[agentifysh]

Yet the stock market is reaching ATH, I don't think recession is the accurate word. I also think the fixation on Trump is misleading and takes away from the actual structural side effects of dollar issuance via unbacked fiat. It's convenient scapegoating to take your attention away from the long lingering issue of US dollar dominance and debt that is now causing large social divide and standard of living.

The physics of a reserve currency is that it reverts to zero through endless supply to fuel the engine to accelerate inequality at home and abroad. You see that an increasingly smaller club of people are politically opposed yet benefit by creating a narrative that takes your attention away from it.

This is the uncomfortable truth that not enough people understand and they are stuck in a loop chasing after things invented and created specifically to keep you there.

[marcosdumay]

It shouldn't require pointing out, but asset prices are not a measure of economic activity. Rain amount and air temperature aren't either, if somehow somebody needs that pointed too. Those are independent things.

You are describing stagflation, that is a kind of recession. Despite all the fundamentals pointing towards it for a while, the US hasn't seen a lot of inflation (at least yet), so that's not what is happening.

[jjk166]

The stock market isn't the economy. Note that stock prices are denominated in dollars. If the dollar price of a stock doubles, but in the same time period the value of the dollar halves, then the stock's value hasn't gone up at all. Compare the price of the Dow Jones to to gold and its value peaked in 1999, and has been nosediving for the past 18 months[0]. The ratio right now is the same as it was in late 2008. Obviously gold isn't a perfect standard candle, but given that inflation has obviously been rampant in recent years, we should obviously treat any economic metric that does not control for inflation with healthy skepticism.

[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/1378/dow-to-gold-ratio-100-year-...

[drstewart]

Cool. Now use the value of a dollar denominated in Bitcoin. Or do you only like cherry picking your statistics?

[shwaj]

I’m as skeptical of fiat currencies as the next guy, but denominating in Bitcoin is the ultimate cherry pick.

The price of everything has crashed in the last 10 years when denominated in Bitcoin. If we measured GDP in Bitcoins, the statistics would show that we’re in an unprecedented depression.

[jjk166]

Pretty sure that would just reinforce my point...

[drstewart]

Great. Do it against the European stock market and really drive home your point. Bitcoin versus the European market, indexed from 2010.

[toomanyrichies]

Note for others - "ATH" => "All-Time High"

[stavros]

Also the IATA code for the Athens International Airport Eleftherios Venizelos, could have meant one or the other, no way to know which.

[rvz]

Well said.

Although the stock market isn't a reflection of the economy, the most relevant concern is the staggering 40TN+ of debt that can't ever go down as long as the dollar is the reserve currency and have no choice but to endlessly supply more dollars.

The issue with oil rising will make it completely impossible for the Federal Reserve to cut any rates and instead will either hold or raise them.

Then the stock market will have a problem; and those that have properties tied to their RSUs will start panicking.

[b112]

This is the uncomfortable truth that not enough people understand and they are stuck in a loop chasing after things invented and created specifically to keep you there.

Hardly. Those 'invented things' are invented for one purpose, to make the inventor money. That's how capitalism works.

Fun fact, let's say that tomorrow, all new credit was outlawed. And by law, all existing credit would require payments that took 3 years to pay off. In this fantasy world where we ignore mortgages, my point is that salaries would diminish.

Right now, the cost of everything a person buys is factored into salary costs. Take away interest, and all those 30% interest credit card debts would eventually no longer be part of your salary. This process takes years of course, but no one would issue credit cards, if every person defaulted on them, yet if you look at where salaries really go? With a lot of people, 30%+ goes to just holding debt.

[Forgeties79]

> Yet the stock market is reaching ATH, I don't think recession is the accurate word.

It did under Biden as well yet nobody had any issues claiming the economy was in terrible shape and that we were entering a potential recession. Which frankly I agreed with! The stock market tells a fraction of the story. Especially because institutional investors now dominate investment in a way they didn’t only a few decades ago. A booming stock market does not benefit “the common man” like it once did unless one believes in trickle down economics or something. Employee pensions have become rare in the private sector, matched 401(k)s used for investment are also becoming more scarce. The stock market just isn’t tied to “the average person” like it once was, relatively speaking.

I do think Biden deserves immense blame for inflation getting out of control, but I also think as usual people overlooked what the Democrat president was handed, which was a Covid economy in this case. There was going to be fallout from that for years no matter what he did. No one blames Trump for the economy he handed off either.

[dualvariable]

Biden inherited COVID, which required a very accommodating policy response, but then had the AI/LLM spending/hiring boom surprise sort of overlap that, which turned out to be highly inflationary, but nobody was predicting that back in 2021. There really was no winning move to play without precise knowledge of future events. And Pandemic-era stimulus started under Trump (including Trump putting his name on the checks), and the Federal Reserve were the ones controlling monetary policy and financial sector support through the pandemic.

I don't see how you can say that he deserves "immense blame" for the inflation that we suffered. He was a passenger for most of it, and lacked a crystal ball to see the events of 2023 with the release of ChatGPT.

Unlike the current inflationary spike which is entirely due to an energy shock caused by a President starting a war of choice.

[Forgeties79]

Maybe I need to go back and read some more there but my understanding was that the American Rescue Plan, in tandem with some of the stuff that you mentioned that I probably should’ve emphasized more, really drove inflation to new heights and arguably wasn’t necessary as Covid was winding down. Also a ton of spending on top of that.

You’re right though that I should emphasize Trump engaged a lot of the same behaviors. It’s certainly unambiguous that the current situation is entirely his fault.

[dualvariable]

Yeah, I probably grossly oversimplified that and forgot about a bunch of other factors. Stimulus was split about 50/50 between Trump and Biden. The ARP probably was a bit too large and contributed something like 1.5% to the eventual inflation spike. A lot of the inflation spike, though, was due to supply shocks, then energy shocks from Ukraine, then "revenge spending" demand shocks as society reopened with not enough goods and a lot of excess savings. Then we had the nascent AI tech hiring boom which was pushing up costs and housing in places like SF and Seattle. By 2024 we were well on our way into the current K-shaped economy with the hypersclar buildout driving inflation due to private sector spending (even in the face of the Fed hiking rates like crazy). Really it is likely that only about ~20% or less of the inflation under Biden was due to government spending.

It is true in 2024 that there was a hell of a lot of gaslighting going on that the economy was great for everyone and that we were having a "vibecession" and praising "Bidenomics" when the K-shaped economy was already appearing, and this DNC messaging effort clearly failed. But it also didn't have a lot to do with Biden, and arguably pushing the message that implicitly accepted that Biden was entirely responsible for the economic conditions of the previous 4 years was flawed and factually inaccurate messaging. Maybe it wouldn't have been possible to argue otherwise, but I do remember a lot of Democrats who argued that Trump's economy had relatively little to do with any of his policies in his first term. I similarly think that Biden had relatively little control over the economy in his term.

Currently, though, Trump pretty well owns this economy due to what his war with Iran is doing. He doesn't own the background of what is going on with AI and hyperscalar spending and the likely bubble and the inflationary pressure and K-shaped economy (although Republican tax cuts over the past 45+ years are cumulatively responsible for the K-shaped economy and Trump owns some of that), but Trump is doing his best to just pour gas over the economy and light it all on fire.

[Forgeties79]

I think this is the first nuanced conversation about Biden and Trump I’ve had in years and I greatly appreciate it