The biggest issue is the need for families to have two incomes to support a houshold. Unemployment would plummet if single incomes for the working class were feasible again,since unemployment is based on looking for employment.
Basically if jobs had living wages and we had universal healthcare we wouldn’t be in this mess.
That ship sailed under Reagan, and it’s never getting back to port, sadly. Thanks to him, families now needed two incomes.
Then, Bush and Clinton came along, and you needed not only two incomes, but two college degrees. Now, with Dubya, Obama, and Trump, not even that’s enough, and they’re capping student loans instead of regulating student loan interest, so your only real shot at being a doctor now is being born in the right zip code.
In the event of an actual crash, a lot of these “nevers” will get re-evaluated. The New Deal consisted of a lot of “nevers” that all got passed because people didn’t want a repeat of the first Great Depression; I’d expect a similar snap-back after the second Gilded Age finally burns itself out.
I mean that’s hopeful, but remember that the New Deal also came against the backdrop of the height of socialism in the West and the labor rights movement. Modern Americans don’t have the organizational strength to make such a compromise attractive in the eye of the ruling class, and they don’t seem intent on ever having it.
People in big wealthy countries underestimate how far those nations can fall.
Argentina was the 5th richest country in the World at one point, and look at them now.
The higher you are, the more you can fall before hitting a new stable state: just look at those places which were once great imperial nations like Greece, Iran, Turkey or Egypt. I mean, most of the Middle East was once the seat of some great nation or other and look at them now.
The US going all the way down to the level of wealth per capita of, say, Russia, is a distinct possibility, if the structural elements which supported its high economic output start breaking (so, things like Education, the productivity of its companies and the belief of outsiders that investing in America is safe and has a good ROI, all things getting worse) and the higher a nation is in that scale the more such structural supports are required to keep it there (for example, not other developed nations don’t relly on their currency being the World’s Reserve Currency to prop-up its public finances), so the harder it is to stay there.
That’s the most visible example of our previous experience with this, but it’s far from the only one: Rapidly increasing economic inequalities, coupled with the fight over slavery, led to the election of Lincoln; he of course issued the Emancipation Proclamation, but he also signed into law social programs such as the Homestead Act and a land grant program which resulted in the establishment of many lower-income colleges and universities around the country, including several HBCUs. When the extreme disparities of the Gilded Age reached a tipping point in the late 1800s, the Progressive Era began, bringing things like women’s suffrage, environmental protections, and “muckraking” journalism that rooted out corruption. The attempts at state-level fascism in the midst of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s led to the election of Kennedy and to Johnson’s “Great Society,” which brought with it food stamps, Medicare and Medicaid, and consumer protections, among many other things.
Buchanan led to Lincoln. Hoover led to Roosevelt. Nixon led to Carter. Bush led to Obama. It’s a pendulum of extremes: rapid progressive change is birthed from times of economic inequality, there’s a steady-state era in which progressive policies lead to rapid growth, but then the rich start to get frustrated with regulation and taxation, and corruption begins to increase once more, leading to increasing inequality; the people get mad, control of the government is wrested back, and the cycle begins anew. The pendulum has been swinging since before the Magna Carta even.
Still, you are right about the big question here: whether or not the country will survive the next swing of the pendulum in its current form, or if a different society will have to be birthed from its ashes.
There is not a single competent politician with a history of working for the good of the many in an electable position in the US at the moment.
The closest was Sanders and you saw what the Democrat Establishment did to make sure he was stopped.
Also, I’m sorry but I was in investment banking at the time of the 2008 and after seeing how he unconditionally saved the worst abusers in that industry, I don’t think Obama counts as a good guy, so Bush to Obama wasn’t really a pendular move between extremes: by the time of Obama the choice for anybody other than the well-off and the rich had already been reduced to Greater Evil vs Lesser Evil. Obama was a masterful speechmaker, but when it come to actual policies he was just another neoliberal working for the 1% and once in a while making a show of throwing some crumbs to the riff-raff.
IMHO in terms of working for the many, America hasn’t had anybody anywhere close to Eisenhower as President since JFK.
Expecting that there will be a white knight president elected this time around given the state of Politics in America is pure Hope with almist nothing to back it (the closest is the guy who won the Democrat Primaries for NYC Mayor, and he hasn’t even been elected yet and we’re talking about a major city filled the people far more educated and worldly than the average American, so it’s unlikely that his likely victory will translated to anywhere else in America than maybe one or two other similar cities).
I think the problem this time around is systemic and “bipartisan” (in that both main parties stopped representing most people and just use different styles Propaganda to herd the sheep or just turn people of from voting altogether) and also linked to the natural end of the period where the US was the dominant nation (basically, in the schedule of the Rise and Fall of Empires, the US has already been long enough in the peak dominance period to have reached the Fall stage) and as I meantioned in my last post, if you look around at other nations that were once great, they tend to fall quite a lot and then stagnate for a couple of centuries before they start recovering and none ever gets back to its peak.
This isn’t really an America-specific problem it’s a much broader Human Societies problem, and whilst the details are different the general pattern is the same (corruption, pretty much all of the elites making money of unproductive activities and political connections, people in general having delusions of superiority that vastly exceed the actual present day achievements and so on).
Turkmenistan has barely been totalitarian for a single generation; the Soviet Union broke up in my lifetime. And yes, North Korea has persisted through a little over two generations of Kim family control that seems to show no signs of stopping anytime soon from the outside, but that’s not too far outside of “a couple” of generations. I’d say that the jury is still out on them, too, but even if the DPRK lasts for a century or more, they become an extreme outlier in the face of every other fascist regime in the history of the world.
The new deal though is not a good deal lmao. It will literally make the rich gen richer and poor get poorer. Like I’m middle class American but still rely on summer and after school programs for my kids. What am I supposed to do when that goes away? Magically afford a daycare? Or is my 10yr or 6yr old supposed to get a job?
They’re not talking about a new deal as in a new status quo after this whole mess; they’re talking about the New Deal and are hoping for more of that.
TL;DR for the article: Pretty much all federal social welfare programs and worker rights in America were established as part of the New Deal. Think if Bernie became president with a cooperative Congress.
When I was a high school student, the New Deal was a topic that was covered with great fanfare. It was as a part of the Early 20th-century unit that led up to the second World War. I partially remember because I was a deluded right-winger at the time and thought it was ridiculous that they were making such a big deal out of a government handout program.
You misunderstand me, as the other comment notes. I’m talking about actual change: “The New Deal,” capitalized: the relief, reform, and recovery of the 1930s, not “the new deal,” lowercase, that they just passed.
Trump just passed a huge cut it he 21s CCLC down to $0… This stops all funding to after school and summer learning programs. I just got an email from. The center my kids go to saying they might have to close because they didn’t get their July 1st budget payments…
You can blame Reagan for a lot of things but not this and frankly even if it somehow was all his fault the Clinton Administration could have undone it.
The economy was already in trouble by the end of Lyndon Johnson’s final term in 1969. The Nixon Administration implemented some large changes trying to fix it but was unsuccessful. The Carter Administration also tried with very limited success. It wasn’t until the 1st Rise of Tech in the 80s during the Reagan Administration that things managed to get moving again. The Clinton Administration caught a lucky break with the 2nd Rise of Tech in the 90s so the streak got extended to right about 2001.
The amusing part is that Johnson, Nixon, and Carter bear no blame for the economic woes while Reagan and Clinton deserve no credit for the economic successes. They just happened to be the guy in the Oval when things happened.
Its a good chunk of the reason that everyone from Wall Street to the US Federal Government is trying so damn hard to make AI happen. They want a 3rd Rise of Tech, or something like it, in order to re-float the economy.
Bla-bla-blame? I don’t think this is about blaming the right or the left wing of politics. It’s about what the State is supposed to do for (as in favor of) the people. They renounced to the idea of working for the people and leave them in the hands of the oligarchy. It worked as long as the illusion and promises lasted.
This is part of my problem. My wife has medical issues and can’t work which is exaserbated by our higher than typical medical costs. It sucked before but we managed and now it seems like the end.
Yeah, I don’t know if OP is in the USA, but having someone like Donald Trump elected to high office is 100% part of a crash already in progress. Inequality got so bad that democracy is not functioning. In a healthy society, Trump would be an unelectable laughing stock.
Yeah. I consider Trump the “blow everything up” candidate, he got a lot of support from people who were just so generically desperate that they wanted to vote for whoever seemed like they were going to majorly change something, somehow. It almost didn’t matter what Trump did as long as he smashed the existing order while doing it.
Also, not so fun fact, but this got me curious so I looked up the unemployment rate during The Great Depression: apparently then it was around 20% to 25% as well, so I feel like that reinforces the point I’m making a bit.
No, the unemployment rate was around 20-25% under the traditional definition. It’s currently 4.2% under that definition.
If you want to use this LISEP definition, fine, but recognize that it’s been above 30% for most of its existence, and has only been under 25% since COVID. Basically, if you go by the LISEP definition then you’re saying that the job market after COVID has been better than it has ever been before.
From your own source on “true” unemployment, it’s the lowest it has been since they started calculating it. It peaked in 09 at 35% and again in COVID, but all through the early 00s it was between 28% and 30%.
You can’t use that number as evidence we “already crashed”, because as we’ve seen in other actual crashes it spikes up to 35%.
When the definition of unemployed is changed to exclude the majority of working age people without jobs then it is no longer a helpful statistic.
U-3 has used the same definition of unemployed since 1940.
Whatever metric you want to use, you should look at that number and how it changes over time, to get a sense of trend lines. LISEP says the “true” unemployment rate is currently 24.3% in May 2025, which is basically the lowest it’s ever been.
Since the metric was created in 1994, the first time that it dipped below 25% was briefly in the late 2010’s, right before COVID, and then has been under 25% since September 2021.
Under this alternative metric of unemployment, the unemployment rate is currently one of the lowest in history.
You’re the one saying we shouldn’t be cross comparing different numbers with different meanings… While literally comparing different numbers with different meanings to support your point
The comments you’re responding to are not making that kind of general argument though, they are only talking about whether a specific claim makes sense. If it doesn’t make sense, that doesn’t necessarily mean our economic system is working for us, maybe it means that whatever problems exist would be better quantified in a different way.
Unemployment statistics do not show an accurate picture of the people who are unemployed based on the definition of unemployed that is used by regular human beings.
I understand the stat looks good, because the definition of the stat excludes growing groups of people who we would consider unemployed.
Well what I’m seeing in this thread is two metrics, BLS and LISEP, with the argument being that the distinction between them doesn’t matter because unemployment is right now historically low by both measures (I don’t really know the difference between them myself, or whether these are the only meaningful ways to measure it). And you’re reiterating that there exists some measure where it is high, but I think for that to be a convincing counterargument you would need to say more about what that measure is, show that unemployment is high by that measure, and make an argument why that specific way of measuring things is more relevant than the other ones.
The 1% own even more stock than they own outright money. You could replace “the economy” in every article with “rich people’s yacht money”. The stock market is 100% dissociated from reality and shouldn’t be used as a measure of general wealth by any means.
Meh, please don’t quote unusual statistics without giving any context for how to interpet them.
For this value, it is calculated by:
Using data compiled by the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the True Rate of Unemployment tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $25,000 annually before taxes.
The fact that it’s pegged to 25k means that the number is much much higher. It’s not 24.3%. its 24.3% plus everyone who can’t afford to live at today’s prices.
I may be wrong in saying it’s indicative of a crash, and I’m okay with being corrected.
As to inaccurate or inflammatory, maybe it feels that way if you’re on the winning side of the equation.
I think we should be inflamed about this. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that thirty years of high functional unemployment being ordinary is an objectively bad thing, but when you couple it with the increasingly supercharged price gouging and inflation the US has experienced over the last several decades, things that seemed improbable before suddenly become feasible. (Like making fascists electable.)
Maybe in 1995 you could actually afford things while functionally unemployed? I mean, while the relative number is stable, the absolute numbers keep growing, and their situation keeps worsening. Here lies the inflammatory part.
The stock market is not the same thing as it was at the start, different players, different motives, and lots of failsafes. That time it was a signal that things were bad, this time we could continue to get worse and you’d never know it looking at the DOW.
If we look at historic crashes, they had major catalysts causing mass sell orders. Right now markets have had time to adjust because the speed of decline has been very slow.
Markets are also largely speculative, many stocks are traded way above their fundamental value (think Microsoft, tesla, or coca-cola). These will probably be hit the hard, algorithms will default to what a stock should be and drop hard. But these companies might have the strongest chance to bounce back as well.
Companies with the strongest books will be safer, but many more risk taking companies won’t be as lucky. This is part of what due diligence of a stock will tell you, but also probably one of the hardest parts of investing.
As long as decline is slow, stability can be found. But when uncertainty rises fast, so does the unstability of the stock market. Catalysts such as the public losing confidence in banks causing a bank run, companies downsizing at unseen scales to cut costs, or global political instability are possible.
TLDR: it needs to get way worse, very quickly for the market to crash
We’re already there. The only reason we aren’t calling this a depression is that the stock market hasn’t been affected much.
But when 25% of Americans are functionally unemployed, it’s hard to argue we aren’t already largely ‘crashed’.
If the economy doesn’t need 25% of the populace to keep functioning…what happens?
The biggest issue is the need for families to have two incomes to support a houshold. Unemployment would plummet if single incomes for the working class were feasible again,since unemployment is based on looking for employment.
Basically if jobs had living wages and we had universal healthcare we wouldn’t be in this mess.
That ship sailed under Reagan, and it’s never getting back to port, sadly. Thanks to him, families now needed two incomes.
Then, Bush and Clinton came along, and you needed not only two incomes, but two college degrees. Now, with Dubya, Obama, and Trump, not even that’s enough, and they’re capping student loans instead of regulating student loan interest, so your only real shot at being a doctor now is being born in the right zip code.
America, baby. Dig it.
In the event of an actual crash, a lot of these “nevers” will get re-evaluated. The New Deal consisted of a lot of “nevers” that all got passed because people didn’t want a repeat of the first Great Depression; I’d expect a similar snap-back after the second Gilded Age finally burns itself out.
I mean that’s hopeful, but remember that the New Deal also came against the backdrop of the height of socialism in the West and the labor rights movement. Modern Americans don’t have the organizational strength to make such a compromise attractive in the eye of the ruling class, and they don’t seem intent on ever having it.
Lot of assumptions there.
Historically, humans don’t just suffer in silence for more than a couple of generations.
People in big wealthy countries underestimate how far those nations can fall.
Argentina was the 5th richest country in the World at one point, and look at them now.
The higher you are, the more you can fall before hitting a new stable state: just look at those places which were once great imperial nations like Greece, Iran, Turkey or Egypt. I mean, most of the Middle East was once the seat of some great nation or other and look at them now.
The US going all the way down to the level of wealth per capita of, say, Russia, is a distinct possibility, if the structural elements which supported its high economic output start breaking (so, things like Education, the productivity of its companies and the belief of outsiders that investing in America is safe and has a good ROI, all things getting worse) and the higher a nation is in that scale the more such structural supports are required to keep it there (for example, not other developed nations don’t relly on their currency being the World’s Reserve Currency to prop-up its public finances), so the harder it is to stay there.
You’re not wrong, though the US has gone through this sort of thing before in the past. Once the Great Depression wiped away the excesses that came from the post-WWI economic boom, it led directly to Roosevelt’s New Deal; “perhaps the greatest achievement [of which] was to restore faith in American democracy at a time when many people believed that the only choice left was between communism and fascism.”
Sound familiar?
That’s the most visible example of our previous experience with this, but it’s far from the only one: Rapidly increasing economic inequalities, coupled with the fight over slavery, led to the election of Lincoln; he of course issued the Emancipation Proclamation, but he also signed into law social programs such as the Homestead Act and a land grant program which resulted in the establishment of many lower-income colleges and universities around the country, including several HBCUs. When the extreme disparities of the Gilded Age reached a tipping point in the late 1800s, the Progressive Era began, bringing things like women’s suffrage, environmental protections, and “muckraking” journalism that rooted out corruption. The attempts at state-level fascism in the midst of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s led to the election of Kennedy and to Johnson’s “Great Society,” which brought with it food stamps, Medicare and Medicaid, and consumer protections, among many other things.
Buchanan led to Lincoln. Hoover led to Roosevelt. Nixon led to Carter. Bush led to Obama. It’s a pendulum of extremes: rapid progressive change is birthed from times of economic inequality, there’s a steady-state era in which progressive policies lead to rapid growth, but then the rich start to get frustrated with regulation and taxation, and corruption begins to increase once more, leading to increasing inequality; the people get mad, control of the government is wrested back, and the cycle begins anew. The pendulum has been swinging since before the Magna Carta even.
Still, you are right about the big question here: whether or not the country will survive the next swing of the pendulum in its current form, or if a different society will have to be birthed from its ashes.
There is not a single competent politician with a history of working for the good of the many in an electable position in the US at the moment.
The closest was Sanders and you saw what the Democrat Establishment did to make sure he was stopped.
Also, I’m sorry but I was in investment banking at the time of the 2008 and after seeing how he unconditionally saved the worst abusers in that industry, I don’t think Obama counts as a good guy, so Bush to Obama wasn’t really a pendular move between extremes: by the time of Obama the choice for anybody other than the well-off and the rich had already been reduced to Greater Evil vs Lesser Evil. Obama was a masterful speechmaker, but when it come to actual policies he was just another neoliberal working for the 1% and once in a while making a show of throwing some crumbs to the riff-raff.
IMHO in terms of working for the many, America hasn’t had anybody anywhere close to Eisenhower as President since JFK.
Expecting that there will be a white knight president elected this time around given the state of Politics in America is pure Hope with almist nothing to back it (the closest is the guy who won the Democrat Primaries for NYC Mayor, and he hasn’t even been elected yet and we’re talking about a major city filled the people far more educated and worldly than the average American, so it’s unlikely that his likely victory will translated to anywhere else in America than maybe one or two other similar cities).
I think the problem this time around is systemic and “bipartisan” (in that both main parties stopped representing most people and just use different styles Propaganda to herd the sheep or just turn people of from voting altogether) and also linked to the natural end of the period where the US was the dominant nation (basically, in the schedule of the Rise and Fall of Empires, the US has already been long enough in the peak dominance period to have reached the Fall stage) and as I meantioned in my last post, if you look around at other nations that were once great, they tend to fall quite a lot and then stagnate for a couple of centuries before they start recovering and none ever gets back to its peak.
This isn’t really an America-specific problem it’s a much broader Human Societies problem, and whilst the details are different the general pattern is the same (corruption, pretty much all of the elites making money of unproductive activities and political connections, people in general having delusions of superiority that vastly exceed the actual present day achievements and so on).
Would pointing out places like North Korea and Turkmenistan be overkill here?
Guess so…
Turkmenistan has barely been totalitarian for a single generation; the Soviet Union broke up in my lifetime. And yes, North Korea has persisted through a little over two generations of Kim family control that seems to show no signs of stopping anytime soon from the outside, but that’s not too far outside of “a couple” of generations. I’d say that the jury is still out on them, too, but even if the DPRK lasts for a century or more, they become an extreme outlier in the face of every other fascist regime in the history of the world.
I hope you’re right.
Well, it’s either that or American Revolution II: Electric Boogaloo, so I hope so too.
The new deal though is not a good deal lmao. It will literally make the rich gen richer and poor get poorer. Like I’m middle class American but still rely on summer and after school programs for my kids. What am I supposed to do when that goes away? Magically afford a daycare? Or is my 10yr or 6yr old supposed to get a job?
They’re not talking about a new deal as in a new status quo after this whole mess; they’re talking about the New Deal and are hoping for more of that.
TL;DR for the article: Pretty much all federal social welfare programs and worker rights in America were established as part of the New Deal. Think if Bernie became president with a cooperative Congress.
Indeed. Yikes, our history education is in rough shape.
I mean something tells me that’s one topic that wouldn’t be appropriately covered in schools, but that’s just my guess.
When I was a high school student, the New Deal was a topic that was covered with great fanfare. It was as a part of the Early 20th-century unit that led up to the second World War. I partially remember because I was a deluded right-winger at the time and thought it was ridiculous that they were making such a big deal out of a government handout program.
You misunderstand me, as the other comment notes. I’m talking about actual change: “The New Deal,” capitalized: the relief, reform, and recovery of the 1930s, not “the new deal,” lowercase, that they just passed.
Why would a new deal get rid of after school programs? If would expand on them.
Yeah man they have started rolling back those regulations for child labor.
Trump just passed a huge cut it he 21s CCLC down to $0… This stops all funding to after school and summer learning programs. I just got an email from. The center my kids go to saying they might have to close because they didn’t get their July 1st budget payments…
… You don’t know what the New Deal was, do you?
Apparently not
ReaGaNoMiCS!!!
You can blame Reagan for a lot of things but not this and frankly even if it somehow was all his fault the Clinton Administration could have undone it.
The economy was already in trouble by the end of Lyndon Johnson’s final term in 1969. The Nixon Administration implemented some large changes trying to fix it but was unsuccessful. The Carter Administration also tried with very limited success. It wasn’t until the 1st Rise of Tech in the 80s during the Reagan Administration that things managed to get moving again. The Clinton Administration caught a lucky break with the 2nd Rise of Tech in the 90s so the streak got extended to right about 2001.
The amusing part is that Johnson, Nixon, and Carter bear no blame for the economic woes while Reagan and Clinton deserve no credit for the economic successes. They just happened to be the guy in the Oval when things happened.
Its a good chunk of the reason that everyone from Wall Street to the US Federal Government is trying so damn hard to make AI happen. They want a 3rd Rise of Tech, or something like it, in order to re-float the economy.
Bla-bla-blame? I don’t think this is about blaming the right or the left wing of politics. It’s about what the State is supposed to do for (as in favor of) the people. They renounced to the idea of working for the people and leave them in the hands of the oligarchy. It worked as long as the illusion and promises lasted.
This is part of my problem. My wife has medical issues and can’t work which is exaserbated by our higher than typical medical costs. It sucked before but we managed and now it seems like the end.
But but billionaires would be slightly less obscenely rich then, oh no!
And the stock market is just another way for the top percent to continue to siphon wealth.
Yeah, I don’t know if OP is in the USA, but having someone like Donald Trump elected to high office is 100% part of a crash already in progress. Inequality got so bad that democracy is not functioning. In a healthy society, Trump would be an unelectable laughing stock.
Yeah. I consider Trump the “blow everything up” candidate, he got a lot of support from people who were just so generically desperate that they wanted to vote for whoever seemed like they were going to majorly change something, somehow. It almost didn’t matter what Trump did as long as he smashed the existing order while doing it.
Agreed. People were angry - many with good cause. Unfortunately, people often make bad decisions when they are angry.
Also, not so fun fact, but this got me curious so I looked up the unemployment rate during The Great Depression: apparently then it was around 20% to 25% as well, so I feel like that reinforces the point I’m making a bit.
No, the unemployment rate was around 20-25% under the traditional definition. It’s currently 4.2% under that definition.
If you want to use this LISEP definition, fine, but recognize that it’s been above 30% for most of its existence, and has only been under 25% since COVID. Basically, if you go by the LISEP definition then you’re saying that the job market after COVID has been better than it has ever been before.
From your own source on “true” unemployment, it’s the lowest it has been since they started calculating it. It peaked in 09 at 35% and again in COVID, but all through the early 00s it was between 28% and 30%.
You can’t use that number as evidence we “already crashed”, because as we’ve seen in other actual crashes it spikes up to 35%.
When the definition of unemployed is changed to exclude the majority of working age people without jobs then it is no longer a helpful statistic.
That’s why we see people calculating real unemployment with other variables.
U-3 has used the same definition of unemployed since 1940.
Whatever metric you want to use, you should look at that number and how it changes over time, to get a sense of trend lines. LISEP says the “true” unemployment rate is currently 24.3% in May 2025, which is basically the lowest it’s ever been.
Since the metric was created in 1994, the first time that it dipped below 25% was briefly in the late 2010’s, right before COVID, and then has been under 25% since September 2021.
Under this alternative metric of unemployment, the unemployment rate is currently one of the lowest in history.
I don’t know how to make you engage with reality.
Slaves arguing for their continued enslavement is just something i will never understand.
You’re the one saying we shouldn’t be cross comparing different numbers with different meanings… While literally comparing different numbers with different meanings to support your point
You can’t understand because you can’t even read the numbers in your own sources haha
I didn’t post any numbers.
“Indignant slave mocks another slave to make themselves feel better.”
Haha
The comments you’re responding to are not making that kind of general argument though, they are only talking about whether a specific claim makes sense. If it doesn’t make sense, that doesn’t necessarily mean our economic system is working for us, maybe it means that whatever problems exist would be better quantified in a different way.
Unemployment statistics do not show an accurate picture of the people who are unemployed based on the definition of unemployed that is used by regular human beings.
I understand the stat looks good, because the definition of the stat excludes growing groups of people who we would consider unemployed.
Well what I’m seeing in this thread is two metrics, BLS and LISEP, with the argument being that the distinction between them doesn’t matter because unemployment is right now historically low by both measures (I don’t really know the difference between them myself, or whether these are the only meaningful ways to measure it). And you’re reiterating that there exists some measure where it is high, but I think for that to be a convincing counterargument you would need to say more about what that measure is, show that unemployment is high by that measure, and make an argument why that specific way of measuring things is more relevant than the other ones.
Hello friend.
This point has been discussed elsewhere in the thread. I hope you have a nice afternoon.
The 1% own even more stock than they own outright money. You could replace “the economy” in every article with “rich people’s yacht money”. The stock market is 100% dissociated from reality and shouldn’t be used as a measure of general wealth by any means.
Im at 42 weeks. My life plane is heading straight down and the rudder is not responding.
Best way to recover from a spin is push the yoke to straight down and rudder opposite the spin.
Meh, please don’t quote unusual statistics without giving any context for how to interpet them.
For this value, it is calculated by:
24.3% is not that out of the ordinary - you can see historical data back to like, 1995 here.
Not saying this stat is useless, but the way you’ve chosen to use it is intentionally and inaccurately inflammatory.
The fact that it’s pegged to 25k means that the number is much much higher. It’s not 24.3%. its 24.3% plus everyone who can’t afford to live at today’s prices.
That’s terrifying.
I dunno, H.
I may be wrong in saying it’s indicative of a crash, and I’m okay with being corrected.
As to inaccurate or inflammatory, maybe it feels that way if you’re on the winning side of the equation.
I think we should be inflamed about this. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that thirty years of high functional unemployment being ordinary is an objectively bad thing, but when you couple it with the increasingly supercharged price gouging and inflation the US has experienced over the last several decades, things that seemed improbable before suddenly become feasible. (Like making fascists electable.)
Maybe in 1995 you could actually afford things while functionally unemployed? I mean, while the relative number is stable, the absolute numbers keep growing, and their situation keeps worsening. Here lies the inflammatory part.
The stock market is not the same thing as it was at the start, different players, different motives, and lots of failsafes. That time it was a signal that things were bad, this time we could continue to get worse and you’d never know it looking at the DOW.
Can you ELI5 why the stock market isn’t affected much?
If we look at historic crashes, they had major catalysts causing mass sell orders. Right now markets have had time to adjust because the speed of decline has been very slow.
Markets are also largely speculative, many stocks are traded way above their fundamental value (think Microsoft, tesla, or coca-cola). These will probably be hit the hard, algorithms will default to what a stock should be and drop hard. But these companies might have the strongest chance to bounce back as well.
Companies with the strongest books will be safer, but many more risk taking companies won’t be as lucky. This is part of what due diligence of a stock will tell you, but also probably one of the hardest parts of investing.
As long as decline is slow, stability can be found. But when uncertainty rises fast, so does the unstability of the stock market. Catalysts such as the public losing confidence in banks causing a bank run, companies downsizing at unseen scales to cut costs, or global political instability are possible.
TLDR: it needs to get way worse, very quickly for the market to crash
So many jobs 🫲🍊🫱
Really weird reading an article that interviews someone you’ve worked for (who is a billionaire themselves).