a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by mk
mk  ·  1473 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Federal Reserve cuts rates to zero and launches massive $700 billion quantitative easing program  ·  

I'm old enough that as a kid, my great uncle Fran used to tell me first hand stories of the Great Depression. My grandfather would walk the railroad tracks as a kid, picking up bits of metal to sell for scrap to get bread. This central banking money system is fucked. Yields have progressively spiked and dropped within lower bounds for the last four decades. Now the bound is near zero.

Central banks are pushing on string. That said, the economy is magic. It heals and transforms. People trade, build, and create. IMO in a very real way, what will die off in this next decade needs to die off. It was on life support anyway.

My biggest worry is that skyrocketing unemployment will lead to populism, nationalism, and conflict. There's going to be fertile ground for that bullshit. But, as far as the economy goes, I think the world has a real opportunity to rebuild with one that is less top-heavy. I see crypto as a fundamental building block of that. Institutions of trust have been the focus of economic exploits. That's Bernie's whole bang. My prediction is that in the next decade, Central Bank hi-jinks will continue to prove ineffectual at best, and an organic token-based economy will grow parallel to it.





kleinbl00  ·  1473 days ago  ·  link  ·  

We have been fortunate in that the populist wave hit before the collapse this time rather than after. WWI, the Great Depression and the 30s were all caused by establishment politics. FDR, Hitler, Churchill and Tojo were all reactions to economic failure, not causes.

The fundamental problem is that we've all been trading our IOUs at each other for so long that the reckoning when we tear them up is gonna be fierce. That, more than anything, is what normies miss in all this discussion because the financial players obfuscate it: stock markets, bond markets, treasuries, all of it is a wager between "now money" and "later money" and collapses like this happen when people lose confidence in "later money" and want "now money." 2008 was about all the later money tied up in people's mortgages was revealed to be an illusion so people traded whatever fractional later money they had for whatever now money they could get.

Now? I mean, Vegas is shut down. Think about that: a city of 2 million people whose only viable industry is entertaining 41 million tourists a year. Multiply by the whole world. Nobody has a good model of what "later money" even looks like.