We have been following articles about the coming economic crash, and how even the Murdoch press are speaking about economic Armageddon, and how one needs to become a “prepper”:
https://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/australian-economy/six-path-ways-to-australias-economic-armageddon/news-story/5f11849237d1621569e85a9f2c2a1948
https://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/australian-economy/how-to-prepare-for-economic-armageddon/news-story/08c0ab60e4184ee2d2f3e3d199a5a803
Then there is the looming Big Tech crash:
http://www.amerika.org/politics/big-tech-crash-threatens-to-wipe-out-american-and-world-economies/
http://www.amerika.org/politics/dot-com-3-0-collapse-is-here-and-will-end-western-economies/
“Last month Robert Bouroujerdi, chief investment officer at Goldman Sachs, and most definitely someone who does remember the last dotcom boom, published a report in which he cautioned of the growing risks presented by the meteoric rise of the Big Five tech behemoths: Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Alphabet and Microsoft. Bouroujerdi noted that in the year to the start of June, these companies added a total of $600bn of market capitalisation – the equivalent of the gross domestic product of Hong Kong and South Africa combined. Parallels to the 1999-2000 crash are becoming increasingly evident, he said. …Tech companies are deeply intertwined: when one falls it often takes scores of others down with it and often psychology dictates that the more a stock falls the more likely it is to fall further. Imagine rats scuttling for the exit on a sinking ship. No one wants to be caught inside a cabin and sink.”
This bursting bubble will sink the American economy and everyone else, including poor little multiculturally diverse, Australia:
“Now we are seeing signs of that economic instability coming mainly because Wall Street has bailed on stocks after disappointing earnings reports from the Big Tech sector. As it turns out, Big Tech also had a demand-side model, and its plan seemed to be to grow as huge as possible on the goodwill advanced by the market because of the number of users that Big Tech has. Investors are withdrawing from stocks and preparing for the crash, for which Trump will be blamed even though really it is a hangover from the Obama era. It’s all downhill from here. “We think U.S. growth may have just peaked,” said Michael Gapen, chief U.S. economist for Barclays Capital, who is in Wall Street’s big-slowdown camp. Few believe a recession is near, and the expansion is widely expected to become the longest on record next year. Still, a slowdown in growth would have big implications for stocks, the central bank and President Trump. Why has the stock market stumbled of late? Mr. Gapen said investors appear to be sniffing out the slowdown that economists have been calling for several months. While earnings growth was strong in the third quarter, and many analysts still expect double-digit earnings growth through next year, some executives sound wary.”
Brett Stevens concludes:
“Oldtimers knew this and were skeptical about internet advertising as a result. Google and Facebook made advertising seem to work, which calmed the business community which was well aware that internet advertising does not work: [T]he number of people who click on display ads in a month has fallen from 32 percent of Internet users in July 2007 to only 16 percent in March 2009, with an even smaller core of people (representing 8 percent of the Internet user base) accounting for the vast majority (85 percent) of all clicks. No one thinks this is an isolated result. If they only a few click ads, likely only a few view ads, and that means that a tiny majority of people who are heavily active on the internet are massively over-represented in advertising. That group tends to be the same people who watched daytime television in the 1980s, namely the old, unemployed, welfare cases, or young.
This is why Big Tech firms keep inflating their figures about how many people their advertising reaches: Singer herself spent approximately $14,000 on Facebook ads for her business, Therapy Threads. She then decided to look into Facebook’s potential reach estimations and do her own calculations on advertising reach. What Singer discovered was that in Chicago, for example, there were approximately 808,000 U.S. resident ages between 18 and 34 according to U.S. census data, but Facebook calculated the potential reach for Chicago residents at around 1.9 million. We are about to find out that Big Tech has always been fraudulent. Google, Facebook, Reddit, etc. are counting users that are not there and depending on a relatively small amount of people with lots of free time and little real world influence to generate the appearance of activity. Like Enron, these companies are going to collapse quickly and vanish overnight.”
There are so many factors coming together, that this time there may be no quick recovery from the crash. It could well be death by a thousand cuts. People would be well advised to start prepping, and moving away from a consumer philosophy life style, and back to the way people in the Great Depression lived. Even the above articles from the Murdoch press are saying this.
“The adage ‘hope for the best but prepare for the worst’ is perhaps the best advice to handle the coming economic Armageddon. Given that the last economic recession in Australia was 27 years ago and that Australians under the age of 44 have never experienced adverse economic conditions as a working adult, most Australians have no conception of how bad economic conditions may become in the coming economic crisis. Reading about what occurred in previous economic crises such as the US depression of 1921, the Great Depression of 1929 or episodes of runaway or hyperinflation such as in Weimar Republic Germany are likely to be your best guide to understand how the coming crisis may unfold, how unprepared people suffered as well as how best to prepare, survive, identify opportunities and take advantage of those opportunities.”
Opportunities? That’s pretty optimistic since many will end up having to eat grass, like the North Koreans.