Leaving my stuff aside for a moment, WTF is going with the US economy? I mean, seriously. What the fuck even is this shit?
To be frank I wonder if we even have an economy anymore. Nothing makes sense financially in the country. The US economy today is a funhouse of nonsense that seems to be operating on it’s own, without any kind of leadership or wise guidance or… brains, of any kind.
Nothing makes any sense. Anything not “big business” is tanking horribly thanks to the lockdowns. The infrastructure here is just… crumbling, everywhere. What is happening in Texas is third world. And everywhere else, everything crumbles. The roads are a disaster, everything sucks. Our system was clearly never designed for this many people, and even stuff like basic maintenance seems to be becoming rare, if not a luxury. Seriously- the fuck, people?
Street violence is off the charts, and guns are flying off the shelves and into the hands of a terrified populace. Fentanyl and other narcotics continue to flood the streets, with much of it ending up in the suburbs now, since rural America is already drenched in the stuff.
The stock market is high, indicating again that stocks have nothing to do with the state of any economy. It’s a gambling hall for algorithms, and nothing more. Half the stocks that are doing well come from companies that struggle to turn a profit.
None of this makes any sense. Obviously, everything I was told about economic matters in school was either wrong or a lie. Financial success clearly has nothing to do with your contributions to society. It has to do with… who the fuck even knows. Nobody can figure any of this shit out that hasn’t 1) been born into the rich classes, or 2) devoted every waking minute of their lives to it.
Confusion reigns on the street level. Nobody knows WTF is going on or why.
Bitcoin continues to climb for reasons that nobody can figure out. Nobody really likes Bitcoin; it’s basically worthless from any angle you look at it. Contrary to popular belief, computer nerds don’t like Bitcoin. As far as cryptos go it sucks; it’s possibly the worst of the bunch. It’s dreadfully slow to transact, expensive to use, and horribly difficult to mine. There are many many better coins than Bitcoin from a technical perspective. Bitcoin is ancient; it is extremely old technology- it’s over a decade old at this point and in the computer world that makes it obsolete years over. Actually using Bitcoin for anything is like trying to game on an old Pentium IV laptop.
So what the fuck is going on? Nobody seems to know. Governments don’t like it, banks don’t like it, the public doesn’t understand it… nobody can figure any of this out, at least from the ground level. Is it money laundering? I suppose it could be, since that also explains the modern art market, and, frankly, probably a lot of other markets as well.
It doesn’t even work as a store of value. There are too many ways to lose the stuff. Lose access to your wallet and it’s gone. Reformat your hard disk accidentally and it’s gone, get a virus that affects your wallet and it’s gone, get your wallet hacked and it’s gone, forget your password and it’s gone, crash your HDD and it’s gone, never to return. There is no limited supply- it can just be forked, whenever. Try forking the Euro or the dollar and see what happens. There are millions of Bitcoins that have been just lost, and nobody knows how many millions, either. I’ve heard estimations that a third of the mined Bitcoins are just gone, somehow.
Stocks keep going up and up and the actual nation visibly decomposes in front of everyone’s eyes. None of this shit is remotely comprehensible based on the whatever trash was told to me by my parents and teachers. I always heard garbage about “The Law of Supply and Demand” and other such nonsense. Obviously, those people pushing that drivel didn’t know WTH they were talking about, lol. If that was true, Musk and Zuckerberg would be cleaning toilets for a living, lol.
For my part, I tried to course correct all of this by forcing the government to address the problem of massive corruption in the gold market. This was many years ago- I could kind of foresee this madness coming, and tried to push people, banks, governments, etc. into resolving some of that corruption, which I thought would cause some of these other horrific problems and insanities to course correct as well, in a kind of domino effect. Unfortunately, that didn’t work, since the establishment didn’t make much of an effort to fix that market, let alone anything else.
It could well be the the corruption in the metal market is in fact the reason behind all of these other corruptions. IDK; that was my hunch, back then. It might be right, or there might be a larger corruption tainting all of these markets somewhere above.
But, back to Bitcoin- it could well be that it gets mainstream adoption, but it will never actually be used, by anyone. Its among the worst of the cryptos when it comes to actual usage, being unwieldy, fragile, not anonymous, expensive and slow. Computer geeks will never like it, Joe Six-pack certainly won’t be using it, and the rich will use actual currency. Who TF is actually going to be using it? I mean, as opposed to investing in it? Nobody, that’s who. Maybe criminals.
But otherwise it’s just a massive speculative bubble being created by people who don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing, as the nation around them continues to crumble to dust outside their houses.
What it looks like is that the country has lost it’s economic center, and is spinning off it’s axis in ways that make it look as though it’s flailing around randomly in some kind of awful, ugly death.
None of these markets make any sense on the ground level. They all seem to be rising and falling back on the whims of oligarchs, and their intentions are inscrutable from the streets. It’s impossible to know where to go or what to do if you don’t have an insider feeding you info on what the oligarchs are thinking of doing- of what markets they favor, or where they want to go with their money, etc. I mean, since none of this has anything to do with profits or business practices or anything else, that is all you have to go by.
I’m not going to offer thoughts on the whole Gamestop and Robinhood debacles. Yet more confusion; who TF knows what is going on there, or where you are even supposed to invest, anymore. I mean… at least, I don’t.
These seem to be all aftereffects of the hyper over-financialization of the US economy. People here are wayyyyyy too interested in money. Way way way way too interested. I mean, money is severely overrated. I mean, you don’t need it for much, really. Example- I am possibly the most powerful single person in the United States, and I’m far from being a millionaire. Money is extremely, extremely overrated here.
What our infatuation with money has created here is an extremely top-heavy economy with way, way too many rich people and a preposterously large divide between the haves and the have nots. Consequently the economy seems to resemble a Jenga tower, or something. There’s too many people at the top and too many on the bottom, and nobody in the middle. So it’s constantly swaying to and fro in some scary balancing act, with everyone trying to not tip it over accidently.
This is nuts, and utterly stupid.