Submitted 22 hours ago by LadyButterfly@piefed.blahaj.zone to [deleted]
Wages are stagnant and cost of living is ridiculous. Are we headed for a 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’.
The biggest issue is the need for families to have two incomes to support a houshold. Unemployment would plummet if single incomes foe the working class were feasible again,since unemployment is based on looking for employment.
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.
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.
if jobs had living wages
But but billionaires would be slightly less obscenely rich then, oh no!
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.
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.
apparently then it was around 20% to 25% as well
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.
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.
And the stock market is just another way for the top percent to continue to siphon wealth.
If the economy doesn’t need 25% of the populace to keep functioning…what happens?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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).
And I just found out I need a new job as we are being ordered into the office after they moved it 50 miles away
That's scary. How are you holding up?
Scrolling through indeed right now, its not great. Maybe just give up trying to find anything I have skills for and find something unskilled?
But I think my contract states once a month in the office so if I can argue that its probably worth staying and just going through a shit commute once a month. Still not great but probably slightly better than taking a local retail job.
Yes. We are heading towards a crash. We are very much already in one, and have absolutley no way out.
Trump killed all US international commerce with his TACO tariffs and is currently propping up a failing stock market by converting medicaid dollars into ICE / TECH BRO MILITARY funding. The stock market keeps doing great because our tax dollars are propping up companies like Google, Plantir, and Amazon through government grants instead of providing us a safety net. That money will run out eventually, but likely not before more CEOs are killed over it.
Literally we are living through the gilded 1920’s again but with an American Hitler.
We now have years of uncontrolled inflation well above target rates, a corrupt government, wealth inequality worse than the French revolution, and rampant unintelligent Tariffs hurting all international trade at the cost of every small business in America. These are the same factors that caused the great depression, and if you think it’s not going to happen again, you are wrong.
We are a country being lead into disaster by the least competent people imaginable.
We are heading towards a crash. We are very much already in one, and have absolutley no way out.
I think this is what folks lose track of when they talk about “the crash”. We’re all waiting with baited breath for the financial system to topple over. But the financial system is increasingly just a dozen private equity firms bidding up one another’s baseball cards. They can’t “crash” in the traditional sense until a sufficient number of them refuse to contribute more to the pot, and so long as everyone has easy credit there’s no real reason to do that.
Incidentally, JPow and Trump (and every Fed Chair/President going back to Bernenke/Obama) have both been militant in keeping Fed Interest Rates at historic lows going on nearly two decades.
Literally we are living through the gilded 1920’s again but with an American Hitler.
I mean, the parallels between Trump and Coolidge Eras are in abundance. War on Immigration. A finance/tech sector that’s eating the industrial economy. Massive spike in white nationalism paired with a full blown Red Scare. Deficit hawkery that never touches the national security state. Global ecological crises compounding into massive famines and agricultural failures.
We are a country being lead into disaster by the least competent people imaginable.
Part of the problem is that we’ve lost track of a consensus on what “competent” looks like. I see plenty of people (rightly) insist guys like Trump and Speaker Johnson and governors like DeSantis and Abbott are criminally incompetent. But then these same people get fully behind Gavin Newsom and Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris, seemingly without recognizing that they’re pushing the backside of the same privatization / national security state coin.
What do you do when blue state bastions like California and New Mexico are turning out Crypto Shills as quickly as any captured conservative enclave like Wyoming or South Carolina? What does competency look like in the wake of Biden’s squandered four years or Obama’s or Clinton’s corporately compromised time in office, for that matter?
How do you talk about climate change or even scratch the surface of our US-backed genocides in Gaza and Yemen and Afghanistan or talk about housing policy or college debts or union organization when half the liberal contingent is just a commodity that’s traded on the stock market?
wealth inequality worse than the French revolution
When the creator of the Revolutions podcast was asked about the one theme that follows every revolution, he said that it was wealth inequality.
If I remember correctly, the French revolution had three major elements that kicked it off the way it did: huge wealth inequality, a major event that hits the lower classes (in this case a drought that destroyed lots of crops and therefore caused a wheat shortage), and incompetent leadership that is unable to deal with said event. Looks like the US is getting there, step by step.
More of a slow collapse than a crash. Ever seen a dilapidated house on a country road, parts of the roof caving in, paint chipped, vines covering the yard? We’re working on being that house by slowly letting social and physical infrastructure in the US collapse over time.
What you’re describing is basically stagflation. It doesn’t necessarily mean a crash. It’s possible for the majority of people to keep on earning less and less real income for a long time without a crash.
I do wonder what the effect of all the layoffs from tech and the public sector and all the cuts in federal funding will do though. Dunno if that’s enough to flood the housing market and crash it or not. I think I’ve read that banks are in a good position to absorb housing market losses, so it won’t be like 2008.
AFAIK, most current economic indicators are OK. Not necessarily great, but not dire either.
The stock market makes no sense to me. It doesn’t appear most stocks move on the fundamentals of the companies or anything like that. It all appears to be driven by hype/gambling, and propped up from sustained lows by 401ks on auto-pilot and people trained to “buy the dip” by the quick Covid recovery.
The USD appears to be rapidly losing a lot of value compared to other currencies like the EUR. But, that fits well into the plan to reduce imports and boost US exports. Inflation with stagnant wages makes US exports more attractive/cheaper.
Could the housing market crash independently? Or would it be always with the other markets?
Isnt a crash in the housing market a good thing for the average person?
The crisis happened because everyone got credits to buy a house, even if they shouldnt, and banks made money by betting against them ever paying it back. This caused a huge bubble that had to burst.
ye best start believin in economic depression, yer in one!
You just need a union job. I just started mine and my first day I find out we’re getting a new contract with $1/hr raises yearly for the next five years, a new boot benefit of $250 a year, better per diem on travel, and better compensation while traveling.
I wonder if IT workers have unions
Nah we just have software killswitches.
Yes this is good, but is this enough?
Republicans are really determined to make life as awful as possible, and the democrats in power are fine with it.
Republicans will buy stock in airlines then sink the Titanic, but first make sure their donors’ rooms are located right next to the life boats. Democrats will make arrangements so that the band plays your favorite song while it sinks.
Yes, it’s gonna get bad. Jobs in both the private sector, and public sector, universities, etc, we are all feeling the heat right now.
Why are universities suffering?
NSF funding cuts, declining enrollment bcz of the ICE crap (people are afraid to come to the U.S.), covid funding issues still being felt, lots of government employees vying for university positions, attacks on science across the board forcing experts to leave the U.S., or go to the private sector. Its bad, and it’ll probably get worse.
I read they are rising taxes to Universities’ donations. In the political side, professors are… receiving too much attention from the government, to put it mildly.
The crab said: You just haven’t seen your steamer yet. The crab is a low-level animal, and its nervous system is so simple that when it is slowly steamed in the steamer, it will keep stuffing the ginger slices next to it into its mouth. It just feels uncomfortable, and it thinks that eating something will make it better. I don’t know if you can understand the meaning of this paragraph. To sum up, we are already in the steamer. We thought that if we find a good job and work hard, everything will be fine, but the fact is that wages are not rising, prices are rising rapidly, and the world is rotten.
the world is rotten
The chef is routine. The world is beautiful. You just can’t see it from inside the steamer.
Neoliberalism is reaching its natural conclusion, coupled with the gradual fall of colonialism, is going to lead to a permanent crash for the working class.
While Trump is being loud, the project to divide the US working class by ethnicity has been ongoing always, and began ramping up this century.
It will be required as all production is centralised within a handful of families. And the global south can no longer be relied on for cheap resources and manufacturing for middle class treats.
The US doesn’t have a union presence, nor does it have understanding of left politics. Conditions will get worse and worse every decade.
In decades past, employees would get both a cost of living raise and performance raise, but the cost of living raise has all but gone away. One way to fix this is to tie the minimum wage to inflation. It’ll have tje side benefit of making companies try to reduce inflation rather profiteering.
It’s already been going on for 30+ years so whatever you call this is pretty much it.
Why, this is a crash, nor are we out of it.
Wait until AI/AGI take over. Which is the most silent part of it all. It’s all “nice and great”, supposedly “making our lives easier”, when in fact it will decimate most of the population’s lives. It’s the part that no one ever talks about. You think it’s bad now? Wait until AI takes over everything, and I mean everything to where millions are left without a job. Yes this tech might be “innovating” and make our “lives easier” at the expense of what? The question is what are people going to do when AI takes over? How are we going to even afford to live. What happens to the our basic provision for sustainability to live life. That’s the quiet part that everyone wants to ignore and never ever has an answer for it. It’s absolutely vile and disgusting, cuz no one is looking at the dire ramifications of such deadly technology that threatens the very fabric of our lives and future generations to come.
A guy put it very well. His wife wanted kids, and the guy did some in depth into researching AI… he told his wife he didn’t want any kids because he knew that his kids wouldn’t even have a job. And he is correct in that statement. The kids that are born now, will they even have jobs? What will their future look like?
You’re in a situation where you have to cut spending and raise taxes while the left promises to not cut spending and the right promises to not raise taxes. It’s an issue the last handful of administrations have not been able to deal with…
It’s going to be painful. Hopefully not a drawn out depression like the 1930s.
Hopefully not a drawn out depression like the 1930s.
Much worse. This time it’s going to be permanent.
Virtually nothing in politics or economics is ever permanent.
HasturInYellow@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Depends what you mean by crash. Before, we have crashed through small bushes and banana stands. Big showy and doing minor damage. We are about to run into that tiny little tree that the devs never made animations for.
We are not prepared for the devastation that tree will cause.
Agent641@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
you are outside the bounds of the map