There’s a reason the U.S. economy soared and others were mediocre ( www.washingtonpost.com )

potatopotato , 6 months ago

This is celebrating home values skyrocketing and making people “feel rich” but that’s going to be one of the biggest antagonists to personal wealth growth for the lower 90% for the next decade. Literally nobody but the top 10% can transact in the housing market anymore and everyone will slowly be turned into renters if it continues to be a lucrative way to extract wealth from the masses.

some_guy , 6 months ago

Still trying to sell people that they’re better off than before the pan. I am. I got a new job with better benefits. But I got laid-off in two rounds of downsizing before that happened. And I’m sure not everyone who was laid-off has done better since. And the internet tells me people feel squeezed.

If the article said that things didn’t go south as much as we’d feared, I might believe it. But they keep reporting fucking miracles. And I don’t believe in miracles. I can see why conspiracy people feel alienated from news media (I’m not a conspiracy person).

davel , 6 months ago

If you aren’t landed gentry then you aren’t relevant; the adults are speaking. Stock and real estate line go up, so the economy is great.

Michael Hudson: Asset-Price Inflation and Rent Seeking

The key to understanding the U.S. economy is not so much GDP as capital (asset-price) gains and the offsetting debt burden financing these gains. This financialized overhead is not real growth. It does not make the economy richer. This paper explains why, and provides a statistical format to measure the magnitude of rent extraction or the [finance, insurance and real estate] sector on the “product” side of the economy, deflating disposable personal income available to spend on goods and services, and capital gains on the “total returns” side, so as to show how most wealth is achieved not by actual production but by increasingly debt-financed asset-price inflation.