestor dead or in jail. One cop dying is all they need to throw away what little restraint they might have had up to that point. They will kill the people who resist and arrest the ones who don't. If they arrest you they'll drag the trial out for years, by the time you get found guilty and sentenced to a year of probation you'll have spent a decade behind bars.

The problem is that this is not a fair fight, it is a suicide mission for whoever decides to take on the police.

Nah, if it goes down like that you weren't organized enough

You're either trolling or dillusional if you think that. We live in a police state, if you're out in the open they will just kill you and if you take shelter they will literally lay seige to you and burn your house down.

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Yeah they are always warning about the stock market and what we need to do to make it go up but most people don't even own stock. Maybe in their 401k if they have one. Other than that the average person probably doesn't care. I hardly even look at my 401k either. Let it tank I don't care. I'll probably work until I die anyways.

The point is other than real estate the 401k is all the middle class has for wealth.

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Honestly, these researchers could have saved themselves some work and simply looked at the current income disparity to come to the same conclusion ...

The crash is very much a part of the cycle. The rich siphon every single dollar they can during boom times, then increase their market share by buying out smaller, struggling competitors during crashes. And they use taxpayer money to fund their acquisitions.

The class war is over. We lost a long time ago.

It's not over as long as the working class exists. Capital owners have addresses.

Last I checked, billionaires are still made of soft, fragile meat.

Have you not seen Elysium? There's a reason Bezos and Musk have been running space programs as a hobby.

Have you seen Gundam? That won't stop anything because there will be a working class there too and much much fewer places to hide.

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I'd argue that the class warfare is still raging on as an inborn human trait that happens to be partially expressed with our various economic systems throughout history. We can still win if we manage to breed out our hierarchical tendencies to a point where it's not detrimental to our survival as a whole.

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I've lived through a whole dark age and three supposed end of days with the stock market.

I was working with Lehman Brothers when they went bankrupt.

Watching the collapse of a major investment bank from the inside is an interesting experience.

Still have one of their plexiglass desk cubes listing "Our values", which always brings an ironic smile to my face whenever I see it.

It didn't really collapse. Your CEO walked out the door with over 600 million dollars for a single year of work.

Both things can be true at the same time.

Also we wasn't "my" CEO as I was a freelancer working with them, not an employee, and even if I had been the latter it would still not have been "my" CEO because Lehman wasn't some kind of cooperative were workers got to chose upper management.

No they can't both be true. Companies that collapse do not have literal billions to give away. Corporate bankruptcy is not the same as personal bankruptcy. Personal bankruptcy you are going to spend the next 8 years eating ramen. Corporate bankruptcy is more like "I don't think I should have to work anymore but should still have money".

That's how it should be, not how it is.

Most institutions that go bankrupt have lots of assets, it's just that they have even more debts, and debt has various levels of seniority with the most senior debt payed first from whatever assets the company has, then if any assets are left the next more senior debt paid from them and so on until there are no more assets, and whomever was holding the more junior debt gets nothing (and stockholders are even more junior than any debt, so they usally get nothing).

There are tons of ways to take advantage of such a system (this being the fishy part) some of which are legal (so, even more fishy), and this being a large financial institution (who generally specialize in exactly playing the money game, including tax evasion, avoidance and all sorts of shennenigans) I'm almost sure the compensation for the CEO was made to be senior enough in the debt heirarchy that it ended up high enough that there was still money left from the sale of the company's assets after covering any debt that was even senior to it, to pay for it.

The Finance Industry is a complete total swamp, a politically endorsed swamp even, which is partly why I'm not working in the Industry anymore.

I pulled an old free frisbee out of a box of toys my mom had saved to find it was WaMu branded. Had a little chuckle at the free plastic frisbee outliving them.

Is that the one where the values were on the other side of a Venn diagram without anything in the overlap?

Bunch of text with even a Mission Statement on one side of the cube.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair."

- A Tale of Two Cities

I would be really worried about that if I were in the investor class. Then again, I wouldn't like myself very much, so I'm glad I'm not.

They're never worried. An economic downturn is just an opportunity to them.

And what's the worst that can happen to them? "Oh no, instead of having 2 villas I will only be left with 1?"

Chances are they already can choose to not work for the rest of their lives. They will never get into a worse position than the average worker already is in.

What op meant by the downturn being an opportunity is that their cash reserves get used to buy up whatever depressed item exists. Land, buildings, etc.

They aren’t weathering the storm like most, they are buying all the abandoned boats.

If there are two classes which are top priority for "rescuing" with public money, is Financiers and Wealthy Investors.

It's the small fry that needs to worry, as invariably they're the ones left holding the bag whenever a way overstreched Economy and associated La-la-Land of Rainbows & Ponies Stockmarket finally get pulled back by the reality that there is nowhere near enough real value in total to justifiy the total value implied by all those sky-high asset prices.

So many people's retirements are in the stock market. This would screw over a ton of the working class too.

This is by design. Retirements are more and more tied with risky markets because then the rich can hold everyone else hostage since it's not just them feeling the pain of a market crash. The insanity has to stop at some point or we're all going to be held hostage forever. Regardless, the amount that most individuals actually have is little and often isn't enough to actually retire on anyway.

What's the out that doesn't see you screaming backwards thanks to inflation?

Safer investments like bonds used to be the way, but were subdued by near zero interest rates for so long.

So feudalism it is then?

We've seen this one before - can we skip past the decades of oppression and bloody revolt, and straight back to worker enfranchisement and something resembling a civilised, free, meritocratic society please?

What do you call what we have now, where the rich keep getting richer and everyone else just rents from them? Obviously inflation doesn't stop feudalism.

It did to me, because I have a locked-in pension from a former union job and after I quit I transferred it to my bank ... who proceeded to tell me I had no choice but to put it into stocks. As of rn it's finally back up to what I had in 2008.

I fucking hate the stock market.

this last sugar rush was nuts, I'm still bearish but refuse to play anything. S&P chart looks like a meme stock.

Would a crash lower house prices?

Sure, but you won't be able to buy any. Hedge funds will hoover up all of the freed inventory faster than retail buyers can.

Then we nationalize the hedge funds and seize their property through eminent domain. Fuck their economy.

Depending on why it crashed, it might in some areas to some extent. It might also motivate a drop in rates which could cause prices to start spiking upwards. The biggest issue with house prices is supply has been constrained since the GFC, there hasn't been enough housing built to meet demand. Until that changes I wouldn't expect house prices to ever decline significantly or over a sustained period of time.

I fuckin this thumbnail

Edit: going over some old comments of mime, and I have no clue what I was trying to say here.