What the fuck happened in 1971?
this post was submitted on 30 May 2026
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Hiroshima?
The US went off the gold standard and money ceased to be something connected with reality. It then became something the wealthy could endlessly inflate and distort for their own ends.
Inflation doesn't bother people with inflatable assets (them). It only bothers people that earn wages (you) that don't inflate.
A similar theory from a Yahoo finance post:
https://finance.yahoo.com/community/post/15ec0385-f41b-428e-82c9-3198a57683db
This guy seems extremely confident given the rapid pace of technological and scientific progress of today
Bubbles are between corrections. We have not seen a correction since 2008 so we are almost 20 years without one. Kinda funny because we were about due with covid but it kinda short circuit it. Sure we had the drop but it was so short a time span it had no real effect and we kept on expanding with new vigor.
There was definitely a correction during covid
not really. it dived and corrected in like less than a week. it was such a blip that it effectively had no real effect and actually seemed to prime it to pretend the high before was a low and just rocketed at an insane pace. Even 2008 was not much of a correction. the millenia seems to feel P/E ratios don't matter.
Wars artificially boost economies, simply because military shit needs to be built during the war, and blown up shit needs fixing after the war. The French even have a word for it.
War also turbocharges scientific research, and post-war economies derive incalculable benefits from new scientific discoveries. You can thank Nazi Germany for the jet plane and landing man on the moon, WW2 Britain for the sonar and the computer (I guess you can thank Nazi Germany for those too in a sense...), Cold War USA for the internet, etc etc.
When all that artificial growth stops, unemployment returns, states borrow out of proportion to maintain social programs for an aging population, everybody gets poorer, lack of education and religious thinking come back as a result, people vote for populists to solve their problems because they're not educated enough to know better, the populists start new wars, and when the war is over, everybody swears it will never happen, reconstruction begins, everybody becomes richer again, rinse, repeat.
We're in the populists-start-new-wars phase now.
Well, also all of the US' competition had been bombed all to hell. That helps give you a head start for a while, especially when they're paying you for a bunch of the stuff needed to rebuild.
Except, as the Internet example proves, we can have the wartime scientific research boom without the actual "war" part, so that's what we ought to do going forward.
The Cold War was 100% a war. Just ask any of the 3rd world countries that served as proxies and lost millions of people to a war that was definitely hot for them. And when I helped my old man build a nuclear shelter in the backyard when I was a kid, it sure felt real to me too.
Hell, today's North Korea and Cuba are direct results of the fucking Cold War.
Most Americans can't comprehend that level of destruction because they're always safe. Ironic I should be telling you this as well.
I'm not ignoring Vietnam etc.; I'm just enumerating them separately.
Check out Thomas Piketty's 'Capital in the 21st Century'. Relevant part is that wealth distribution was at its most equitable from ~1945 to 1980, after which nearly all new wealth generated from increased production (i.e. computing/internet/tech/etc) was captured by the top 10% of earners, and within that 10% it's crazy skewed towards the 0.000001%.
The romans had their bubble... Go back further than WWII and this could be the capitalist bubble.
No. A bubble is when, on paper, money goes up, but no real value (products, amenities, innovations) are created to back it up.
There have been a shit ton of new creations in the last 70 years. A lot of inflated paper money as well but its mostly not a bubble
My take on this is that the US truly experienced a period of 'greatness' for around 40yrs, starting with FDR's response to the Great Depression in the mid-30's. Then you have post WW2, and the US was considered something of a hero nation around much of the world, plus was one of the few major countries with lots of intact production going on, with lots of demand around the world. For some decades there, you could work a job like gas station attendant and make a salary good enough to buy a home and support a family (I may be exaggerating somewhat, but the point's made).
Nothing is ever perfect, and of course you had various minorities getting the short end of the stick, or outright blatantly discriminated against, as with African and Native Americans. But for the larger populace, I understand that you really could live a pretty comfortable life, with social safety nets available if you were struggling.
Cue Jim Crow laws being struck down in the mid-60's and a huge hippie movement to relax norms and expand one's mind, and by the late 60's you had the furious right-wing, dog-whistling movement responding by electing Tricky Dick, and it's been a slow (but increasingly quick) return to the robber barons, blatant discrimination and the breakdown of democracy.
I'm not super well-read on all this, so might be missing some key points, but my take is that the USA as a whole has not remotely appreciated how good things were for ~40yrs, starting with most Boomers. It took the Muckrakers, two Roosevelts and the Great Depression to claw our way out of Monopolies and corporations taking over everything, and now we've lost most of that, and are hurtling towards 1984, even as civilisation itself is heading towards... a pretty rough ending.
you present it more eloquently but I very much feel this. I think one big thing is the fall is so slow at first that it is barely noticable but its an accelerating function so eventually the veolocity was such that it was becoming very obvious. Its amazing that so many seem to respond at this point with the head in the ground reaction.
the fall is so slow at first
I'm forced to believe that, but it also makes my head spin. I believe it, because the general populace and a bunch of talking heads and (otherwise) smart comedians were doing 'business as usual' in the 80's and 90's. For example, mercilessly mocking Clinton for his affairs and that kind of thing, while meanwhile Nixon had opened the gates of capital elitism and Reagan had bull-rushed his way through, greatly dooming democracy right there.
But few people of influence were sounding the alarm, maybe because 'American greatness' had existed as recently as the mid-70's, and too many people wanted to sort of lazily believe that 'things go in waves,' implying that somehow, magically, democracy would right the ship. Something like that, anyway.
yeah there was a kind of oh this is just a thing and we will get back to normal. While the slow velocity was kinda fall we could climb back up and that was kinda true if you looked at reagan clinton. One thing though was bush sr. was still a saner old school type republican and actually did not do more damage and kinda started a recovery that made it easy for clinton. Increasingly we can't right the ship so easily. Its like if we get through this we might plug the holes but the ship will still be filled with water and republicans will of course blame it on the administration that plugged their holes.
Right-wingers have massive pockets of dumbass voters who don't have any real perspective on facts & reality, and just 'do what everyone else around them is doing.' You can hear people in Southern States sometimes talk about this online. Similar groups routinely fall for ragebait, and therefore insulate themselves from facts & reality in that way, too. The hope obviously is that the Orange regime and swing states haven't totally gamed the electoral process for this coming election. Otherwise the USA is lost IMO.
The americans sure have, at least a sort of loan bubble combined with enforcement of debt taking (reserve currency, dumping the gold standard, the petro dollar, all the wars about oil & the petrodollar).
Seems like luck is running out though.
If the "bubble" lasts for more than a generation it's a "golden age" instead.
Hell yeah, we been riding the economic advantage of providing weapons and not loosing people or infrastructure. Now imagine if the government just ordered a bunch of housing, yeah sure they go into debt but people become more productive
Ya never know