If you think this started with Silicon Valley that’s a mistake
You have to take that into consideration in your planning. Don’t go full prepper but do diversify your holdings. That’s just basic anyway.
Why wpuld anyone ever be a god damned prepped that sounds like the most miserable life imaginable. You are signing up to be Salad Fingers fuck that shit
But I like my rusty spoon
There is a bubble every decade. When you are saving over 40 years or more a single year dip every 10 years is fine.
Don’t sell in the dip, buy in the dip.
The underlying asset bubble based on unequal exchange has never been popped and there is zero cushioning for it. This is not 1976 nor 2008
Capitalism cannot last forever, though. With imperialism dying, crashes are going to get harder, to outright ending capitalism.
Don’t sell in the dip, buy in the dip.
What would happen if everyone did this? Can everyone do this, even theoretically?
This is effectively impossible. Time in the market beats trying to time the market because it is hard to identify the dip until you have already exited it.
If everyone bought the dip, the dip would end. Stock prices are only loosely tied to reality. They are more strongly tied to the perception that a stock’s price will increase. So, if people started pouring money into stocks (or other assets) the price of those stocks would naturally rise as they become more scarce and sellers demand a higher price for them. Assuming the reasons for the dip remain, it would just result in the inflation of another bubble.
Take a look back at the whole GameStop (GME) rollercoster. Large investors expected the stock to crater and began taking short positions. Retail investors saw the dip this was causing and bought the stock in droves, forcing the price up beyond anything it had any business being. Eventually, that bubble popped and the stock has settled to a more reasonable (if still higher) level.
The whole system is built on winners and losers. It’s very frustrating to me.
An economy is really just a way to distribute finite resources in a world with infinite wants. Even the most egalitarian of systems is going to require deciding who gets something and who doesn’t (winner and losers). It’s perfectly valid to be frustrated by being on the “doesn’t” end of that equation. And we (US and other Western Democracies) could certainly do a lot more to shift some of the resources away from the few who are hording a lot of them, even without a radical “tear the system down” approach. The difficulty is the political will to do so.
Unfortunately, mustering political will for a collective good, which may come with some individual losses can be a tough sell. Especially when large parts of a population are comfortable. Not only do you have to convince people that the collective good is an overall good for them, you also have to convince them that the individual losses either won’t effect them or will be mitigated by the upsides of the collective good. And given peoples’ tendency to over emphasize the short term risks over the long term risks, this can be especially hard. But, that doesn’t mean you should give up, just that you need to sharpen your arguments and find ways to convince more people that things can be better for them, if they are willing to take that step.
The essential factor is that the imperialist countries, ie the US, EU, etc, leverage their financial and millitary domination of the global south to expropriate large sums of wealth. These spoils are used to bribe the working class into passivity. Imperialism, however, is self-defeating, and the rate of profit is lowering while there aren’t really new markets to plunder anymore. This causes crisis.
It’s not particularly outlandish to orient the economy around collectivized production and distribution based on need, rather than profit. Socialist countries already exist, and achieve good results compared to peer countries. They require working class organization, which is a difficult but possible process.
Imperialism, however, is self-defeating, and the rate of profit is lowering while there aren’t really new markets to plunder anymore. This causes crisis.
Potentially yes, but empires can last for hundreds or thousands of years. Democracy is relatively young by comparison, and we’re already seeing large cracks in it in the USA, one of the older democracies.
The point being: humanity hasn’t yet found a long term stable form of government.
It’s not particularly outlandish to orient the economy around collectivized production and distribution based on need, rather than profit. Socialist countries already exist, and achieve good results compared to peer countries. They require working class organization, which is a difficult but possible process.
I’m interested in your perspective on this. Which socialist country are you using as an example of what you describe above?
The US is really only democratic for the capitalist class, the wealthy capital owners whose primary income originates from capital ownership. The US isn’t seeing cracks in democracy, but in the entire system of financial plunder that keeps it going. Capitalists in the US, facing internal market saturation and steadily falling rates of profit, have had to expand outward, leveraging a strong overseas millitary to keep the global south under their thumb.
The US Empire wasn’t the first, it’s merely the largest. Britain, France, and Germany have all reached this stage of Capitalism. World War I left them debt-ridden to the US, and World War II flipped the script, with the US flooding the world with dollars, later destroying the gold standard, leveraging its own debt to essentially tax the entire world. The entire west, or the “global north,” gains from this system with the US as the “top dog,” and is falling down with it.
In the modern era, however, the sheer unsustainability of that system is choking itself. Manufacturing has been hollowed out and is all handled overseas, and countries in the global south are throwing off the west in favor of more favorable relations with China. The rate of profit is falling, and overconsumption as the US Empire’s strongest card to keep demand up is faltering due to this. It’s a house of cards.
As for socialism, the easiest answer is the PRC. Public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy, governing the large firms and key industries, enabling them to plan for the future and actually meet their targets. Market mechanics are used primarily to make central planning more efficient. This century is going to be marked by China’s undisputed rise. As they continue to develop, market mechanics will continue to be phased out:
Other countries, like Cuba, manage to maintain higher quality of life metrics despite being under intense embargo than peer countries. The USSR had, in its time, the most rapid improvements in economic growth and quality of life in history. None of these countries have been perfect utopias, or anything, but all have surpassed the inherent unsustainability of capitalism.
If you want further reading, Michael Hudson’s Super Imperialism is a pretty good book on how the US Empire rose in the first place, as well as how it can’t continue forever, and we are merely observing its dying phase.
It isn’t about “discovering” new systems. Capitalism was not invented, it emerged from mercantilism and early industrial manufacturing within the boundaries of feudalism. It was never a choice to adopt it, it arose naturally as it subsumed everything else, extending the domain of private property. History is not progressed by people randomly discovering new ideas, but is a gradual material process, and the ideas that rise and fall are secondary to that and support that process. Liberalism arose because of capitalism’s rise and need for ideological justification.
If no one sold in the dip for you to buy would there even be a dip?
Exactly.
I’m about 6ish years away from retirement (the goal is Dec 31 2031). I’ve been doing a lot of work in stock markets as a result of preparing for it. The thing with the stock market is you only lose money when you sell. If a bubble pops, but you don’t sell and you keep it in there, you will eventually make your money back and recover. Diversifying your portfolio also helps, if the housing bubble pops, the entertainment sector will likely grow because people need escapism. The AI bubble is huge right now and when that pops it will be worse than the dot com bubble, even though that bubble popped, websites are still around and that industry is larger today than it has ever been. Like websites AI is here to stay, and will eventually become larger than it is right now. It’s just time, wait it out and it will normalize.
I mean, if you have stock in like blockbuster you’re losing money there too.
Not great
GOOD luck
I don’t expect to live long enough to retire. Any hope that I’d eventually be able to retire and enjoy life for a change went out the window in 2008 when the housing bubble popped.
There’s a lot of fun stuff coming soon, stick around if possible.
same here and my doctor confirmed it not too long ago; it’s a little bit freeing knowing that i don’t have to put any effort into planning from my elderly years.
If you live long enough, you’ve been through a number of bubbles. For me thats:
- Black Monday (1987)
- Dot com bubble (2000) which also bled into 9/11 economics impacts
- Great Recession (2008)
- COVID (2020)
The next bubble will just be another. Economy will slow, value of most assets will drop. Jobs will be lost, homes foreclosed on…and then the recovery will begin again. We’ll look in the mirror shocked we survived it then in a few years we’ll completely forget about it and be terrified of the next bubble.
So, prepare by living within you means, take care of yourself and your loved ones, and just be ready to weather the next storm. We’ll get through that one too.
While the rich get richer and more people get poorer.
