Finance thread!

i keep being taken for a raving SJW commie when i talk liberalism 101.

so let's liberal liberally for a bit. 1/10

the one trend that stands out for me in finance and markets over the past decade is increasing desperation to achieve returns.

interest rates are in the toilet, so investors are susceptible to questionable, and increasingly desperate, schemes. 2/10

arguably this is the past 20 years - the 2008 financial crisis came from the same desperation, building Jenga stacks of CDOs.

or indeed the past 40 years. the trouble with neoliberalism is that eventually you run out of other people's public institutions to asset-strip. 3/10

interest rates are down, the non-rentier economy is in the toilet because of rentierism - i believe that Smith fellow had a few words on this subject, and this is Piketty's basic thesis - and so the rentier economy is geting more desperate in looking for returns. 4/10

so we get a proliferation of nonsense in attempts to magick up returns - Softbank, SPACs, etc.

because of an ideological bias against just supporting the non-rentier economy, and against remembering why rentierism is bad for an economy. 5/10

the US covid response is a perfect example. screw supporting the real economy, let's feed unlimited fed $ into the stock market! i.e. the derivative of the real economy.

the people are still screwed, but they can brag how NUMBER IS UP. 6/10

(like, probably the first thing to do is crash house prices. this is hard, because landlords own the government. the US housing market seems driven by corporate landlords snapping up everything as quickly as possible.) 7/10

if you feed your rentiers, they parasitise your non-rentiers, and trouble is the non-rentiers are where the money comes from for interest.

(i'm sure someone will be along shortly with a Marx quote to this effect, as this follows directly from Smith.) 8/10

now that's literally just basic liberal economics. becuase Keynes (the successful capitalist investor) was just completely right, and neoliberalism is based in ideological objection to Keynes and never mind if it works. Be more Keynes - Hayek was *wrong*. 9/10

and in conclusion, guillotines and people setting fire to shit are an unfortunate if predictable consequence of several decades' blatant fuckery, and it would be wise to do the things that lead to less of those.

also returns will go up. thank you. 10/10

oh okay: the cr*pto market's frantic posturing as totally real financial institutions is a pitch for the desperate investor market, in the hope that cr*pto nonsense can be sold as sufficiently resembling regular finance nonsense 11/10