Caesura109 posted:

damn someone's been reading islamic apocalyptic hadith

toyotathon posted:

is there any comparison w/ past crashes, where the US market led nikkei/EU index crashes? if the US market crashes on its own, and the other imperial countries hold steady, it would re-order world profit capture, idk

i was going to write something but read this instead: https://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/political-and-economic-crises/political-and-economic-crises-pt-2/

Because it coincides with an increasingly critical political situation, the current critical point is more critical than many that have occurred since 1971, when the “dollar standard” emerged from the ruins of the gold-dollar exchange Bretton Woods international monetary system. This context includes the present U.S. paper dollar-centered monetary system, the general decline of U.S. capitalism relative to other countries engaged in capitalist production, the Trump presidency and its tariffs wars, the political crisis in France, the fading of the German government of Angela Merkel, and the Brexit crisis that almost brought down the Theresa May government of Britain.

This creates the possibility that the political and economic crises could combine and feed on each other in a “perfect economic and political storm.” We will examine this possibility, not prediction, in next month’s post.

To examine how such a perfect storm might arise, we first have to examine how the general characteristics of the critical point of the industrial cycle under the post-1971 U.S. dollar international monetary system interacts with the policies of the Federal Reserve System.

&c.

cars posted:

crisis in capitalism is an opportunity. what sucks though is that most stock market crashes aren't crises at the level of the system and when the stock market crashes or even dips across the board, it's a lot worse for people the further you get from people who own a lot of stock and have means to hedge their losses, until you get to the lumpenproletariat who don't care I guess. like... usually this shit is just bad for workers.

every stock market crash has underlying systemic causes, they're all crises at the level of the system...i dont see how you can claim that "most stock market crashes aren't crises at the level of the system", certainly not without factoring in magnitude, otherwise "stock market crash" is a nebulous term which could be applied blanket fashion to 2015 (or 2010 lol) in the same way as 2008, which makes no sense outside of pointless generalisation - each "crash" needs to be looked at in its historical position and through the underlying economic factors at work, and since right now we're not talking about minor slumps or blips, but all the inexorably grinding gears of capitalism coming to a head, business cycles coming to a close, repeated wild volatility swings which are completely unprecedented (todays 5% rise after the falls on the 24th are absurd, S&P500 is flailing about with almost 8% swings over the course of 48 hours), as in they have never happened at this scale before, ongoing reductions in credit availability through fed reserve tightening as a necessity to try and avert a complete fuck up, ongoing and increesing slowdowns in housing and automobile sales, general large scale overproduction interacting with credit availability all combined with 1. large scale concurrent instability across a whole host of imperialist countries during the "good times" with their "record low unemployment" and 2. 2018 the year of unprecedented catastrophic "natural disasters", which are steadily and rapidly increasing in severity and having significant impacts on global capitalism, somewhere along this line there's gonna be breaks in the capitalis payments chain, and breaks in circulation tend to spiral outwards - williams rightly recognises that there is potential here for catastrophe on the level of 1971 if not worse - this is the most critical point in your economy since, at the very most conservative, 2007; though I'm going all in at the moment and saying there is potential here for serious implosion, perhaps not in the us because of the many magical talismans amerikkkans have built in to the global system to defend their position, but the rest of the world just doesnt have as many guns. obviously this will be far more catastrophic for proletariat and peasantry in the global south than for some pension-owning amerikkkan but like no shit.

i don’t think anyone understands the magnitude of the situation at the moment, nor the criticality of the next few months.

Parenti posted:

let's figure out how to profit off the crash

for sale: good bullets $1 good shovels $10

shriekingviolet posted:

for sale: startup shares, never IPO'd

shartup stares

tears posted:

since right now we're not talking about minor slumps or blips, but all the inexorably grinding gears of capitalism coming to a head,

oh ok

cars posted:

Parenti posted:

let's figure out how to profit off the crash

It's called being a capitalist

yes, i am trying to raise the productive forces of the movement...for communism

Parenti posted:

Some analysis here https://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/political-and-economic-crises/political-and-economic-crises-pt-2/

The boom weakens

In recent weeks, there have been growing indications that the pace of the ongoing U.S. and global economic boom has slowed. In late November, General Motors announced that it will lay off 14,000 workers – both factory workers and white-collar employees – and is considering closing five plants. GM plans to lay off 3,600 factory workers in the U.S. and 3,000 in Canada, while the jobs of 8,100 will be eliminated by either buyouts or outright job terminations. Residential construction has slowed as rising mortgage rates and housing prices have put the cost of purchasing homes out of the range of more and more consumers.

Demand for houses, automobiles, and other durable consumer goods bought on credit typically weakens in the later stages of the capitalist industrial cycle. As capital spending – expanded capitalist reproduction – increases during a boom, industrial capitalists enter into competition for the remaining supply of credit with home buyers and other purchasers of durable consumer goods such as automobile and appliances – as well as merchant capitalists building up their inventories.

This puts upward pressure on long-term interest rates and even more on short-term rates. Therefore, just as industrial capitalists expand the ability of the economy to build additional homes, cars and appliances, the demand for the additional commodities that the newly built or expanded factories can produce declines. This happens first in the area of residential buildings and other durable consumer goods and then becomes generalized as increasingly tight credit conditions oblige merchant capitalists to cut back on their inventories. In Marxist terms, the capitalists shift from the accumulation of commodity capital to the de-accumulation – liquidation – of their commodity capital. (5) Once this happens, the boom ends and the recession begins.

A possible sign of strength running counter to weakening demand for housing and autos is a sharp fall – after a modest rising trend – in the U.S. weekly claims for unemployment insurance, though these claims remain slightly above their most recent level. In recent years, it has become far more difficult to obtain unemployment insurance. This reflects both the relentless capitalist offensive and computerization that enables officials at the unemployment office to quickly determine whether you are telling the truth when you claim unemployment benefits. These factors have led to a decline in claims for unemployment insurance to the lowest numbers in the last 50 years.

The U.S. media falsely represents this to give the impression that demand for labor (power) is unusually high even for a boom and the rate of unemployment unusually low. However, other figures confirm that the boom, at least within the U.S. and other imperialist countries, is actually one of the weakest on record, as is overall participation of the potential working population in the labor market.
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5 Marx described commodity capital as commodities containing surplus value that are being offered for sale on the market.

Ugh he needs to timestamp his posts, I opened this a couple days ago and thought the article was old and closed the page. Thx

cars posted:

Barack to the topic at hand, though, which is that cackling and rubbing your hands at the economy collapsing is not Marxist and consistently erases class.

karphead posted:

everyone on this goddam forum knows what a market crash means so let us pull some goofballs and funny bones

i mean you do, some don’t, this thread makes that obvious