The TSLA Market / Economy

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This only works if they don’t allow the NFTs to travel off platform. There are tons of potential problems that come up if they let the tokens escape.

I’m not intentionally trying to mansplain. I’m saying that “retirees sell therefore market crash” is pretty hand wavy and I don’t really understand why people think it’s so obvious it will happen. Like, sure, psychology affects market prices. But what does that have to do with retiree withdrawals?

I think a lot of people here conflate our awful political situation with inevitable economic catastrophe. It’s possible but not assured that our incoming political disaster will decimate the economy.

I’m not referring to any specific part of the current or past conversations. Rather it’s the way so many of these conversations are framed as if the markets and economy in the coming decades are going to largely resemble the current ones. I don’t see how anybody could possibly have much confidence in that.

A 22 year old college grad gets a good job and is told to they should put X% of their salary in low cost index fund Y with targeted retirement date Z blah blah blah, and based on everything we know that really is the best advice that person can get. But any confidence that 50 years from now that will actually turn out to have been the best advice should be extremely low.

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I’m not sure what the point of this is, we don’t get to make decisions based on future data.

It’s about not making decisions with unreasonable certainty of future data, and about not describing current situations with unreasonable certainty of known data.

It seems more logical if you think about the supply and demand for capital and the discount rate. If a bunch of people want to withdraw funds from their 401(k)s, then they are selling capital. To whom? All the buyers of capital had all they wanted at the current rate of return. In order to balance out supply and demand, the return for owning capital has to go up, so asset prices have to go down.

It’s totally fair for the burden of proof to be on the people claiming this time is different. Because people are always claiming that and it rarely is.

The basic capitalist boom bust cycle has been going on for hundreds of years even if things have evolved. There were short term impacts but the cycle eventually returned to normal after the great depression and both world wars.

I think boomers retiring and withdrawing funds over the course of a few decades aren’t going to fundamentally alter the mechanics. There could be a major crash followed by a buying opportunity or a lost decade of returns or other things that suck for market participants but it is more likely than not things will revert back to a normal cycle afterward because it is driven by human behavior.

This assumes everything else doesnt change. Those boomers are pulling the money out to spend, it goes somewhere. Wherever it goes it will also impact the capital markets.

Generally in macro terms this is captured as the savings rate. It’s not obvious whether higher savings rates are good or bad for economic growth or asset prices.

Not directed at you. A lot of this forum would benefit from a couple of basic economic courses. You’re trying to debate this stuff from first principles when theres a lot of thought and data you could be drawing from.

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Who says they’re certain about the future here? Any number of unpredictable black swan events might happen, I’m not sure how that should change anyone’s investment strategy.

I agree with this. Markets are nowhere near as stable or predictable as people are implying. Boomers withdrawing from the stock market absolutely might crash the market. Or not.

It’s not primarily human behaviour that’s driving long term growth. Its productivity growth. The same amount of capital and labour creating more goods and services.

Concurrently there are ALSO increases in capital and labour stocks, but that leads to linear growth, not exponential growth.

The longer the time horizon the more certain we should be about investing in stocks being the best approach not less certain. Like over 50 years? We could have multiple crashes and it would still be the best approach. Anything conceivable black swan event that would make stocks a bad idea over that time period basically also makes every alternative worse. The only things I could envision where investors are better off in things like crypto, bonds, cash, or gold are government seizing the means of production in USA #1, nuclear war, or some other dystopian scenario.

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I don’t think people are claiming things will be different. Rather many are pointing to reasons why they might be different. Hundreds of years is a ridiculously short period of time to point to as proof they won’t be different, and your range for possible outcomes seems absurdly narrow even within that time frame. You really think nothing worse than another great depression is possible?

I meant patterns of human behavior drive investment inflows and outflows and boom bust cycles in the markets and are predictable over long time horizons, not that they drive economic growth.

Advance of technology is the primary driver of increasing productivity and that is in no way slowing down.

I think if something worse than a great depression happens we’re all fucked anyway so it’s not worth planning for unless you want to be one of the guys with a cache of ammo and years of food in a bunker somewhere.

It seems about as mild as the level of spice I order (1) at Tandoor Palace? He’s just saying that prices are set by supply and demand, which they obviously are. The rest is just details to backsolve for. Reminds me of this complex pricing text I had to read in graduate school once where first paragraph stated (paraphrasing) “the price is what buyers are willing to pay, and no more,” which was to say none of the inane rabbit-hole stuff you’re about to read supersedes that basic fact.

Right, you’re doing the exact thing I was talking about in my earlier post. You talk with dead certainty about possible outcomes, but when I press you admit others exist.

I don’t expect anybody to plan for black swans because ldo, if you could, they wouldn’t be. It’s about pretending they won’t happen when they almost certainly will. And that other bad outcomes don’t even need to be black swans. They are unfortunately far too easy to imagine these days.

The point you’re missing is that anything that perma-crushes stocks is almost certainly even worse for everything else. Like, I think I remember from the other thread that you’re all about crypto and apes, you think that shit is going to hold up if there’s a nuclear war or whatever?