a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  1534 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Repo Lightening

So here's the great dichotomy of our economy: ostensibly we're a regulated capitalist society whereby the market is permitted to work its efficiencies through the invisible hand. However, the more sophisticated your market the greater the influence of its regulation.

If you care about the market, you let bad things happen to it in order to restore equilibrium. If you care about the society, you protect it from the bad things in order to prevent deutschmark bonfires and the like. Economics in a nutshell. The downside is that there are no relationships that prevent regulation from killing the market or the market from destroying society and because it's damn hard to run lab tests on the global economy, we're all lab rats.

A few places this goes:

1) Steady capital injections of whatever the market needs returns it to its previous equilibrium. I mean, it could happen. Anything could happen. 3-2-1 Contact told me 40 years ago that overpopulation and peak oil were going to kill me just in time for the new Ice Age.

2) Steady capital injections of whatever the market needs makes the market insatiably hungry for capital. This is kind of what we're seeing. Will we be able to feed it forever? I've seen it suggested that eventually the Fed will just start buying stocks. Stranger things have happened. We're here talking about the Fed directly loaning money to hedge funds. The Swiss Central Bank owns enough apple stock for every citizen of Switzerland to have a $350 share. I believe we call that a corporatocracy.

3) Eventually the Fed can't feed the beast enough and the beast recoils. Everyone dumps their position so as to not be left holding the bag. Do the robots buy it back up? Who knows. What does a crash look like when the crashers are robots and the money is external?

Bitcoin exists because enough cypherpunks were pissed off about the first bailout. It's been ten years. The song remains the same. The bailouts happened because Ben Bernanke was one of the foremost scholars of the Great Depression and he thought he had a pretty good idea how to keep it from happening again. He was right - he prevented a second great depression. But he didn't stave off disaster entirely. One of the reasons I pay attention to John Mauldin is he called 2019 in 2009.

I wonder how this will end every single day.





ButterflyEffect  ·  1534 days ago  ·  link  ·  

You know, that’s a really interesting point of wtf do the algorithms end up doing in the event of abrupt market or regulatory changes? Do they function in a manner that eases the financial impact or do we find out that the software behind all this isn’t suited for bear markets or lack of bailouts? Maybe that’s too Y2K esque.

kleinbl00  ·  1534 days ago  ·  link  ·