this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
2314 points (98.0% liked)
Comic Strips
12717 readers
2862 users here now
Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
The rules are simple:
- The post can be a single image, an image gallery, or a link to a specific comic hosted on another site (the author's website, for instance).
- The comic must be a complete story.
- If it is an external link, it must be to a specific story, not to the root of the site.
- You may post comics from others or your own.
- If you are posting a comic of your own, a maximum of one per week is allowed (I know, your comics are great, but this rule helps avoid spam).
- The comic can be in any language, but if it's not in English, OP must include an English translation in the post's 'body' field (note: you don't need to select a specific language when posting a comic).
- Politeness.
- Adult content is not allowed. This community aims to be fun for people of all ages.
Web of links
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world: "I use Arch btw"
- !memes@lemmy.world: memes (you don't say!)
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Oh yeah, the explosion of indebtness at all levels has been the tendency for decades now, certainly ever since money creation started being done by the banks themselves when they lent money (there's an interesting paper from the Bank Of England called "Money Creating in the Modern Economy" which is quite the eye-opener on how money is created nowadays)
All the obcession with Public Debt is to a large extent smoke and mirrors: both consumer and corporate debt have grown just as fast or even faster and are very high as percentage of GDP compared to the historic average.
In many ways we're repeating the period that led to the Great Crash of 1929.
My point in the last post was about the graphic itself rather than critical of the point you were making.
Understood. Whether or not we are replicating economic conditions from 1929 is another story entirely. Other than AI, there really isn't too much of a stock market bubble. The S&P 500 P/E ratio is lower than pre-pandemic and the Buffett indicator(US stock market value divided by GDP) is still well within a safe range. 1929 was pre-globalization, pre-SEC and there were next to no banking regulations at the time. The Internet bubble of 2000 with its insane speculation more closely resembled the crash of 29 than does the current market conditions. The 2008 housing debacle was primarily too much leveraged mortgage debt.
I'm not a student of economics and haven't studied much of it but I have owned stocks for quite a few years and have a basic understanding of how money works.
Oh, a lot of banking regulation introduced after 29 was rolled back in the 90s and 00s and not restored after the 2009 Crash.
I was actually in Investment Banking before, during and after the 2008 Crash and unconditional rescues with no lessons learned were all the rage.
That said, my point comes more from the economic super-cycle which takes about an century and is mostly visible in terms of general indebtness. This stuff has to do with the nature of economic activity in general and risk aversion (or lack thereof) by economic actors, so it's way beyond mere stockmarkets and their crashes (which reflect it rather than drive it).
There's a lot going on with anemic growth and the "solution" for the persistent recession after the 2008 Crash - ultra-low interest rates - being rolled back due to an accumulation of bubbles all over the Economy leading to Inflation (which was already going up before the war in Ukraine), in turn causing rumbles in the realestate mortgage market and the more bubbly stockmarkets like the Nasdaq (and even more in the Tech Startup investment asset class).
I mean, we're even seeing the rise of populism in politics.
I suspect we might be living in interesting times.