US Politics Mega-thread - Page 4590

On November 13 2024 06:06 Byo wrote:
Perhaps the stock market is where the trickle down happens, we all are vested in the stock market. Company x pays bonus of 3 billion to me, which I don't need, so I throw it into the stock market, and it trickle downs to others who already have same stocks as me. See the economy is doing great

On November 13 2024 06:24 WombaT wrote:

I remember explaining the mechanics of the 2008 financial crash to someone, partly in explaining technical terms in layman’s terms, partly with analogies (something I never otherwise do)

The response I got was effectively that that sounds so stupid that I don’t believe you, these institutions can’t be full of idiots. You must just not understand these mechanisms.

Brass tacks, the stock market is also fundamentally flawed, although not worthless either. It’s a speculative beast, sometimes very informed by numbers and data, but crucially also influenced by intuition.

Crucially it’s also a value assessment based on prediction and perception. Not reality. In a crude sense if that wasn’t the case and it was an assessment of how a company is actually doing, insider trading wouldn’t be illegal.

I don’t have any innate issue with betting and gambling, but that’s effectively what the stock market is. Whereas I think many have the perception that it’s some kind of infallible, neutral arbiter of company or asset values.

The stock market wasn’t collectively smart enough to figure out that Theranos not actually having a functioning product maybe was a problem in their evaluation.

Or that Tesla was at one valued more as a company than the next 10 automobile manufacturers combined is the insane valuation of a crazy person.

On November 13 2024 05:58 Impervious wrote:

You can also look at this going back even further. Most people were generally better off under Obama compared to Trump. Then most people were generally better off under Bush compared to Obama. Then most people were generally better under Clinton compared to Bush. Etc. It goes all the way back to the 70's. Social mobility and the ability to achieve the American Dream, which was achievable by the previous generations, has declined pretty steadily since then. While a lot of things have improved, especially technologically since then, the average person has to work more and harder to achieve the same level of relative wealth, even though the average person right now is something like 4x as productive in each hour of work as they were in the 70's. Meanwhile the USA has had unprecedented growth in total wealth in that same period of time.

Logically, we have over 50 years of data showing that trickle down economics, which was one of the biggest changes from that time that can be attributed to this decline, isn't really helping the majority of people. Neither party seems to be competent enough to do anything about this, so I fully expect that in 4 years, the majority of people are going to look back and think that we were better under Biden compared to this 2nd Trump presidency. But the stock market is likely going to be at record highs yet again.....

On November 13 2024 06:40 Simberto wrote:


A related example to this is bitcoin. While not a stock, it still works quite similar. With the exception that it is more stupid.

Bitcoin doesn't do anything. It doesn't produce anything, and it doesn't serve any purpose. It is literally people wasting hardware and energy on completely useless calculations. It is completely based on Greater Fool ideas. And yet you can make a lot of money with it. Because, as it turns out, there are quite a lot of pretty Great Fools out there.

A market like the stock market or crypto stuff doesn't actually necessarily value stuff based on any real fundamental information about the thing being valued. It values stuff based on an estimate on how other people will value the same thing later.

Tesla is valued highly not because of anything that Tesla does, but because it has a weird hype, and even if that hype is stupid, so are a lot of people. Thus, even non-stupid people invest in it, because they expect stupid people to invest in it, too.

On November 13 2024 06:06 Byo wrote:
Perhaps the stock market is where the trickle down happens, we all are vested in the stock market. Company x pays bonus of 3 billion to me, which I don't need, so I throw it into the stock market, and it trickle downs to others who already have same stocks as me. See the economy is doing great

On November 13 2024 06:24 WombaT wrote:

I remember explaining the mechanics of the 2008 financial crash to someone, partly in explaining technical terms in layman’s terms, partly with analogies (something I never otherwise do)

The response I got was effectively that that sounds so stupid that I don’t believe you, these institutions can’t be full of idiots. You must just not understand these mechanisms.

Brass tacks, the stock market is also fundamentally flawed, although not worthless either. It’s a speculative beast, sometimes very informed by numbers and data, but crucially also influenced by intuition.

Crucially it’s also a value assessment based on prediction and perception. Not reality. In a crude sense if that wasn’t the case and it was an assessment of how a company is actually doing, insider trading wouldn’t be illegal.

I don’t have any innate issue with betting and gambling, but that’s effectively what the stock market is. Whereas I think many have the perception that it’s some kind of infallible, neutral arbiter of company or asset values.

The stock market wasn’t collectively smart enough to figure out that Theranos not actually having a functioning product maybe was a problem in their evaluation.

Or that Tesla was at one valued more as a company than the next 10 automobile manufacturers combined is the insane valuation of a crazy person.

On November 13 2024 07:27 Elroi wrote:

Theranos wasn't listed on the stock market, though. The founder was just extremely charismatic and forged her results, which managed to deceive some very rich investors. Besides, Tesla already has a very strong product that sells like water in the desert so that's not really comparable.

Is Tesla worth 1 trillion dollars? That, I have no idea about.

On November 13 2024 06:41 WombaT wrote:

These observations exist in a relatively rare space, where they’re actually inarguable, to me. If someone wishes to claim the contrary they either haven’t looked at what I’ve looked at, or they have and can’t read the numbers.

Maybe there’s one very specific niche somewhere, but in terms of direction of overall travel I’ve never seen data to the contrary. And I’ve looked at quite a lot.

From my time in retail, chatting to one of the oldies, guy bought a house with his pregnant wife on a single retail worker income back in the day. And then supported his growing family as the single wage moving forwards. Northern Ireland has lower house prices, even factoring for relatively lower wages than many areas of the UK, and many areas of the Republic of Ireland. Even with that, what he did is just outright not possible here unless you life like a monk. In those other areas, living like a monk isn’t sufficient, it’s just outright impossible.

My partner’s sister is a doctor down in Dublin, 3 years in to graduating and working. Still house sharing with some college buddies because they can’t afford to rent solo, much less actually buy.

My parents had free university, I do not. To take another example

On November 13 2024 09:30 Sadist wrote:
Teslas stock price increasing is bizarre

They have more competition than ever, in fact every day going forward should be tougher for them than the last. More automakers have EVs than ever before.

I have to think Elons behavior is a turn off for some of his target market. I would have thought liberals were the majority of early adopters, i would imagine liberals are getting sick of his courting of MAGA.

It feels like a huge meme stock.

On November 13 2024 09:30 Sadist wrote:
Teslas stock price increasing is bizarre

They have more competition than ever, in fact every day going forward should be tougher for them than the last. More automakers have EVs than ever before.

I have to think Elons behavior is a turn off for some of his target market. I would have thought liberals were the majority of early adopters, i would imagine liberals are getting sick of his courting of MAGA.

It feels like a huge meme stock.

On November 13 2024 09:34 Impervious wrote:

As an aside, I'm Canadian, however, our economy is so tightly tied to the US economy that we have very similar trends overall.

I agree that these observations are inarguable. There's so much data to back it up..... There are definitely some legitimate counter-points I've seen, but the overwhelming amount of data out there supports the conclusion that things have been getting steadily worse for the median person for the last 50 years. This goes all the way to now an increase in infant mortality rates and lower life expectancy.

Regarding how much things have changed, I can give you an example from my side of the pond too. The general financial advice that my parents grew up with and shared with me when I was younger was to spend ~25% of your after-tax income on your house, whether that is in rent or ideally a mortgage. This also included repairs, utilities, etc. Spend ~25% on your car(s). This included the payment, gas, insurance, maintenance, etc. Spend ~25% on food, hobbies, vacations, etc as essential and discretionary spending. Finally, put the remaining ~25% into paying off outstanding debts, and if you're out of debt put it towards savings and investments to fund your retirement.

That was considered good advice at the time. Good luck doing that nowadays.

My parents accomplished this, or at least did early on, and by their late 20's had purchased their first home (a small townhome), which they upgraded a few years later using built up equity (a small 3 bedroom duplex) and upgraded again a few years later using more built up equity to buy a pretty nice house with 6 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, 2 kitchens, a big garage and a couple of acres of decent property (it did need some repairs admittedly, and we definitely put in some sweat equity for it). My mother was a stay at home mom for most of my childhood and my siblings childhoods. My parents were even able to put money into education for me and my siblings. My father did this without a degree, and my mother has a college degree (think more like community college or technical college, as Canada has two different types of post-secondary education in a college system and a university system) that she basically didn't use for more than a couple of years before I was born, and then again about 20 years later. Neither were particularly well educated. Things kinda went sideways because cancer is a bitch, but it's absolutely incredible and infuriating to see how different things are compared to a generation ago, and yet when you look at the economic data available from ~25 years ago and compare it with ~50 years ago, it's about as drastic of a difference between those times too. The struggles we have right now are just a continuation of ~50 years of things getting worse.....

Similar to your partner's sister, we've got struggles affording a place here too. My girlfriend and I have been looking into finally buying a house ourselves, we're in our late 30's, we're both finally doing well financially, and yet we already resigned ourselves to moving out of the city I've been in for the last 16 years and she grew up in because we simply can't afford it now..... Everything either doesn't meet our requirements for even a basic starter home (we both work from home so we basically just need some office space in addition to our bedroom, I want a 2nd bathroom so that if I need to do any renos we still have one that can be functional, and I want a garage or space to add a garage as I used to work on cars and still have the tools for it, so while it would be expensive I could use it to save a bunch of money in the long run), or if it does meet our requirements, it would stretch our budget and leave us house-poor in the process.

As much as I'd love another housing price crash from a selfish/personal perspective, it would absolutely screw both my mother and my girlfriend's parents, as they are both partially relying on equity to fund their retirements, so a crash would likely screw us in a different way. And last time there was a crash, it kinda affected the industry I currently work in (aerospace).....

By all reasonable metrics, the USA did extremely well under Biden over the last 4 years relative to other countries. I would have loved to have both the inflation rate and the GDP percentage growth that the US had compared to us here in Canada, for instance..... To me, it's shocking that the messaging was so awful. While the status quo sucks and the dems were pushing policy that was pretty much just the status quo, Trump's policies and the republican policies seem worse..... All I can say is that it looks like this election was more about emotion than anything else. Things suck right now for most people, and the republicans were able to channel the associated anger and fear better.