Shareholder value. Companies are cutting everything they can to increase stakeholder value: wages, quality, support, ownership, etc.

You’re finally realizing the end game of capitalism. The 1% trying to hoard everything and milk 99% of the population. I call them piggies because they’re gluttonous with money.

Edit: you’re

Greed

Capitalism. The longer Capitalism exists, the more it has to find new ways to stop/slow its own built-in death clock. If it doesn’t, it dies, due to problems like the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall and rising disparity. Enshittification, so to speak.

With each economic disaster, the wealthiest of the bourgeoisie can claim large swaths of cheaper Capital at a discount, compounding the issue into a form of neo-feudalism that will eventually collapse under its own weight.

I think the enshitification of the Internet was sort of just what happens to everything once it gets monetized. It was already happening before COVID.

On the other hand - when I was growing up, my city was rough. So much violent crime, bands would not come here, it was notorious. Now? No. Violet crime has decreased sharply, my kids grew up in a different world than I did.

Jobs haven’t become less secure, or at least not in my experience, that change happened in the 1980s, and it’s been about the same since.

Everyone is broke because of Ronald Reagan, for lack of a better way to explain it. Deregulation. Workers have gotten ever more productive without getting their cut of that increase in productivity and this is the endgame of that trend.

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Capitalism arrived at its limit. Now it must do these shitty things to continue to grow profits. Basically it’s now cannibalising itself. Next there will be fascism and war so that it can reboot the machine.

You see it all started when some dumb motherfuckers decided to leave the relatively plentiful African Savannah for the dead-land that was the desert. Then they had to invent agriculture and it was all downhill from there.

Don’t forget that global climate change has really kicked into gear the last few years. Just 10 years ago, summer in Arizona was terrible, but you wouldn’t get third degree burns from falling on the ground. The polar vortex is getting all screwed up, causing severe cold in winter on one half of the northern hemisphere while the other half experiences very very mild winter weather. global weather phenomena are getting more and more severe, and still the people who actually can effect change on large scale are loathe to do so because it would hurt their bottom line. Hell in a hand basket would be an apt descriptor for where we’re going and how we’re getting there.

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

A significant part of it is that for a couple decades our economy was based on bullshit. Instead of companies being profitable, especially in tech, their primary goal was to attract venture capital. There was a lot of money floating around with not many easy options to make it grow. Investors were willing to take big risks for the possibility of big future returns. Executives ywe’re happy to spend as much as they could and hire as much as they could because the more they spent the higher the company’s valuation would be, regardless of current profit.

With the interest rates rising, money is abandoning riskier investments. All these places that had tons of cash flowing in because they might be the next big thing are suddenly trying to be profitable now.

This is compounded by companies wanting constant growth, and flat out refusing to take any of the hit. Investors want companies to show profit now, and goddamn if they’re not going to deliver. (Even if it does cost future revenue and stability.) So instead they’re trying to push the entire burden onto consumers and are just testing how much they will tolerate.

Are you still buying coke and Pepsi products? Because their prices have doubled in five years. For a lot of cheap things, especially food, demand is fairly inelastic. People gotta eat, and they’re not looking to change any habits based on prices.

I, for one have cut way back on coke/Pepsi products. It’s not because I can’t afford $13/case, because I can. I can afford $20/case without really noticing. I refuse, mostly out of spite. (Unless there’s a good sale.) Those companies don’t need to improve their 2019 profit margin of 20% (it’s now 23%). First, that profit margin excludes the ridiculous salaries of execs. Second, 20% of $13 is already a bigger number than 20% of $6 was. They don’t need to both increase their profit percentage WHILE increasing their prices. They’re double dipping. And they’re passing none of that windfall to consumers or the government or to their employees.

Here’s the thing… There’s always shit hitting the fan, that doesn’t change. What has changed is our perception. We see everything that happens everywhere all the time right in the palm of our hands. Our ability to have control over any of it hasn’t changed much. I was born in the 60s when a president, presidential candidate and a civil rights leader were assassinated which is pretty intense and everyone is aware of it. There were other events that were “big deals” at the time that younger people today aren’t aware of. It’s a thing that strikes me as I get older. I guess that’s how it goes, we all together stress over one thing or another. The first one I remember getting wrapped up in was the Swine Flu outbreak in the 70’s. My 5th grade class got a new textbook with a picture right inside the cover of a kid getting an inoculation shot. The needle device looked more like an industrial staple gun than a traditional needle and I was scared shirtless of it. I waited for my turn to get that shot and it never came. The next news headline replaced Swine Flu and the whole thing blew over. My point is these things come and they go, it’s nothing new. I’m not saying don’t be concerned about the state of things just don’t stress out too hard. It’s not on your shoulders to save the world at least not yours alone. You do have an effect on things just not everything.

Are you American? Because I seem to recall between five and ten years ago a particular event that changed the way we ran a lot of the government.

My theory? The Mayans were right. 2012 was the end of the cycle, and so the 12 years before and 12 years after are the transition period.

So we’re in the final lap, we just have to make it to December

(I’m not coping, you’re coping)

Covid made things worse, but the fundamentals were bad.

We are in the middle of a massive tightening of the labor market as boomers retire and there aren’t enough young adults to fill the gap. This is causing major ripples in the market, with a very antagonistic relationship forming between capital trying to keep labor costs down and labor tired of the bullshit.

This is causing some mild inflation, so companies are jacking up prices since they have an excuse to. This increased inflation is making the time value of money cost more. So now you have companies that were losing money having to scramble to finally generate a profit. This is causing the enshittification of the Internet and the loss of jobs in the tech sector.

The worse economy is causing political problems as it is harder for politicians to justify their positions in power. This encourages conflict between nations and the justification to deny some people of social benefits to create an underclass to benefit voters.