What happened in 2002? Was that from the war on terror?
9/11
End of the dot com bubble.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_market_downturn_of_2002
But it happened mostly in 2000:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
And coincidentally 9/11
The September 11 attacks also contributed heavily to the stock market downturn, as investors became unsure about the prospect of terrorism affecting the United States economy.
Was the 2002 a year of recession? Or is the stock market downturn considered a recession because rich people lost money?
Unlike wealth, losses usually trickle down. When companies go bankrupt their employees loose their jobs. Millionaires actually love recessions, Jack Welch said:
Never miss out on an opportunity like a good recession.
The 2002 recession was not as global and universal as later ones. The dot com bubble mostly affected tech companies, and the internet was not as common as nowadays. I asked my parents once how they felt that recession, when I first read about it later, I was in school in 2002. They said they didnt even know there was a recession that time, in eastern europe it wasnt noticably worse than the chaos of the 90s
There is a simpsons episode about the bubble, s13e18, aired in 2002:
Crisis seems like the natural operating mode of c*pitalism
And the wealthy manage to come out on top every single time.
When they should really come out 6 feet under.
Buy blue chip stocks during recessions and sell after recovery
Instructions unclear, invested life savings in a company that produces blue corn tortilla chips.
If it worked to funnel money to the wealthy the first time why not the second? Or third… and so on.
See, I exchanged my 100% S&P500 401k to SPAXX in December, waiting for the crash. I’ve made 10%~ doing nothing! It took me a while to realize, but I’m finally going to buy the dip.
and every time the rich get richer, funny that.
It starts to make sense when you realize that each of those events is basically a fire sale for billionaire investors.
Just look at income inequality before/after each of those events.
This is the truth.
The economic crisis’s have all been real, they all really have been huge events that have restructured life for everyone, it’s just that they’re not accidental, they’re not unforseen consequences of policy decisions nobody could have imagined… they’re engineered, or foreseen with great clarity.
And every time, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the so-called middle-class shrinks even more. Prices go up, we all have to work a few more hours in the week, we get less in return, our future dreams dwindle, and we plug into social media and AI slop and drugs and alcohol to placate us while we say “I just gotta save up enough so I can…”
And those savings NEVER increase. There is always some event, some family crisis, some medical problem or a car breaks down or your parent dies or the company you work at gets bought out and your 6 years of experience only makes you a liability for the new management team who wants to make a culture of “young, energetic pioneers.” (who they can pay less.)
The wealthy are at their happiest and strongest when they exist as they have for centuries, land-owners up high, living off the hard work and struggles of thousands of people beneath them, shaving a bit off everyone’s pay, offloading their problems to people who are already struggling. They want to run around in the manor and keep getting wasted and banging winches while we serfs toil in the fields we don’t own.
Seeing shit like this play out just makes it harder to keep going. At this point it’s a matter of when I do it, not if. What point is there if it’s only getting worse? I’ve seen my best years by now
Your choice, of course.
But there’s something to be said for living as well as well can in spite of the bullshit. Especially if there’s folks that rely on us.
The most punk thing for me to to as a person of queer is to keep living, but God is it hard to find the spirit.
I get that.
I take some comfort that - I know I won’t outlive every asshole, but I think I can outlive a bunch of them.
(This bunch in particular. A bunch of them are ancient.)
I wish upon a star that we could be a generation that takes power back for the average worker and uses our strength in numbers as leverage to have a better quality of life by making the wealthy pay their fair share.
But it’s looking like our historic legacy is going to be that of a fool generation that votes against their own interests and refuses to stand up for themselves.
A very embarrassing time to be an American.
we could be a generation that takes power back
The bigger problem right now is that unlike revolutions of old, this time there are millions of people who adore and cherish their overlords and would literally fight to the death to protect them for no other reason than ideological.
Even if it all went down tomorrow, even if we all locked arms and marched on Washington and installed a group of compassionate leaders who want to make sure all people are treated fairly and that we all had basic rights… we would still have to share this land with the millions of people who hate us for wanting better outcomes. There would still be hostile, evil forces twisting the minds of the stupid into hating their neighbors.
It’s such a larger problem than the wealthy hoarding all the money. We’re facing the absolute limit of human capacity to mitigate outside influence, we have every possible entity, commercial or political, trying to make us feel a thing, make us think a thing, make us serve them. We are attacked all day from every side with malicious lies and narratives meant to make us be quiet and hide. Even if it doesn’t work on most of us, if it only works on a fraction of a fraction of the people, we still have millions who hate you and want you dead simply because you might think that your tax money should go into making all our lives better equally.
I don’t think boomers are very good at running things.
They grew up in a for the most part prosperous time, middle class had 2 cars in the driveway, jobs were easier to obtain, it’s no wonder alot of them think the way they do.
Boomers grew up in a world with a 91% top-tier income tax rate that drove businesses to spend their excess income on products and services, which became their parents’ paychecks.
deleted by creator
Take heart, in 10 years the worst of the boomers in power today will be dead. In 20 years there will be almost no boomers left. Hopefully there will be enough of a country left to fix once they’re all dead.
You’re forgetting that there are many brainwashed younger people who totally bought the bullshit. It won’t be easy.
In about 25 years most countries will be warzones and anyone that cant afford whatever the elite are charging for the few freshwater sources left on the planet will be dead or enslaved. anyone within twenty degrees of the equator will have fled or be dead, and anyone living above ground anywhere else will live in nonpermanent shelters due to the yearly storms that destroy standing structure.
boomers will be taking the worlds habitable range with them, and leaving us with a nightmare.
This message is brought to you by the Storm of the Century and the hotest year in history. Available to you every year.
I was going to say I live in a “50 year flood plain” and I’ve seen 3 floods in the last 16 years.
Don’t forget the wildfires.
Good thing we dumped the california agriculture water reserves to solve their winter fires.
I know there have been people predicting they live in the “end times” for all of humanity. But I can’t help but feel like our generation isn’t crying wolf like the others.
It never really felt to me like the tech bubble crash was that big a deal to many people outside of a group of greedy rich assholes. There’s always collateral damage of course, but the only change I really witnessed was a stop to people getting paid 20x the median salary after spending a few weeks with a Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours book.
It’s the same crisis, in various stages of escalation. The rich are squeezing more and more of the lower and middle class all over the world, and there is almost nothing left to squeeze.
The next few years will bring a massive collapse in government services (the USA is starting) for ordinary people, because that is one of the last things that the rich can still squeeze out.
After that, there will be only the ultra rich and the destitute poor left; and the ultra rich will only be able to take from each other.
This will mean war, and they will send you all into it.
Unless we stop it now. Tax the rich.
After that, there will be only the ultra rich and the destitute poor left; and the ultra rich will only be able to take from each other.
It’s already starting to happen. Half of consumer spending in the US is done by just the top 10% of earners. For an economy built on consumer spending this means that you get more economic growth by giving those rich people more money to spend, not by lifting up the other 90%.
For an economy built on consumer spending this means that you get more economic growth by giving those rich people more money to spend, not by lifting up the other 90%.
You’ve gone and mixed up correlation and causation here.
The top 10% arent spending 50% of the money because they are the glorious saviors of the economy, protecting and nurturing it while us poor people thoughtlessly hoard and save all our wealth. It’s actually quite the opposite.
I’m not saying it’s a good thing. It’s a symptom of the concentration of wealth.
But if you’re a politician and want a quick, popular, short-term solution you get quicker effects giving the big spenders more money. It would be better to lift everyone, but that takes a lot more work.
Which is what’s been happening for decades, and has gotten us into this mess. We’ve been kicking a lot of cans and we’re running out of road.
Except that isn’t true at all. The COVID stimulus checks were a huge boon to the economy and cost about 800 billion dollars, meanwhile just the first round of trump tax cuts are projected to cost the US 1.5trillion. Dollar for dollar, providing spending power to the lower income earners generates more economic stimulus. Talk to someone making less that 200k a year, and there is a laundry list of items they need or want to purchase. Ask a billionaire what they are waiting for the money to buy, and it’s nothing. When you have an unlimited check book, why would you wait?
The whole reason why the top 10% spend 50% of the economy, is because they have 99% of the disposable income. The idea that the poorer 90% of us are hoarding money more than the freaking multi-million/billionaires is laughably out of touch.
Except they could still do that level of spending while not perched atop a massive hoard, and the rest could do cumulatively more spending via their sheer numbers if said hoard were distributed more evenly.
That’s why I support a maximum wealth cap. My preferred figure is 1000x median household income. Anything beyond that is taxed at 100%. I don’t even care what the wealthy do with the money over that wealth cap. Donate it, spend it on conspicuous consumption, I don’t care. What matters is that the wealth isn’t pooling at the top, allowing the wealthy to outbid everyone else for things like housing.
Hell, imagine a world like that. Maybe at the end of each year, the rich burn off all their excess wealth by throwing giant lavish parties that they invite the entire populace of their cities to. Or maybe they just cut everyone a check. If you’re forced to burn off all your excess cash, you might as well burn it in a way that makes you popular.
this means that you get more economic growth by giving those rich people more money to spend, not by lifting up the other 90%.
This is probably true for industries like fashion, but I disagree with this point applying in general. There is only so much food, gasoline, and paper products an individual is willing to buy, no matter how rich.
The restaurant industry, for example, would collapse as we know it if most non-wealthy people suddenly don’t have any extra income to spend on prepared food. They need velocity in orders just to remain open at all. I doubt most places could remain open off of a few rich people buying a lot.
This isn’t to say that they won’t stop extracting more from the lower earners. Many of them would be fine killing off industry if it makes themselves richer. I personally think all of it’s a short-sighted cash grab that’s gonna keep poisoning the economy until something changes.
I don’t know who came up with this “once a generation” bullshit, but you can see that economic crises were more often than once a decade in 20th century https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_economic_crises#20th_century
Sounds like it’s time to stop believing the way headlines and pundits phrase things.
You start noticing this pattern after some decades.
Always accompanied by “we need to temporarily tighten the belt now to keep our properity for the following generations”.
The period before is sold as a great economic time, despite that they called it a crisis back then and also ‘needed’ austerity measures to get back to the prosperity of the previous period.
The western standard of living has been destroyed bit by bit since the post WW2 period with this tactic, not for the multinationals, banks, stock folks OC, that’s where the stolen money goes to.
The ones in power telling us in their paid press how great ‘the econonomy’ is doing bcs stock line go up and BS GDP up.
In reality that means more billions in the pockets of a few oligarchs while income equality is growing.Don’t forget - you were also BORN into a once in a generation economic crisis: The savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s was the failure of approximately a third of the savings and loan associations in the United States between 1986 and 1995. These thrifts were banks that historically specialized in fixed-rate mortgage lending.
