The AI bubble will “burst” as soon as they figure out how to inflict all the damage onto regular working people. The housing bubble bursting is what enabled the ownership class to kick a bunch of working people out of their homes and then buy up all the recently vacated real estate for cheap. Nothing about the damage that the rich did to our economy caused any of them to face any actual consequences.
The promise of AI was that it would replace all the workers, but it’s not doing that fast enough and it’s beginning to look like it never will. We’ve been hearing that the AI bubble will “burst any day now” for years at this point, but if it happened right now, the ownership class are the ones who would be left holding the bag, and that can’t be allowed to happen. When they find a way to take it out of our hides, we’ll see that suddenly the “invisible hand of the free market” will present a scenario such that the floodgates open and the bloodbath is finally allowed to proceed. I imagine that’s why they started wrapping up so many pension funds and the like in AI investments.
The “invisible hand of the market” is such a fascinating myth, because it frames the results of capitalist endeavors as inevitable and almost holy - but as soon as the sufficiently wealthy and well-connected suffer a setback, then “government bailouts” are granted.
The invisible hand is actually very visible of you dare to look close enough.
The basic supply & demand, “invisible hand of the market” stuff applies at like. A farmer’s market. This is the context Adam Smith was talking about when he made up the invisible hand phrase. If one farmer has cheaper produce than another, he’ll probably get more customers. Anything more complicated than a local farmer’s market is… more complicated.
It’s not invisible though (despite them wanting it to be).
The hand is the culture of the investment banks. They set who the winners and losers are, and if there was one thing The Big Short showed very well, it’s that anyone going against that culture is exiled.
They already have. Public Banks are huge investors in the private credit companies that underpin a good amount of the AI bubble.
The Magnificent 7 have been driving the stock markets gains for the last few years. They have also created independent companies to build out the data centers. The debt for these companies is off their books and funded primarily by private credit markets and is underpinned by contracts with the big 7 for data processing once the data center is built.
Projections by the Mag 7 have driven their share increase. So what happens if one or two of the magnificent 7 miss their projections? Well look at Oracle, its stock is tanking because it missed projections.
If the Mag. 7 stock tanks so will your 401ks. When their stock is worth less they will stop plowing money into AI. Suddenly all of the companies with contracts to build the data centers will loose their source of revenue. No revenue and they can’t pay off the loans to private credit. Private credit companies will start to go under and begin to take down the public banking companies that invested in them…
Its a house of cards ready to fall if any of the Mag 7 start to flounder.
It’s a good time to learn about what investments are in your 401k if you have any. You can look at the data sheets on the investments to see what stocks the index funds are made of. I’m moving mine to International index funds that are not tech heavy. I’m no expert in investing but I have heard that it’s sound to invest in companies that make basic things that people need.
Healthcare, consumer staples and utilities are considered to be defensive stocks because they are always needed regardless of economic situation.
I am minimising my exposure to US stock market as well. There is the perception that the European stock market doesn’t have the explosive growth the way that US stocks does but it is at least safer.
Japan could also be considered safe and their stock market have been on the rise after 30 years of stagnation.
Exactly, as long as it’s billionaire buddies with trump, they can always print more money to keep the bubble going. When they realize they need to print the money to keep the rest of us afloat, that’s when they’ll let it crash.
Same thing. Pension funds ARE the ownership class.
I’ve been commenting that people over 55 own 52% of the US and baby boomers as a generation own ~8x more than billionaires as a class, but I re-checked and I’d quoted the wrong number in a bunch of my comments. 52% is for baby boomers only. All over 55s added together are actually over 70%. Let that sink in.
The entire goal of the economy is to let old people enjoy the spoils of the young’s work. Even billionaires are just a symptom of a larger, systemic issue (which is not to say they shouldn’t be hunted for sport, that should still happen).
I think this kind of data is exactly what you’d expect to see in a somewhat equal society: you work your whole life, saving, of course you’ve got more savings then people who haven’t been working their whole lives.
Really I suspect averaging here is skewing your perception, that 70% can hide a few super wealthy and many more poor (which is what you’d expect given 1% of the population own more than the combined bottom 95% ).
And silent. But notice how little the percent goes up when you add both silent and much of gen x to it. Most of it is still baby boomers.
I think this kind of data is exactly what you’d expect to see in a somewhat equal society: you work your whole life, saving, of course you’ve got more savings then people who haven’t been working their whole lives.
Yes. So why are people whining that their paychecks aren’t rising, that they can’t afford property, etc? All that goes to old people who, via retirement funds mostly, own the companies that young people work for. The housing is owned by old people and companies belonging to old people. If the US suddenly had a 50 dollar an hour minimum wage, old people would be fucked and have to go back to work because their holdings would no longer be worth shit.
Really I suspect averaging here is skewing your perception, that 70% can hide a few super wealthy and many more poor (which is what you’d expect given 1% of the population own more than the combined bottom 95% ).
Median baby boomer is worth like 400k, average is near 2 mill, so of course it’s still skewed, 10% of baby boomers own 70% of their wealth. But what I’m trying to argue is that you can’t have both a great working life and a great retirement life at the same time unless the amount of retired people is small. Baby boomers enjoyed a great working life and now they’re enjoying a great retirement life, but they can only enjoy the latter because everyone else’s wages stagnated. No other generation has ever been as rich as the baby boomers, no other generation’s wealth outclassed the preceding generation as early as theirs. They’re enjoying more time at the top than anyone before them. Gen X and millennials on the other hand are getting there much later in life and I don’t know if Gen Z will ever be the wealthiest generation before most millennials are dead.
People just aren’t having enough children for this whole retirement thing to work much longer. Millennials might never retire, Gen Z will definitely not retire (and this isn’t specific to the capitalist system). But we get to pay baby boomers to retire.
Eventually we need to start talking about getting rid of retirement altogether. We can’t have 5 retirees living off the back of one working person, that’s absurd.
Ironically the AI everyone’s fighting against, combined with a better economic system of course, is the only thing that can change things. When there are truly very few jobs that need a human, we can finally consider having so many non-working people for so few working people, without outright straddling all the working people with debt. Maybe not AI as it is now, but AI that can truly replace knowledge workers to the point that it can design automation for physical jobs on its own. As it is now, even supposedly “communist” countries need people working well into the 50s and 60s, and it’ll get worse when their demographics crises hit.
If the US suddenly had a 50 dollar an hour minimum wage, old people would be fucked and have to go back to work because their holdings would no longer be worth shit.
This is a counter factual, I think it’d be really hard to prove what would have happened to current people over 55’s savings if wages had kept pace.
I don’t actually think that people need to work forever otherwise the old prey upon the young. I think this is more of an inequality issue, that is remedied with taxes on wealth (i’m mostly basing that opinion on “capital in the 21st century”).
Eventually we need to start talking about getting rid of retirement altogether
Yes yes, make the old’s work again! WTF dude. You know this will happen to you if your lucky right? Personally i want my old age or my parents to not be plagued by want. I see it as part of my duty to support my parents, on account of them supporting me. It seems like you’ve consumed too much zero sum game.
I also think AI has way too many negative externalities (more propping up the ultra wealthy, contributing to climate change) to counter it’s positive effects.
This is a counter factual, I think it’d be really hard to prove what would have happened to current people over 55’s savings if wages had kept pace.
Well they’d certainly own less, that’s for sure. Corporate profits would’ve gone down, and corporate profits are where most old people’s wealth comes from (401k, pensions, etc).
Yes yes, make the old’s work again! WTF dude. You know this will happen to you if your lucky right? Personally i want my old age or my parents to not be plagued by want. I see it as part of my duty to support my parents, on account of them supporting me.
The boomers had to support their parents. We have to support our parents and some of their childless friends. Our children will have to support more like 10-15 people each. Unless we raise our retirement ages enough that we aren’t a burden on our children. In general, if you’re under 40 and thinking of retiring one day, you’re selfish as fuck. Personally I at least acknowledge to myself that my desire to retire one day, is extremely selfish, as it requires me to accumulate resources that other people could use.
It seems like you’ve consumed too much zero sum game.
While there are places in economic where zero sum game does not apply (e.g you get more out of education than the money invested into it), resources are largely a zero sum game, as is time (labour). Once an apple has been grown and harvested, only one person can eat it. Once a house is built, only one family can live in it at a time. Etc. When there are fewer people working, less work can get done, unless those people work more hours. To have enough resources for everyone, a big enough share of people has to work. As we have more old people, we need people working longer, unless we figure out a way to replace human labor. As you’re against AI, there’s little real way to do that.
The whole retirement thing is predicated on growth. There’s enough growth that you can tax young people, either via corporations underpaying them (corporations owned by old people), or via direct taxation and a national pension (where the old people benefitting at least benefit a bit more evenly), without it weighing down on them too badly. This worked great for a while because the population kept growing, but that has pretty much stopped in the developed world.
Which is why I keep telling people: If you don’t want retirement ages to rise, you better be making babies and tons of them.
Well they’d certainly own less, that’s for sure. Corporate profits would’ve gone down
There is no way you could say this with certainty. Why would corp profits go down… I could as easily say they’d go up (people have more money because their wages are keeping up so they spend more blah blah. Your taking at least 40 years and suggesting you could predict what would happen if they were fundamentally different.
Once an apple has been grown and harvested, only one person can eat it. Once a house is built, only one family can live in it at a time
Sure, but we don’t have a lack of food problem, or a lack of housing problem. We have distribution problems. It doesn’t take one person to farm all day to feed a family anymore, we can feed thousands with one persons labour now. We have the houses, the ownership is concentrated.
The whole retirement thing is predicated on growth
Right, we don’t have 0.01% holding 10% of total wealth, we couldn’t possibly be spreading that out more evenly. We don’t ask children to go down to the mine, we put them in school. We work together to make more than we need and those growing up and those in old age reap either the benefits of learning and practising, or having earned it through their lifes work resting.
It baffles my mind that you ignore the work retired people did before they retired.
Which is why I keep telling people: If you don’t want retirement ages to rise, you better be making babies and tons of them
They own, but they don’t control that ownership. Their savings are used as investment funds, but very few actually know what they are invested in. That control is in the hands of the indexes. S&P, NASDAQ and the like. Just because NASDAQ blessed SpaceX with being part of their index, millions of pensions bought the stock.
They don’t control, yes - the control (on the level of the individual companies) is being handled for their benefit though. Line must go up for the shareholders - aka old people.
The AI bubble will “burst” as soon as they figure out how to inflict all the damage onto regular working people. The housing bubble bursting is what enabled the ownership class to kick a bunch of working people out of their homes and then buy up all the recently vacated real estate for cheap. Nothing about the damage that the rich did to our economy caused any of them to face any actual consequences.
The promise of AI was that it would replace all the workers, but it’s not doing that fast enough and it’s beginning to look like it never will. We’ve been hearing that the AI bubble will “burst any day now” for years at this point, but if it happened right now, the ownership class are the ones who would be left holding the bag, and that can’t be allowed to happen. When they find a way to take it out of our hides, we’ll see that suddenly the “invisible hand of the free market” will present a scenario such that the floodgates open and the bloodbath is finally allowed to proceed. I imagine that’s why they started wrapping up so many pension funds and the like in AI investments.
The “invisible hand of the market” is such a fascinating myth, because it frames the results of capitalist endeavors as inevitable and almost holy - but as soon as the sufficiently wealthy and well-connected suffer a setback, then “government bailouts” are granted.
The invisible hand is actually very visible of you dare to look close enough.
The basic supply & demand, “invisible hand of the market” stuff applies at like. A farmer’s market. This is the context Adam Smith was talking about when he made up the invisible hand phrase. If one farmer has cheaper produce than another, he’ll probably get more customers. Anything more complicated than a local farmer’s market is… more complicated.
The problem is this time American national debt is too big for the size of bailout needed for AI.
Housing is already maxed out so where is the next thing to prop up the market?
It’ll have to be robotic automation.
Factories are already robotic. Replacing humans is just more tech bro bullshit, like how AI will fix your toilet.
It’s not invisible though (despite them wanting it to be). The hand is the culture of the investment banks. They set who the winners and losers are, and if there was one thing The Big Short showed very well, it’s that anyone going against that culture is exiled.
SPCX is the model all AI companies plan follow. IP0 valuation of 2K X forward Earnings.
Your retirement fund will be the exit liquidity forced to buy through indexes as the stocks crash and flat line.
They already have. Public Banks are huge investors in the private credit companies that underpin a good amount of the AI bubble.
The Magnificent 7 have been driving the stock markets gains for the last few years. They have also created independent companies to build out the data centers. The debt for these companies is off their books and funded primarily by private credit markets and is underpinned by contracts with the big 7 for data processing once the data center is built.
Projections by the Mag 7 have driven their share increase. So what happens if one or two of the magnificent 7 miss their projections? Well look at Oracle, its stock is tanking because it missed projections.
If the Mag. 7 stock tanks so will your 401ks. When their stock is worth less they will stop plowing money into AI. Suddenly all of the companies with contracts to build the data centers will loose their source of revenue. No revenue and they can’t pay off the loans to private credit. Private credit companies will start to go under and begin to take down the public banking companies that invested in them…
Its a house of cards ready to fall if any of the Mag 7 start to flounder.
It’s a good time to learn about what investments are in your 401k if you have any. You can look at the data sheets on the investments to see what stocks the index funds are made of. I’m moving mine to International index funds that are not tech heavy. I’m no expert in investing but I have heard that it’s sound to invest in companies that make basic things that people need.
Morningstar is a decent source in breaking down the holdings of nearly every ETF and Mutual Fund.
Healthcare, consumer staples and utilities are considered to be defensive stocks because they are always needed regardless of economic situation.
I am minimising my exposure to US stock market as well. There is the perception that the European stock market doesn’t have the explosive growth the way that US stocks does but it is at least safer.
Japan could also be considered safe and their stock market have been on the rise after 30 years of stagnation.
Too big to fail!
I noticed the pension fund thing and I’m scared.
Exactly, as long as it’s billionaire buddies with trump, they can always print more money to keep the bubble going. When they realize they need to print the money to keep the rest of us afloat, that’s when they’ll let it crash.
Same thing. Pension funds ARE the ownership class.
I’ve been commenting that people over 55 own 52% of the US and baby boomers as a generation own ~8x more than billionaires as a class, but I re-checked and I’d quoted the wrong number in a bunch of my comments. 52% is for baby boomers only. All over 55s added together are actually over 70%. Let that sink in.
The entire goal of the economy is to let old people enjoy the spoils of the young’s work. Even billionaires are just a symptom of a larger, systemic issue (which is not to say they shouldn’t be hunted for sport, that should still happen).
Over 55 isn’t babyboomers anymore that’s gen x.
I think this kind of data is exactly what you’d expect to see in a somewhat equal society: you work your whole life, saving, of course you’ve got more savings then people who haven’t been working their whole lives.
Really I suspect averaging here is skewing your perception, that 70% can hide a few super wealthy and many more poor (which is what you’d expect given 1% of the population own more than the combined bottom 95% ).
And silent. But notice how little the percent goes up when you add both silent and much of gen x to it. Most of it is still baby boomers.
Yes. So why are people whining that their paychecks aren’t rising, that they can’t afford property, etc? All that goes to old people who, via retirement funds mostly, own the companies that young people work for. The housing is owned by old people and companies belonging to old people. If the US suddenly had a 50 dollar an hour minimum wage, old people would be fucked and have to go back to work because their holdings would no longer be worth shit.
Median baby boomer is worth like 400k, average is near 2 mill, so of course it’s still skewed, 10% of baby boomers own 70% of their wealth. But what I’m trying to argue is that you can’t have both a great working life and a great retirement life at the same time unless the amount of retired people is small. Baby boomers enjoyed a great working life and now they’re enjoying a great retirement life, but they can only enjoy the latter because everyone else’s wages stagnated. No other generation has ever been as rich as the baby boomers, no other generation’s wealth outclassed the preceding generation as early as theirs. They’re enjoying more time at the top than anyone before them. Gen X and millennials on the other hand are getting there much later in life and I don’t know if Gen Z will ever be the wealthiest generation before most millennials are dead.
People just aren’t having enough children for this whole retirement thing to work much longer. Millennials might never retire, Gen Z will definitely not retire (and this isn’t specific to the capitalist system). But we get to pay baby boomers to retire.
Eventually we need to start talking about getting rid of retirement altogether. We can’t have 5 retirees living off the back of one working person, that’s absurd.
Ironically the AI everyone’s fighting against, combined with a better economic system of course, is the only thing that can change things. When there are truly very few jobs that need a human, we can finally consider having so many non-working people for so few working people, without outright straddling all the working people with debt. Maybe not AI as it is now, but AI that can truly replace knowledge workers to the point that it can design automation for physical jobs on its own. As it is now, even supposedly “communist” countries need people working well into the 50s and 60s, and it’ll get worse when their demographics crises hit.
This is a counter factual, I think it’d be really hard to prove what would have happened to current people over 55’s savings if wages had kept pace.
I don’t actually think that people need to work forever otherwise the old prey upon the young. I think this is more of an inequality issue, that is remedied with taxes on wealth (i’m mostly basing that opinion on “capital in the 21st century”).
Yes yes, make the old’s work again! WTF dude. You know this will happen to you if your lucky right? Personally i want my old age or my parents to not be plagued by want. I see it as part of my duty to support my parents, on account of them supporting me. It seems like you’ve consumed too much zero sum game.
I also think AI has way too many negative externalities (more propping up the ultra wealthy, contributing to climate change) to counter it’s positive effects.
Well they’d certainly own less, that’s for sure. Corporate profits would’ve gone down, and corporate profits are where most old people’s wealth comes from (401k, pensions, etc).
The boomers had to support their parents. We have to support our parents and some of their childless friends. Our children will have to support more like 10-15 people each. Unless we raise our retirement ages enough that we aren’t a burden on our children. In general, if you’re under 40 and thinking of retiring one day, you’re selfish as fuck. Personally I at least acknowledge to myself that my desire to retire one day, is extremely selfish, as it requires me to accumulate resources that other people could use.
While there are places in economic where zero sum game does not apply (e.g you get more out of education than the money invested into it), resources are largely a zero sum game, as is time (labour). Once an apple has been grown and harvested, only one person can eat it. Once a house is built, only one family can live in it at a time. Etc. When there are fewer people working, less work can get done, unless those people work more hours. To have enough resources for everyone, a big enough share of people has to work. As we have more old people, we need people working longer, unless we figure out a way to replace human labor. As you’re against AI, there’s little real way to do that.
The whole retirement thing is predicated on growth. There’s enough growth that you can tax young people, either via corporations underpaying them (corporations owned by old people), or via direct taxation and a national pension (where the old people benefitting at least benefit a bit more evenly), without it weighing down on them too badly. This worked great for a while because the population kept growing, but that has pretty much stopped in the developed world.
Which is why I keep telling people: If you don’t want retirement ages to rise, you better be making babies and tons of them.
There is no way you could say this with certainty. Why would corp profits go down… I could as easily say they’d go up (people have more money because their wages are keeping up so they spend more blah blah. Your taking at least 40 years and suggesting you could predict what would happen if they were fundamentally different.
Sure, but we don’t have a lack of food problem, or a lack of housing problem. We have distribution problems. It doesn’t take one person to farm all day to feed a family anymore, we can feed thousands with one persons labour now. We have the houses, the ownership is concentrated.
Right, we don’t have 0.01% holding 10% of total wealth, we couldn’t possibly be spreading that out more evenly. We don’t ask children to go down to the mine, we put them in school. We work together to make more than we need and those growing up and those in old age reap either the benefits of learning and practising, or having earned it through their lifes work resting.
It baffles my mind that you ignore the work retired people did before they retired.
You should stop telling them that.
They own, but they don’t control that ownership. Their savings are used as investment funds, but very few actually know what they are invested in. That control is in the hands of the indexes. S&P, NASDAQ and the like. Just because NASDAQ blessed SpaceX with being part of their index, millions of pensions bought the stock.
They don’t control, yes - the control (on the level of the individual companies) is being handled for their benefit though. Line must go up for the shareholders - aka old people.
Theoretically, yes. In reality they’re a long way down the food chain.
So shareholders are now a long way down the food chain? If that’s the case, maybe publicly traded companies aren’t as evil as we once thought.