I’m hearing that a big ole crisis is in the makings.
Slightly spooked.
What do you think? Is it alarmist? What will inflation hit worst in this case? What will be devalued most?
I have no idea what an economic crisis would look like anymore. Ever since 2008, it seems the playback for any sign of economic trouble has been printing ridiculous amounts of money and shoving it directly into the pockets of rich people while playing a shell game with bad debts. This seems to allow the terrible economy to keep limping along.
Yep and the working class continues to struggle more and more while they gaslight us while pocketing all the assets for themselves
This time they can’t print oil so that bullshit stops working, which is why this one might do them in.
Japan and China have been selling US treasuries and buying gold or their own treasuries instead… It’s not looking good. You can only print money needlessly when you have the unique privilege to do it as the reserve currency.
They can’t print oil, but they can play games with the strategic reserve and maybe implement heavy (heavier) subsidies, but yeah, eventually reality should set in. I just have no idea how long that would take. So far the market seems to take trump at his word every time.
End of July is what I’m hearing. Right now Peter is being robbed to pay paul
I’m pretty gloomy based on
- Pax Americana destabilizing/collapsing; wouldn’t be surprised to see some minor parties make a move
- Hormuz will remain closed, because USA is anti-diplomatic and Iran has nothing to lose
- AI spending will continue, but the money will start to need to be real, and the firings will continue until AI wins
- El Niño will further disrupt food security
- global warming will disrupt everything
Which foods do you think will see the highest inflation?
Most modern cereals are bred to respond to nitrogen well for obvious reasons, and they also happen to be fodder for meat and animal products. Flour, rice, meat, eggs .etc. anything that grows in a grain based feedlot or is grain finished.
Rapeseed should go up in price too. Same with soy. Both of these are high protein high oil fodder crops.
Nitrogen fertillizer turns into protein pretty directly. So the higher the protein content of what we’re talking about, the more fertillizer you need to give it the building blocks it needs to make amino acids into proteins.
I bet farmers will rotate into legumes next year to help replenish their soil and to get better yields for animal fodder. Same with beans if you can grow them, although that can need ammonia too even if it’s less than soy or canola.
That’s very interesting about the relationship between nitrogen and protein.
Yeah protein can’t be made without fixed nitrogen to work with. It is kind of fascinating that in all likelihood the vast majority of the protein in our bodies was made using natural gas due to Steam Methane Reforming (SMR) being the primary method for making the hydrogen needed for the Haber-Bosch process.
Ammonium nitrate is effectively solidified natural gas which is also neat to think about.
Foods that need fertilizer, eat fertilized crops, or are transported.
I agree except that I suspect Iran wants to open the straight and to toll everything that passes through. They just need the US to get out of there and let ships pass.
I don’t think the “economy” has ever actually picked up in my lifetime. At least not for the working class, I don’t give two fucks if something happens to billionaires.
Same here.
I didn’t know if I’ve ever seen a better image reaction to a question than this.
I’m no expert, but I’d say everything looks pretty bad. AI bubble, housing crisis, climate change, Iran. I’m pretty sure as soon as any big money player blinks, things are gonna crumble fast.
It’s bad for regular folks. There are some people swimming in money because of everything you have mentioned.
Just the other day I have read that the USA has depleted most of its bomb stock in the Iran war and it will take years to replenish. Translation: weapon makers are guaranteed orders for new bombs at least for the next few years.
While you’re right, I’m personally of the mind that they’re at more risk than that. Yeah some people will still be rich and powerful when the cards start falling, but I think things are gonna breakdown too fast for them to manage. If too many “regular folk” become too poor too quickly, things will get violent. It hasn’t happened yet because neoliberalism thrives in a state of managed decline.
I think the decline will accelerate dramatically as soon as something big enough happens to break private equity. PE is in a very precarious state from everything I’ve been reading, relying and vast amounts of debt in order to maintain itself. When that breaks, it’s going to do serious damage to the economy as regular folk experience it very quickly. At which point the rich and powerful are going to have to both sacrifice and coordinate to stop the bleeding which I don’t think they’re capable of. Instead they’re expecting this collapse and literally building bunkers.
The optimistic scenario for the economy is a pessimistic scenario for the world.
For the economy to do well would require the AI bubble to not pop. It would mean that these absurd valuations for the AI companies turn out to be correct. That all the circular financing somehow comes good and all these ridiculous-seeming bets about the future of AI turn out to be at least partially correct. It will require that the companies that fired workers to replace them with chatbots turned out to have made a good and profitable decision. It’s the scenario where Musk becomes a trillionaire.
What’s funny is the AI bubble has exposed how bullshit the economy is in general, like GDP is really just a measure of how fast money moves, which Nvidia, Microsoft & AI companies shovelling money through a circular economy counts as growth, even if they lose money doing it.
There’s a joke about that:
One economist says to the second “I’ll give you $10,000 if you eat that pile of dog shit.” The second economist reluctantly agrees, but the smug look on the other guy’s face makes him regret it. He sees another pile of dog shit and offers the first economist $10,000 to eat it. The first one agrees, $10,000 is a lot of money.
Afterwards, both economists are sitting there, dog shit smeared on their faces. One says to the other “What a waste! We both have the same money we started with, but we both had to eat dog shit.”
The second replies: “That’s absurd, in just a few minutes we grew the economy by $20,000!”
Bad.
It looks bad.
Next year could be slightly better or worse. The next decade will definitely be worse, as climate change really starts to bite. Over the next century? We are as fucked as the planet will be, unless some serious societal changes happen. Trouble is they won’t happen while billionaire psychopaths control everything.
I think we’re close to needing wheelbarrows to buy bread
Since our country is being run by an idiot it’s anybody’s guess.
It really depends where.
I’m fairly optimistic about most of EU. Last time we had energy crisis they put windfall taxes on energy and banking sectors to stop price gauging. They are already talking about doing the same thing which will slow down inflation. Spain, where I live, invested heavily into renewables in the last couple of years so the current fossil fuel increases don’t have almost any effect on electricity prices. There’s continuing push for public transport and most people can survive with minimal driving. My guess is food prices will go up, unemployment will go up, growth will slow down in many sectors but it will be manageable.
In US though… Inflation will skyrocket (both because of food and energy), people won’t be able to go anywhere, the completely inept government will not be able to handle the crisis and probably will just continue to ignore it. I expect widespread hunger and misery.
Private equity black box Enron style collapse taking down a couple of over leveraged major banks requiring trillion dollar taxpayer bailout and the total dismantling of any social programs in the name of austerity
In other words, it’s socialism or barbarism
F U C K E D
I dont know. It got bad in 1929 but it’s a very different world now where things occur and get fixed a lot quicker.
Back then the US was in a depression for 10 years.
Well, the US is eating itself from the inside out. These things will take much longer to manifest but they’ll be way more insidious.
Hmm. Insane is probably the best bet, rather than good or bad. The AI bubble is set to pop, but no one knows when it will because most thought it was going to repeatedly over the last year but it didn’t. The big tech IPOs are going to be devastating to anyone with a 401k. The possibility of a ‘super el nino’ year could be very damaging for North Americans. The shipping crisis has only begun to really hit so energy crises are going to be likely to hit important industries like food, possibly at the same time they are dealing with the input shortages.
Of course, the tech bros insist AI is going to make everything super easy and cheap to make at some point super-super-soon, so there’s always hope they aren’t full of shit, right?
