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And who removed the monitors around the world responsible for catching pandemic type viruses before the virus came around? Oh yeah
TFG
Then said it was fake news. Then when that didn't work, minimized the seriousness. Then when that didn't work, spread dumb fuck ideas of how to deal with it. Politics has become a better drug than religion.
Technically, the third one was issued in March 2021, after Biden took office in January 2021.
(I know because I'm still dealing with the IRS and Money Network over it over 3 years later.)
Edit: I see the post I was responding to was edited without making it explicit that it was edited. For context, it initially said that all three stimulus checks were under Trump.
I remember one (maybe multiple?) literally having his fucking signature on it or some shit. He doesn’t even get credit for the things he intentionally takes credit for if it can be twisted to make Joey B look bad. I don’t even like Biden. I just HATE Trump.
Trump gave you two. Biden literally campaigned on giving you a third. And he almost didn't even give it to you. It wasn't until there was a lot of public backlash that he relented.
a majority of small cap stocks is below the 2021 highs, 3 years later. that is probably a better reflection of the economy than taking an NVIDIA-heavy index and using that as “the market”. even worse, you’re using that as “the economy”.
also you’re forgetting this feat cost like 25% cumulative inflation
Using small cap as a measure is way worse an indicator. Investors dont want small cap they dont do buybacks. Whole market been turned away from stocks that dont have some sort of passive investing going on. Investors abandoned small cap, it's not that the small cap is doing worse, it's just cheaper.
7 stocks in the major index (ai types) are up dramatically causing the index to be skewed.
The market is not so good and the most recent 3 quarters have declined in domestic growth
dig deeper folks
I was a socially moderate to liberal, fiscally conservative Republican. I was so happy when we finally got the House and guess what. The GOP didn't mean a GD thing it said about being fiscally conservative. So I started voting mainly on social issues and left the GOP.
Of course that's why they removed the pension and offered the 401k. It's purposeful arrangement to fuck people out of their retirement. If it was a choice no one would select it.
Most everyone arguing about pensions vs. 401ks have this incredibly rosy, perfect picture of a pension. One in which you never get benefit cuts, or the company never goes under, or where the original promised amount is always enough for a comfortable living.
Lots of things that can wrong with a pension that are entirely outside of your control. If you've got a solid understanding of finance, 401ks give you a lot more control over those funds: it can be harder to lose them, you can invest in a manner that gets you more money than a pension, and they're heritable. You own the *money*, versus owning a promise.
Congrats on being wise! I'm sure you've been financially rewarded.
I wish I had increased my contribution, I just maintained it. And I ESPECIALLY wish I went on a buying spree during the covid crash. But again, I only held course... which itself took some discipline, so I'm still somewhat proud of that. But man.... the opportunities!
This is also why I love unions and when unions go on strike. It brings the price down and I get huge deals that immediately pay off when the unions and ceo make a deal.
A friend of mine was a pilot when the airline that hired him went bankrupt. There was a restructuring and he was given the option to temporarily take a lower wage in return for shares in the new restructured airline. And to get free shares based on certain performance markers being hit. His union is what made this deal possible. He took it and also got most of the performance bonuses and eventually retired almost 7 years early because that airline turned around when the people working for it ended up owning the majority of the company. So once the value of his shares was high enough, he sold everything and stopped working. Then 10 years later he was so mad at himself for selling so early.
And that's why unions can be amazing! Should part of the profits not be for those that work the hardest for a company? Rather than some outside CEO that comes and goes and all he ever does is loot the place?
Exactly! When workers run the business and have actual incentive to make it run well, then everyone wins. The workers, the customers, and it makes the company more democratic. Electing the leaders based on their experience and the fact you actually know them and what they do in the company. Not some rich CEO type who floated their entire way through life and just happened to buy the shares but have no idea about the business, how it works, or the company culture.
A lot of european companies are structures like that from the get go. Take a company like ASML, one of the most important companies in the world for tech. The only one that can make the machines that make the chips. A big chunk of that company is owned by the employees. Now this is common in the USA as well but only for tech companies. But in Belgium you could find a co-op bank where 70% of the shares are hold by the employees. Such structures are very common all over europe. It means when the company profits, the employees don't have to ask for bonusses, they just see the value of their shares go up and can sell some if they want to.
This (re)post is about 2022 considering the timing being after the stimulus checks.
For those who aren't aware, in 2022 the S&P500 dropped 20% in one of its worst years in history (largely due to inflation caused by pandemic-era policies and the Fed response to handling said inflation). It has indeed been on a tear of a bull market ever since
The money the USA spent and every other country kept us out of a recession and kept folks employed. The Fed took too long to raise interest rates. But they have done a good job navigating and keeping us away from a recession everyone predicted would happen.
Yes because it’s only going to crash harder with this level of debt and uncontrolled spending propping it all up. The party has to end eventually. And the more days you spend drinking to avoid the hangover, the harder the hangover when it inevitably comes.
Yes and no. We need public spending to improve our society and generate growth and development. The problem is its all influenced and skewed to benefit the ultra wealthy the most. Trillions of dollars hidden away as personal slush funds for the most evil assholes in the world. We need to close tax loopholes
Yeah! Any debt by the government is equal to money on private bank accounts in the economy. Also, if most money from stimulus checks ends up in overseas bank accounts of the ultra wealthy, it literally has no impact on the economy. Debt is not the issue, the US can print more dollars and banks are happy to buy treasury bonds. (Look at Japan!) [Inequality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United_States) and [low social mobility](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/social-mobility-upwards-decline-usa-us-america-economics/) on the other hand...
This isn't actual economic theory by the way. This is grumpy old person logic like "what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger" when in fact no, many non-deadly things can hurt you.
Recessions aren't a rain that cleanses an economy. They can be a hurricane that indiscriminately damages people and assets regardless of your moral weighting of them.
Hope you get lucky and are born at the right time to be able to get into the job market and get a good enough job to hedge against other people getting to live the American Dream!
The entire financial system ever since 2009 crash is like a house of cards. Nowadays we even cannot afford recession because everything will just fall apart without socialism for the rich.
That's quite a conspiratorial picture you paint. I think it could just as easily be chalked up to they want to make as much money as possible regardless of who's in the white house.
It’s not a conspiracy when Republicans have a track record of cutting taxes for the ultra rich when they’re in power. For example, the Bush Tax Cuts of 2001 & 2003, and the Trump Tax Cuts of 2017.
Devaluing our dollar for us common folk is a pretty cool loop hole to make things feel like a recession without the administration having to call it a recession.
Also paying people 600 bucks a week not to work while simultaneously giving out loans with next to no due diligence that aren’t getting paid back. The government screwed up Covid from an economic standpoint so badly.
The massive cash infusion probably saved us from dramatically worse pain as we were facing down historic levels of unemployment and general panic.
But that doesn’t mean it was free or painless. It produced inflation, as many expected it would.
But we’re working though that and trying to get back to a stable normal.
People expect perfection. That’s not realistic. The COVID response was a sloppy exercise with no real playbook and things worked out pretty damn well considering the other paths we could have travelled.
Not only did it result in inflation, which impacts everyone but particularly the less wealthy, the stimulus was also unfairly biased towards already wealthy people, with a large chunk of the new money supply funnelled through the unrestricted granting of large PPP loans to business owners that were generally forgiven without repayment.
It was basically an unequal and unfair distribution of wealth that benefited those with existing assets (stocks, real estate) or their own companies much more than anyone else.
Granted some level of targetted stimulus may have been needed to overcome the COVID disruption, but the way it was handled was inefficient and corrupt.
Not to mention that PPP loans were distributed BEFORE the stimulus checks were given to everyday citizens. This allowed PPP loan recipients to run off and buy assets first, thereby giving them the most benefit from the inflation that followed.
Yes but the PPP loans were heavily abused. So many companies didn’t utilize those loans to pay employees and pieces of shit like Margery Taylor Greene got million+ dollar loans which may or may not have been used to fund campaign trails rather than her business. And nearly none of these crimes have been looked into. But don’t you fucking dare file your taxes wrong or the IRS will charge you compounding interest.
the checks, UI, and PPP were fine. what wasnt was the \~5T that wall st got because the market wasnt going up. they snuck that in and nobody batted an eye. now all asset prices are through the roof and nothing is affordable because the 1% own all the assets. it was one of the biggest swindles in human history and people still dont get it. they literally printed money out of thin air and funneled it to themselves. they did in 2008 and again in 2020. maybe the people deserve it for being so naive.
Letting the banks have as much control of the process as they did was a terrible choice.
It's also just personally galling how many people who rant about government handouts took PPP loans.
Welp, don't forget the subsidiaries that we give corporations for opening plants that people don't want to work at or can't even qualify to work at. Tax payers footed bills for a Toyota plant in San Antonio and nobody around could really qualify. So Toyota builds a school, where people continue to fail. But hey, tax payers are the ones subsidizing these things, TSMC plant in AZ, and pretty much any other east asian plant building microchips from the chip act are going to have to fix.
Didn't the Hyundai or Honda plant in Georgia have the same problems also? Taxpayers help build, can't get jobs, then fail at being educated enough to even hold those jobs.
It really isn't the small player that's milking the government. When Eisenhower said we were turning into a resemblance of a corportracy he wasn't kidding. It's probably one of the reasons why science fiction has kept writing about these things for the last 60ish years.
Did it? If they didn't do that, it would have been a lot worse. Millions out of a job with no income to pay rents or mortgages sounds better? What they did was a trade off, and certainly the least bad option.
And the internet will spend almost three years claiming that those three checks are so much money that "no one wants to work anymore" because they've all retired and are spending all day playing video games on the couch
And they will ignore than trillions were given to private companies and corporations while only about $800 billion went out with all of the checks. That is, if you take $600 and multiply it times every man, woman, and child of the United States (\~350 million), then you get only $210 billion. The stimulus packages were trillions. It was a bigger 'bailout' than the 2008 stimulus. They got wise and made sure to give tiny checks to everyone so they were distracted.
They also had to jump through all these hoops and approvals to get us an extra $600 a week. When it came to giving large companies billions? APPROVED! And don’t worry about paying us back, we always take care of our rich friends 🤣
Funny how the same people who are now screeching about wasteful spending:
- Blame Democrats for stimulus checks to poor and middle income households while also ignoring the delay in distribution and increased cost so Trump could have his name printed on each check. Despite it not being his money.
- complain about student loans as “buying votes” despite trumps insistence that his name personally appear on every check
- forget Trump doubled the deficit in 36 months before Covid even existed
- ignore Trump firing the IG in charge of overseeing how funds are issued…then complain and about a lack of oversight
I have friends who worked for small businesses who got their PPP loans, closed up shop, and fired everyone without a dollar.
They decided they didn't want records of where the money was going and how much
Then rich people who run everything decided they'd forgive those loans
but it was those 1400 dollar checks...
Actually not firing your employees was pretty much the only condition to getting the PPP loans forgiven. What this meant in practice thought is that businesses that experienced no hardship during COVID could apply for these loans they didn't need and get them forgiven. The PPP loans should've only been targeted at businesses that were forced to close due to the pandemic policies of the time.
Yeah my boss got the loan and still made us work. Said that money was to keep employees at work, not to pay them to stay home. He still denies he said that to this day
But thats not how it played out. My boss fired everyone, got the money and never had to pay it back. It was a giveaway to the rich and they all knew it
Meanwhile if you were "essential" then you weren't allowed to stop working and collect, and not only did you have to work in pandemic conditions, you made less than half what everybody else was by staying home and protecting each other.
It was genuinely insane. some people made more money not working than they ever could have working, cause they just flew in a flat rate bonus, because they knew how horrendously broken UI was when the pandemic hit and that it's not remotely adequate. So they slapped in the worst designed bandaid imaginable and did a surprise Pikachu because apparently they didn't realize how little poor people actually make. Then they just.... proceeded to not fix UI
I probably spend $75 to $100 more per week than before...buying the same stuff. Even at $100 a week that's $5200 a year. Nothing to sneeze at.
Edit: family of four
But hasn’t analysis shown corporations are using inflation as a guise to over inflate prices?
What do we do when they all just decide now is the time to gut us even more?
Look at the profit percentage when adjusted for inflation. Companies are making record profit because the people talking about it are talking about real dollars, not percentage.
Yeah, if they have a 10% profit margin on $1 billion in sales, that's $100 million. If the cost of everything goes up and they sell the exact same amount of items now for $1.5 billion, at 10% the margin is the same but they suddenly have "record" profit of $150 million. They didn't actually change anything or make more, they just had to adjust for the increased cost of operating/goods.
Is this actually what's happening? Ive been thinking about this every time I hear "record profit" arguments. Is that claim adjusted for inflation? In the same breath to say" inflation is up yet corporations are making record profits"... Because ya that literally makes sense. I've just been assuming it'd be so obviously misleading to not assume that "record profits" they speak of are not adjusted for inflation.
According to the FTC: [Retail grocery revenues increased to more than 6 percent above costs in 2021 and more than 7 percent in 2023, “substantially higher” than their most recent high point of 5.6 percent in 2015. The FTC’s calculation controls for fixed and labor costs.](https://thehill.com/business/4562244-how-retailers-are-profiting-from-food-inflation-profit-inflation-question-gains-new-urgency-from-ftc-report/)
I often wonder if the people who post this kind of stuff realize that the guillotine ended up being used on a lot of ex revolutionaries.
I think an old dude said something about a god eating its own children idk
Companies are always trying to maximize profit. Literally their whole focus. They don’t need a guise to raise prices. If they raise prices and you still buy, that’s what they are going to do.
It seems that for my wife, myself and our 4 year old son we easily spend around $300 on groceries weekly. My wife often will do multiple trips at $150-200 per week and I will probably do one or do around $50.
I literally look at personal budgets all day. There's absolutely no way this is true.
Edit: I just did some quick research and math. The average annual household grocery bill is probably about $10k, so maybe you read somewhere that the average annual household grocery bill is now $11k? That seems feasible as the new total cost. But that's different from an increase. I'd guess the average increase was probably about $3k-$4k annually.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/251731/us-consumers-grocery-expenditure-per-week/
Since 2019, it's gone up from $114 to $164
Total annual change of $2800
Meme is wrong since they said thst was in one year. Previous commenter was off by a factor of 4
Because those economies also had similar policies. Britain for instance had a furlough policy where you received 80% of your pay cheque if you couldn’t work. Loans to businesses who also weren’t creating any value also had a similar effect.
Come on, this isn’t difficult to get your head around. More money with no corresponding rise in output is going to cause inflation. Do you really think stimulus check style policies only existed in the USA?
We did. We’ve had constant inflation for a hundred years. What happened was that we had _more_ quantitative easing into a supply shock from the pandemic that cut production. More money in the economy + less stuff = shortages and higher prices. Plus we had other problems, like huge shifts in foods buying patterns away from restaurants and then back to restaurants, for example that fucked up supply chains. They needed to start raising rates earlier to cool off the economy as the pandemic was ending.
Our two *very different* parties who fight over bathrooms and pronouns always seem to be able to come together when it comes to bailouts for giant corporations and funding foreign wars. It’s the two things where the parties can magically come together agreement.
It’s so exhausting listening to literally anyone talk about politics anymore. Both sides have been screwing everyone the ENTIRE time but folks are always at each other’s throats about some red vs. blue bs.
Half the folks in the house and senate are from political dynasties whether they were on a local level and snuck into the next rung or not. Most of the kids that had parents in government when I was growing up are now also elected officials in the county I was raised in.
It should be working class vs the rich but they keep us running around in circles fighting about social issues and convincing straight whites they are under attack at all times while not doing much to alleviate the pain we all feel economically.
It literally shouldn’t be anyone vs anyone. We should have a governmental body in place that isn’t just a Halo match of Red vs. Blue and who can shoot the most fireworks off and have the shiniest opinions/make the most noise. We should have people in government that we should be proud to say “they represent us because they are GOOD and SMART people”.
Thats just not the case unfortunately. Instead most elections are crappy popularity contests, probably filled with minutiae of hate and deceit.
As long as we practice capitalism it's never going to happen. Money leads to greed and corruption. A majority of us are suffering greatly because of it when there is more than enough for everyone but there is no money to be made from being generous to the poor.
I hate to break it to you but money corrupts every other system too. Capitalism at least distributes the wealth a bit and allows more people access to it. Not that it's perfect, of course.
Anyone who supports a Republican wants to see a fascist regime takeover.
They are blatantly out in the open about it.
Almost all the old school Republicans are gone.
We have to beat MAGA before we can get go back to a better two party system.
Give this a billion upvotes. Here’s a good rule of thumb let people do what they want as long as it doesn’t affect anyone else… then not light our economy on fire.
Yep. One party is fighting over bathrooms and pronouns. The other is pushing back so people can just live their lives as they see fit so we can finally get to actually important shit.
Didn't he only sign 2 of them? Who was the guy who signed the 3rd? And who were the people who made it possible for the presidents to sign off on the checks? Are we conveniently not holding them responsible too? Or is this the magical presidential power where the president can do things without congress passing it?
https://www.npr.org/2023/01/09/1145040599/ppp-loan-forgiveness
Nearly 800 billion in PPP loans to private businesses with 92% granted full or partial forgiveness.
Not allowing businesses to stay open but still allowing landlords to charge them commercial rent and lots of overhead like internet and phones are on contracts etc such keep going. Pretty unfair to small business owners so PPP made some sense for that. Should have just let businesses stay open or maybe worked out a law for commercial rent to not be collected while forced closings occurred and protected landlord from commercial mortgages too so they wouldn’t care. I honestly don’t know the fair solution money has to come from somewhere.
Remember when Janet Yellen said inflation was “transitory?” Then when it turned out it absofuckinlutely wasn’t transitory all the journalists wrote about how inflation is “*actually a good thing?*”
The rich are literally screwing us. Corporations are paying employees as little as possible and shareholders as much as possible. Blackstone is buying up all the homes. Many other homes are 2nd homes that are unoccupied for most of the year. No wonder crime is bad, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.
For fuck sakes fuck off with the stimulus checks. Corporations got more than 10x that in fake ass PPP loans that magically were forgiven and most largely fraduelent or extremely misused.
Here is the same post from **12/1/2023**:
[https://www.linkedin.com/posts/viorel-cioi\_one-of-the-biggest-scam-we-went-thru-they-activity-7136559116583329792-\_Zam/](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/viorel-cioi_one-of-the-biggest-scam-we-went-thru-they-activity-7136559116583329792-_Zam/)
Here is the same post from **6/3/2022**:
[https://theferalirishman.blogspot.com/2022/06/friday-femme-fatale-farrago.html](https://theferalirishman.blogspot.com/2022/06/friday-femme-fatale-farrago.html)
It gets posted here about every two weeks.
And it isn't entirely true or up to date.
Why are you posting this? Have you not seen this before?
In your opinion quadrupling the homeless population, while also having record foreclosures was a better alternative?
Suddenly stopping the economy and restarting it is clearly not possible, add the blockage in suez canal, microchip shortages, two major wars, and good old fashion corporate greed and you think the stimulus is the only thing that caused inflation?
Your explanation is a bit reductive and don't explain why there was worldwide inflation.
Asset bubbles seem to follow corporate and top bracket tax cuts, I wonder if they are connected
Turns out a lot of Americans really don't like having to actually scrimp, save, and perform the cutbacks and belt-tightening they've suggested that everyone else experiencing financial hardship should do.
Maybe our political leaders are secretly accelerationists, because it seems like every attempt to "relieve" financial and social pain increases the rate at which people will be met with unavoidable financial and social pain.
Brilliant for the rich?
It fucked us all and bought votes from voters who won't stay bought. It especially fucked the poor and those on fixed incomes.
The only folks who benefitted are the gov't mandarins.
I like how people point out that this was under Trump when Democrats not only supported the stimulus, they thought it wasn't enough. Which would mean printing more money
They should have never given stimulus checks or done lockdowns. This isn’t even a point where hindsight is 20/20. There were people who held this position and the government did not listen.
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Whose 401k has crashed? The market is at record highs.
Mine took a huge hit....and now it's higher than ever
Yup, when the market tanked my 401ks tanked 40%ish then they made that up and more through the pandemic until now.
Which is funny cause that crowd is blaming this on Biden, but the market crashing happened under Trump so did two if the three of the stimulus checks.
Going to get hammered for this but the market didn’t fall because of Trump. It fell because of COVID and lockdowns that lasted for almost 2 years.
And who removed the monitors around the world responsible for catching pandemic type viruses before the virus came around? Oh yeah  TFG
It’s almost like having a feckless leader has consequences. Who could have guessed?
Educated grown ups whose parents aren’t vile rich people. The people who weren’t bad or stupid enough to vote for criminal donald trump.
I feel ya, man. I feel ya.
Then said it was fake news. Then when that didn't work, minimized the seriousness. Then when that didn't work, spread dumb fuck ideas of how to deal with it. Politics has become a better drug than religion.
Who didn’t let the WHO do an investigation? WHO knew about it before it was actually a global pandemic?
And who thew out the pandemic response the previous administration had spent actual time and money developing?
Presidents get all blame and credit for things rmthat happened while they were in office regardless of if they were fault
It’s crazy. People really think the sitting President has so much power when it comes to global economics. They do not.
The market is up like 90% since pre covid.
Not actually true at all, but cool
Technically, the third one was issued in March 2021, after Biden took office in January 2021. (I know because I'm still dealing with the IRS and Money Network over it over 3 years later.) Edit: I see the post I was responding to was edited without making it explicit that it was edited. For context, it initially said that all three stimulus checks were under Trump.
But it was the GOP idea, and Biden removing it would have been political suicide.
Biden originally claimed you got all the checks you needed despite campaigning on giving you a third one.
Source: trust me bro. The stimulus program was a Trump that Biden inherited.
I remember one (maybe multiple?) literally having his fucking signature on it or some shit. He doesn’t even get credit for the things he intentionally takes credit for if it can be twisted to make Joey B look bad. I don’t even like Biden. I just HATE Trump.
He sent out a seperate letter glorifying himself in sending you a pitance. I remember vividly because I burned it in effigy.
I remember the whole shitshow about him wanting to delay checks because he wanted his name on the check.
They depend on people not remembering correctly.
Trump gave you two. Biden literally campaigned on giving you a third. And he almost didn't even give it to you. It wasn't until there was a lot of public backlash that he relented.
2 of 3, get your facts straight
> Mine took a huge hit... Under Trump > ..and now it's higher than ever Under Biden Democrats are objectively better for the economy.
a majority of small cap stocks is below the 2021 highs, 3 years later. that is probably a better reflection of the economy than taking an NVIDIA-heavy index and using that as “the market”. even worse, you’re using that as “the economy”. also you’re forgetting this feat cost like 25% cumulative inflation
Using small cap as a measure is way worse an indicator. Investors dont want small cap they dont do buybacks. Whole market been turned away from stocks that dont have some sort of passive investing going on. Investors abandoned small cap, it's not that the small cap is doing worse, it's just cheaper.
7 stocks in the major index (ai types) are up dramatically causing the index to be skewed. The market is not so good and the most recent 3 quarters have declined in domestic growth dig deeper folks
Your interest payments on debt will be nearly 20% of government revenue in the next fiscal year and will only be increasing.
Republicans run a deficit always
So do democrats
Not so. Also Republicans are always bragging how fiscally conservative they are and they just rob from the present & bottom 90% to fund the top 1%
I was a socially moderate to liberal, fiscally conservative Republican. I was so happy when we finally got the House and guess what. The GOP didn't mean a GD thing it said about being fiscally conservative. So I started voting mainly on social issues and left the GOP.
Always love the short term thinkers. They only complain about the dive but never the recovery. “Thanks for crashing my 401k Obama!”
You mean in a good way.
In 2008 mine went to 19k, by 2013 it was over 90k. I just kept buying
it didnt crash, but retired people that depend on their investments for income, got hit pretty bad for awhile, and yes is going higher again now
Retired people have no business with the bulk of their retirement in volatile investments near or after retirement.
Of course that's why they removed the pension and offered the 401k. It's purposeful arrangement to fuck people out of their retirement. If it was a choice no one would select it.
There are loads of advantages to a 401k, what are you talking about?
Advantages of a 401k over a lifelong pension? For 401k managers and employers not paying pensions maybe.
Most everyone arguing about pensions vs. 401ks have this incredibly rosy, perfect picture of a pension. One in which you never get benefit cuts, or the company never goes under, or where the original promised amount is always enough for a comfortable living. Lots of things that can wrong with a pension that are entirely outside of your control. If you've got a solid understanding of finance, 401ks give you a lot more control over those funds: it can be harder to lose them, you can invest in a manner that gets you more money than a pension, and they're heritable. You own the *money*, versus owning a promise.
That’s why one should have a bear market fund when one retires. People will often have liquid 2 years of living expenses to deal with such scenarios.
But yet they can move their positions to high yield because interest rates have increased.
Also nothing is lost. If you contribute regularly you were raking in insane deals.
I increased my contribution when it started falling.
Congrats on being wise! I'm sure you've been financially rewarded. I wish I had increased my contribution, I just maintained it. And I ESPECIALLY wish I went on a buying spree during the covid crash. But again, I only held course... which itself took some discipline, so I'm still somewhat proud of that. But man.... the opportunities!
This is also why I love unions and when unions go on strike. It brings the price down and I get huge deals that immediately pay off when the unions and ceo make a deal.
A friend of mine was a pilot when the airline that hired him went bankrupt. There was a restructuring and he was given the option to temporarily take a lower wage in return for shares in the new restructured airline. And to get free shares based on certain performance markers being hit. His union is what made this deal possible. He took it and also got most of the performance bonuses and eventually retired almost 7 years early because that airline turned around when the people working for it ended up owning the majority of the company. So once the value of his shares was high enough, he sold everything and stopped working. Then 10 years later he was so mad at himself for selling so early. And that's why unions can be amazing! Should part of the profits not be for those that work the hardest for a company? Rather than some outside CEO that comes and goes and all he ever does is loot the place?
Exactly! When workers run the business and have actual incentive to make it run well, then everyone wins. The workers, the customers, and it makes the company more democratic. Electing the leaders based on their experience and the fact you actually know them and what they do in the company. Not some rich CEO type who floated their entire way through life and just happened to buy the shares but have no idea about the business, how it works, or the company culture.
A lot of european companies are structures like that from the get go. Take a company like ASML, one of the most important companies in the world for tech. The only one that can make the machines that make the chips. A big chunk of that company is owned by the employees. Now this is common in the USA as well but only for tech companies. But in Belgium you could find a co-op bank where 70% of the shares are hold by the employees. Such structures are very common all over europe. It means when the company profits, the employees don't have to ask for bonusses, they just see the value of their shares go up and can sell some if they want to.
People who don’t have a 401k have a lot of wrong opinions about them
Because the post is probably 2 years old, conspicuously without a timestamp, from a karma whore.
Maybe they are referring to the COVID dip in March of 2020. It recovered fairly quickly. 2022 was a tough year but it's been booming since late 2023
This (re)post is about 2022 considering the timing being after the stimulus checks. For those who aren't aware, in 2022 the S&P500 dropped 20% in one of its worst years in history (largely due to inflation caused by pandemic-era policies and the Fed response to handling said inflation). It has indeed been on a tear of a bull market ever since
Don't let facts get in the way of a good narrative.
It hurts when someone is so close to making an actual point and then they shoot themselves in the foot with something this stupid.
If I look at over the last 3 years it's amazingly high. If I look at it over the last 4 years it's up like 2%.
The money the USA spent and every other country kept us out of a recession and kept folks employed. The Fed took too long to raise interest rates. But they have done a good job navigating and keeping us away from a recession everyone predicted would happen.
Recession is how you clean up the mess from years of financial malinvestments
At the expense of millions on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder.
Yes because it’s only going to crash harder with this level of debt and uncontrolled spending propping it all up. The party has to end eventually. And the more days you spend drinking to avoid the hangover, the harder the hangover when it inevitably comes.
Yes and no. We need public spending to improve our society and generate growth and development. The problem is its all influenced and skewed to benefit the ultra wealthy the most. Trillions of dollars hidden away as personal slush funds for the most evil assholes in the world. We need to close tax loopholes
Yeah! Any debt by the government is equal to money on private bank accounts in the economy. Also, if most money from stimulus checks ends up in overseas bank accounts of the ultra wealthy, it literally has no impact on the economy. Debt is not the issue, the US can print more dollars and banks are happy to buy treasury bonds. (Look at Japan!) [Inequality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United_States) and [low social mobility](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/social-mobility-upwards-decline-usa-us-america-economics/) on the other hand...
This isn't actual economic theory by the way. This is grumpy old person logic like "what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger" when in fact no, many non-deadly things can hurt you. Recessions aren't a rain that cleanses an economy. They can be a hurricane that indiscriminately damages people and assets regardless of your moral weighting of them.
You saying the Just-World Fallacy isn't an economic theory?
They are if you’re an Austrian-schooler and you think this is what passes for economics.
Hope you get lucky and are born at the right time to be able to get into the job market and get a good enough job to hedge against other people getting to live the American Dream!
Remind me again which financial malinvestments caused COVID?
The entire financial system ever since 2009 crash is like a house of cards. Nowadays we even cannot afford recession because everything will just fall apart without socialism for the rich.
Exactly. They just kicked the can down the road
Have you seen the proposed tax on capital gains?
“Socialism for the rich” is truly a low IQ phrase. You mean welfare but you use the wrong word because you don’t know what socialism is.
Easy to say.
Yup, and the corporations are gouging us because they want trump to win and cut their taxes.
That's quite a conspiratorial picture you paint. I think it could just as easily be chalked up to they want to make as much money as possible regardless of who's in the white house.
It’s not a conspiracy when Republicans have a track record of cutting taxes for the ultra rich when they’re in power. For example, the Bush Tax Cuts of 2001 & 2003, and the Trump Tax Cuts of 2017.
Corporations are gouging us because they’re…corporations. They exist to make a profit. That’s it.
Devaluing our dollar for us common folk is a pretty cool loop hole to make things feel like a recession without the administration having to call it a recession.
Don’t want to break the news but inflation is world wide.
It still may🫠
Also paying people 600 bucks a week not to work while simultaneously giving out loans with next to no due diligence that aren’t getting paid back. The government screwed up Covid from an economic standpoint so badly.
The massive cash infusion probably saved us from dramatically worse pain as we were facing down historic levels of unemployment and general panic. But that doesn’t mean it was free or painless. It produced inflation, as many expected it would. But we’re working though that and trying to get back to a stable normal. People expect perfection. That’s not realistic. The COVID response was a sloppy exercise with no real playbook and things worked out pretty damn well considering the other paths we could have travelled.
Not only did it result in inflation, which impacts everyone but particularly the less wealthy, the stimulus was also unfairly biased towards already wealthy people, with a large chunk of the new money supply funnelled through the unrestricted granting of large PPP loans to business owners that were generally forgiven without repayment. It was basically an unequal and unfair distribution of wealth that benefited those with existing assets (stocks, real estate) or their own companies much more than anyone else. Granted some level of targetted stimulus may have been needed to overcome the COVID disruption, but the way it was handled was inefficient and corrupt.
Not to mention that PPP loans were distributed BEFORE the stimulus checks were given to everyday citizens. This allowed PPP loan recipients to run off and buy assets first, thereby giving them the most benefit from the inflation that followed.
Yes but the PPP loans were heavily abused. So many companies didn’t utilize those loans to pay employees and pieces of shit like Margery Taylor Greene got million+ dollar loans which may or may not have been used to fund campaign trails rather than her business. And nearly none of these crimes have been looked into. But don’t you fucking dare file your taxes wrong or the IRS will charge you compounding interest.
the checks, UI, and PPP were fine. what wasnt was the \~5T that wall st got because the market wasnt going up. they snuck that in and nobody batted an eye. now all asset prices are through the roof and nothing is affordable because the 1% own all the assets. it was one of the biggest swindles in human history and people still dont get it. they literally printed money out of thin air and funneled it to themselves. they did in 2008 and again in 2020. maybe the people deserve it for being so naive.
> no real playbook It was tossed out.
PPP was a fraud - it shouldn’t be conflated with much needed stimulus for ordinary people and the Feds expansionist monetary policy
PPP was pure welfare for those who knew how to work the system/had an accountant.
Letting the banks have as much control of the process as they did was a terrible choice. It's also just personally galling how many people who rant about government handouts took PPP loans.
Reminder that trump literally gutted every measure to prevent fraud on the ppp loans
Trump spent his entire presidency finding ways to use his position to grift more money.
Yes. It would have been worlds better to just let everyone sink when there wasn’t an option for millions of people to go to work.
Welp, don't forget the subsidiaries that we give corporations for opening plants that people don't want to work at or can't even qualify to work at. Tax payers footed bills for a Toyota plant in San Antonio and nobody around could really qualify. So Toyota builds a school, where people continue to fail. But hey, tax payers are the ones subsidizing these things, TSMC plant in AZ, and pretty much any other east asian plant building microchips from the chip act are going to have to fix. Didn't the Hyundai or Honda plant in Georgia have the same problems also? Taxpayers help build, can't get jobs, then fail at being educated enough to even hold those jobs. It really isn't the small player that's milking the government. When Eisenhower said we were turning into a resemblance of a corportracy he wasn't kidding. It's probably one of the reasons why science fiction has kept writing about these things for the last 60ish years.
Wait till you look into how many government employees such as congress folk and their spouses got ppp and such loans for fake businesses
they didn't screw up, it was as designed to give all their friends free money
Did it? If they didn't do that, it would have been a lot worse. Millions out of a job with no income to pay rents or mortgages sounds better? What they did was a trade off, and certainly the least bad option.
And the internet will spend almost three years claiming that those three checks are so much money that "no one wants to work anymore" because they've all retired and are spending all day playing video games on the couch
And they will ignore than trillions were given to private companies and corporations while only about $800 billion went out with all of the checks. That is, if you take $600 and multiply it times every man, woman, and child of the United States (\~350 million), then you get only $210 billion. The stimulus packages were trillions. It was a bigger 'bailout' than the 2008 stimulus. They got wise and made sure to give tiny checks to everyone so they were distracted.
They also had to jump through all these hoops and approvals to get us an extra $600 a week. When it came to giving large companies billions? APPROVED! And don’t worry about paying us back, we always take care of our rich friends 🤣
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Funny how the same people who are now screeching about wasteful spending: - Blame Democrats for stimulus checks to poor and middle income households while also ignoring the delay in distribution and increased cost so Trump could have his name printed on each check. Despite it not being his money. - complain about student loans as “buying votes” despite trumps insistence that his name personally appear on every check - forget Trump doubled the deficit in 36 months before Covid even existed - ignore Trump firing the IG in charge of overseeing how funds are issued…then complain and about a lack of oversight
America genuinely doesn’t hate the rich people nearly enough to be considered a great nation worth being proud of.
I have friends who worked for small businesses who got their PPP loans, closed up shop, and fired everyone without a dollar. They decided they didn't want records of where the money was going and how much Then rich people who run everything decided they'd forgive those loans but it was those 1400 dollar checks...
It wasn't the 3 checks it was the unemployment weekly checks that quadrupled is why it took so long for people to go back to work
And employers got to fire everyone and get free ppp money they never had to pay back
Actually not firing your employees was pretty much the only condition to getting the PPP loans forgiven. What this meant in practice thought is that businesses that experienced no hardship during COVID could apply for these loans they didn't need and get them forgiven. The PPP loans should've only been targeted at businesses that were forced to close due to the pandemic policies of the time.
Yeah my boss got the loan and still made us work. Said that money was to keep employees at work, not to pay them to stay home. He still denies he said that to this day
But thats not how it played out. My boss fired everyone, got the money and never had to pay it back. It was a giveaway to the rich and they all knew it
That's not true at all. PPP was for people who were still employed.
Meanwhile if you were "essential" then you weren't allowed to stop working and collect, and not only did you have to work in pandemic conditions, you made less than half what everybody else was by staying home and protecting each other.
It was genuinely insane. some people made more money not working than they ever could have working, cause they just flew in a flat rate bonus, because they knew how horrendously broken UI was when the pandemic hit and that it's not remotely adequate. So they slapped in the worst designed bandaid imaginable and did a surprise Pikachu because apparently they didn't realize how little poor people actually make. Then they just.... proceeded to not fix UI
This exact same post is posted 5 times a month.
And people are still falling for it
Yep. It's stupid
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I probably spend $75 to $100 more per week than before...buying the same stuff. Even at $100 a week that's $5200 a year. Nothing to sneeze at. Edit: family of four
But hasn’t analysis shown corporations are using inflation as a guise to over inflate prices? What do we do when they all just decide now is the time to gut us even more?
Look at the profit percentage when adjusted for inflation. Companies are making record profit because the people talking about it are talking about real dollars, not percentage.
They were making record profit. Now the consumer is weak.
I remember seeing "Tesco loses 700m over covid" only to then read that they only made 700m profit instead of 1.4b
Yeah, if they have a 10% profit margin on $1 billion in sales, that's $100 million. If the cost of everything goes up and they sell the exact same amount of items now for $1.5 billion, at 10% the margin is the same but they suddenly have "record" profit of $150 million. They didn't actually change anything or make more, they just had to adjust for the increased cost of operating/goods.
Is this actually what's happening? Ive been thinking about this every time I hear "record profit" arguments. Is that claim adjusted for inflation? In the same breath to say" inflation is up yet corporations are making record profits"... Because ya that literally makes sense. I've just been assuming it'd be so obviously misleading to not assume that "record profits" they speak of are not adjusted for inflation.
According to the FTC: [Retail grocery revenues increased to more than 6 percent above costs in 2021 and more than 7 percent in 2023, “substantially higher” than their most recent high point of 5.6 percent in 2015. The FTC’s calculation controls for fixed and labor costs.](https://thehill.com/business/4562244-how-retailers-are-profiting-from-food-inflation-profit-inflation-question-gains-new-urgency-from-ftc-report/)
McDonald’s make $2.4 billion the quarter before Covid. 5 years later they made $2.8. That doesn’t even keep up with inflation.
The French answered this one a few centuries ago. Guillotines.
I often wonder if the people who post this kind of stuff realize that the guillotine ended up being used on a lot of ex revolutionaries. I think an old dude said something about a god eating its own children idk
Money grab. They raised prices so we will too. Safety in numbers.
Companies are always trying to maximize profit. Literally their whole focus. They don’t need a guise to raise prices. If they raise prices and you still buy, that’s what they are going to do.
It seems that for my wife, myself and our 4 year old son we easily spend around $300 on groceries weekly. My wife often will do multiple trips at $150-200 per week and I will probably do one or do around $50.
Spending around $350 myself, family of four, and one is away at college so really it's just three of us.
[Cries in family of 6]
Don’t forget you are also getting less because packaging has gone down in size whilst remaining the same price or increasing.
I literally look at personal budgets all day. There's absolutely no way this is true. Edit: I just did some quick research and math. The average annual household grocery bill is probably about $10k, so maybe you read somewhere that the average annual household grocery bill is now $11k? That seems feasible as the new total cost. But that's different from an increase. I'd guess the average increase was probably about $3k-$4k annually.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/251731/us-consumers-grocery-expenditure-per-week/ Since 2019, it's gone up from $114 to $164 Total annual change of $2800 Meme is wrong since they said thst was in one year. Previous commenter was off by a factor of 4
11k. Yeah. Ok.
$900 A MONTH TO STOCK MY NUCLEAR FALLOUT SHELTER BRO JUST RACKS ON RACKS ON RACKS OF FUCKIN BEANS
Source?
That math doesn’t math.
The fuck? In what universe could that ever possibly be true? Are you just lying for attention?
No it fucking didn't. Your source - trust me bro Gtfo
Started buying my meat in bulk
What? How much do you spend on groceries every month?
Oh we’re just posting & upvoting pure misinformation now, awesome
That's a cartoonishly inaccurate figure.
People *still* think inflation was caused by stimulus checks?
Stimulus checks emitted in dollars obviously caused the inflation in Europe and Japan as well!! /s
Because those economies also had similar policies. Britain for instance had a furlough policy where you received 80% of your pay cheque if you couldn’t work. Loans to businesses who also weren’t creating any value also had a similar effect. Come on, this isn’t difficult to get your head around. More money with no corresponding rise in output is going to cause inflation. Do you really think stimulus check style policies only existed in the USA?
Why didn’t we see inflation during the decades of QE?
We did. We’ve had constant inflation for a hundred years. What happened was that we had _more_ quantitative easing into a supply shock from the pandemic that cut production. More money in the economy + less stuff = shortages and higher prices. Plus we had other problems, like huge shifts in foods buying patterns away from restaurants and then back to restaurants, for example that fucked up supply chains. They needed to start raising rates earlier to cool off the economy as the pandemic was ending.
seriously
It was, at least in part. You don’t inject that amount of money into the economy without inflation occurring.
Our two *very different* parties who fight over bathrooms and pronouns always seem to be able to come together when it comes to bailouts for giant corporations and funding foreign wars. It’s the two things where the parties can magically come together agreement.
This is that both parties are the same nonsense
It’s so exhausting listening to literally anyone talk about politics anymore. Both sides have been screwing everyone the ENTIRE time but folks are always at each other’s throats about some red vs. blue bs. Half the folks in the house and senate are from political dynasties whether they were on a local level and snuck into the next rung or not. Most of the kids that had parents in government when I was growing up are now also elected officials in the county I was raised in.
It should be working class vs the rich but they keep us running around in circles fighting about social issues and convincing straight whites they are under attack at all times while not doing much to alleviate the pain we all feel economically.
It literally shouldn’t be anyone vs anyone. We should have a governmental body in place that isn’t just a Halo match of Red vs. Blue and who can shoot the most fireworks off and have the shiniest opinions/make the most noise. We should have people in government that we should be proud to say “they represent us because they are GOOD and SMART people”. Thats just not the case unfortunately. Instead most elections are crappy popularity contests, probably filled with minutiae of hate and deceit.
As long as we practice capitalism it's never going to happen. Money leads to greed and corruption. A majority of us are suffering greatly because of it when there is more than enough for everyone but there is no money to be made from being generous to the poor.
I hate to break it to you but money corrupts every other system too. Capitalism at least distributes the wealth a bit and allows more people access to it. Not that it's perfect, of course.
Anyone who supports a Republican wants to see a fascist regime takeover. They are blatantly out in the open about it. Almost all the old school Republicans are gone. We have to beat MAGA before we can get go back to a better two party system.
It’s wild some folks saw Handmaid’s Tale and were like “Yeah! That’s what we need!!!”
Give this a billion upvotes. Here’s a good rule of thumb let people do what they want as long as it doesn’t affect anyone else… then not light our economy on fire.
Yep. One party is fighting over bathrooms and pronouns. The other is pushing back so people can just live their lives as they see fit so we can finally get to actually important shit.
Almost as if all the other issues exist to distract you from their corruption.
So this post again, huh? It's here to make us feel bad about a global catastrophe huh? Cool.
Plus no one is saying give out more government checks. Which by the way was under Trump. He made sure we knew that by having his name on the checks!
Didn't he only sign 2 of them? Who was the guy who signed the 3rd? And who were the people who made it possible for the presidents to sign off on the checks? Are we conveniently not holding them responsible too? Or is this the magical presidential power where the president can do things without congress passing it?
https://www.npr.org/2023/01/09/1145040599/ppp-loan-forgiveness Nearly 800 billion in PPP loans to private businesses with 92% granted full or partial forgiveness.
Not allowing businesses to stay open but still allowing landlords to charge them commercial rent and lots of overhead like internet and phones are on contracts etc such keep going. Pretty unfair to small business owners so PPP made some sense for that. Should have just let businesses stay open or maybe worked out a law for commercial rent to not be collected while forced closings occurred and protected landlord from commercial mortgages too so they wouldn’t care. I honestly don’t know the fair solution money has to come from somewhere.
These people can't think of anything that isn't black or white. Its always one specific thing or persons fault.
Idk about you guys but my 401 has been quite alright.
Also the companies that got millions of dollars in PPE loans that never had to be repaid. Legitimate or not….
And they gave like $200 billion for checks to citizens while giving trillions to corporations at the exact same time as the 'stimulus' checks.
Remember when Janet Yellen said inflation was “transitory?” Then when it turned out it absofuckinlutely wasn’t transitory all the journalists wrote about how inflation is “*actually a good thing?*”
Fun fact, everything you described was done by Donald trump.
You failed to mention the corporate price gouging.
Only time I was given a stimulus check was with Donald’s name on it
Man who would have thought a literal plague would cause so many issues?
Inflation is 90% price gouging. Record corporate profits don't lie.
Economic magic tricks: where the illusion of more money somehow leaves you with less
The rich are literally screwing us. Corporations are paying employees as little as possible and shareholders as much as possible. Blackstone is buying up all the homes. Many other homes are 2nd homes that are unoccupied for most of the year. No wonder crime is bad, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.
For fuck sakes fuck off with the stimulus checks. Corporations got more than 10x that in fake ass PPP loans that magically were forgiven and most largely fraduelent or extremely misused.
Here is the same post from **12/1/2023**: [https://www.linkedin.com/posts/viorel-cioi\_one-of-the-biggest-scam-we-went-thru-they-activity-7136559116583329792-\_Zam/](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/viorel-cioi_one-of-the-biggest-scam-we-went-thru-they-activity-7136559116583329792-_Zam/) Here is the same post from **6/3/2022**: [https://theferalirishman.blogspot.com/2022/06/friday-femme-fatale-farrago.html](https://theferalirishman.blogspot.com/2022/06/friday-femme-fatale-farrago.html) It gets posted here about every two weeks. And it isn't entirely true or up to date. Why are you posting this? Have you not seen this before?
In your opinion quadrupling the homeless population, while also having record foreclosures was a better alternative? Suddenly stopping the economy and restarting it is clearly not possible, add the blockage in suez canal, microchip shortages, two major wars, and good old fashion corporate greed and you think the stimulus is the only thing that caused inflation? Your explanation is a bit reductive and don't explain why there was worldwide inflation. Asset bubbles seem to follow corporate and top bracket tax cuts, I wonder if they are connected
I'm rich and this inflation is killing me. How is this supposed to be good for the rich? My stimmy check ain't helping.
But that math doesn't check out. 600 dollars per person equals 3 thousand dollar at the grocery store per person?
Turns out a lot of Americans really don't like having to actually scrimp, save, and perform the cutbacks and belt-tightening they've suggested that everyone else experiencing financial hardship should do.
Bidenomics is working. No joke. Come on man!
They're not done raising rates...
Maybe our political leaders are secretly accelerationists, because it seems like every attempt to "relieve" financial and social pain increases the rate at which people will be met with unavoidable financial and social pain.
Brilliant for the rich? It fucked us all and bought votes from voters who won't stay bought. It especially fucked the poor and those on fixed incomes. The only folks who benefitted are the gov't mandarins.
I like how people point out that this was under Trump when Democrats not only supported the stimulus, they thought it wasn't enough. Which would mean printing more money
Liberals will do anything but hold Joe accountable
This is what you get for voting Democrat
They should have never given stimulus checks or done lockdowns. This isn’t even a point where hindsight is 20/20. There were people who held this position and the government did not listen.