I know absolutely nothing about stocks. My eyes glaze over if you try to explain the stock market to me. I could be wrong, but isn’t it bad when the line goes down?
I also suspect that it is bad when prices at the grocery store go up, as they’ve been doing lately.
I’ll try not to fall asleep if you explain to me what I’m getting wrong.
I did try to puzzle it out for myself, so I went to some site called Marketwatch to read some articles. This is what it looked like this morning.
I tried, but I got bored. Maybe I’m misunderstanding this, but it doesn’t look like good news for the stock market.
You think that’s bad, you should have a look at the ticker for Tesla… Down 53% since its peak in December, knocking somewhere around $150bn off Elon Musk’s personal net worth.
I slashed my exposure to US stocks the week after the inauguration.
78-year-old Idiot Boy was asked on TV about the possibility of a recession and he did not rule it out.
Also, tariffs (see the Smoot act of 1930).
Also, U-turn after U-turn. But I am sure it is “good TV”.
A line I’ve heard somewhere before is that the stock market is the guage of rich people’s feelings.
I don’t think they’re very happy right now.
Voters – at least many American voters – sold out their Democracy and put Putin’s fascist puppet (& without them knowing it also Musk’s puppet) in power for the supposed benefit of reducing the cost of eggs. They were predictably lied to and the price of eggs is now much higher and the economy getting totally fucked. I’m guessing there’s a lot of Buyers remorse far too late.
Stephen Colbert; “No Money, More Problems”
Trump Tanks Stocks, Exhausts Wall Street | Erasing “Women” From The Internet
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=xU50WUvMDtU
@StevoR
The leopards won’t be going hungry for a long time.
As FT Alphaville put it: Putting the FFS in Tariffs.
(For those unfamiliar, Alphaville is the snark-ridden blog outpost of the venerable British Financial Times paper.)
Seth Meyers :
“Trump Won’t Rule Out Recession as Markets Plunge; Musk and Rubio Clash in the White House ”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZZdiFir_kNUå
(Ever since 2016 I have depended on the dark humor of late night TV hosts to deliver bad news from USA in a manner that does not lead to depression)
Dunc @ 6
The title Alphaville is probably taken from the French dystopian SF film of 1966.
The stock market doesn’t care about fascism or white nationalism, but it hates uncertainty. Trump’s wildly erratic swings on tariffs – OK, they’re in effect, no, actually they’re delayed, oops, they’re in force again – are making it impossible for businesses to plan for the future. No one can be sure where they’ll get their raw materials from, how much they’ll cost, or what markets will be accessible for them to sell their goods to.
The mass layoffs of federal employees, the paralysis of infrastructure spending, and the deportation of immigrants who do the actual important jobs can’t be helping either. People are afraid and uncertain, so they’re cutting back on consumption. Not good news for an economy that’s based on consumer spending.
An upbeat advice from Fox News: Raise chicken in your back yard to get affordable eggs. Not making it up.
@ #6, quite possibly, but also a pun because “alpha” is a term used in financial analysis, denoting the ratio of how much the value of a security moves relative to some index.
It is too complicated and right now, no one is too sure what is going to happen with the economy.
I’ll just point out a few things.
Trump doesn’t have an ecnomic policy.
It changes from day to day.
Tariffs are on, they are off, they are on again.
A billion dollar factory can takes years to plan and build.
Who is going to invest that money when the GOP planning horizon is two hours?
Uncertainty.
The tariffs are going to have a lot of negative effects.
They will raise prices for everyone, which adds to the inflation that we finally managed to get under control.
They are going to inhibit economic growth because we are now fighting trade wars with our former friends. They won’t be buying our exports.
So the Trump incompetence could have negative effects on the economy.
.1. Uncertainty which inhibits long term planning.
.2. Tariffs and trade wars which increase prices and decrease exports of US goods and services.
.3. The earned anti-Americanism from the rest of the world.
The rest of the world isn’t going to want to do business with us or buy our goods if we are perceived as an enemy.
.4. There will also be negative effects as the unemployment rate goes up with fired Federal workers and lower government revenues and spending.
We just have to see how this plays out.
Trump the bully has a long history of backing off when people confront him.
He is already backing off on tariffs towards Canada and Mexico.
@10
Says the people who have absolutely NO IDEA how much it costs to raise chickens. I’ve seen plenty of online responses from farm hobbyists who raise their own fowl and they assure us that that’s it’s cheaper to buy them at the grocery store.
@ ^ Akira MacKenzie : Also backyard chooks aren’t immune to bird flu either. That pandemic that Trumpmusk is ignoring adn has fired some of the people who would’ve actually helped albiet if they weren’t ignored or even attacked for tyring tohelp anyhow.
(Had chooks onc efor a year or two – before my then dog Fox Terrier x Jack Russell got them.
We’re all wrong. A Trump spokesman deigned to explain reality to us. He said the stock market jitters have nothing to do with any of Trump’s policies. It’s the terrible Biden economy coming to its inevitable end. That’s right, it’s all Biden’s fault. So, just be patient, Trump will right the ship and all be well. It will take a little time, but we’ll all be rich in the end. Oh, and if grandma’s social security check doesn’t arrive, that’s just the price we must pay to save America.
@ 14
Recently, Bobby Brainworm said that we should just let bird flu burn through the poultry population. Sure, many will die, but the survivors will be stronger and pass their superior immunity to their offspring.
Hey, he was an “environmental lawyer” so he knows EVERYTHING about immunology and genetics.
@ #16:
The problem with that – OK, one of the many problems with that – is that that’s just not how commercial poultry breeding works. The current laying flock is not the source of the future laying flock. The future laying flock is raised by specialist breeders, and their genetics are very closely controlled.
When sailing your boat on the Market Sea you have to let the waves of hype wash over you. Steady as she goes!
In 2021 the DOW was at 30,000. It’s now at 41,000. So, if you have a DOW index fund, or your stocks somewhat track the DOW (or pick your market) you’re still in the black. Don’t Panic. (’cause it’s gonna get way worse)
Financial reporting is, on the whole, terrible. Talking heads and couch potatoes are downright dangerous if you pay them any heed. How many times has T**** been corrected by a “journalist” live and to his face that tariffs are paid by the IMPORTER, not China, Mexico and Canada. Like, zero time. Every time the Orange Menace opens his pie hole with that lie there is silence. Just click your heels, MAGA, and chant “There’s no place like home. There’s no better Daddy than you!”
Latest headline this morning:
Trump just raised Canadian tariffs on steel and aluminum to 50%. This is part of a trade war with Canada who had the courage to put tariffs on their electricity exports.
And, Trump once again threatened to annex Canada as our 51st state.
““This cannot continue,” Trump wrote. “The only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State.”
“This would make all Tariffs, and everything else, totally disappear,” he wrote, while promising that Canadians’ taxes would go down.”Sort of a weak threat here.
I just hope he doesn’t threaten to nuke Toronto if the Canadians don’t surrender and become our next victims.
This is why our stock market is crashing.
Trade wars and wars with our former friends and allies isn’t going to do the American economy any good.
And, Trump is starting to look more and more senile and crazy every day. This is all unnecessary.
Just found some powerful musical accompaniment for this thread with a song here – Tariff man by Barry Tinmore (2.35 mins) or two Make America Grow Afraid Again (2 mins 30 secs) or three Babies in the White House – by the Parody Project 3.30 mins.
@ 14 StevoR
Dude, that’s horrible. (For those making the effort to decipher Stevo’s drunken posts “chooks” is Australian for chickens.)
No doubt, “mon petite chook” is a term of endearment!
The stock market has always been a fraud that rewards the manipulations by the obscenely wealthy. Small investors are just being taken for a dangerous ride. I HOPE IT CRASHES COMPLETELY!
Stocks are located in the town square. You lock sinners in them so town folk can throw rotted produce at them.
@ #23:
Unfortunately, that’s where everybody’s pensions are these days. Small investors are along for the ride because, like it or not, it’s the only game in town. You’re hoping that most people who have not yet retired (and quite a lot of those who have) lose the bulk of their life savings.
I have money in the stock market, though not by choice. After I was hit by a car when I was very young, there was some sort of settlement that awarded me money–key word here is “me.” My parents were simply the trustees. By law, all monies obtained in a settlement must be invested for the benefit of the injured party. It’s not a lot, but still… I’m positive that I’m not the only one around who has such an arrangement.
True.
All this GOP talk about privatizing Social Security is misleading and wrong.
Our retirement plans have already been privatized.
Social Security is the last resort and/or supplemental retirement funds for us. It doesn’t pay all that much but it is a huge improvement over…zero.
The private plans are IRAs, Roth IRAs, 401(k) plans, and the legacy Defined Benefit pension plans.
60% of retired Americans rely on both Social Security and the other plans for their retirement.
And all the privatized retirement plans are mostly invested in…the stock markets.
It’s hard to explain this to atheists hrmm…
People believe in and worship our current president. Seriously. More than God. Yup yup. I (as a believer in God) see this in their faces and the way that they talk. You can believe yourself that this is irrational why would anyone do that all you like. You’re still wrong. Human beings are irrational. It’s what we do.
Much of the investor class believe in and worship the idea that republicans of any kind or shape are a pure and holy benefit for the market. Seriously. More than they actually like to make money. Yup yup. As an actual investor, I see this in their faces and the way that they talk.
I had a hard time explaining to my broker why I expected the market to go bouncy bouncy and to make money off of this by buying low and then selling again. Because tariffs would be on and off because Trump is both a weenie and because he and his cronies are planning on making bank selling exceptions to his tariffs. It did not compute to him, it was contrary to his deeply held faith.
@25 Dunc wrote: You’re hoping that most people who have not yet retired (and quite a lot of those who have) lose the bulk of their life savings.
I reply: I resent that false accusation! You are showing ignorance when you say about the stock market: ‘it’s the only game in town’. Many in our organization are retired or are about to retire. They (and I, too) have, with 1 exception, avoided putting retirement funds in the hands of gambling investment institutions, including the stock market. Everyone has the ability to get good information regarding the amount of risk they will be exposing themselves to depending how they handle the money they set aside and invest for their retirement. EVERY tv commercial about investment advisors is required to warn (in tiny, but important text) that having them handle your retirement funds RISKS LOSS of your funds. And, many pension plans allow you to stipulate how your retirement funds are invested.
@27 raven wrote: Social Security is the last resort and/or supplemental retirement funds for us. . . .60% of retired Americans rely on both Social Security and the other plans for their retirement.
I reply: That is true. However, social security has been beat-up by the repugnantcant politicians so the cost of living increases are a fraud, they should be much more. Now, the miscreants are trying to steal our decades long investment of money in social security. And, I know it is difficult (and in a few cases, almost impossible) to avoid gambling everything when investing for retirement. But, in @29 I indicate that many in our organization have minimized the gamble.
@Dunc 25
Not mine, or the pensions of anyone I know. Putting pensions on a volatile market is kinda stupid.
Last week I checked my TSP account (government 401), it was down close to $400 dollars since the start of the year. Most of it in Feb and March. Switched my stock funds to the Government G Fund. Today’s rate is 4.05%
In the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP), the “G Fund” stands for the “Government Securities Investment Fund,” which is a fund that invests solely in U.S. Treasury securities, essentially guaranteeing the principal amount invested while providing a set interest rate, making it a very stable option with no risk of losing money in the market fluctuations; it’s considered a safe haven investment within the TSP.
Just checked the DJI, it is down nearly 600 points again today. Have to wonder how long before the shit hits the fan for the Trump/Musk economy? Trump/Musk will just continue to lie and hold off as long as they can hoping to reach their goal of totally destroying the Federal Government and making Trump the CEO/CFO of the new Trump America Corporation. He will be the sole decider of everything in his new founded company (America is in the middle of a hostile takeover).
I rely on a social security, a federal pension and a government 401k. I may be screwed.
While 60% of retired Americans have both private pension type funds and Social Security, the other 40% rely solely on Social Security for retirement.
I know some of those living in Senior and Disabled housing.
It’s not much.
They can get by with subsidized housing at 30% of their income plus food stamps.
None of them have cars because they can’t afford them.
Social Security is a long running, self funding, and wildly successful program. It is also very popular.
https://www.gocomics.com/scarygary/2025/03/11
Sorry, ignore last post, but check this one out.
https://www.gocomics.com/drewsheneman/2025/03/05
USA is like a strategic bomber flying without a pilot.
POTUS is neither willing nor able to learn from experience.
“Humiliated Trump Doubles Down On His ‘Transgender Mice’ Talking Point”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=GZBv1HjpJRo
Apart from the reading comprehension issue, he has a personality flaw that makes him unable to admit a mistake, even when it is the clever thing to do. Instead of letting the issue be forgotten, he is keeping it alive against his own interests.
Likewise, he will refuse to admit tariffs are bad.
birger @36: His role models were his father and Roy Cohn. Guaranteed lack of any sense of decency.
Just two things:
First, all of the chaos may or may not be by design, but it is clear that it helps them reach their overarching goal, which is the destruction of people’s belief that their government can be effective and help people (this goes back to Reagan). Once that’s done, it’s a lot easier to privatize any government functions. Thus, while it might be accidental due to incompetence and them generally illustrating Dunning-Kruger on a daily (if not hourly) basis, it works out to be a feature.
Second, I am not a financial advisor, but many people literally do not have a choice in terms of retirement investments (i.e., their employer handles that or gives them few options). Further, given the modest sums that many people are able to salt away, the only practical way to outpace inflation and wind up with a decent amount for retirement is to invest in the market. Granted, if you have some flexibility, you can choose socially responsible funds (e.g., those that will not invest in weapons manufacture, fossil fuels, etc.). The other thing is that, as you get closer to retirement (and assuming you don’t have a huge amount saved), you should be shifting your balance to safer investments (e.g., for retirees, currently CDs are outpacing inflation by a point or so, and although you won’t gain much, your risk of losing it is near zero*). If you’re one of the lucky ones with a lot of money, then sure, keep a portion in riskier investments, but never risk what you can’t live without should the market tank. And you should always have a cash reserve to ride out a market downturn. Of course, the practical reality is that many people cannot reach those goals anymore because much of what used to go to the working class got hoovered up by the Wall Streeters starting in the 70s and accelerating through Reagan to now.
*I say “near zero” because even those are protected by FDIC, nothing says that the entire government can’t dissolve.
@19 Raven
I can’t wait for Tesla to raise the cost of their vehicles to pass on the higher cost of steel and parts to the consumer…
Buy a thing, hold it a while, sell at whatever the price is later. In between, you’re just fantasizing about the value of your shares. It’s not ‘realized’ profit/loss until you sell and compare with what you paid for it at the beginning.
Down line = good when you plan to buy shares and are optimistic about the future to sell at a higher price later.
Down line = irrelevant if you already have shares but just hold on until things get better to sell at a higher price.
Down line = bad when you already have shares and you panic sell or because there’s no hope of going up again in the timescale you need, so you cut your losses before it gets worse. That makes the losses real.
Index funds aggregate shares across the whole market—or sectors of it—some companies go down, but generally most go up modestly… until some catastrophe wrecks the entire market.
well we knew this was coming what else would you expect when we elected an incompetent fraudulent business man as president.
From all the most successful Investors all you ever hear is do not put your eggs in one basket the key is diversification. True enough but for those who have said they do not invest in “the market” at all nor other risky things where do you find such things. It the only game in town as they say but what is the game actually? I think the game as we play it today is money and what money can buy. I have made some money and lost some money in investing in the stock market and used other instruments like real estate and some collectables ( true I can’t through anything away) I have managed to keep the principle and some modest gain for now.
everything is outside of personal relationships, family, fiends and the like though it is often a source of conflict is involved with money and around money. It is what a world with this many people has come up with to survive and manage to get the needed resources for survival distributed. There is of course some flaws and inequities in the distribution of that but that is the system we have today now. The market is volatile just like the weather which is the reason for the diversification advice.
One of the things that is missing is the involvement the population as a whole instead we have this arrangement the monopolization of the market by a small number investors in comparison to the population as a whole.
I have heard that Marxism advocated the the workers should own the means of production. that has always been interpreted as governmental confiscation by the conservative. I see no reason that that should be the only way that that could come about. It seems that if business ownership was by common stock and all the workers had a share of that stock, a share in the business, then they would own the means of production directly. Since public companies are controlled and managed by the investors through boards of directors who select officers to manage the day to day operation of the business for the benefit of the stock holders. In practice though the corporation is most often controlled by a small number of large share holders who operate it for themselves and the management hired by them is also doing the same thing thus we find ourselves where we are.
Like in politics what is lacking is an emphasis on a really democratic process.
* @40: Well, not entirely fantasizing. Many stocks/funds pay dividends a few times a year just for holding onto them, which your broker can either reinvest into additional shares or pass on to you.
Line down = bad for those dividend amounts. However, they’re tiny a fraction of the money you’d put in. You’d have to put a LOT in to get more than a few dollars.
There’s a saying; “When America sneezes the rest of the world catches a cold”. Right now my purchasing power is declining as the value of my country’s dollar declines. This is largely due to successive governments jamming their heads up the orange despots backside. There might be no cure for the American disease but the rest of the world needs to stop the spread by quarantining it.
Y’all should be listening to Press Secretary Leavitt. Don’t ya know that “Tariffs are a tax cut for the American people”?
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5188744-ap-reporter-white-house-tariffs/
/s
Economists didn’t think that through, did they now.
Ahem, gijoel. That’s an example of a negative headline, not an actual true claim.
cf. https://tcf.org/content/commentary/economists-agree-trump-is-wrong-on-tariffs/
“January 31, 2025
As President Trump threatens to slap steep tariffs on many countries, he is boasting that his taxes on imports will be a boon to the U.S. economy, but most economists strongly disagree—many say Trump’s tariffs will increase inflation, slow economic growth, hurt U.S. workers and result in American consumers footing the bill for his tariffs.
“Virtually all economists think that the impact of the tariffs will be very bad for America and for the world,” said Joseph Stiglitz, an economics professor at Columbia University and a winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. “They will almost surely be inflationary.””
The stock market is pretty much a graph of “how well are rich people doing”. People often mistake it for how well “the economy” or “the country” is doing, but it’s really not, because the better rich people are doing the worse everyone else is.
One thing to look at is the so-called “fear index”, VIX. VIX is a measure of uncertainty, which is anathema to investors wanting guaranteed returns. It’s skyrocketing: nearly 70% gain over the past month. If you look over the past five years, it mushroomed during the COVID lockdowns, trended downward until Dobbs, got a bump then before beginning to settle back down, then spiked in August following Biden’s disastrous debate performance amid growing calls for his resignation — calls that had begun being echoed by Dem officeholders in late July. It dropped when Harris took over the campaign, then began creeping up in the final weeks before the election, and now, well, see for yourself. Just punch “VIX” into any Google search box.
These events are thus very interesting, because usually the rich favor Republicans and Republicans favor the rich (even more than the Dems do), so it’s very odd to see Republicans hurting the rich. But one then wonders, are they hurting all of the rich or just a subset of them? Could this be intraelite competition heating up as this current episode of the Structural Demographic Reality Show approaches its ugly climax?
The fact that ordinary people are also not doing badly suggests so. Normal people are being screwed; so are a large enough subset of the rich as for the stock market overall to be going down, not up. So who is benefiting?
Adam Lee gives us a hint:
Much of the uncertainty is from the tariffs, and tariffs affect physical goods. If you make widgets, or something else tangible, you’re impacted. If you’re in the service or the tech sector, not so much. Importing an egg now costs extra, but making Steam or iTunes purchases doesn’t, downloading Windoze 11 doesn’t, subscribing to Netflix doesn’t, and neither does browsing Facebook and seeing an ad there.
So, tariffs benefit the tech sector at the expense of every other industry. Who basically bought Trump the election and who are now heavily intertwined with his administration? The tech broligarchs, Musk especially.
They’re taking this opportunity to renegotiate at gunpoint the division of America’s economic pie: more for big tech, less for everybody else, even the other oligarchs.
I’ll note that the next stage after intraelite competition is for the whole system to melt down, big-time, often culminating in a civil war. The sides will be backed by different elite factions; it’s shaping up that this iteration will be keeping the manufacturing sector and other venerable old-school businesses on the Union side, but cotton plantation owners will be replaced by the digital sharecropping barons as the Confederacy’s wealthy backers, with Elon Musk as the latter-day Jefferson Davis.
Maybe Canada will intercede on the Union side, as I recall France doing the first time around …
Raven noted:
Or just as unpredictable. Foreign investors are no more enamored of uncertainty than your domestic ones are.
Nuclear war, and the accompanying EMPs, won’t do the tech broligarchy much good. If it looks like things are heading that way, expect the tech broligarchy to find some way to quietly dispose of Trump. Vance will be a safe pair of hands from their perspective.
John Watts:
At this point, the only thing I expect Trump might do that would right the ship is get fitted for a toe tag. Frankly, I’m not even sure that would help at this point, especially since it’s not like Vance would be likely to rein in Musk. Maybe if that 2004YR4 rock decides to drop right on top of Mar-a-Lago when all three of them happen to be holding a soiree there … Any D&D experts here? Can liches, other assorted undeads, nameless horrors from beyond our dimension, and whatever else might have reraise status come back from taking a hundred megaton explosion to the face at point blank range or does the chunky salsa rule apply?
unclefrogy:
Rigged, of course, by the usual suspects.
“The stock market is pretty much a graph of “how well are rich people doing”.”
Nope. Think pension/superannuation funds, for example. Plenty of ordinary people rely on them.
(What it is is a reflection of market expectations)
@47 clearly, the house always comes out a winner. some of the big guys win not always the same ones because they are all competing against each other and some will not win there is only loyalty to winners.
When the arch-conservative Wall Street Journal is critical of Trump, you know things are bad.
The readership is dependent on correct information about economics so WSJ cannot mimic Fox News and ignore reality.
“@47 clearly, the house always comes out a winner.”
Um… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Entertainment_Resorts#History
:)
—
“When the arch-conservative Wall Street Journal is critical of Trump, you know things are bad.”
Depends. Their news section is rated -0.20, and their opinion section is rated 1.80, out of a range [-6..6].
https://www.allsides.com/news-source/wall-street-journal-media-bias
https://www.allsides.com/news-source/wall-street-journal-opinion
Bekenstein Bound @ 47
President Vance might not push back against Musk, but without the charisma of Trump he cannot scare the yellow cowards of Republican congressmen into obedience. It would become a herd of cats, and the government would not be able to do as much deliberate harm as under Trump.
Still discombobulated when people say, “the charisma of Trump”. The WHAT?!! Local troll Morales is more charismatic and I’m very sure we can all agree he’s one of the most repulsive humans on record. X-D
@Bekenstein_Bound
Considering that the NASDAQ is hit just as hard as everything else, I don’t see the techbros benefitting from Trump’s moronic policies. Their millions are going up in smoke too.
No, the truth is that Trump is a Russian agent and him bringing ruin the US is Putin taking revenge for the fall of the Soviet Union.
Peter Zeihan ain’t impressed… and he’s usually soft-pedalling things.
(See around the 15 minute mark)
@ 21. Silentbob : @ 14 StevoR – Dude, that’s horrible. (For those making the effort to decipher Stevo’s drunken posts “chooks” is Australian for chickens.)
Sleep deprived and stuffed hands and suck at typing and previewing Silenbob. I haven’t had a drink in a few weeks.
Oh and yeah, it was horrible. Had the chooks – yes – chickens to non-Aussies – kept in their own run behind a wire mesh fence. Harry, my old Jack Russell x Fox terrier, used to bark at them from the other side of the fence but thought he was being friendly. Until I came home from work one day to find he’d dug his way under the fence and killed them all. Didn’t eat them, just killed them. Not good. No, he didn’t end up in the gravel pit Kristi Noem style. Because my beloved pet and I’m not a sociopath and understand that it wasn’t his fault given, y’know, being a dog and their instincts.
Oh and, yes, chickenfeed doesn’t cost well, chickenfeed and ain’t all that cheap. My folks – parents had chooks for many years too and, yes, they’re good to have but they do require $$ to feed and keep and require proper housing and protection from foxes at least where I & they lived* so, yeah.
.* Adelaide hills , suburban area but with big backyards. Old houses wihen they did build them with proper yards & gardens unlike many modern houses.
@51 the point being it would be a better arrangement if instead of the 1% being the owners of public companies it was the people in the form of the workers themselves .
shermanj, @ #29, lasius, @ #31, and probably others…
There are a few problems with the idea that people should just put their pension savings into “less risky” investments…
First off, all investments bear risk, but there are lots of different kinds of risk.
For example, remember the 2008 crash? That was triggered when it turned out that an entire class of investments which had been assessed and marketed as low risk suddenly turned out to be very risky indeed – and worse still, the risk was highly correlated across the whole sector. People got wiped out because their “low risk”, AAA-rated mortgage-backed securities turned out to be radioactive garbage.
Then there’s inflation risk – for most of time since the 2008 crash, the yield on a 10 Treasury note has been around or below the rate of inflation, meaning that holding Treasuries guaranteed that you would lose money in real terms. And then, of course, inflation spiked up to 9.1% in 2022, so if you’d bought Treasuries on a 1.25% yield in the middle of 2021, you’d have lost nearly 10% (in real terms) a year later. You may think that investing your pension in risky assets such as stocks is foolish, but is it really less foolish to invest it something that is, at best, guaranteed to make a modest loss, and still bears the risk of a fairly substantial loss, with no equivalent upside?
However, even if it were reasonable for the average person to fund their retirement differently, the fact remains that we are where we are, and saying that other people could or should have made different choices does not absolve you from blame when you recommend a course of action which will seriously harm the people whose choices you disagree with. The plain historical fact is that over any reasonable time period, at almost any time in the last hundred-odd years, investing the stock market has delivered superior returns to any other investment option, and many people are going to make what they consider to be entirely rational investment decisions on that basis.
The fundamental problem here is that the current model for funding retirement forces all of the risk onto individuals. The sensible solution would be to pool that risk across the whole of society, by implementing a well-funded and robust social security system. However, until that happens, most people’s retirement savings are going to be in the market regardless of what you personally think about that, and burning the market down will harm them very substantially. It’s a essentially a hostage situation.
Personally, I would love to have some better options available, but right now, we don’t.
@silent bob
We do not agree. Have you apologized to Chigau and Mano for being a demented fuckwit? Nein, you have not, so I suggest you reflect on your own repulsiveness and quit harassing John. He can be annoying, but unlike yourself, he is not deliberately cruel for fun.
The NASDAQ is tanking because the AI bubble picked now to burst, taking NVidia and every heavy investor in AI with it. That’s in turn dominoing into other areas such as the data center business and even the data center construction business. Needless to say, the timing of this bubble bursting was not something either the tech broligarchs or Trump could have predicted.
As for the hostage situation, sometimes the least worst option is to shoot the hostage, sad to say. In any event, it’s out of our hands now. I think Trump might be a bit like that Project Arcturus thing from Stargate: Atlantis, and the techbros and other rich D-bags like Rodney McKay in the episode in which it appeared. The first time he switched it on, it generated massive energy but also went out of control and fried some redshirt engineer. When he tried it again, figuring just to watch it more carefully this time to intervene and adjust things sooner if it started happening again, it went into a runaway meltdown and Rodney barely escaped with his life. The whole thing blew up and took an abandoned solar system or so with it. Something similar happened with Doc Ock and his fusion reactor in Spiderman II (similar enough the SGA writers probably lifted the plot wholesale from the Marvel film, which was a refreshing change from lifting it from Star Trek like they usually did).
The rich switched Trump on in 2016 and he generated a nice flow of tax cuts and deregulation, then flared up and enacted a few tariffs, most of which they eventually managed to tamp down. Some (e.g. with China) remained (the dead engineer). (The 200,000 extra covid dead aren’t the dead engineer. The broligarchs liked that, since the alternative was lockdowns and an increasingly empowered workforce.)
Now they’ve turned him on again but this time he’s going full China syndrome on them. Tariffs everywhere, saber rattling, mass firings that are destabilizing markets … all combined with the ill-timed AI bubble pop. From the standpoint of non-tech rich, they fucked around and now they’re finding out, much as Ock and Rodney did. They’ll be lucky to escape still owning the shirts on their backs. As for the techbros, they thought they’d put one over on the other rich idiots, only for China (irony!) to unleash Deepseek on an unsuspecting populace and kick the props out from under nVidia, and now they get to ride the same rollercoaster (and maybe, afterward, the same tumbrels) as the rich people they tried to screw. (Cue world’s tiniest violin, and some kind of AI bubble denial screed from you-know-who.)
“(Cue world’s tiniest violin, and some kind of AI bubble denial screed from you-know-who.)”
You’ve just asserted that the bubble has burst.
(“the AI bubble picked now to burst”)
No bubble left, now. Right? Not like they take ages to burst.
(The internet bubble burst in the early 2000s, so clearly the internet is not a thing)
—
I can’t help but think of Ukraine as the hostage, given current events*.
Also, it would have to be a super-contrived event for the best option to shoot (presumably not to kill!) the hostage.
—
* Of course, it’s the population of the USA that’s the true hostage in that allegory.
Basically, 1/3 voted for Trump, 1/3 voted for Harris, 1/3 couldn’t be bothered (or could not) vote.
(Interesting times)
As a retired person who makes a living off the market, I could see this coming from a mile away – almost as if real events are designed to fit the charts. Nevertheless, when close family members talk about Trumpty Dumpty in messianic terms, it adds a very special kind of stupid to the whole dynamic.
…the AI bubble picked now to burst, taking NVidia and every heavy investor in AI with it. That’s in turn dominoing into other areas such as the data center business and even the data center construction business. Needless to say, the timing of this bubble bursting was not something either the tech broligarchs or Trump could have predicted.
Maybe those particular dipshits couldn’t have predicted it, but that’s only because they’re morons who don’t understand consequences. It was (IMO at least) not at all a coincidence that the AI bubble burst at this time. The broligarchs — via their support for DOGE’s “move fast and break everyone we don’t care about” ethic — have proven themselves to be neither as decent, nor as mature, nor as competent and all-knowing as they’d been pretending to be for the last few decades or so. The entire “tech entrepreneur” bubble was based on hype and pretense, and as soon as some of them got real power, they proved themselves nowhere near equal to their boasts; so of course a few of their investors (the ones willing to give up their obsolete-sci-fi-fantasy worldview at least) started to bugger out. (Good for them, better late than never I guess — I have zero sympathy for anyone involved in that scam, especially those who blew other people’s money in it; but there will be knock-on effects harming innocent people.)
So, each of you shall henceforth not invoke “the AI bubble”, unless it’s a new one, right?
(When a bubble has burst, it’s gone)
(The internet bubble burst in the early 2000s, so clearly the internet is not a thing)
Not sure what your point is here, John (are you?)…but I’m pretty sure it’s possible to have speculative bubbles around real products, services or lines of business, which then burst and leave the original thing intact.
It’s also possible to have more than one bubble around one thing, at either the same or different times.
“Not sure what your point is here, John (are you?)”
Yes, I am.
The ‘Internet Bubble’ was financial, not technological.
Exactly the same thing.
(The technology and its financing and capitalisation are not the same thing)
—
You wrote “the AI bubble burst at this time”, not “one of the AI bubbles burst at this time”.
(What’s possible and what is real, tricky shit, that)
[good grief! — pardon, got distracted, redo]
“Not sure what your point is here, John (are you?)”
Yes, I am.
The ‘Internet Bubble’ was financial, not technological.
Exactly the same thing.
(The technology and its financing and capitalisation are not the same thing)
—
You wrote “the AI bubble burst at this time”, not “one of the AI bubbles burst at this time”.
(Definite article, there)
OMG that’s one of the lamest, most pointless quibbles I’ve ever seen. Yes, John, I used a definite article to refer to the one particular bubble we’re talking about recently. It is still possible for there to be one or more other bubbles that we’re not talking about this week.
Seriously, if you want to emulate a PROFESSIONAL word-choice-quibbler, just be like me and go the fuck to bed.
Yes, It’s Morales. ‘Nuff said. X-D
(Trolls gotta troll)
“We?” No. You.
But sure. There were always more than one AI bubble.
(Now this bubble has burst, how many AI bubbles yet remain?)
So, to be like you, I should want to emulate a PROFESSIONAL word-choice-quibbler.
(Your professionalism is, well, not evident to me)
—
Gotta love how you imagine it’s all about bubbles bursting.
(Tariffs? What tariffs? :)
STOP IT! EVERYONE!
Essentially, what @9 said. The stock market hates uncertainty. Add to this, Trump hates a strong Dollar, and would love to fire Jay Powell. The Fed interest rate decision is this coming Wednesday, so markets will be watching this with quite some apprehension. I don’t think they will cut. The other things to watch this week are Tesla (also Starlink, anything Musk really), and the bank of Japan interest rate decision, which will determine what happens with Yen carry trades. The S&P500 may have entered a correction (down 10%), but I don’t think we’re at the bottom yet.