
Americans Are Not Prepared for the Coming Mother of All Stock Market Crashes - spking
https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2019/05/30/40347971/americans-are-not-prepared-for-the-coming-mother-of-all-stock-market-crashes
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FreedomToCreate
You cannot predict the market. Here is a Forbes article citing the same issue
in December and speculating that the stock market would not rise in 2019.
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/jessecolombo/2018/12/31/when-
th...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jessecolombo/2018/12/31/when-the-stock-
buybacks-go-bye-bye/#2c3a9bdadedf)

If you had pulled out of the market at the end of 2018 expecting a bigger
drop, guess what, you would have missed one of the fastest market comebacks.

The scenario being discussed is just one possible outcome. There are numerous
other outcomes as well. You can off course bet on this scenario and pull your
money out of the market, and if the crash occurs, you can tell everyone about
how to timed the market. Or you might be the person who lost big time.

As with all speculation...only time will tell

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julianlam
"Lost big time" is relative. At most you "didn't gain", and it's easy to get
swept up in FOMO when you don't always remind yourself of that.

That said if the market shoots up and you hold on, you didn't gain anything
either. No gains or losses until they are realized.

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bestnameever
Looking at the author's bio, I'm not sure how he is any more qualified to make
a statement on this than any other random person on the street.

> Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in
> Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a
> steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory of this birth, but he
> does remember noticing himself in the mirror for this first time—it happened
> on May 3, 1972. Mudede is also a filmmaker: Two of his films, Police Beat
> and Zoo, premiered at Sundance, and Zoo was screened at Cannes. Mudede has
> written for the New York Times, Cinema Scope, Ars Electronica, C Theory, and
> academic journals. He also wrote the liner notes for Best of Del Tha Funkee
> Homosapien: Elektra Years. Mudede has lived in Seattle since 1989.

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3327
Agree, I thought i was reading the wrong bio.

A little out of his league i would say.

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intopieces
What bugs me about these doomsday articles about how Americans are unprepared
is that they never mention what Americans ought to be doing. Saving more
money? Sure. But what exactly am I supposed to be investing in / divesting
from / etc?

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mnky9800n
Until you are old, basically investing is better than not. When you are old
short term dips start to matter. Prior to that, the market eventually goes up.

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jasonbarrah
Danger ahead! Pivots quite strongly from somewhat reasonable market discussion
to advocating communism/socialism. Reminds me of college...

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thatoneuser
Whenever someone tells you "the only solution is..." You can just write them
off. There's never only one solution to any problem, let alone one where the
problem is purely speculative.

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lowdose
A good read on QE is Currency Wars by James Rickards. It isn't written as a
dry traditional economic book while covering the monetary history of last 2
centuries. I suspect the book is not mentioned often being published in 2012
it predicted the destruction of the dollar by the QE policies. The predictions
of the book can still become reality because QE is a monetary experiment which
increases the supply of money at unprecedented level. Creating money out of
thin air and holding more than 4 trillion dollar [0] on assets is not a
healthy situation for the FED. [0]
[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=lFm1](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=lFm1)

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jonahbenton
Define and defend "unhealthy."

Money is created out of thin air every day. That's how banking works.

There are hundreds of T of undervalued assets around the world. You can buy a
beautiful castle in Sicily for $100. The Fed's holdings are nothing.

The assets on the Fed balance sheet are also largely inert. Like the
archeological underpinnings of a skyscraper. Dig and you will find interesting
things, could put them into museums. But they do little from a structural
perspective.

The translation of capital into productive work and actual value worldwide is
still extremely inefficient. This inefficiency is the guard against inflation.

Pay more attention, as always, to actual businesses, their P&Ls, projections
of future cash flows.

