UnderpantsWeevil @ UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world

Posts

143

Comments

13,454

Joined

2 yr. ago

USD is already down 15% to the Euro as of the start of the year.

I think that's what people seem to miss, here. Not the risk of a stock market crash but of a massive inflationary surge as domestic dollars rapidly outstrip natural resources. We're staring down the barrel of Stagflation.

If Trump gets his way and removes Jerome Powell as chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, the market reaction would be swift and brutal, Deutsche Bank’s George Saravelos argues.

Okay, lets game this out. The Trump Admin is stacked with private equity bankers, silicon valley hucksters, and individually super-wealthy plutocrats.

The estimated current valuation of the U.S. stock market is $46.2 trillion, according to Siblis Research. This value has tripled over the last 20 years. (In 2003, the total value was $14.2 trillion.) Based on this estimate, the richest 10 percent of U.S. households own roughly $42.7 trillion in stock market wealth, with the richest 1 percent owning $25 trillion. The bottom half of U.S. households own less than half a trillion dollars in stock market wealth.

So, we're left asking the simple question. If the market has an enormous sell-off, who will be doing the selling?

BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street? That's $21T of the $46.2T in equities right there. Which one of these titans blinks? How about Fidelity or JP Morgan Chase? Are they divesting to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars if Jerome Powell is replaced?

And if they are divesting from the market, which equities are they selling?

The Mag7 make up over 50% of the valuation of the current S&P 500. If Jerome Powell is fired, which one of these stocks should I view as overvalued and look to sell off?

Because you can make a fuckton of money if you can answer this question correctly. Place your bets. Place your bets.

That said, I've heard a more compelling argument. The Mag7 is driving the current S&P 500 valuation. And the Mag7 is being propped up by speculative investment in new computer chips. Which means the real lynchpin in the economy is...

NVIDIA

Back in May, Yahoo Finance's Laura Bratton reported that Microsoft (18.9%), Amazon (7.5%), Meta (9.3%), Alphabet (5.6%), and Tesla (0.9%) alone make up 42.4% of NVIDIA's revenue. The breakdown makes things worse. Meta spends 25% — and Microsoft an alarming 47% — of its capital expenditures on NVIDIA chips, and as Bratton notes, Microsoft also spends money renting servers from CoreWeave, which analyst Gil Luria of D.A.Davidson estimates accounted for $8 billion (more than 6%) of NVIDIA's revenue in 2024. Luria also estimates that neocloud companies like CoreWeave and Crusoe — that exist only to prove AI compute services — account for as much as 10% of NVIDIA's revenue.

These companies need lower borrowing costs in order to keep buying more chips. And Powell needs to go in order to lower interest rates, which will facilitate more borrowing and more chip-buying.

It is, in fact, Powell that is a mid-term threat to S&P 500 valuation thanks to his intractable stance on interest rates. And Trump's efforts to remove him are driven by his own cabinet's need to keep inflating the bubble that is the US Tech Sector.

In 1929, the US had a GDP of $104B and a national debt of $16.4B

By 1933, the US had shrank to $57B in valuation, nearly 50% of its 1929 baseline. However, an austerity budget had kept national debt to a meager $23B. While economic scalds warned of a catastrophe, we had saved the country from itself. We had kept our budget tight and our gold reserves in tact. It was the most successful year of the American economy in its entire history.

Then the incoming President, FDR, institutes a sweeping expansionary economic policy which rapidly grew the US debt. From 1933 to 1945, the debt soared to $269B. US GDP was fully eclipsed, at a comparatively meager $229B. The surging rate of GDP was entirely thanks to year after year of domestic debt financing. The consequences would haunt us for generations.

As we all know, 1945 was one of the worst years for the US economy. I would like to think Americans will have learned a lesson from this story. But instead, they continue to spend recklessly at the federal level, bloating our national debt year after year, and driving our economy into the pavement as a result. We currently have a GDP of $27T and a Debt of $35T. Our country is ruined. Our economy is in shambles. We are the poorest nation on Earth. And yet we will not stop.

We need to go back. Herbert Hoover was right, but we wouldn't listen. We need to go back.

Spoken like someone who has never lived on the moon.

You'll notice a lot of the "Likes China" nations are consumer economies and a lot of the "Likes US" nations are export economies (particularly those in direct competition with China).

If I was working at Toyota, I wouldn't like the folks exporting BYDs to all my biggest customers, either.

If my government was transforming into a dictatorship, I would simply stop it.

How dumb can someone be.

Susan Collins has been playing this game for over 20 years. "I voted for X but I didn't think that would mean Y?!" is this endless call and response we get from "moderate" Republican Senators to explain why they supported horrifying reactionary shit.

The real suckers are the voters who keep putting people like this in office. But, more broadly, its the residents who keep selling the best years of their life away in the brutal freezing wilderness so that they can suck the last bit of our natural reserve away to burn up in some rich snob's SUV. The state is full of people who believe the best they can do for themselves is to spend their most productive 40 years self-immolating.

All the people that tried to convince me over the last decade that she was somehow an intelligent principled candidate.

Just like with Ron Paul, the fact that she was outspokenly critical of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (among other fronts) made her such an outlier that people would tilt towards her on reflex. Also like Ron Paul, her deeply reactionary religious beliefs and her profound racism never got the kind of daylight it deserved even among her mainstream media critics.

She was worse than even I implied at the time.

I saw a lot of people lashing out at her as a "Russian Asset" precisely because she was so staunchly anti-war. The fact that she was corrupt (and, largely corrupt in favor of Narendra Modi, whom these hawks continue to adore) was incidental to the fact that she was opposed to the Bush Era Middle East atrocities.

One of the most damning critiques of Gabbard in the modern day is that she was absolutely full of shit with regard to her anti-war stance. Turns out it was entirely circumstantial and fell away rapidly when the belligerents changed. But, again, this never seems to be a point against her with the Bush Era neocons. If you can get Gabbard on board with bombing China or Pakistan or Iran, that's good enough for them.

I think Tulsi Gabbard is quite possibly the least principled politician I’ve ever seen.

It's not really a competition. More of an over/under sort of thing. You either have enough principles to function as a productive member in society or you don't.

Atlanta journalist fights deportation from Ice jail despite dropped charges: ‘I’m seeing what absolute power can do’

Statute of Limitations isn't going to save you from a fascist pogrom.

Moving to TERF Island, no less.

You're off by a factory of 13x

Can you name two or three

Ocasio-Cortez publicly castigated the railway companies and demanded better conditions for workers — then voted to forbid them from striking.

During the 2021 American Rescue Plan COVID relief bill, she advocated in favor of raising the minimum wage as part of the legislation. Ocasio-Cortez was quoted as saying. “If we as a party decide to stand down on our promise of elevating the minimum wage, I think that’s extraordinarily spurious and it’s something that as a party we could have a further conversation about how to fight for it.” With her Squad caucus - and Republican intransigence - they had the ability to hold the bill hostage until minimum wage was included. But she caved and supported the bill anyway.

And she voted for the CHIPS Act without including language to curb climate emissions from data centers, and now we've got a flood of new data centers that are polluting at an unprecedented rate.

(Not this vote, this is horseshit as I’ve explained elsewhere in the comments.)

It was "horseshit" that seemed to win support from Al Green and Ilhan Omar. Perhaps AOC simply had too much beef with MTG to stomach a vote. But it's a bad look to her constituents, regardless.

Clay vessels, being porous, would alter the flavour and would harbour yeasties and other microorganisms.

There's a winery in Sonoma called the "Jacuzzi Family Vineyards" (yes, that Jacuzzi) that does fermenting in amphora jars for their Clarum. It is just about my favorite wine. Very light and minerally, perfect for a hot day. At $50/btl, its not cheap. But I like to set aside a bottle or two for special events.

If ancient wine is anything like that, they've got nothing to complain about.

Tends to make the job easier, too. Lots of accumulated experience that goes neglected when people hide in their cubbies and don't interact with one another.

Any company culture that expects you to be friends with your coworkers is a dumpster fire.

Any company culture that demands friendship, certainly. But there are more than a few firms that do a good job of cultivating it naturally. When work requires collaboration and people spend lots of time together, they often form bonds of friendship of their own accord.

I find that companies which cubicle off their staff, silo the work so its never more than one or two people working on a given project, deliberately run short-staffed (particularly when business is slow and there's ample time for socializing), have managers that give you heat for any kind of non-work activity, and visibly stack-rank staff so that everyone is on edge about layoffs can create an environment where people are poorly socialized.

But so much of this is about squeezing "efficiency" out of workers. If you're not friendly with the people you spend a solid third of your day with, you're not doing anyone any favors except the bosses. Alienating you from your co-workers is the end result of the long tail of union busting and precarious employment.

Why are all these far right dickheads - who normally decry the very concept of sending “our” money to “foreigners” - so horny to send millions to foreign countries when it suits them?

This isn't unique to the far right. UK Labour has been on the anti-immigration warpath since their election, having fully swallowed the "Brexit" pill and embraced xenophobia as a popular election strategy.

As the domestic economy contracts at the proletariat level, capital needs to displace blame for its own failures onto marginalized and politically powerless groups. Migrants - particularly undocumented migrants - are easy targets. Farrage is repeating the "Send them to El Salvador" line because its the high water mark for American reactionaries. But he's just in a game of one-upsmanship with Keir Starmer, who will likely come back with a "That's too expensive, we can dispose of migrants more cheaply" rebuttal.

Hurt by Houthi blockade, debt-ridden Eilat port seeks aid to help it stay afloat

Unless plea to Economy Ministry is heeded, southern port could shut down as soon as Sunday; activity has dived over 90% amid Iran-backed Yemeni rebels terrorizing Red Sea shipping

With multiple chapters.