Americans have depleted their excess savings and are now depleting their credit lines as well. The percentage with delinquent credit card debt is approaching the peak at the end of the dotcom bubble.
The great American boom is finally running out of steam, leaving mountains of debt
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/06/05/great-american-boom-running-out-steam-mountains-debt/
High borrowing and low personal savings are dashing hopes of an economic soft landing
All of this talk is already 1 or even 2 years obsolete. While people were arguing about soft vs hard landing shit the stock market rallied to all time highs, they created an entirely new AI/Tech bubble and everything now hinges on whether or not that bubble will crash.
Bad data about the real economy, if and when it comes at all will be completely irrelevant to the mainstream economic analysis going forward.
I find it challenging to envision how the tech bubble could sustain the economy. Essential needs must be met, and people must be able to afford basic necessities such as housing and food. The US economy is moving towards a state where these necessities are no longer accessible for the majority of individuals. As Lenin once noted, every society is three meals away from chaos.
We just subtly redefined the economy. It no longer involves provision of essential goods and services to actual people. It's all a scoreboard of stock prices and interest rates.
Cults never change: we're all going to transcend and become beings of pure energy Nevada Limited Liability Corporations that no longer need food or housing because we can subsist on Lord Kalutika's Golden Light eternal 9% annualized paper growth.
This is why GDP is such an irrelevant measure. In the US it includes financialization. Rents are included as "product." Insurance is "product." Tech industry vaporware investment is "product." They define things that most definitely are not being produced as "product" and say look how much we produce the economy is great! It's just made up
It's even worse than that because a lot of the GDP comes from the industries that are actively harmful to society. Private health insurance is a perfect example, it's an industry that profits of basic needs of the people, and it's making the working majority poorer and less healthy. Yet, it bolsters the GDP on paper.
Right, and once the economy becomes disconnected from the actual needs of the people it loses all meaning.
There's lots of work being done so people are being paid, it's just that this work is not productive so the money generated by other actually productive sectors of the economy is essentially being put in a big pile and lit on fire
everything now hinges on whether or not that bubble will crash
*when that bubble will crash
Crypto. Nfts. Ai. The trifecta of absolute bullshit that's actively made things worse
I wasnt really old enough to follow what we going on, but I think the .com bubble was like this. "get a website! E-commerce! Unlimited weatlh and beauty" and somehow no one stopped to consider that while E-commerce might be convenient, it wasn't going ot create much in the way of new markets. And then in 99 everything crashed and the end of history ended for the first time.
If anything e-commerce just cannibalized revenue from brick & mortar stores and killed malls. So the tech stocks popped while RIETs got killed
They just need a new buzzword to keep tech prices from crashing until they find a new buzzword to keep tech prices from crashing until they find a new buzzword
Yea except if you look at the price of actually needed stuff it’s been skyrocketing constantly so the tech bubble has only delayed the inevitable for finance bros and no one else