What’s it going to take?

Doog_de_Jour said:

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whlinder said:

RaceBannon said:

The economy has always been a sort of confidence game and as long as enough people have confidence the game goes on


The cliff notes to @whlinder

Indeed, though I still maintain confidence doesn't matter on the bottom layer of the hierarchy of needs. Confident or not, you need to eat, and that's still economic activity, just not as much if you're confident.

creepycoug said:

whlinder said:

I'll toss my hawt taek on this out there:

The economy as a whole is a perpetual motion machine. Slowing down = economy bad, speeding up = economy good. Different sectors move at different speeds and are either accelerating or decelerating accordingly. March was the closest we've come to ever just stopping the damn thing, but it didn't stop. The basic needs on Maslow's hierarchy still need to be fulfilled. Psychological and self-fulfillment needs were still there, but how they were delivered had to change, but the need didn't go away. It just moved around. People need stuff to do, so they don't stop and the wheel keeps moving.

Stopping the whole thing would take a massive psychological change where no one could agree on the relative value of goods and services anymore or if tangible asset holders which provide for basic needs decided to quit selling goods.

So shit could go down, and this somewhat depends on how "crash" is defined (stock market? Housing market? job market? How bad and to what degree?), but 7 billion people need something to do each day with their miserable and pathetic lives and are highly interdependent on each other.

I'd love to spend some time studying psychology and behavioral economics since I think that's the foundation of the study of all of this.

Our now retired staff economist, PhD dude from Cal, was advising one of my kids about her possible career directions. He’s the one who encouraged her to seek out a LAC for undergrad because they are particularly adept at interdisciplinary instruction given that’s what they are all about. His take is that the future is going to be all about cross- disciplinary solutions to problems, and he cites what you said as example 101. That we have these economis theories that make sense and should predict human action100%, except that it doesn’t.

Hence the burgeoning dev of economis/psychology curricula and focus.

Yeah it's funny cause I'm an Econ grad from UW (went for the BS track but also got a Stat minor) and all that theory was nice but none of it really holds in practice. The econometrics and game theory was great though. Luckily all of it taught me how to think about problem solving instead of how to "do economics".

Since Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning is all the rage now I would love to consider those emerging capability in the construct of behavioral economics.

If I had to do it all over again, I would have taken more economics and statistics classes at UW. I find both those fields fascinating.

Pitchfork51 said:

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Doog_de_Jour said:

whlinder said:

RaceBannon said:

The economy has always been a sort of confidence game and as long as enough people have confidence the game goes on


The cliff notes to @whlinder

Indeed, though I still maintain confidence doesn't matter on the bottom layer of the hierarchy of needs. Confident or not, you need to eat, and that's still economic activity, just not as much if you're confident.

creepycoug said:

whlinder said:

I'll toss my hawt taek on this out there:

The economy as a whole is a perpetual motion machine. Slowing down = economy bad, speeding up = economy good. Different sectors move at different speeds and are either accelerating or decelerating accordingly. March was the closest we've come to ever just stopping the damn thing, but it didn't stop. The basic needs on Maslow's hierarchy still need to be fulfilled. Psychological and self-fulfillment needs were still there, but how they were delivered had to change, but the need didn't go away. It just moved around. People need stuff to do, so they don't stop and the wheel keeps moving.

Stopping the whole thing would take a massive psychological change where no one could agree on the relative value of goods and services anymore or if tangible asset holders which provide for basic needs decided to quit selling goods.

So shit could go down, and this somewhat depends on how "crash" is defined (stock market? Housing market? job market? How bad and to what degree?), but 7 billion people need something to do each day with their miserable and pathetic lives and are highly interdependent on each other.

I'd love to spend some time studying psychology and behavioral economics since I think that's the foundation of the study of all of this.

Our now retired staff economist, PhD dude from Cal, was advising one of my kids about her possible career directions. He’s the one who encouraged her to seek out a LAC for undergrad because they are particularly adept at interdisciplinary instruction given that’s what they are all about. His take is that the future is going to be all about cross- disciplinary solutions to problems, and he cites what you said as example 101. That we have these economis theories that make sense and should predict human action100%, except that it doesn’t.

Hence the burgeoning dev of economis/psychology curricula and focus.

Yeah it's funny cause I'm an Econ grad from UW (went for the BS track but also got a Stat minor) and all that theory was nice but none of it really holds in practice. The econometrics and game theory was great though. Luckily all of it taught me how to think about problem solving instead of how to "do economics".

Since Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning is all the rage now I would love to consider those emerging capability in the construct of behavioral economics.

If I had to do it all over again, I would have taken more economics and statistics classes at UW. I find both those fields fascinating.

I find them unbearable. I switched from econ to finance because it was stupid. Then again finance is also stupid.

Actually stats is cool. All data science and analytics stuff is pretty neato nowadays.

Doog_de_Jour said:

My reading comprehension might not be the best, since it’s Friday and I’m skimming through these poasts in between seeing clients, but not a lot of answers to the OP’s question. We know what’s propping things up, but what’s the piece in this economic game of Jenga that will cause things to finally collapse?

Seems like one (or any combination) of these things might be it:

- As Race alluded to, COVID relief running out
- COVID vaccine not working/distributed as fast as we? hoped
- Loan or credit delinquencies finally get to be too much
- More Robinhood/GameStop-esque type bullshit causes investors to lose their damn minds
- The specter of inflation that has been discussed in other threads
- As HoustonHusky said, unemployment numbers getting worse

Again, maybe I’m stressing out for nothing, but it’s seems weird that after the huge dip in March of 2020, the year closed with this:

S&P 500 gained 15.6%.
Nasdaq gained 43.7%.
Dow Jones gained 6.6%.

FremontTroll said:

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HoustonHusky said:

I think a recession is coming whether the official numbers say it or not. Unemployment is going the wrong way the last month and we are only a week into new economic policies...small business sentiment is in the crapper. I’ve been sitting in bank and consulting forecasts for the last couple weeks though and the consensus from them is that everything should be rosy by middle of the year so what do I know. The line that made me laugh the most was that one group said the Fed will starting talking at the end of this year about raising rates at the end of 2022. Suckers.

That said, the rest of the world is a mess which helps prop us up. Europe is a complete mess...same with Japan. Same with all of South America. China, for as much as people sing their praises, isn’t open to outside companies and all of its growth is tied up into building useless infrastructure as much as they try to claim otherwise. So in that environment the only place to put your money is still the US...helps to cover up the many warts we have here.

show previous quotes

HoustonHusky said:

I think a recession is coming whether the official numbers say it or not. Unemployment is going the wrong way the last month and we are only a week into new economic policies...small business sentiment is in the crapper. I’ve been sitting in bank and consulting forecasts for the last couple weeks though and the consensus from them is that everything should be rosy by middle of the year so what do I know. The line that made me laugh the most was that one group said the Fed will starting talking at the end of this year about raising rates at the end of 2022. Suckers.

That said, the rest of the world is a mess which helps prop us up. Europe is a complete mess...same with Japan. Same with all of South America. China, for as much as people sing their praises, isn’t open to outside companies and all of its growth is tied up into building useless infrastructure as much as they try to claim otherwise. So in that environment the only place to put your money is still the US...helps to cover up the many warts we have here.

Recession is coming? We’ve been in a recession since February 2020.

The stock market is not the economy.

doogie said:

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RaceBannon said:

The economy has always been a sort of confidence game and as long as enough people have confidence the game goes on


The cliff notes to @whlinder

What happens when the only people with Confidence are the people with no money?