|
|
|
|
|
|
by HarryHirsch
1460 days ago
|
|
|
That's what you get in a zero-interest rate environment with no industrial policy. Building physical infrastructure would cost real-world money and cut into profits, hence what you end up with is virtual casinos. No one is better off with that. At least in the runup to 2008 there was housing built speculatively, but since then there has been no productive investment at all. |
|
|
There was a complete lack of any kind of policy in almost all major Western countries. Since the competitive pressure of the USSR fell away, Western politics have stagnated - keep the economy as-is, maybe lower corporate taxes and privatize government services. The only thing where a bit of progress happened in politics were social equality issues (gay marriage, access to abortions) and that's it.
But no government really thought about what digitalization would bring, how to regulate it to prevent the rise of new exploitation models (gig workers) or speculative bubbles (dotcom bubble, the current shitcoin collapse), or how the economy should transform to the new possibilities and realities.
The result is - we've seen it all - not pretty... the economy clearly wants directions from politics where it should go (particularly in the automotive industry), and a ton of money was blasted into cryptocurrencies, NFTs and other scams simply because there was no direction where money should go instead. If one wants to boil it down, I'd call it "this is what happens when the free market takes ultimate control over everything".