Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

On Sunday, the cryptocurrency lending platform Celsius Network announced that it was pausing all withdrawals and transfers between accounts in order to “honor, over time, withdrawal obligations.”

Straight-up Ponzi shit right there

how could they lose two trillion when the shit wasn't worth anything anyway

Among the True Believers, cryptocurrency X was worth Y per unit. IT'S STILL REAL TO THEM, DAMMIT!

I'd be amused if this wasn't having broader effects on the market. And while no cryptocurrency investors should be eligible for Federal relief, I'll eat my words if the government completely refuses any such requests.

But crypto true believers wouldn’t want any of that made up fiat money, right????

How many of the big crypto whales are true believers? How many are Wall Street fat cats who were chasing this shiny new thing, and have well-established hotlines to the Fed and zero shame about demanding bailouts?

TBH I think there have to be a good number of true believers. My impression is that the wall street fatcats were latecomers. It's a little too elaborate to have been planned out all along as a ponzi.

then I want a bailout for my beanie babies losses

sure, but the venture capitalists were on it early, and they love a good ponzi scheme

I don't necessarily think it was intended as a pyramid scheme - there was some wide-eyed utopian naivete going on there. It just went in that direction, and the ones who cashed out early came out on top, while the hold-steady folks and late comers were left holding the bag

As has been pointed out previously, stocks have intrinsic value, gold/silver, pork bellies, whatever... even U.S. greenbacks - all have something backing them. Ethereum is just a shared delusion of value, there's nothing there but ether

xp were they? I didn't get the impression that venture capitalists got into crypto that early, am I wrong?

guess it depends what "early" is

I'm kind of surprised there isn't also more news about the SPAC crash and burn. Another inevitable crash, perhaps even more inevitable than crypto, but still.

My perception was that it started with libertarian techies getting all enthused and evangelistic over bitcoin and blockchain freeing the world from the tyranny of central banks and fiat money, then was latched onto by the "dark web" as a way of anonymizing payments for illegal activities.

When authorities cracked down hard on the dark web crypto languished for a time, then revived when a wave of admiring stories got planted in the media about crypto's promise and how small timers were striking it rich. That was probably the work of a few wealthy opportunists like Thiel, who saw it as a market they could dominate and exploit. So they did and it worked.

stocks have intrinsic value, gold/silver, pork bellies, whatever...

The things you have listed are commodities, and are traded on a whole different exchange. (At one point I considered becoming a commodities broker, which was what my dad did, until he realized his bosses were scammers and ratted them out to the government and became a witness in a class action lawsuit brought by the clients they'd ripped off systematically for years. Anyway, every time I tried to study for the certification exam my retinas would detach out of sheer boredom, so I gave up. But trading commodities is slightly less driven by casino-esque bullshit than the stock market. I can't imagine it's much fun doing it these days, what with looming climate disasters and wars fucking up everyone's crops and distribution thereof...)

The commodity futures market is even more tethered to reality than stocks because it's in large part used by people who are actually in those industries or related industries in order to mitigate price swings.

also, a pork bellies contract literally means you agree to take delivery of a certain number of pork bellies, so it is literally tied to a tangible thing.

contract literally means you agree to take delivery

Which is why, when the pandemic halted most global economic activity for about a month and every means of storing crude oil had been filled to capacity, oil futures entered negative values, where, if you had no place to put the oil you'd contracted for and were desperate to sell it, you had to pay the other party to take it off your hands!

It got depressing in 2020 to start seeing "Buy Bitcoin" machines at truck stops in Rust Belt and Great Plains middle of nowheresville.

Manufacturing Recessions

I was seeing some of those bitcoin ATMs a few years before 2020 and thought it was weird. Many of them would be convenience stores selling a lot of CBT and other assorted 'semi-regulated' chemicals besides tallboys and wraps.

But hey, Lot Lizards and weed dealers gets to be part of the new economy too.

Yeah, when darknet markets were booming Bitcoin ATMs were the best way to buy BTC anonymously but you had to pay a premium over Coinbase/etc. assuming you could even find one that was working.

An astonishing sentence: “Every $100 increase in median rent is associated with a 9 percent increase in the estimated homelessness rate, according to a 2020 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.” https://t.co/s6nffeyST8

— Brian Goldstone (@brian_goldstone) July 3, 2022

calling my broker

New filing for the "God Bless America ETF (YALL)" another addition to the anti-ESG wave. This one tracks US stocks but "screens out cos that have emphasized political activism, social agendas or make public statements about political hot button items unrelated to their business." pic.twitter.com/BMt96ZmuUv

— Eric Balchunas (@EricBalchunas) July 12, 2022

this could be spicy https://www.freightwaves.com/news/americas-freight-railroads-are-incredibly-chaotic-right-now

ESG always struck me as bullshit anyway, xp

yeah, it kinda frankly is, at least most ESG ETFs I've ever looked at have included massive S&P500 corporations that are very questionable

this could be spicy https://www.freightwaves.com/news/americas-freight-railroads-are-incredibly-chaotic-right-now🕸

To address low staff, Berkshire Hathaway’s BNSF took one particularly unpopular approach. In February, BNSF began to penalize employees who took time off for fatigue, family emergencies or illness. Union officials said 700 rail crew left as a result of the policy. The $23.3 billion railroader nixed the policy in June.

Last I heard the BNSF workers were still not allowed to strike by a judge, the article doesn't mention it but I guess the order was lifted?

President Joe Biden is being charged with appointing a “Presidential Emergency Board” to nail down a new contract. If he doesn’t do so by Monday, railroad crews could legally have their first nationwide strike since 1992.

https://railfan.com/freight-rail-strike-looms-as-biden-mulls-emergency-board/

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden established an emergency board on Friday to prevent a nationwide railroad strike on Monday.

The establishment of the board will prevent a strike for at least two months. During that time, the emergency board will come up with non-binding suggestions in hopes of helping the unions and the railroads find common ground. The two sides have been negotiating for three years and earlier this summer the National Mediation Board announced that talks had fallen apart.

dumb economic question:
Will these Fed interest rate hikes affect my savings account interest rate? Because it's been shit.0% for years it seems like

Oh good lord no

Interest rates on savings accounts do tend to go up with a fed hike, but you may need to shop around to get the highest rates. Highest I’ve seen recently is 1.4% to 1.5%. Today’s rate hike should push them up more.

fwiw the best rates have gone from about 0.5 to 1.5% this year. still behind the fed rate, and well behind inflation.

2%! https://www.lendingclub.com/personal-banking/savings

yeah I should probably move that money somewhere but I don't think it's a good time to enter the market via a money market or something

i wouldn't do lending club tbh. it's FDIC insured, but they seem like the kind of fintech firm where you might actually need that. point is you can do slightly better than shit%. shit and a bit%, and that will go up tomorrow/next week.

I bonds are paying around 10%.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjkbg7/chick-fil-a-is-asking-for-volunteers-to-work-for-5-chicken-sandwiches-per-hour

xpost yeah, I Bonds are currently 9.62% which is not half bad

I already have a Treasury Direct account from buying some bonds back in the early oughts... I don't look very often but every time I check, the balance only goes up - which is more that I can say for my depressing 401(k)... maybe I'll drop a couple grand in there and forget about it for another decade

https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/research/indepth/ibonds/res_ibonds.htm

Wealthfront just raise the rate on my cash account to 2%. Thanks.

do we have a stonks/wsb thread?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/shares-of-a-chinese-tech-firm-are-up-more-than-15000-25-since-its-july-ipo-and-even-the-company-has-no-idea-why/ar-AA10enoq

this shitco ipo'd a couple weeks ago and is now one of the ten most valuable companies on planet earth by market cap.

It's a safe bet that somebody is manipulating the shit out of that stock.

interesting

it's a meme stock that has a super low float...any attempt by the company to take advantage of the situation by selling a significant block into the demand would probably tank the stock price, unless they did something like an at the market offering like AMC did back when AMC was meme-y

Market cap is not even that meaningful when less than 10% of a Company’s stock trades. This is basically a penny stock style pump and dump but on a larger scale, maybe using more sophisticated means of manipulation.

Also it’s already way down

There is no recession. In fact, there's apparently an insanely strong recovery. A thread:

Put that recession talk away, and change the subject. A vibecession ain't no recession:

July payrolls came in at a huge +528k, and unemployment is down to 3.5%.

A whap-bop-a-loopa-a-whap-bam-boo!

— Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) August 5, 2022

Oh shit, recession inflation! RIP Biden.

Oh yeah? If the economy is so great how come I see “Help Wanted” signs everywhere?

Jobs don't kill people, people kill jobs