The Business/Finance/Economics Thread | Page 59 | Vital Football

The Business/Finance/Economics Thread

BodyButter said:
I just can't imagine any kind of scenario which could manage this crisis in China. The US used the TARP program to draw a line under the subprime mortgage crisis. Those homes that were sold to buyers with subprime loans were houses that real people could live in.

A lot of these Chinese developments were built as new cities in the middle of nowhere. They were bought by investors, often families clubbing together their life savings to make a safe investment. There were also a lot of companies who set up property investment funds so that people with small amounts of saving could benefit from the real estate boom.

The savings of the nation have been wiped out in one go with this property bubble bursting. There are going to be 1.4bn people very angry and looking for someone to blame.

I can't see any way in which the CCP can manage this crisis so I suspect they are getting overthrown by the end of the decade.
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An overthrow of the CCP would bring massive instability in China. Nobody likes them, but at least you know who and what you are dealing with. An overthrow would create a massive vacuum, and if t think it's bad now, you ain't seen nothing yet.
 
wittonite said:
An overthrow of the CCP would bring massive instability in China. Nobody likes them, but at least you know who and what you are dealing with. An overthrow would create a massive vacuum, and if t think it's bad now, you ain't seen nothing yet.
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Yep. I think we have seen the peak of China for a long time. The scale of the malinvestment is off the charts.
 
I think China's GDP growth figures are a sham as well, their economy is growing a lot more slowly than the data suggests. They are in big trouble.

The question for me though is whether the CCP can ever be overthrown. They have too much power and influence in all forms of politics, incredible levels of surveillance and enough brutality to stop most forms of rebellion. What happened in Hong Kong is a pretty good microcosm of what would happen in mainland China.

I also wonder how the Chinese would organise in the absence of communism. There will a small number of people who remember the pre Mao years but those memories would be China under the thumb of the Japanese. I think religion would actually play a strong role in any alternative. This is heavily suppressed in China but still very much active, there's a lot of Buddhists in China.
 
Pangloss said:
I think China's GDP growth figures are a sham as well, their economy is growing a lot more slowly than the data suggests. They are in big trouble.

The question for me though is whether the CCP can ever be overthrown. They have too much power and influence in all forms of politics, incredible levels of surveillance and enough brutality to stop most forms of rebellion. What happened in Hong Kong is a pretty good microcosm of what would happen in mainland China.

I also wonder how the Chinese would organise in the absence of communism. There will a small number of people who remember the pre Mao years but those memories would be China under the thumb of the Japanese. I think religion would actually play a strong role in any alternative. This is heavily suppressed in China but still very much active, there's a lot of Buddhists in China.
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Every statistic from China is political. It's either the CCP trying to inflate their success or the outside world trying to diminish their success.

Even their population numbers are dodgy.

I'd imagine their military is completely incompetent and the vast majority of their weapons don't function properly.

I think we are going to see a spectacular bursting of a bubble unlike anything we have ever seen.
 
Wonder what y'all think of the likes of Nvidia and Microsoft. I am about to sign on the dotted line for one of these AI leaders so I'll be handed a fist full of stock in a year.

Looking at the Nvidia run up is just sensational. 10,000 in this 5 years ago would be a very healthy wedge.
 
CDX_EIRE said:
Wonder what y'all think of the likes of Nvidia and Microsoft. I am about to sign on the dotted line for one of these AI leaders so I'll be handed a fist full of stock in a year.

Looking at the Nvidia run up is just sensational. 10,000 in this 5 years ago would be a very healthy wedge.
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Microsoft have very impressive AI capability which is superior to Google and they are also going to completely reinvigorate search as a result, Bing is already increasing it's share of search.

Nvidia is the engine of AI with products like CUDA and the like. These sorts of products allow AI tasks to be distributed across multiple GPU cores for super fast computation.
 
I see Britain is in recession. That goes along with China, Germany, Japan, Italy and a lot of the rest of the world. The American domestic economy is booming but there isn't much other good news out there economically.

I think demographics has a lot to do with it. Apart from America, sub-shaharan Africa and a few countries here and there, most of the world is already in demographic decline. Their populations are getting old and there aren't enough people in the generations below them to replace their spending power.

I think we are facing into a very long period of economic stagnation where the world tries (and fails) to generate economic growth for decades (see Japan since the 90s).

I don't know how this situation resolves itself. Perhaps in 50 years when the population levels out and there is abundant housing and well paid jobs, people will start having more kids again?
 
CDX_EIRE said:
Wonder what y'all think of the likes of Nvidia and Microsoft. I am about to sign on the dotted line for one of these AI leaders so I'll be handed a fist full of stock in a year.

Looking at the Nvidia run up is just sensational. 10,000 in this 5 years ago would be a very healthy wedge.
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I think the AI hype is overblown. It's estimated that $3bn has been spent on developing fully autonomous vehicles and we are still nowhere near having fully self-driving cars. Silicon Valley is a hype machine that never delivers on its promises.

Still, that doesn't mean that Nvidia won't sell a shit load of chips to every Tom, Dick and Harry who can sell AI dreams to investors (and probably Adam Newman).

Share price line that go straight up like Nvidia's scare me.
 
One of the stock market guys I follow reckons we are heading for a huge stock market bust by the summer. It's rare to see him so firm on anything. He said he is still actively invested in the market but is preparing to exit as soon as the indicators turn (he does technical trading).

If you want further proof that the market has gone mad, Bitcoin (the shitest of all dog shit) is at record highs.

That doesn't mean you can't make money while the sun shines but when the market turns, get out fast.
 
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BodyButter said:
I think the AI hype is overblown. It's estimated that $3bn has been spent on developing fully autonomous vehicles and we are still nowhere near having fully self-driving cars. Silicon Valley is a hype machine that never delivers on its promises.

Still, that doesn't mean that Nvidia won't sell a shit load of chips to every Tom, Dick and Harry who can sell AI dreams to investors (and probably Adam Newman).

Share price line that go straight up like Nvidia's scare me.
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AI seems to be different, Microsoft is going to roll out copilot with M365. I see people complaining about Google being too woke to produce reliable AI but Microsoft is. Copilot can build charts in excel with prompts.

All these data center whores are x2 and x3-ing their programmes over the next 5 years. Construction companies are already constrained.

I don't know what its going to take to tank the economy here. Construction drives so many industries when its roaring and it is absolutely booming. Which frightens the life out of me as Celtic tiger cub going to school for construction management in the deepest recession ever.

As a side note the stock market does look like its running hot. The 3y to 5y charts for the likes of Nvidia and Microsoft is insanity. The last 6 months for these companies even looks crazy.
 
Nvidia share price declined last night for the first time in weeks. A slight pause in the bull run or the exhaustion of the rally?

Monday will be interesting.
 
I wonder if Biden is going to kill off Aviators. He has to be the least cool guy on the planet and he loves those sunglasses.
 
Just saw a guy talking about his company's rental portfolio. They have 10,000 rental properties in the US. The rate of 'move outs' has gone from 3 - 4% to 17% over the last few months. These are people skipping out or being evicted.

They reckon a lot of people are taking second and third jobs like Uber to try to make rent and they have seen a big increase in the number of people living in an average unit.

They also talked about a company called Flex who are lending people money to pay their rent. That's a terrible idea and is definitely going bust.

Are things really that bad in the US @CDX_EIRE ?

I thought the US economy was booming.
 
BodyButter said:
Just saw a guy talking about his company's rental portfolio. They have 10,000 rental properties in the US. The rate of 'move outs' has gone from 3 - 4% to 17% over the last few months. These are people skipping out or being evicted.

They reckon a lot of people are taking second and third jobs like Uber to try to make rent and they have seen a big increase in the number of people living in an average unit.

They also talked about a company called Flex who are lending people money to pay their rent. That's a terrible idea and is definitely going bust.

Are things really that bad in the US @CDX_EIRE ?

I thought the US economy was booming.
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I think it goes back to this thing where the metrics every Government uses to analyze the economy don't translate back for the average person. They'll talk about net positive add's to payrolls and the stock market being so strong. Yet you'll read at length about people in tech spending 6+ months trying to find a job in their field.

Myself and many others are in a good spot because our industry is booming (Data Center construction). You see others not benefitting from that though. The secretary at my old job worked two jobs which was a disgrace IMO. And I raised it with management, now she may have made financial errors, I don't know but how do we have someone working for us and needing a weekend job. This company was bringing in 200m revenue and record profits.

She is moving to Arizona because she basically earns the same money as SF but rents are dirt cheap in comparison. If I were to move there I would have my salary docked because of the way my new company works out the geoparity of living.

Everyone who is in a non-professional / non-skilled line of work is getting wrecked. I don't know how restaurant workers make enough to live or people just working the tills at places. The anomaly is tech workers because their leaders are booming (Data Centers / AI / Cloud, etc.) but these companies are restructuring like crazy. If you're in a cost center you're at risk and the tech side is just flooded with people so there is big competition for those "prestigious" jobs at Google etc.

Companies have also let people go and tried to rehire them on less than what they previously earned. I think that's where this noise is coming from. Google and these big companies have done amazing PR because people are less inclined to go work at IBM or Cisco or Oracle. I don't know of or hear about people earning way over the median income levels working extra jobs but those who are at and area the median income level (mid 40,000s). They need to work extra. And people in San Francisco earning less than 100k I get that too.
 
Anyone looking for a quick buck?

DWAC is the ticker for the Truth Social SPAC. Buy it and dump it once it goes public.
 
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