Noise in the Markets?

Too big to fail...

Well, that isn't exactly the case, but some of these banks might be too big to be allowed to fail, so they will get bailouts. Which is likely what is going to be on the cards with the high chance of Credit Suisse close to failing, after circling the drain for months now. For those counting, the bank has been around for 166 years and manages about 1.5 trillion in capital.

That's going to make a bit of a dent.

Especially since Deutsche Bank is close on its heels.

But you know -

the economy is fine. It works perfectly. Don't worry, it'll recover.

And it will. This is all just part of the game that bankers play with our lives, because in a very direct sense, it is the financial economy that controls all of us, but also in very indirect ways - like the war in Ukraine or the crime on our streets, the education and healthcare systems and our ability to be employed, or run a business. Everything is affected.

Over the last half a century, most of the financial growth innovation hasn't been in developing business capabilities, it has been in developing financial vehicles that do not produce anything at all, other than money for those who have access to them. And then, they wonder why the economic collapses are so catastrophic. When nothing of value is being produced but money is being generated, the system is going to become increasingly unstable, as that money is pushed into what is ownable, like real estate and producing businesses.

Imagine it is like trading in shells and you live in the rainforest and produce tools, and I live on the coast and have access to millions of shells. As long as you are happy taking shells, I am able to keep buying whatever you produce. However, now that you have all those shells, what are you going to do with them? Make a necklace? While it might be pretty, it doesn't fill your stomach, nor does it help you hunt.

That is what most of the financial market is doing -

generating shells.

They then convince us that these shells are important and use them to buy into the businesses that produce what we value - making us pay the shells back to them with some extra profit on top, while they are still harvesting more shells off the beach. No matter what we do, they will have an increasing number of shells and because we buy into the economy, we keep accepting them as payment for our time, energy and skills to work in the companies to produce something that we will have to pay more for, than what we were paid to produce it. It is the only way for a company to make profit, isn't it?

While an individual might be able to "beat the system" through various financial practices, on average, we are all going to lose, because the system is designed to pool purchase power into the pockets of those who are also able to collect as many shells as they want. So, we have to keep playing the game of trailing behind, in the hope that their overstuffed pockets will spill some shells into our path, that we are going to use to buy back from the businesses they already own anyway - putting it straight back in top their pants, albeit in new pants that have deeper pockets.

And when these banks fail, they are bailed out by...

Us.

To stop "disruption" to the system, the governments reward the banks' failure by giving them more money and saying, Don't lose it this time. It is like giving a drug addict a hundred and saying, Don't buy drugs with this.

So, then they take the "loan" from us, given to them by the governments and use it to generate more profit for themselves, using similar financial vehicles that led to the last failure. But for a time, they are able to pound away and generate some more profits, so it will fool people into thinking that this time they are not longer addicts and this time, they are going to do what is right.

No - they never will.

They are businesses that are designed to make profit, and they are businesses that do not care how they do it, as long as it maximizes their generative ability. This means that they will continually be incentivized to make money where the fence is at its lowest, which is in places that don't have to build anything of practical value.

We see the same thing in crypto, where +90% of the tokens have absolutely no product whatsoever but people are still hyping them on Twitter. If it is being hyped on Twitter, it is most likely going to produce nothing - especially if the ones doing the hyping are the development team. Development teams shouldn't be hyping, they should be building products and services that people love so much, that their customers will do the hyping for them.

Good luck with that.

Even when the economy is "healthy" it is failing, because it isn't doing the fundamental task that an economy needs to do, which is make our lives better. It incentivizes the wrong kinds of behaviors at all kinds of levels, where CEOs are paid 1000x their average employee, a football star earns the same as 500 nurses, and the investment goes into bailing out banks for hundreds of billions, but a cancer researcher can't even get a grant for a few thousand to support their work.

Perhaps it has to be this way, because we are too idiotic as a species to work out a way that actually empowers us on average, rather than disenfranchises us on average. Perhaps the 99% are destined to be beggars and dependents, because we are unable to understand that we have the option to be other. WE might very well just be like the trained fleas, where after hitting our head on the lid of the jar a couple times, we will be conditioned to never jump any higher than that again.

I don't know about you,

But I am tired.

There must be an alternative that works, right?

If it isn't working toward a better world - It is all just noise.

Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]