Gen-X, having lived through 1987 (Black Monday), ~2000 Dot-Com Bubble burst , 2008 global financial meltdown, and the 2020 COVID-19 crash:

post
It’s all funny money that never existed to begin with lol.
True, but as what happend in the dot com bubble, the middle and lower classes will pay. If you lived in a tech area during the bubble burst then, you'll know how bad this is going to be worldwide.
So what to do if I suspect a bubble is coming? Sell my investment funds and keep fiat? Buy gold? Buy merchandise to sell later? Buy real estate?
I have no idea how to prepare.
If you see risk being very high, make low risk investments: high yield savings accounts, CDs, bonds.
CDs? Damn I have a bunch of CDs with music, games. I'm gonna be rich.
On the real, I've heard the used CD market is making a massive comeback. There's something to be said about physical media in the age of internet becoming more and more scary.
Bonds? Just not US bonds. Trump says he can take care of US debt with inflation, no problem.
Unless you’re retiring in the next 5-10 years, it’s probably best to stand pat or shift some % out of large-cap funds to mid-caps. But the old adage usually holds true: “time in the market beats timing the market.” In other words, pulling it all out is way harder to get right than just leaving it in.
(Your choice- I am not a financial advisor)
My plan is just to cry.
Depends how wealthy you are. If you're wealthy and even remotely intelligent this is where you make even more money. Wealthy people will diversify, they'll sell some of their tech stocks and put it into anything not related to AI. Be it oil or manufacturing or agriculture etc. Then they liquidate those stocks (or loan against them, depending on how wealthy we're talking about) to buy up tech stock when they've crashed. You then wait a few years and make money.
If you're not wealthy enough to do that put your money into something stable, like bonds. If you want to be sure you won't lose money (in the sense that the amount of money you put in won't go below what you put in, it can still lose value due to inflation) your bank probably offers term deposits where you let your bank reserve your money for a few years and in return they guarantee something like a 2% annual return on your deposit.
And if you're not wealthy enough to do that... You're pretty much fucked. Learn to cook and enjoy cheap meals, start budgeting right now, forget enjoyment and hope you don't get fired.
buy the dip (not financial advice)
OK I went to the store and bought some queso dip... Now what?
Not financial advise but I personally decided to keep my money in MSCI World ex USA ETFand some gold + Stoxx 600. For now it seems my strategy is working. Will see where we go from here
Pay down short term debt.
Build emergency funds.
What short time debt?
Opposite to long term debt.
Long term is mortgages, loans with fixed terms.
Short term is credit cards, pay day loans, overdrafts, stuff like klana etc.
Get those cleared so that the money you earn stays as yours and you're not paying interest on debt. Once that's done the money were paying to other people can go into high interest savings so you start earning interest on it, and act as a buffer to stop you going back into debt in the future
Gold not silver small portions is ok, bonds because different types are liquid govt backed interest, real estate is always good they don't make more land, staying liquid is ideal. The most money is made during down turns if you buy right. Don't time the market it'll never happen. Instead grow steady of buy whole under valued assets.
Ohh absolutely, it was devastating to watch, and then to see corporations being bailed out because they were too big to fail. The big question is, is this really the start of a serious crash where the circle jerk of circular money pumped between 4-5 megacorps comes to an end, or do things really go crashing down from here. You need sanity to stabilize…the nuts have spun off the lugs that were holding the wheels of the economy to the hub…i think one wheel just wobbled a little…
I hope you're not excited for that to happen is what I'm saying. Even if you're not American, you will feel this.
There won't be an AI bailout as with the auto industry and banking. AI hate is bipartisan and no national-level politician is dumb enough to throw public money at them. They're not a huge employment/manufacturing concern like autos and they're not the backbone of our financial system.
(And once again, I love your lug nut analogy, spot on!)
Greetings again 👋
Yah I agree, I don’t think it will be a traditional bailout like the auto industry though which was forgivable loans, I think it’ll likely come in the form of additional stock purchases by the US government, which is wild when you think about it.
They’re not a huge employment/manufacturing concern like autos and they’re not the backbone of our financial system.
No but they (AI companies and those claiming to be one including chip companies) directly influence the stock market, and this administration is having its day manipulating the hell out of it making a ton of money along the way. So if there is a way for the to make money on it, it will absolutely happen. Also the chip companies have national defense interests and so it’ a similar scenario as the DOD’s mission can not ever be hampered lol. The line must go up lol.
Ha! And thank you.
One sticking point, Trump can't spend that kind of money and he's about to lose the House and possibly the Senate.
and then will there be jobs?
You would assume so…but who knows. We have a wanna be dictator at the helm in the US that has the mental capacity of goldfish, so fiscal responsibility isn’t exactly this administrations forte!
I forsee layoffs instead of more jobs.
It is quite possible, the giant hiring spree during covid and immediately after was never going to last unfortunately. Maybe after the midterms things will change in a positive direction.
They are desperately trying to stave off the crash until Democrats have a majority so it can be blamed on the Democrats.
Ahh good point, it is certainly a method that works for them since they really don’t have much else to campaign on.
While that has worked in the past, I don’t think it’s gonna fly this time.
Optics matter and right now GOP are far more all in on AI, it’s also Cheeto’s halfway point, things crashing badly with Dems having some power won’t look like it’s the Dems in control.
The fact that the economy took a bad turn right when he came into office is an association that most people won’t forget.
What a terrible insult to goldfish.
It is, but there is no reason to be coy about it.
Think it might bounce back one more time?
Crashes usually include a few sharp rallys
Absolutely will, lot of financial institutions still need to finish offloading their shit on the rubes and they need another big IPO for that. All bets are off after that though
Oh no, my life savings (2 sticks of DDR5) will decrease in value.
This was the most pathetic economic bubble I've ever been a part of
Fully agree. At least in the past bubbles, some parts of it trickled to the rest of the economy and we had a societal bonanza.
During the dotcom bubble you could start a company and make millions out of thin air, you'd pay your engineers ridiculous amounts and everyone could get a job.
During the housing bubble everyone could get loans and buy a house, live a decent life for a moment. Real economy, not just Wall Street, was soaring.
AI bubble? Layoffs for everyone. Sense of impending doom all around. Clear signs of financial manipulation directly in front of us. Egomaniac CEOs being obnoxious. Inflation racing. Fucking lame, kill it now, please and let's start over.
All of these of course resulted in misery, and it'll come again. But fuck it, at least the other bubbles were fun.
This one has seemed to be a bubble of stupid by stupid. Like 90% of humanity straight up sat this one out because it sounds like a bad idea, but somehow it'll crash global economies anyway.
Other bubbles were reasonably hidden, or had some surprise elements, but we've all been watching and talking amongst ourselves about this one.
It's like watching a degenerate gambler keep going after everyone at the table and even a couple of people walking by have tried to intervene.
Pathetic indeed.
No bailouts for these leeches
WE.ALL.SAW.THIS.COMING.
It's legit crazy how financially illiterate top executives can sometimes be.
In a company I worked for, they decided to stop using on-prem systems and move them to cloud servers. I made a rough calculation on a coffee break with colleagues that the move increases costs by roughly 10 times. It was unbelievable and all we could do was laugh.
Some 4 months later it was announced that the cloud systems are to be decommissioned due to costs and employees have to find a way to do the same things on their laptops (which will be upgraded if needed). I still cannot wrap my head around it, there must have been some nasty politics or absolute numeral illiteracy going on in the background.
I worked in the title insurance industry around 2005, data entry. So I saw thousands of mortgages being issued every week, and my job was to data enter mortgage details and data enter the research showing clear title of the property.
I was 19 years old and renting a studio apartment and even I was shocked that every. Single. Mortgage had an adjustable rate or balloon rider on it. Reading the terms of those I was thinking how the hell will any of these people make their mortage payments in 4 or 5 years?
When I would talk to people older than me with homes and investments they would get genuinely upset and tell me I couldn't possibly understand, the banks know what they are doing. Ok.
nasty politics or absolute numeral illiteracy
Or kickbacks from the cloud service providers.
Well, some of the C-level executives had shady ties to cloud companies..
I'm currently wearing my entirely-unsurprised-face. Look, I'm never going to be an advocate of the dystopic post-capitalistic hellscape of Cyberpunk, but there's something to be said for a Militech-style severance package.
"I was hoping to reach Anthony Gilchrist on this number," said Faraday tentatively.
"I'd tell you that I regret to inform you that I just executed Mr. Gilchrist in his office for violations of corporate policy five minutes ago," replied Meredith Stout smugly, "but then I'd be lying."
"About executing him?" asked Faraday cautiously.
"About regretting it."
I would be dramatically less upset if I was surprised. Its painful to of shouted this from the rooftops for what feels like years now, only to be dismissed so easily. What males it even more painful is its the same idiots that where so desperate for nfts to work because their lives are so pathetic the only way they can see it improving is yoloing it on some tiktok fad they just learned about a week ago.
The same people that are desperately defending ai on every turn desperately need it to work because they have taken full bait on the scam. They probably bought some 10k course from the PDB podcast or something like that on "how to get rich quick with ai for dummies" and then wasted 7.5k in tokens to make a web wrapper that sends all user input to Claude and does literally nothing. All their retirements are getting fucked by ai and they probably dumped all their personal savings into ai stocks. Literally the whole american economy is held up by a scam and instead of looking at death in the eye people rather claim ignorance and get mad and upset when you point out the truth.
I rapidly flip between "everyone is just misguided and have been intentionally deprived of good information", and "oh god the stupid people are running the planet, they are lesser beings who only prevent progress." And that usually just depends on my mood.
I just don't understand how practically every business in recent times has operated on this model, and its not just obvious to everyone that this is the new scam to siphon money out of you instead of a real grass roots business that has actual real proven thing.
I think they saw it coming as well.
There is a song playing, fewer chairs than people running and it is about to stop. They want to earn money and hope they are not the last one to sit.
They are playing a game and they know it
They saw it coming. This is a legal bank heist. The ultra rich rob the banks then will cry poverty (to big to fail) and demand to be rescued only rob the banks again another day. This isn't the first time they've pulled this scheme, it won't be the last. As long as it keeps working they'll keep doing it.
the AI
boombubble


top 96 comments