Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

participation based on quotes from The Joker

FWIW, I have been actively avoiding the stock market and equity funds for decades now for ethical reasons. Simply participating in the system feels like too great a leap to do without turning my stomach.

That all said, I'm eying fifty from across the room and starting to wonder if I need to make the leap, perhaps with an ethical fund? I've been courted by Green Century for years, maybe after I read up on their vetting further.

just want to mention that given the topic of this thread and the current state of affairs all this fund talk feels like whistling past the graveyard

I mean that's the other thing to bear in mind! When would one choose to buy into this shitshow? Presumably post-MAGACOVID.

don’t try and time the market if you’re investing for the long term. slow and steady wins the race

yah, post-MAGA life suggest that the monopoly cast of rapacious dingleberries will be somewhat less performatively gluttonous and past experience suggests that leads to an indefinite bear market?

i don't wanna win the race, i want working parks departments and functioning infrastructure!

read taht as 'raspberry dingleberries' at first

available at nuts.com

This IS the time to think about it because it's so weird. The market is absurdly high and reality-proof at the moment, unless we're all just admitting the actual financial health of the world doesn't matter to the stock market. My parents watch CNBC every day, so I'm always seeing the reactions of the investor class. (As long as our portfolios are okay, nothing else matters, cue Metallica)

Every week I wonder if I should cut my 403b contributions or not...

i think we already admitted the financial and physical health of the world doesn't matter to the stock market, right? thought that was the one generally undisputed economic lesson of covid.

Needs to be shouted from the rooftops

assume the stock market is continuing on its merry way because investors’ view is that many firms fundamentals were sound pre-pandemic, the extraordinary government support pumped into the economy will pick up some of the interim slack, and the recovery will be fairly fast and robust. you can quibble with all three of those hypotheses but assume that’s what’s driving the rally... either that or irrational exuberance I suppose

the actual financial health of the world doesn't matter to the stock market.

The financial health of part of the world matters to the stock market, and that part is doing fine. That's what it tracks and that's what it's meant to track. Of course there comes a point where aggregate misery drags down even the comfortable, but trickle-up is only modestly more effective than trickle-down.

xp i've been chalking it up to inertia, terror and greed myself but i think we're saying the same thing.

Keep having visions of Dennis Hopper in his penthouse tower in Land of the Dead

I chalk it up to the fact that switching to a low-risk, defensive strategy or moving into a cash position looks riskier to their job security for the fund managers than plunging into the market and looking for big gains, because their clients actively demand maximum gains and if the market doesn't retreat they look incompetent to deliver that asset growth for clients, but if it crashes it will take down every fund hard and they can claim that they did no worse than anyone else.

Keep having visions of Dennis Hopper in his penthouse tower in Land of the Dead

― Nhex, Wednesday, August 19, 2020 9:14 AM (two hours ago)

hahahahah !!!!

yo I literally just started my 1st 401K at age 54, no I have zero guilt and yes I am pursuing an "aggressive" investment strategy, once I have some real money in there I may reconsider

also fuck Trump, etc. and I will happily take a hit for the greater good

FWIW, I have been actively avoiding the stock market and equity funds for decades now for ethical reasons. Simply participating in the system feels like too great a leap to do without turning my stomach.

That all said, I'm eying fifty from across the room and starting to wonder if I need to make the leap, perhaps with an ethical fund? I've been courted by Green Century for years, maybe after I read up on their vetting further.

― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Wednesday, August 19, 2020 10:54 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

sorry but there are no ethical reasons not to buy some bonds and broad index funds, only innumeracy. if you think making yourself poorer is ethical there are much faster ways to do it

just want to mention that given the topic of this thread and the current state of affairs all this fund talk feels like whistling past the graveyard

― sound of scampo talk to me (El Tomboto), Wednesday, August 19, 2020 11:18 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

people thought this throughout the 20th century, during which those who passively invested a small share of their income made a killing

here's a useful calculation by brad delong:

If you had taken 1 in real value, invested it in the stock market in January 1871, reinvested the dividends, and paid no taxes, you would have 16,000 today. Such are the returns to patience, risk-bearing, diversification, and capital ownership in the extraordinary economic boom that was the extended American century.

note the dates. that's averaging over 2 world wars and the great depression

investing on a 150 year timeline is much easier (and lower risk) than investing on a 15 year horizon, which is what those of us in middle age are trying to do.

not me i'm retiring in 2130

Its also worth pointing out there was almost no avocado toast in 1871

caek you really think forks should just... what, put money in a savings account?

no but i don't think a 16000x return over the past 150 years is relevant to what he should do

unless you feel strongly and/or have enough time on your hands to eke out a a few basis points in fees then buying the vanguard target date fund for when you want to retire is a good option. but "we recovered from the great depression" doesn't mean it's guaranteed to work on short timescales.

https://delong.typepad.com/.a/6a00e551f08003883401bb09acd0ce970d-pi

(green is treasury bonds, red is s&p)

i don't see many 15 year periods where you'd come out negative. of course you need some flexibility about when to withdraw, but unless you're planning on withdrawing it all in one day in 15 years, that's fine

i believe caek is all about that red curve and not the single stocks or managed funds with fees

mama she told me don't worry about your size

xp i am too about the red curve

i personally don't think another great depression is possible because we know how monetary policy works now, the great recession is probably an upper bound on how bad things can get off of pure financials

i haven't dug into the details of this and my basic point is not "don't invest in stocks" but more "you need to think differently about investing the money you need to live on in retirement in 15 years to how you would invest a single dollar for 150 years".

but simplifications like "withdrawing it all on one day" notwithstanding, losing money happens:

https://github.com/zonination/investing

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zonination/investing/master/returns-40yr.png

"Down after 15 years (4.73% chance historically): 1905 1906 1907 1929 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969"

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zonination/investing/master/snippets/short-probability.png

nice. yeah i agree with your general pt

4% chance you catch that 8 multiplier hoo boy

choosing stocks such that i catch the 8x multiplier every 15 years is my personal investing strategy

i personally don't think another great depression is possible because we know how monetary policy works now, the great recession is probably an upper bound on how bad things can get off of pure financials

I mean, we're living through worse than the great recession now with no reason to believe a significant part of the economy that's gone will ever come back. Seems questionable to bet on external factors not playing a greater role over the coming decades.

funko stock can rebound

xp milo- this isn’t worse than great depression tho. i mean it was comparable on some measures for the one month during which everything was shut down. but many non-US countries‘ employment are rebounding quickly and persistently, which probably represents a reasonable counterfactual for the US trajectory without policy own-goals. obvs things are terrible now but Great Depression hit different; the only way you can get that now imo is if you’re like Greece and don’t control your own monetary policy

I'm not saying it's worse than the Great Depression, only that we're living through a real world example of how you can't count on pure financials. The best thing for most people is to just hop on that index fund train and not think about it (because if that plan fails you've got bigger worries anyway), but I wouldn't trust the growth rates of Pax Americana to tell us much about the future.

Even setting aside pandemics and climate change and so on, that we know how monetary policy works doesn't mean we'll use it - more than half of the party in power would just as soon not intervene at all in the midst of the pandemic. We're not rebounding as quickly and we're not going to, because our economy wasn't sound to start with and as above, a significant part of our economy and jobs are just never coming back. We're going to have a lifetime of policy own-goals coming in more rapidly.

This is all fascinating to me..I've made more than 30k in a year once. We have a mortgage on a house after years of being homeless and living in subpar conditions.

But investing just seems insane to me

It's fascinating to me too, as a no-longer USA resident. it seems so inefficient (wrt "having time to do things you like") to have to invest individually for retirement with these "index funds" when you could just have a state apparatus do it for you. but I guess it's so americans can think the dream of getting rich was meant for them and will continue to sit quietly while the pirates loot their bounty.

This ties into something else upthread: that because "we know how monetary policy works now" that "the economy" can't crash into depression anymore. but since "the economy" only means what >= upper-middle-class people do, this leaves out what happens to < upper-middle-class people. & then this ties to something I saw on another thread, about whether you can ethically participate in this >= upper-middle-class economy while still being "leftist". I guess I should be heartened that so many people agree with me that the answer is "no", but it seems nevertheless like the response is "can't knock the hustle", "I don't make the rules, gotta look out for #1" etc.

It's just an old "pet peeve" of mine to see people who present as leftist living in income-maximizing ways & then trying to justify doing so as consistent with their leftism. I think they're full of shit, even when they say "oh it's so I can give all my extra money to the SPLC" or whatever, because they're regularizing "the economy" & that's their actual contribution to morality.

I can afford to save some money away, but I can't quite afford to live in my own apartment in my area without giving up over half of my income to it. So yeah, I can only claim to be so far to the left, I guess? But in honesty, I'm never going to tell people that I donate to leftist causes for social points.

i guess i have a hard time thinking is consistent or inconsistent with anything if you are not given a choice but to save on your own for retirement unless you want ("want") to work until you die, and you don't have a choice to not sell your labor for money and spend the money on commodities in order to survive. we also have to save money for future health expenses and other crap we should never have to pay for.

railroading citizens into participating in the stock market so they don’t have to eat cat food when they’re elderly is one of the more despicable things american style capitalism has ever done

and probably the biggest contributor (outside of just straight up racism) to the insane death cult drive for people who’ve made it to 50 or so with 6 months of living expenses to their name

xp i've been chalking it up to inertia, terror and greed myself but i think we're saying the same thing.

― Fuck the NRA (ulysses)

i keep thinking about how the stock market behaved after trump got elected. i have a pretty good idea of how the stock market will behave if joe biden gets elected. i remember how obama got blamed for all sorts of shit he had nothing to do with and it was a joke but people still believed it, people still _accepted_ it, and i have a hard time imagining things will be any better on this front with biden. this worries me a _lot_.

yeah I just remember after coming into office during the worst failure of capitalism in 80 years Obama spent an inordinate amount of time placating and soothing and lovingly stroking Wall Street... only to be repaid with a parade of Very Serious economists and CEOs coming on CNBC and talking about “uncertainty” vis-a-vis this radical community organizer’s administration.

and that’s about when I started thinking it was probably time to burn down their vacation homes and sink their yachts

like homeboy you should be IN JAIL, but instead you’re out here on “the news” explaining how the guy who’s been president for 20 minutes is hampering the recovery

sorry but there are no ethical reasons not to buy some bonds and broad index funds, only innumeracy.

Maybe it’s kind of like the airplane mask analogy. If you want to carry on the struggle to improve the political and economic situation in the world, you need to take care of yourself first, which means doing something to ensure you’re not completely broke at a point in the foreseeable future.

pretty sure that's how we got here?