"It is too early to say where the bottom is to this recession, but we have reason to believe the Millennials and Generation X do not have the resources to purchase the stock that Baby Boomers want to sell at prior market highs. With Corporate profit growth unmasked and the Baby Boomer’s transition into retirement, it seems unlikely that stocks will make a quick return to their prior levels unless governments engage in massive asset inflation."
It's almost like bankrupting a generation by forcing them through punishingly expensive higher education, obscene healthcare costs, absurd cost of living in major metropolitan areas, and stripping worker benefits makes an entire generation of this country's youth unable to prosper like their predecessors. I truly have no idea what will be left behind for me and my peers, when all of this is said and done.
Well it's now clear that the Fed IS willing to engage in massive asset inflation. Nothing will stop that until the USD starts to significantly depreciation. Unlimited QE is essentially current debasement, but being the world's reserve currency provides protection.
Corporations are the largest net purchasers of stock. The narrative was never "generations of ordinary people will support prices". Because ordinary people control proportionally small amount of the nation's total wealth.
I should amend my point to say that stock prices cannot acceptably fall without massive intervention by the government. The system is set up so that those who have the most invested in the market (mostly the older generation who are trying to retire, institutional investors, high net worth individuals) will do anything to prop those prices up, and the government will listen because it's beholden to the interests of the older and the wealthy. They'll bankrupt this nation's economy for those that will inherit it to save those retirement funds at the benefit of wealthy investors.
> unlikely that stocks will make a quick return to their prior levels unless governments engage in massive asset inflation.
I agree with you, and I'm especially concerned about this "unless". Markets are supposed to reward accurate predictions, but I would not be willing to put my money where my mouth is now. How can we trust the stock market will not be massively manipulated by the US government, by bailouts, and by measures like stock buybacks?
Your average Gen-Xer is 50+ years old today, so your very bleak picture fails to acknowledge that they've also been the benficiary of all the public expenditures and national debt that funded it.
Outside of the US Millenials have enjoyed cheaper (when adjusted) education than ever before and better healthcare. I think you paint an unnecssarily bleak and defeatist future (coming from another in a similar situation)
I can't find the link, but an economist made the argument that college has gotten cheaper because although costs have gone up so has its utility. So it's a "more for your money" sort of situation. I personally don't subscribe to this view and it's not something one can simply state as a fact.
Similar to how say an automobile's year-over-year price may have increased by 5% but the adjusted value is 2% because last year's models didn't have side airbags as standard or something like that.
Given that the current sentiment seems to be that vast majority of college degrees are either worthless or simple table stakes to be able to participate in a white collar vocation I wouldn't say I follow that view either.
Well fear not: Boomer private retirement accounts don't hold most of the stocks.
What's really going to be challenging for capitalists is losing the whole "It's good for your 401K!" justification when nobody actually owns enough stock to care. Only 45% of millennials have retirement accounts and only 33% of millennials have one they are actively contributing to[1]. The median balance also shows them getting a late start [2].
Defined benefit pensions for government employees are invested in the market too, and everyone is exposed to that risk by way of being subject to taxes.
> absurd cost of living in major metropolitan areas
I fail to see how this is the Boomers' fault. Cosmopolitan urban life is a choice, often fiercely defended by Millenials on account of access to "culture", which frequently boils down to a wide diversity of differently-decorated venues in which to get drunk.
Sure, suburban life is boring, and living in the country is hard. But it's not a choice your Dad or your guidance counselor made for you.
I don’t think non Boomers are any better about it. When push comes to shove, everyone wants their kids to go to school with other kids whose parents earn as much or more, so the situation will tend to non dense housing as long as there is a wide wealth/inequality gap.
The root cause is technology obviating many jobs and letting labor from around the world compete with the same labor in the US.
Obviously if middle class people live like kings in the US compared to 90% of the world where people don’t have single family homes with garages and two cars, then there exists a tremendous arbitrage opportunity which will have to be taken advantage of if a business/country wants to remain competitive globally.
> I truly have no idea what will be left behind for me and my peers, when all of this is said and done.
I'm in the same boat, as a new grad about to enter the labour market with a computer engineering degree.
While the situation may seem impossible, once this is all said and done we will still have each other - with everyone the wiser having witnessed the collapse of our current ridiculous system. We're two weeks into isolation and layoffs where I live, and I'm already seeing lots of graffiti and posters about rent strikes.
One day the boomers will die, penniless because their wealth only exists in an overly-engineered financial system, and the young will be left to rebuild a more intelligent and caring society.
Serious? Good luck with that because in 30 years the 25 year old know-it-alls will be saying the same thing about your generation. The cycle never ends.
This is a good point, but I've been getting the feeling that the working class is getting more and more fed up with our conditions as we're squeezed for every last dollar of surplus value.
At the end of the day "the people in power" have power because the masses allow them to. If enough people refuse to participate in the system then the system will fall apart - e.g. the state only has the capacity to process so many evictions. This pandemic has been the greatest catalyst for class consciousness that I've seen in my life, and I think it has the potential to reshape our society after it's over.
I agree that this might catalyze awareness. But the people in power know they need the mass acceptance to stay in power. Which is why every new medium that reaches a big enough audience is infiltrated with agenda pushing content. It is absolutely critical to divide the masses to stay in power. It doesn't matter which side, as long as you have one side to identify with and another side to blame in this post-factum society. The percentage of people dropping out of the belief systems and trying to rationalize again is IMHO too small for large scale effects to not allow the people in power to continue. Its a handful of swing states that matter.
That being said, I have more hope for smaller, local circles, because then the partisan lines get blurry due to a common local identity.
‘A banker, a worker, and an immigrant are sitting at a table with 20 cookies. ‘The banker takes 19 cookies and warns the worker: “Watch out, the immigrant is going to take your cookie away.”’
If the ruling class plays it right the working class will go after each other instead of the ruling class. And so far they seem to do really well.
Hah! I've never actually heard that joke but it's a good one.
And yes, that is definitely what they'll do - every time something major happens in our society I've observed the mass media following the playbook from Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" almost exactly.
That being said, every "big event" is an opportunity for mass radicalization of the working class and these "big events" are happening more and more often. It's like the quote from the IRA: "We only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always".
Electing Trump was already a response to these events but unfortunately people chose a billionaire who mainly cares about themselves. The Russian revolution and the nazis were also a response to events but in either case the people made bad choices....
“the young will be left to rebuild a more intelligent and caring society.”
Make sure they really do this. The boomers started out with “love and peace” before they turned to “greed is good”. I can easily imagine the next generation to create an even tougher society if they aren’t careful.
As you grow up, you will, as I said, realize how much smarter all those people you dismiss actually were than you believed.
The world is a complex place. The "old people are dumb and we should throw out everything they built" mantra is a silly trivialization of reality, one that every generation believes fervently as children, and one that the intelligent ones reject when they find out what the world is really like.
That doesn't mean that the system as it exists is good. The system as it exists isn't perfect. Maybe listening to those coming at it with a fresh perspective gleaned from youth would benefit society a bit.
Every time I see an HN analysis of the stock market, I hesitate to click it. It's only one-degree better than bitcoin spam memes on reddit.
For example, the above paragraph is completely hollow until it gives some numbers. What % of the stock is held by boomers retirement funds? (is it 1% of the market volume? 10%?)
"It is too early to say where the bottom is to this recession, but we have reason to believe the Millennials and Generation X do not have the resources to purchase the stock that Baby Boomers want to sell at prior market highs. With Corporate profit growth unmasked and the Baby Boomer’s transition into retirement, it seems unlikely that stocks will make a quick return to their prior levels unless governments engage in massive asset inflation."
It's almost like bankrupting a generation by forcing them through punishingly expensive higher education, obscene healthcare costs, absurd cost of living in major metropolitan areas, and stripping worker benefits makes an entire generation of this country's youth unable to prosper like their predecessors. I truly have no idea what will be left behind for me and my peers, when all of this is said and done.