If not for the top 10 of the S&P 500 - the companies that can get a meeting at the white house - we'd probably be in a recession and S&P would be down.
The EU did it too, probably second with the US being last. It’s just that the EU focused on worker’s rights, protections for origins of products (can’t call bubbly wine Champaign if it’s not from there), etc.
It's "losing" compared to the US? Haha. I guess from a true VC startup bro perspective. It's not "the EU is way behind the US and China", it's "the EU and US are way behind China". Because the latter is the only one who has been taking long-term decision on decision over the last decades, whereas for the other two, 95% is for the short-term, the next quarter, the next election a year from now. The US is even worse in this regard, hence why it's deteriorating even more rapidly.
An actual socialist would say the state in capitalist society provides a legal and infrastructural framework that supports business enterprises and the accumulation of capital, so it is business as usual. But feel free to throw words around as they mean nothing.
(Actually I'm not, but the rest of the market seems to be. In this version of musical chairs, you can sit down any time you like—you just miss out on potential gains before the music stops.)
The biggest "pretend" is where spokesmen, spin doctors, and sycophants for the plutocrat class have somehow convinced the 99% that stocks going up makes more jobs for the little people.
The most pernicious part of the con is that by systematically dismantling pensions and forcing everyone into 401(k)s, they've ensured that we all have to root for the plutocrats. We're forced to watch our retirement funds, which means we're incentivized to hope Amazon's stock does go up after firing 14k (or 30k according to other sources) people.
It's a system of forced complicity. We have to root for the billionaires, or we risk our own survival in old age.
Factor out the AI companies doing circular dealing to juke their stock price and GDP growth was like 0.1% combine that with purchasing power loss and US economy is net negative.
It's pretty clear what happens next.
Over 42 million people are about to lose their SNAP payments in 4 days[1] and millions more medical care.
The only publicly traded companies that are involved in what could be considered circular dealings in enough volume to affect their stock price are Nvidia and Oracle.
Well, it may be - hidden, at least in the US, by the "AI"-Bubble. But also an interesting point is that these layoffs do not happen in struggling companies -they all have increasing profits.
It is most likely a way to squeeze out some easy penny and pump up share prices - remember the "shareholder value". Shareholders today are all looking for pump & dump schemes.
"At the end of July, Amazon reported second quarter results which beat Wall Street expectations on several counts, including a 13% year over year increase in sales to $167.7bn (£125bn)."
The stock-owning class is in a boom. The working class is in a recession.
(People who have stock-market investments and need to work for a living are somewhere in between.)
The average of one billionaire gaining £10M and a hundred middle-class folks losing £100k is solidly positive, so this looks like a "growing economy" to many of the usual metrics.
I am not sure whether the people who are benefiting from all this have noticed how often this sort of dynamic in the past has led to torches and pitchforks and the like.
> In the United States, a recession is defined as "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the market, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales."[4] The European Union has adopted a similar definition.[5][6]
I learned once (on npr when i used to listen to it) that when you hear some new information, you should immediately think the opposite. This gives you the ability to not subconsciously weight the idea you heard higher than you should. After all, for every point in life a reasonable counter point exists.
I've done this for many years and I do believe the practice has helped me not blindly believe things.
You can be right and still go broke shorting something. "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." And shorting crypto has additional challenges beyond shorting traditional securities.
By six, you're usually at something like "because that makes me happy". By seven, you're into metaphysics and cognitive science.
Of course, some issues are genuinely simple, and you're off in unhelpful territory halfway through. I suspect five why's is a decent estimate, but not necessarily more accurate than four.
American government was intended to be limited. That would limit the number of people, and the power that they have in government.
Today, our government is huge, and has a lot of power. This means that often times the people that get into government aren't doing it as a servant to the people, but instead as a service to themselves.
We need more servants. Viewing this reality and calling it Apathy or not Apathy is a perspective. We are all free to our perspective, and I think the wider variety, the better.
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