this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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No Stupid Questions

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[–] HasturInYellow@lemmy.world 8 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

Depends what you mean by crash. Before, we have crashed through small bushes and banana stands. Big showy and doing minor damage. We are about to run into that tiny little tree that the devs never made animations for.

We are not prepared for the devastation that tree will cause.

[–] Agent641@lemmy.world 4 points 17 hours ago

you are outside the bounds of the map

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[–] sobchak@programming.dev 19 points 1 day ago (2 children)

What you're describing is basically stagflation. It doesn't necessarily mean a crash. It's possible for the majority of people to keep on earning less and less real income for a long time without a crash.

I do wonder what the effect of all the layoffs from tech and the public sector and all the cuts in federal funding will do though. Dunno if that's enough to flood the housing market and crash it or not. I think I've read that banks are in a good position to absorb housing market losses, so it won't be like 2008.

AFAIK, most current economic indicators are OK. Not necessarily great, but not dire either.

The stock market makes no sense to me. It doesn't appear most stocks move on the fundamentals of the companies or anything like that. It all appears to be driven by hype/gambling, and propped up from sustained lows by 401ks on auto-pilot and people trained to "buy the dip" by the quick Covid recovery.

The USD appears to be rapidly losing a lot of value compared to other currencies like the EUR. But, that fits well into the plan to reduce imports and boost US exports. Inflation with stagnant wages makes US exports more attractive/cheaper.

[–] SunshineJogger@feddit.org 4 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Could the housing market crash independently? Or would it be always with the other markets?

[–] vxx@lemmy.world 7 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (2 children)

Isnt a crash in the housing market a good thing for the average person?

The crisis happened because everyone got credits to buy a house, even if they shouldnt, and banks made money by betting against them ever paying it back. This caused a huge bubble that had to burst.

It was more a housing-credit crash than anything else.

Sure, it's bad for people wanting to sell their house to make profits, but it's good for people that want to buy a house.

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[–] SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world 1 points 13 hours ago

ITT: Slaves use bunk stats to feel indignant about maintaining the status quo.

[–] EightBitBlood@lemmy.world 52 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Yes. We are heading towards a crash. We are very much already in one, and have absolutley no way out.

Trump killed all US international commerce with his TACO tariffs and is currently propping up a failing stock market by converting medicaid dollars into ICE / TECH BRO MILITARY funding. The stock market keeps doing great because our tax dollars are propping up companies like Google, Plantir, and Amazon through government grants instead of providing us a safety net. That money will run out eventually, but likely not before more CEOs are killed over it.

Literally we are living through the gilded 1920's again but with an American Hitler.

We now have years of uncontrolled inflation well above target rates, a corrupt government, wealth inequality worse than the French revolution, and rampant unintelligent Tariffs hurting all international trade at the cost of every small business in America. These are the same factors that caused the great depression, and if you think it's not going to happen again, you are wrong.

We are a country being lead into disaster by the least competent people imaginable.

[–] meowgenau@programming.dev 11 points 22 hours ago

wealth inequality worse than the French revolution

When the creator of the Revolutions podcast was asked about the one theme that follows every revolution, he said that it was wealth inequality.

If I remember correctly, the French revolution had three major elements that kicked it off the way it did: huge wealth inequality, a major event that hits the lower classes (in this case a drought that destroyed lots of crops and therefore caused a wheat shortage), and incompetent leadership that is unable to deal with said event. Looks like the US is getting there, step by step.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 19 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

We are heading towards a crash. We are very much already in one, and have absolutley no way out.

I think this is what folks lose track of when they talk about "the crash". We're all waiting with baited breath for the financial system to topple over. But the financial system is increasingly just a dozen private equity firms bidding up one another's baseball cards. They can't "crash" in the traditional sense until a sufficient number of them refuse to contribute more to the pot, and so long as everyone has easy credit there's no real reason to do that.

Incidentally, JPow and Trump (and every Fed Chair/President going back to Bernenke/Obama) have both been militant in keeping Fed Interest Rates at historic lows going on nearly two decades.

Literally we are living through the gilded 1920’s again but with an American Hitler.

I mean, the parallels between Trump and Coolidge Eras are in abundance. War on Immigration. A finance/tech sector that's eating the industrial economy. Massive spike in white nationalism paired with a full blown Red Scare. Deficit hawkery that never touches the national security state. Global ecological crises compounding into massive famines and agricultural failures.

We are a country being lead into disaster by the least competent people imaginable.

Part of the problem is that we've lost track of a consensus on what "competent" looks like. I see plenty of people (rightly) insist guys like Trump and Speaker Johnson and governors like DeSantis and Abbott are criminally incompetent. But then these same people get fully behind Gavin Newsom and Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris, seemingly without recognizing that they're pushing the backside of the same privatization / national security state coin.

What do you do when blue state bastions like California and New Mexico are turning out Crypto Shills as quickly as any captured conservative enclave like Wyoming or South Carolina? What does competency look like in the wake of Biden's squandered four years or Obama's or Clinton's corporately compromised time in office, for that matter?

How do you talk about climate change or even scratch the surface of our US-backed genocides in Gaza and Yemen and Afghanistan or talk about housing policy or college debts or union organization when half the elected liberal contingent is just a commodity that's traded on the stock market?

We're all waiting for the dream to end in a sudden shocking economic turn. I don't know if that's necessarily what will happen. What if we've just pivoted our economy towards a monetization of human suffering? What if this system is stable and enduring? There is no crash because there's nothing left to be broken into and fleeced.

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[–] Ileftreddit@lemmy.world 12 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Republicans are really determined to make life as awful as possible, and the democrats in power are fine with it.

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[–] FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 227 points 1 day ago (18 children)

We're already there. The only reason we aren't calling this a depression is that the stock market hasn't been affected much.

But when 25% of Americans are functionally unemployed, it's hard to argue we aren't already largely 'crashed'.

[–] minorkeys@lemmy.world 4 points 21 hours ago

If the economy doesn't need 25% of the populace to keep functioning...what happens?

[–] spankmonkey@lemmy.world 97 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

The biggest issue is the need for families to have two incomes to support a houshold. Unemployment would plummet if single incomes for the working class were feasible again,since unemployment is based on looking for employment.

Basically if jobs had living wages and we had universal healthcare we wouldn't be in this mess.

[–] FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 72 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That ship sailed under Reagan, and it's never getting back to port, sadly. Thanks to him, families now needed two incomes.

Then, Bush and Clinton came along, and you needed not only two incomes, but two college degrees. Now, with Dubya, Obama, and Trump, not even that's enough, and they're capping student loans instead of regulating student loan interest, so your only real shot at being a doctor now is being born in the right zip code.

America, baby. Dig it.

[–] ilinamorato@lemmy.world 40 points 1 day ago (13 children)

it's never getting back to port

In the event of an actual crash, a lot of these "nevers" will get re-evaluated. The New Deal consisted of a lot of "nevers" that all got passed because people didn't want a repeat of the first Great Depression; I'd expect a similar snap-back after the second Gilded Age finally burns itself out.

[–] NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io 20 points 1 day ago (10 children)

I mean that's hopeful, but remember that the New Deal also came against the backdrop of the height of socialism in the West and the labor rights movement. Modern Americans don't have the organizational strength to make such a compromise attractive in the eye of the ruling class, and they don't seem intent on ever having it.

[–] head_socj@midwest.social 1 points 14 hours ago

Lot of assumptions there.

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[–] lemmy_outta_here@lemmy.world 54 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah, I don’t know if OP is in the USA, but having someone like Donald Trump elected to high office is 100% part of a crash already in progress. Inequality got so bad that democracy is not functioning. In a healthy society, Trump would be an unelectable laughing stock.

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 26 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah. I consider Trump the "blow everything up" candidate, he got a lot of support from people who were just so generically desperate that they wanted to vote for whoever seemed like they were going to majorly change something, somehow. It almost didn't matter what Trump did as long as he smashed the existing order while doing it.

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[–] FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 43 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Also, not so fun fact, but this got me curious so I looked up the unemployment rate during The Great Depression: apparently then it was around 20% to 25% as well, so I feel like that reinforces the point I'm making a bit.

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[–] sartalon@lemmy.world 13 points 1 day ago

And the stock market is just another way for the top percent to continue to siphon wealth.

[–] hobovision@mander.xyz 16 points 1 day ago (2 children)

From your own source on "true" unemployment, it's the lowest it has been since they started calculating it. It peaked in 09 at 35% and again in COVID, but all through the early 00s it was between 28% and 30%.

You can't use that number as evidence we "already crashed", because as we've seen in other actual crashes it spikes up to 35%.

[–] SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world 17 points 1 day ago (8 children)

When the definition of unemployed is changed to exclude the majority of working age people without jobs then it is no longer a helpful statistic.

That's why we see people calculating real unemployment with other variables.

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[–] Kyrgizion@lemmy.world 26 points 1 day ago

The 1% own even more stock than they own outright money. You could replace "the economy" in every article with "rich people's yacht money". The stock market is 100% dissociated from reality and shouldn't be used as a measure of general wealth by any means.

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[–] KingGimpicus@sh.itjust.works 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You just need a union job. I just started mine and my first day I find out we're getting a new contract with $1/hr raises yearly for the next five years, a new boot benefit of $250 a year, better per diem on travel, and better compensation while traveling.

[–] pineapplelover@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I wonder if IT workers have unions

[–] Agent641@lemmy.world 4 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

Nah we just have software killswitches.

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[–] burgerpocalyse@lemmy.world 58 points 1 day ago

ye best start believin in economic depression, yer in one!

[–] Ilya12@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The crab said: You just haven't seen your steamer yet. The crab is a low-level animal, and its nervous system is so simple that when it is slowly steamed in the steamer, it will keep stuffing the ginger slices next to it into its mouth. It just feels uncomfortable, and it thinks that eating something will make it better. I don't know if you can understand the meaning of this paragraph. To sum up, we are already in the steamer. We thought that if we find a good job and work hard, everything will be fine, but the fact is that wages are not rising, prices are rising rapidly, and the world is rotten.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 15 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

the world is rotten

The chef is rotten. The world is beautiful. You just can't see it from inside the steamer.

[–] AngryRobot@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago

In decades past, employees would get both a cost of living raise and performance raise, but the cost of living raise has all but gone away. One way to fix this is to tie the minimum wage to inflation. It'll have tje side benefit of making companies try to reduce inflation rather profiteering.

[–] Kayel@aussie.zone 10 points 1 day ago

Neoliberalism is reaching its natural conclusion, coupled with the gradual fall of colonialism, is going to lead to a permanent crash for the working class.

While Trump is being loud, the project to divide the US working class by ethnicity has been ongoing always, and began ramping up this century.

It will be required as all production is centralised within a handful of families. And the global south can no longer be relied on for cheap resources and manufacturing for middle class treats.

The US doesn't have a union presence, nor does it have understanding of left politics. Conditions will get worse and worse every decade.

[–] NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world 34 points 1 day ago (16 children)

Yes, it's gonna get bad. Jobs in both the private sector, and public sector, universities, etc, we are all feeling the heat right now.

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