The rich will get richer while the rest of us will become poorer due to our pay not beating inflation. You know, the same as every year since market deregulation in the 80.
this post was submitted on 26 May 2026
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Surely the invisible hand will save us!
Surely the invisible hand will slap us!
Don't @ me. Just needed to be pointlessly funny for my own sake.
Grab your bootstraps!
You must first have a boot.
Supply side Jesus is asleep at the wheel Reagan asked him to take.
I have no idea what an economic crisis would look like anymore. Ever since 2008, it seems the playback for any sign of economic trouble has been printing ridiculous amounts of money and shoving it directly into the pockets of rich people while playing a shell game with bad debts. This seems to allow the terrible economy to keep limping along.
Yep and the working class continues to struggle more and more while they gaslight us while pocketing all the assets for themselves
This time they can't print oil so that bullshit stops working, which is why this one might do them in.
Japan and China have been selling US treasuries and buying gold or their own treasuries instead... It's not looking good. You can only print money needlessly when you have the unique privilege to do it as the reserve currency.
They can't print oil, but they can play games with the strategic reserve and maybe implement heavy (heavier) subsidies, but yeah, eventually reality should set in. I just have no idea how long that would take. So far the market seems to take trump at his word every time.
End of July is what I'm hearing. Right now Peter is being robbed to pay paul
The global economy is severely weakened, but stable. There is also a long list of developments that could crater everything, both literally and figuratively, and very little to look forward to for the vast majority of the population.
Best case scenario is the ending of multiple hostilities, allowing the resumption of trade, and a slow grinding recovery.
Worst case scenario is an extinction event, either caused by escalation in Ukraine, or to a lesser extent Iran, leading to nuclear conflict.
Both extreme's are unlikely, and the entire range between them is just various levels of who is going to get fucked.
and a slow grinding recovery.
Which will most likely happen during the next Dem presidency. But not fast enough so everyone will lose faith again and gamble with another Republican felon (maybe rapist too) and rinse and repeat.
As soon as we squeeze out of the clown car we pile right back in.
I appreciate your optimism.
It seems improbable to me that absolutely none of the current risks start to become realised in the immediate future, and that we are allowed to resume muddling on like before.
As an englishman I hate to say it, but the president of the united states is a true agent of the future.
I’m pretty gloomy based on
- Pax Americana destabilizing/collapsing; wouldn’t be surprised to see some minor parties make a move
- Hormuz will remain closed, because USA is anti-diplomatic and Iran has nothing to lose
- AI spending will continue, but the money will start to need to be real, and the firings will continue until AI wins
- El Niño will further disrupt food security
- global warming will disrupt everything
Which foods do you think will see the highest inflation?
Most modern cereals are bred to respond to nitrogen well for obvious reasons, and they also happen to be fodder for meat and animal products. Flour, rice, meat, eggs .etc. anything that grows in a grain based feedlot or is grain finished.
Rapeseed should go up in price too. Same with soy. Both of these are high protein high oil fodder crops.
Nitrogen fertillizer turns into protein pretty directly. So the higher the protein content of what we're talking about, the more fertillizer you need to give it the building blocks it needs to make amino acids into proteins.
I bet farmers will rotate into legumes next year to help replenish their soil and to get better yields for animal fodder. Same with beans if you can grow them, although that can need ammonia too even if it's less than soy or canola.
That's very interesting about the relationship between nitrogen and protein.
Yeah protein can't be made without fixed nitrogen to work with. It is kind of fascinating that in all likelihood the vast majority of the protein in our bodies was made using natural gas due to Steam Methane Reforming (SMR) being the primary method for making the hydrogen needed for the Haber-Bosch process.
Ammonium nitrate is effectively solidified natural gas which is also neat to think about.
Foods that need fertilizer, eat fertilized crops, or are transported.
I agree except that I suspect Iran wants to open the straight and to toll everything that passes through. They just need the US to get out of there and let ships pass.
I don't think the "economy" has ever actually picked up in my lifetime. At least not for the working class, I don't give two fucks if something happens to billionaires.
Same here.
I’m no expert, but I’d say everything looks pretty bad. AI bubble, housing crisis, climate change, Iran. I’m pretty sure as soon as any big money player blinks, things are gonna crumble fast.
It’s bad for regular folks. There are some people swimming in money because of everything you have mentioned.
Just the other day I have read that the USA has depleted most of its bomb stock in the Iran war and it will take years to replenish. Translation: weapon makers are guaranteed orders for new bombs at least for the next few years.
While you’re right, I’m personally of the mind that they’re at more risk than that. Yeah some people will still be rich and powerful when the cards start falling, but I think things are gonna breakdown too fast for them to manage. If too many “regular folk” become too poor too quickly, things will get violent. It hasn’t happened yet because neoliberalism thrives in a state of managed decline.
I think the decline will accelerate dramatically as soon as something big enough happens to break private equity. PE is in a very precarious state from everything I’ve been reading, relying and vast amounts of debt in order to maintain itself. When that breaks, it’s going to do serious damage to the economy as regular folk experience it very quickly. At which point the rich and powerful are going to have to both sacrifice and coordinate to stop the bleeding which I don’t think they’re capable of. Instead they’re expecting this collapse and literally building bunkers.
Leading economic indicators are slightly down: https://www.conference-board.org/topics/us-leading-indicators/
Economic sentiment (one example https://www.sca.isr.umich.edu/ ) is sharply down.
Predicting the economy is difficult, many different people bet real money both ways.
The best summarization I recommend considering is the discussion of the "K" shaped economy. Standards seem to be shifting, those with wealth seem to be doing well if not growing. Those at the margin or poorer seem to be getting worse. So you can have two true statements that the stock market is soaring and GDP is growing, AND most people are facing declining economic prospects.
I'm a stranger on the Internet, so don't put too much weight on my analysis. Check historically reputable resources and even then take their predictions with a grain of salt.
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The optimistic scenario for the economy is a pessimistic scenario for the world.
For the economy to do well would require the AI bubble to not pop. It would mean that these absurd valuations for the AI companies turn out to be correct. That all the circular financing somehow comes good and all these ridiculous-seeming bets about the future of AI turn out to be at least partially correct. It will require that the companies that fired workers to replace them with chatbots turned out to have made a good and profitable decision. It's the scenario where Musk becomes a trillionaire.
What's funny is the AI bubble has exposed how bullshit the economy is in general, like GDP is really just a measure of how fast money moves, which Nvidia, Microsoft & AI companies shovelling money through a circular economy counts as growth, even if they lose money doing it.
There's a joke about that:
One economist says to the second "I'll give you $10,000 if you eat that pile of dog shit." The second economist reluctantly agrees, but the smug look on the other guy's face makes him regret it. He sees another pile of dog shit and offers the first economist $10,000 to eat it. The first one agrees, $10,000 is a lot of money.
Afterwards, both economists are sitting there, dog shit smeared on their faces. One says to the other "What a waste! We both have the same money we started with, but we both had to eat dog shit."
The second replies: "That's absurd, in just a few minutes we grew the economy by $20,000!"
Bad.
It looks bad.
I think we're close to needing wheelbarrows to buy bread
I don't know about any global crisis, however I'm feeling optimistic about the Russian invasion ending within a year, hopefully allowing my country (Finland) to continue trading. I also hope fossil fuel usage starts declining. I'm feeling cautiously optimistic, atleast about my country.
What has been going on with Finnish trade since the invasion? I haven't seen any reporting on this here in the UK, as far as I'm aware.
I also hope fossil fuel usage starts declining. I’m feeling cautiously optimistic, atleast about my country.
Well you will be pleased to hear that I am done with fossil fuels. Part of my reason for creating this post is to get some perspective before laying down most of my savings on offgrid renewables.
What has been going on with Finnish trade since the invasion? I haven't seen any reporting on this here in the UK, as far as I'm aware.
I'm not sure about specifics, but we have had pretty much no economic growth since covid.
The black line represents the value of exports in billions of Euros. (Yellow is imports). This graph is not as severe as I expected, but still you can see the covid and then Russia killed the growing exporting quite a bit.
Last time fuel prices were up (Close to 20 years ago) there was major interest in hybrids and gasoline alternatives. Now that gas prices are up again we'll see more interest in electric vehicles and alternative forms of transportation.
Hopefully Finland pulls out of the terrible unemployment and the random drone nonsense soon!
Next year could be slightly better or worse. The next decade will definitely be worse, as climate change really starts to bite. Over the next century? We are as fucked as the planet will be, unless some serious societal changes happen. Trouble is they won't happen while billionaire psychopaths control everything.
Since our country is being run by an idiot it's anybody's guess.
It really depends where.
I'm fairly optimistic about most of EU. Last time we had energy crisis they put windfall taxes on energy and banking sectors to stop price gauging. They are already talking about doing the same thing which will slow down inflation. Spain, where I live, invested heavily into renewables in the last couple of years so the current fossil fuel increases don't have almost any effect on electricity prices. There's continuing push for public transport and most people can survive with minimal driving. My guess is food prices will go up, unemployment will go up, growth will slow down in many sectors but it will be manageable.
In US though... Inflation will skyrocket (both because of food and energy), people won't be able to go anywhere, the completely inept government will not be able to handle the crisis and probably will just continue to ignore it. I expect widespread hunger and misery.
Next year? Hard to say. If Starmer gets ousted, which looks more and more likely, then that'll probably mean a cabinet reshuffle. Honestly can't say I've been too impressed by Rachel Reeves' efforts, but then again I imagine it's hard to totally insulate the economy from a mad bloke who's seemingly trying his level best to destabilise the entire world.
If Burnham or Miliband do get elected, then I imagine we'll do ok.
I'm actually a bit worried about Burnham winning the byelection. If he becomes PM we'll be having a political crisis at the same time as an economic one.
To be fair, I think we've been in the midst of a political crisis for some time.
Although, I agree - I think Andy Burnham winning Makerfield would be the flashpoint for the leadership contest that has been looming for the past few months.
Maybe this is the only way things will settle down.
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I dont know. It got bad in 1929 but it's a very different world now where things occur and get fixed a lot quicker.
Back then the US was in a depression for 10 years.
Well, the US is eating itself from the inside out. These things will take much longer to manifest but they'll be way more insidious.
Private equity black box Enron style collapse taking down a couple of over leveraged major banks requiring trillion dollar taxpayer bailout and the total dismantling of any social programs in the name of austerity
In other words, it's socialism or barbarism
F U C K E D
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