One of the steps in a societal collapse is a loss of faith in financial tools. The stock market has seemed like a casino for a long time to me, yet it is still cranking out money for the upper crust. It is the primary driver for business decisions that produce short term gain, but reduce long-term viability for the companies and for the environment.

Currently, there are no other real vehicles for the average US citizen to invest in for their retirements. In my parents’ generation, there were more. Heck, they had a lot of money in CDs and even those earned a decent rate of interest. Yet everything now is such a low return, or boom/bust like housing, so little guys like me are pushed into getting retirement accounts that are stocks. I’m not keen on that.

What’s even worse is that many jobs will employer match if you put into one of the stock market based retirement funds. But if you want to just put your money into a savings account, you miss out on the employer matching. So there’s strong incentive to keep putting your money into the stock market.

So I keep trying to read the tea leaves to figure out when the casino is going to collapse. …or even if it will. I think there are some folks that just assume that it will keep making money for the wealthy and the rest of humanity will just get left behind.

  • @queermunist@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    11 year ago

    iirc there’s a tendency for crashes to occur in September/October

    Obviously we can’t predict black swans (COVID caused a crash in March I think?) but when capitalism inevitably enters another crisis it’ll probably be in the fall around that time. Maybe when historically low grain harvests are coming in due to el nino…