I wanted to add a couple of observations. First, most American manufacturers are really vulnerable to supply chain disruptions.
They have been streamlining their process for years, moving towards a management philosophy called “just in time”.
Which means they don’t stockpile inventory. This always caused a lot of short delivery delays that drove salespeople like me crazy. But the factories claimed to save a ton of money by not tying up capital in excess inventory.
Second, these tariff wars will ultimately benefit manufacturers at a cost to consumers. Last year the factories I was working with kept raising their prices like crazy, driving up the cost to the end users.
And I can guarantee that when those tariffs go away, those prices aren’t coming back down. The manufacturers will just take more profit.
On the other hand, when a dip immediately follows the release of bad news about the virus, the cause seems pretty clear.
Why it went down so much is another matter.
Seems clear sure. But how much of that is psychological and how much is fundamental? How much is a bet on others acting psychologically? No one knows and it is in fact fundamentally unknowable.
One is either investing in an economy or one is gambling.
That the stock market went down on reports of a mysterious virus isn’t cause for alarm or proof of a ‘fake’ economy. But the fact that we’ve gone from a record high…to a correction pretty much proves that I was right - total fucking fake ass economic “growth.” You know why? Because it’s unprecedented. We’ve never gone from record high to correction - not even during the depression. It’s never, ever happened - like, ever.
Economic growth that looks good on paper, but ain’t shit in real life because about half this country would be absolutely feelin’ the hurt if employers were to lay them off for the better part of 4-6 weeks - and guess what boys and girls, we just might be about to see that scenario play out.
Moreover, the little stock buyback shell game scam might also be exposed for what it is. See, in economic growth cycles, people don’t ask questions, they just take the money and run. But when “growth” stops, like when the tech bubble popped, economists and people with a financial background start, ya know, asking questions - like how the fuck companies like Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco make their money. Once people stop rolling in the over-inflated P/E ratios, they start asking questions, and that’s bad fucking news, especially when most of the real “growth” - the wage growth and wealth growth - is happening at the top.
The stock market highs were fueled by l’aissez faire, silent hand, “maestro” policies and this is the result. This is what happens when you prioritize ‘growth’ over stability, real wages, and a social safety net.
One is always gambling. Sometimes the gamble is an investment (like a lottery ticket supporting schools) but it is always a gamble.
And since any stock sale or purchase is a bet on the future, which we don’t know, I think it is safe to say it is all psychological - even if analysts think the market is rational. Which we know it isn’t.
What reports represent are triggers. We know a report will cause some action - we just don’t know in advance what action.
I work for one of the biggest manufacturers on the planet. We don’t make much profit unless you think 5% is a lot of profit? Seriously, manufacturers are at the bottom of the food chain.
I was in investment banking for the 1997 Asian crisis. Things were great until they weren’t. IMHO markets are rationale over time but certainly not in the short term. Current markets have been fed by central bank incontinence, deficit spending, high valuations and stock buybacks. Coronavirus is simply pointing out the emperor has no clothes.
Tell you all what, you start selling and I’ll keep buying and holding with a nice boring DCA strategy and in 20 years or so let’s compare today’s valuations and purchased or sold shares with the valuation of 2040 or so. Honestly, I wouldn’t mind a 20% drop for a few years. That’s lots of cheap shares to buy.
I’m not selling because it’s foolish to sell long-term investments based on corrections and dips in the market - and you’re not really fundamentally rebutting anything I’ve said.
At the risk of sounding like a Bernie Bro, I agree with the Senator from Vermont: the economy is rigged. It’s rigged so that the wealthy get the greatest gains from expansion, and the poor lose the most during contraction. Each expansion does the opposite of what many economists purport: rather than actually growing the middle class, it ultimately places more and more people into an underclass from which they will never escape - once the bubble pops. When the economy finally corrects for real - not just in the stock indices but in terms of a correction in the labor market, that’s when all of this will bear out. Millions of people are just barely hanging on. The market says they’re “employed” and that their wages are “growing,” but that doesn’t really tell the story.
Worse, with each correction and with each new segment of the middle class population that gets lopped off and dumped into the waste bin, those with disproportionate power use that power to concentrate their wealth even further.
If inequality is bad for the economy, these last couple of days with the stock market plummeting must be great for the economy since wealth inequality is shrinking at a huge rate.
You do sound like a Bernie Bro, bad at math.
It is axiomatic that the rich always do better in good times, because of math. If the stock market is going up then those with stocks will do better than than those who do not. That is not being rigged that is just reality. There is no way to design a system where the stock market doing better benefits those out of the market more than those in the market.
How many poor people have lost millions of dollars during this market decline? Zero. How many rich people? Lots. Therefore, how do the poor lose more than the rich? That is mathematically impossible.
Whether more people are going leaving the middle class is an empirical question. Since 1979, the percentage of middle class has shrunk by 7%, the lower middle class by 7%, the lower class has shrunk by 4.5%, the upper middle class has expanded by 16%, and the upper class expanded by 2%. This is the opposite of your narrative. People are not becoming poorer they are becoming richer.
Some 35 million boomers hit 65 last year. Yet a net 1.5 million people joined the labor force above and beyond anyone who left. Replacing someone who has decades of experience with someone who has zero is going to drag the average down, even if everyone else is better off.
ETA: more like replacing everyone who leaves with 1.5 new people.
Ignoring that middle class people in their 50s and retirees on fixed incomes are getting their portfolios hammered while those who get paid in 7 or 8 figure salaries plus stock options have a range of options at their disposal. But yeah, a massive stock market correction is clearly what I had in mind when I expressed my yearning for a fairer economic system. :rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:
Uh huh.
No, but there are ways to encourage economic systems to become less dependent on shareholder value and stock market manipulation, and more on compensating those who actually produce the wealth with their own labor, and reinvesting in public services and infrastructure beyond that. The current economic system has not fundamentally changed since 2008. The policies in place reward corporate barony by incentivizing policies that deliver shareholder gains over everything else - even if shareholder gains aren’t necessarily driven by actual earnings. Simply buying the shares back can increase the value of shares held. Worse, corporate barony are using borrowed money to buy back the loans. It’s a pump-and-dump scheme that will eventually be exposed, and coronavirus would be just the sort of situation that could expose it. That’s partly the reason why stocks aren’t just falling, they’re falling damn hard because traders know the shit’s overvalued to begin with. But shareholders aren’t the ultimate losers. When stocks fall too hard, too fast, the first thing to go in order to return to profitability is labor.
Yeah, and how many working class people - let alone poor people - can just sell properties, sell shares, and rearrange their investment portfolios while they wait out the financial storm. The difference is that those on top have the means to survive deep recessions; half the country would have a serious time with so much as a disruption - that’s probably something else that’s being priced into the selloff. Major supply chain disruption equals disruption elsewhere throughout the market, which is then compounded by the fact that individual spending power is disrupted everywhere along the supply chain.
I’d really like to see where you’re getting your data - I rather doubt the economic picture is what you’ve described.
I’m not sure you’re as good with the math as you claim to be.
The way the poor lose is that stock market collapses worsen economic downturns. Economic downturns result in unemployment, and unemployment disproportionately hurts the working class. A stock market shock will not be limited to the Dow Jones number. (If it did, that would prove the stock market is total bullshit.)
A little more math for you, with some economics; the impact of a loss on a person is correctly measured not by the raw number of dollars they lose, but by the marginal impact of the dollars they lose. If a billionaire loses $1 million, that has no real impact on the utility they enjoy from their wealth. If a person just hanging on loses their $600/week job for a few months that could cause them tremendous pain and misery.
The idea that Jeff Bezos losing a few million dollars somehow being worse off than a single mom losing her job because the single mom doesn’t make a million dollars a week is… I mean, learn the math.
There’s some truth to those points, but puddlegum’s statement was still pretty much accurate for the expressions of wealth inequality usually quoted. Which is what % owns what %, where the upper %-tiles both own a lot and own a lot of riskier assets. Stuff like bank accounts and home equity tend to be a bigger % of net worth for median-ish people; houses aren’t riskless but not generally as volatile in value as stocks, particularly not in financial upsets originating in the stock market and/or overseas (as opposed to a housing crisis per se).
So the fact is that wealth is noticeably (not hugely) less unevenly distributed today than a week ago. That is pretty much ‘just the math’.
Marginal utility of wealth is useful to think about in some contexts but it’s not what’s being counted when people talk about wealth distribution.
Also besides market to and fro, it’s actually pretty unlikely you’d come up with a ‘much fairer system’ that didn’t cause a pretty big deflation in stock values. Realistic people in favor of big leftward economic change should be willing to accept that (not proclaim it in their electioneering necessarily, that’s too much to ask I think, but I mean in their more honest inner view of things). People who want to fine tune this or that might more realistically argue it could be win-win for the upper-middle with substantial stock portfolio’s, but people themselves calling their proposals ‘a revolution’, that’s a stretch.
The 2008 crash did decrease income inequality, if you just look at the numbers. But it didn’t decrease the impact of income inequality.
I’ve probably lost a bundle this past week (I don’t feel like looking) but I have good cash reserves, I don’t have to worry about losing my job (I’m retired) so the impact is zero. Someone who has nothing in the market but who does lose a job due to say the decline in tourism will lose an amount that is trivial compared to what a rich person loses, but which impacts their life a lot more.
Jucst clicking to thank RickJay for his apt math lesson.
… But I’m afraid math instruction is a lost cause. GOP defenders are delighted with their narrative that the ever-suffering super-rich are the biggest victims of America’s progress. :smack:
The “impact” of income inequality is low. My well-being is not lessened when someone else gets a raise.
If we’re worried about how the average person or a poor person is doing, and I think we should be, then let’s look at how they’re actually doing. Not how some billionaire is doing.