In the last 5 to 10 years everything seems to suck: product’s and services quality plummeted, everything from homes to cars to food became really expensive, technology stopped to help us to be something designed to f@ck with us and our money, nobody seems to be able to hold a job anymore, everyone is broke. Life seems worse in general.

Why? Did COVID made this happen? How?

  • ComradeKhoumrag
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    10 months ago

    So, before I say “capitalism” like everyone else id like to argue many of the monetary/economic policy can be used by either authoritarian state capitalists or free capitalists alike.

    https://42macro.com/education Edit: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjqe6xtZYTfvA4pHs0HgJsQ

    This can be useful^ it’s a brief read. Also I love Adam Taggart, he’s a really good person to follow on YouTube for economics.

    Things were getting bad for a while, and we kick the can down the road until an exponentially worse problem arrives, then repeat. Let’s look at COVID for now tho instead of going back decades

    COVID happens, society has to adapt, and now there’s growth issues with the economy (growth domestic product or gross domestic income)

    First, government gives a shit ton of stimulus checks to the consumer market. A market is a collection of buyers and sellers. The consumer market is a collection of buyers and sellers who spend their money on one thing and don’t retain that value. So most of the stimmy money went from consumers to corporations. To give you an idea, over the last 3 years we’ve seen 35% of inflation that is never going away, it will forever weigh on the consumer market (and that’s the market that needs to be well off for an economy to be anything more than the stock/financial market)

    Second, Fed sees an incoming recession so they lower interest rates to make banking loans cheaper to encourage investment to increase growth again. This means people who are not suffering from the economy can easily afford another house since they’re basically not paying any interest on it, then rent it out to Airbnb or whatever.

    All these things cause growth in the short term, while making inflation a much worse problem in the long term.

    FED starts raising interest rates slowly over the last year or 2. Now they’re about to lower them again which is a sign we’re in for another recession, but let’s look at what raising interest rates did:

    Banks operate on a very tight margin and raising interest rates hurts banks in the short term and takes a while for markets to react to (which is part of the reason why we saw so many bank closures like silicon valley bank)

    But raising interest rates also makes it more expensive for people to afford mortgage payments.

    H.O.P.E: housing , orders, profits, employment

    When mortgage payments got more expensive housing got expensive. When housing gets expensive orders go down and/or credit card usage goes up (which is another separate problem / indicator). When orders go down profits go down, and when profits go down employment goes down.

    It should be worth noting the one thing J Powell did right was creating slack in job openings to prevent a complete crash in the labor market, but that’s the last thing to crash in a recession so we’re still just kicking the can down the road.

    That’s the best analysis I can do with respect to COVID, but some other interesting things:

    The average boomer is 2 years into retirement. The labor force is going to continue shrinking for the next 7 years. It won’t be this bad in America, but in south east asian countries, there’s going to reach a point where there are more old people than young people, and when that happens there’s not enough people to care for the elderly and support the rest of the economy, so both tend to suffer. America will feel this pain as well, but our population “pyramid” is more of an hourglass, where south east asian is an upside down pyramid

    Also, geopolitical tensions are likely going to get worse over the next few years. China manufactures everything consumers like that don’t have to do with defense, so things like smartphones are going to get much more expensive , and tech stocks are likely to suffer. Edit: not to mention food and gas prices increasing from Ukraine war (which isn’t in the Feds basket of goods for inflation which is HILARIOUSLY STUPID considering that’s their excuse for inflation)

    Also, there’s tons of shadow banks with stealth liquidity where there’s no information how much money they have. So however bad inflation was the last few years and will continue to get with the Fed cutting rates, it can get MUCH worse once those banks start releasing their liquidity.

    So, things are bad and they’re going to get worse before there’s a chance things get better. I really recommend listening to Adam Taggart and the people he interviews to help form your decision making

    • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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      10 months ago

      Your post was highly informative and surprisingly apolitical given the topics at hand. High five man.

      I’ll read your link later.

    • el_abuelo@lemmy.ml
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      10 months ago

      Gas prices feed through to consumers by raising the cost of energy for everyone except those not using gas. So it seems reasonable to not double count it by adding it to the basket as well.

      The only real gas consumers use is for heating and cooking - and that is very low volume compared to the impact on us from costs to producers going up.

      • ComradeKhoumrag
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        10 months ago

        From Google:

        Examples of shadow banks or financial intermediaries not subject to regulation include hedge funds, private equity funds, mortgage lenders, and even large investment banks

        Shadow banks aren’t illegal, just have loose regulations