I picked 10% worse because I think that the US is generally on a trajectory of slow decline and that in the absence of meaningful structural reforms they will just keep losing ground. Without reversing long term trends in wealth inequality it’s hard to judge the US economy as anything buy a failure. I don’t care how many gold toilets Donnie Dumb Dumb has, I care how many people live lives with basic dignity.
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It’s pretty fun watching boomer and boomer-adjacent shitbags lose their mind at workers standing up for themselves.
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The overall size and strength of the economy has increased since covid but that doesn’t mean as much as people think.
Companies have solidified and shed the excess fat that put a drag to the bottom line which raised the markets. That excess fat is what gave folks options on what and who to buy from.
As I said somewhere else, we can have the greatest economy of all time if you’re happy spending most of your time at home content with your phone waiting for your amazon Turkey club sandwich form a doordash robot.
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pandemic forced a lot of savings onto businesses that made it through. it forced better wages in the restaurant industry. it also sped up transition to renewables and remote work. it opened the eyes of many workers that work ain’t all paid. it also strengthened world’s healthcare supply chain by sheer necessity. those are massive positives, but no more than 10% better feels right
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pattern checks out
This isn’t controversial. The stock market only reflects the outlook for large corporations. About half the economy is small businesses. There are plenty of scenarios where the outlook is good for large corporations and bad for small businesses.
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I said the same but I do feel much more optimistic that I, and workers generally, could probably get a similar or even better job if I wanted to whereas 2 years ago I felt very fortunate to have the job I have.
Guess I’m so used to a corporate centric view of the “economy” that I subconsciously factored in that workers being more in demand hits the bottom line of companies to get a net of “same.”
Programmers, at least those living in good markets, have felt this way for a long time.
my ceo recently posited that private equity is currently bringing 15x the roi compared to ipo’ed companies. he probably meant some industries where that’s true, and he probably meant roi to early/mid investors, but there’s definitely an argument that stock market doesn’t even capture a giant completely opaque economy of private money.
I said slightly worse economy because wealth inequality has increased, inflation is gnawing at the poor/lower middle class psyche, if not the actual wallet, and I keep reading about the supply chain problems. The economy as a machine has been severely knocked off kilter, and has not returned to whatever passes for normal.
In the long-term view, we are still destroying the planet with no hope of stopping or slowing down that process. So yeah.
Regarding participating in the market, I am at my lowest stock allocation probably ever. If the market/economy tanks from here, I’ll be dollar cost averaging into it. If it recovers/shoots up, then I’ll miss out on some upside, but I’m fine with that. I’ll still be DCAing into the market.
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Zillow seems to be run by idiots but with their market cap down to $13 billion this has to be a takeover candidate for real tech companies, right? Imagine how much money amazon or google could make if they were running Zillow.
Why would Google need to buy Zillow? If they wanted get in that game there aren’t huge barriers to entry.
Why would they make more? Zillow’s problem is that their new business strategy (market-making in real estate) makes no sense. RE is too illiquid, you have to hold positions too long.
Can eg Google model prices more accurately? Maybe, maybe not. Everybody has the same dataset -RE transactions and property tax assessments are public record. Look at Zillow’s estimate for any property - valuation is +/- 7% or so. Why so big? LOL sample size, that’s why.
Otoh, in their core business (selling ad space to RE agents) they’re the dominant player in the space so yeah if a bigger player wanted to get in there, sure. that said, idk how much growth is left on that side of the business, just don’t see a lot of upside for a takeover.
Didn’t they shut the house buying thing down because they were losing so much money on it?
I don’t think this is a foregone conclusion. There are obvious problems with ongoing conversion of natural resources into consumable goods. But that is not the entirety of economic growth. Economic growth can include a number of other things that do not necessarily contribute to environmental degradation, and indeed can contribute to better environmental outcomes. Things like more skilled and knowledgeable labor, better infrastructure, and improved technologies all contribute to economic growth. There are not guarantees that these things can be achieved but there is similarly not guarantee that we are locked into a future of declining quality of life forever.
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Yeah, 1st part of my post is why they lost money at it.
Without a major change in economic assumptions and the growth mindset, this is an eventuality. Not necessarily within our lifetimes or our grandchildren’s, but possibly. Unfortunately, because we are human and fallible, it will be a disaster/collapse(/plague?) scenario rather than a long-term maximizing (with a large buffer) of return on energy input for a stable population.
Most current demographic researchers are forecasting that the population will increase at a slower rate and level off. This will almost certainly happen this century. That doesn’t mean that economic growth will necessarily stop or reverse, but it would mean that economic growth will have to be different. In the last century a ton of economic growth was driven by throwing a new and larger wave of young people into the labor market every year and driving quality of life improvements by having them convert natural resources into consumer goods for each other. Ironically, the biggest opportunity for economic growth in the a 21st century with a stagnant population is the massive amount of work that will need to be done to transition to a post climate change world. So there is a very plausible and somewhat ironic scenario where the story of the 20th century was economic growth driven by environmental degradation and rapid population growth and the 21st century will be the story of economic growth driven by dealing with the necessary transformations arising from the 20th century behaviors and outcomes.
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Someone tell me why I’m wrong on this. … the only other thing that I’ve seen grow consistently (like the stock market) and which can help explain the economy, is population. So this …
… is the sort of thing I think can undo this whole mirage of perpetual growth and bring these valuations back to earth.
Valuations correlate more strongly with money supply. As long as fed go brrr, stonks. Seriously, the cheaper money is the higher dollar value stocks should have. It has been argued that stock valuations are largely fine given the current fiscal environment.
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