I know this is a stretch but I'm inclined to trust JP Morgan's understanding of the economy more than I do CNN's.
Recessions are half psychological, and JP Morgan would get hurt far worse by most recessions that might happen than AT&T by a recession.
Remember that Trump was going to collapse the global system with his "war" against china? Apple and Microsoft have gained 2 trillion dollars in market cap since Trump. That's 2 trillion with a T. The media tells us there is going to be a collapse but people with money are betting that there will be significantly more global trade, even with china.
Who knows what they are actually talking about? Someone working at CNN or the monied elites?
In the West, we’re about 100 years, give or take, into the socialist revolution, which is a lot more like the Second Agricultural Revolution than the French Revolution, which is why people looking for something that looks like the latter miss it entirely.
Just look at what these groups spend their time squabbling over. This DSA meeting is reflective of how little chance they have of getting anything accomplished: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NdE9CjkvTY
They become a parody of themselves, much like this Libertarian debate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZITP93pqtdQ
However as things have general run fine, those fears and worry's soon diminished and more and more shifted from warehousing supplies to using suppliers and logistics chains as there warehouse.
Then that whole just in time mentality shifted to workers, so you have tempory/contract staff you can pull in when needed and drop when you don't, zero hour contracts and more money saved on the accountants sheets who did well selling of the old warehouse space to some house building company and made a nice balance sheet that year and far bonus.
This all goes fine until you get a hickup and the whole covid19 set a lot of dominios falling and not only highlighted how the supply chain works, but also opened up a few more cracks.
Which has been educational for some consumers who have for years and years enjoyed cheaper prices - all paid for by this accounting, logistics and off-shoring cheap labour etc.
How will it play out, well it will see price rises, often more than needed by some companies capitalising upon the opportunity, others being unable to rise prices as much and having to burden that extra cost. Some will have supply contracts that are tighter than others for supply and prices with penalty clauses, others not so. But that all boils down to insurance companies and reinsurance having a very interesting time ahead as the whole ripple effect plays out.
Will the system collapse - nope. It will adapt, over compensate and then as the fear and risk seem so far away, slip back into the same cost shaving until the next impacting disaster.
One thing though that will and does seem to be a changing is more divergence in production and with that, supplies. Which will only make the supply chain more robust overall. But then it will take a few years for things to settle and then be more years for all the knock on effect ripples to settle as well - be those government tax bills to pay for bailout or insurance/reinsurance companies and banks seeing the ripple impact play out in debts and claims.
As always we live in interesting times, just gets hard to stay interested sometimes when the news is so depressing in spin-tangent fear and doom.
Though one good thing has changed this past year - people have finally started to appreciate the little people who do all those jobs many take for granted. How long that appreciation will last is perhaps and will it be reflected in how much such people are paid for what they do is an aspect we can only hope changes. But sadly the whole working conditions of some supply chains at the production level has been an issue for a while, only now do we see that highlighted more from a consumer appreciation and understanding. After all in a crisis a bin collection person is more useful than another coffee shop (Though I'm sure some may have valid reasons to disagree)
However if in the next year or so I read about a house burning down that was filled with toilet rolls and jerry cans - I don't think I will be the slightest bit supprised. As always - I hope I'm wrong as that's how we learn the best.
Wife wanted to jump on the bandwagon as well but then I explained to her that the sewage moves to the treatment plants via pumps and if civilization collapsed due to pandemic then using a toilet would be least of our problems.
But maybe there is still a lot of room left for productivity increases with advances in robotics, etc. We're not seeing that now, since it seems like most of the growth comes from services and digital stuff, but maybe it's still a little too early.
However, it is rational to buy it if other people are hoarding it, so, self enforcing scarcity ...
The Tory party, always "sensible"...
I don't know whether to laugh or cry?
You say "causing it". They may be, but I suspect most of them aren't actively, deliberately causing it. So they can still be (and are) caught by surprise when it happens.
When I wrote "elites", I wasn't talking about "rich people" in the common sense. I doubt many elites were surprise considering the 1929 crash happened because the elites decided to start ww2 - japanese invasion of manchuria in 1931.
> How many rich people, active in real estate, got caught by surprise by 2008?
Once again, I'm talking about elites. Not bernie madoff.
> You say "causing it". They may be, but I suspect most of them aren't actively, deliberately causing it.
Of course they are. The masses don't decide when to go to war, when to upset the global world order, etc. It's the elites.
> So they can still be (and are) caught by surprise when it happens.
Absolutely. When the catalyst is external to the system or they are the elites who are left out of the loop ( aka when on group of elites decides to turn against another group of elites ). Unless you think the man-made and controlled system is an organic and natural system.
Shocks to a man-made system can result from natural disasters or it can result from the elites themselves. In the former, it most likely will be shocked to the elites. As for the latter, it won't except for the out-of-the-loop elites.
First, how in the world did the Japanese invasion of Manchuria show that the elites weren't caught by surprise by 1929? I mean, you've listed two events, and one came after the other, but that in no way demonstrates that the elites had advance knowledge of 1929. You're going to have to demonstrate a link there, not just list events.
Second, the amount of influence that western elites had over Japanese foreign policy in 1931 was very close to zero. The amount of control that Japanese elites had over the western financial system was also very close to zero. So you're talking about disjoint sets of elites, which means that your "proof" is lacking in another way.
> Once again, I'm talking about elites. Not bernie madoff.
Yeah, sure. "It's not who you're thinking of, it's someone else." Some never-specified someone else, so that the claim can never be disproven. I notice that you don't name any of these "elites", just "not Bernie Madoff".
You're sounding more and more like a conspiracy-theory nut case. If you've got an actual case, you need to do a better job presenting it.
When a global war is planned, the money tends to flood out of speculative consumer goods because that money is needed to fund wars. Why do you think the markets collapse in 1929? Everything was running smoothly and it all crashed down just before the start of the greatest war in human history.
> Second, the amount of influence that western elites had over Japanese foreign policy in 1931 was very close to zero.
Japan has been a US "vassal" since the 1850s. We used Japan as an attack dog to protect our interests in china/east asia and of course to keep the russians at bay. If you are interested, go read about a bunch of black ships sailing into tokyo bay in the 1850s. Sure, Japan got off leash for a few years, but we corrected such "misbehavior" rather brutally. The idea that the "the west" had no influence over japan is laughable.
> I notice that you don't name any of these "elites", just "not Bernie Madoff".
I imagine the elites are people who I will never hear of. I don't know. The people who decide to sanction cuba, venezuela, etc. The people who decided to open trade relations with china in the 1970s. The people who decided to invade iraq. Certainly the people didn't decide any of it. Certainly madoff didn't either, but that's my assumption.
> You're sounding more and more like a conspiracy-theory nut case. If you've got an actual case, you need to do a better job presenting it.
What is "conspiratorial" about saying the elites set up any system - national or international. Who do you think set up the global order? Aliens? The people? Who do you think sets up governments? Who do you think starts wars. Who do you think artificial man-made systems are created and broken down.
Resorting to silly ad hominems doesn't make you look great. I'm not saying there is some crazy "conspiracy" for the elites to collapse the system to turn humans into batteries. I'm saying that artifical human systems are created by elites and usually broken down by elites. The exceptions being natural causes.
For example, Japan. Yes, I know about Perry. That doesn't mean that the US was running Japan's foreign policy 80 years later. Where is your evidence that the US-imposed vassal status lasted much past the Meiji Restoration? (Yes, they were open to trade after that. That doesn't make them a vassal.)
Or the crash of 1929. Where is your evidence that elites pulling money out to fund WWII was the cause of 1929? The conventional position is that it was a speculative bubble crashing in the normal way that such bubbles crash, through mechanisms that are fairly well understood. Where is your evidence that the standard narrative is wrong?
You think elites set up the system. I agree with that; they do. (Who else is going to set them up? If you've got the power to set up a system, you are, by definition, one of the elite.) Where we differ is that I think things are much more chaotic than you do, and therefore that the elites have much less actual control.
No. Just the systematically important things. Obviously they aren't concerned about every minutiae.
> For those of us who don't share that starting point, you aren't giving nearly enough to be convincing.
What other starting point is there? Who else but the elites create systematically important institutions? Also, you are really asking for the impossible. It's not like the elite come out and say, "we are the elite".
> For example, Japan. Yes, I know about Perry. That doesn't mean that the US was running Japan's foreign policy 80 years later.
That's quite a walk back from "the amount of influence that western elites had over Japanese foreign policy in 1931 was very close to zero.". You just jumped from one extreme ( no influence ) to running the whole show.
> Where is your evidence that the US-imposed vassal status lasted much past the Meiji Restoration?
Other than the fact we currently occupy japan? Can't tell whether you are being serious or not. We are the ones that allowed Japan to have korea.
"Back in 1900, Roosevelt had written, 'I should like to see Japan have Korea.'"
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/opinion/06bradley.html
We are the ones that limited japan's naval growth via the washington naval treaty. You can read up on that yourself. As I said, other than those few years where japan "rebelled", they've been a vassal. Don't ever remember us or anyone else freeing them from vassalage.
> Or the crash of 1929. Where is your evidence that elites pulling money out to fund WWII was the cause of 1929?
All crashes are a result of the elites creating the environment whether money flows out of the markets. Naturally they'd be the first to pull out which causes others to and so forth. What else could it be?
> The conventional position is that it was a speculative bubble crashing in the normal way that such bubbles crash, through mechanisms that are fairly well understood. Where is your evidence that the standard narrative is wrong?
Right. Who creates the environment of speculative bubbles? Are they fairly well understood? Funny how we keep getting speculative bubbles and financial crises. Unless you think the markets are natural entites and not artificial man-made creations. Does mother nature naturally create a stock bubble? Does mother nature naturally pop it? Or do you think it's because your friend stop funding his 401k?
> You think elites set up the system. I agree with that; they do.
But you said you disagreed with me from the very start. "For those of us who don't share that starting point, you aren't giving nearly enough to be convincing."
> Where we differ is that I think things are much more chaotic than you do, and therefore that the elites have much less actual control.
What's chaotic? Things seem remarkable stable. So elites have the power to create a global order but they don't have the power to control it? Makes sense. Once again, so chaos starts wars? Chaos invented the lie about iraq wmds?
Nevermind who created the 2008 financial crisis. Who do you think fixed it? You? Me? Or did the elites come up with a plan to prop up the markets? We can never have any definitive proof because it's the nature of this business. But my educated seems more correct rather than your "conventional wisdom". Good day.
> Other than the fact we currently occupy japan?
We have bases there. We don't currently occupy Japan. There's a difference. The occupation ended in 1952.
But even if we did currently occupy Japan, that started in 1945, and so has absolutely nothing to do with how much influence we had over their foreign policy in 1931.
You apparently are serious, but your arguments make no sense.
Yes, we limited their naval growth with the Washington Treaty. We pushed them into it against their will, because they considered an arms race against the US to be a worse outcome than the treaty. That still doesn't show any evidence that the US elites were dictating that Japan would invade China in 1931.
> All crashes are a result of the elites creating the environment whether money flows out of the markets. Naturally they'd be the first to pull out which causes others to and so forth. What else could it be?
Overleveraged buying of stocks that aren't going up any longer leading to margin calls? What else could it be?
> Who creates the environment of speculative bubbles?
Prosperity creates earnings, which makes stocks look undervalued, which makes people buy them, which makes the stocks go up. When that happens for long enough, people buy them because they've been going up. That makes the stock go up more. When that happens for long enough, people buy stocks with borrowed money, because it's been going up for so long that they expect that it's certain to continue to do so. And that makes the price go up even more, which makes even more people buy it on borrowed money. Eventually, the price stops rising because the banks won't lend any more, and then people start selling, and it collapses in a panic.
At what point do you think the elites are making that happen? More, were deliberately making that happen?
I don't agree with your starting point, which is that the elites currently control things to the degree that you think they do. I agree that they set it up; I disagree that they still have the level of control that your ideas imply.