Dow jones plunges 512 points in one day; nasdaq down 136; s&p down 60

I think a class analysis which pretends that racism is less important than income level in American society is flawed. The New York Times hasn't spent the last three years interviewing Black Working Class Clinton voters hanging out in diners in rural Mississippi, and I'm sure you know why.

Trying to draw a hard distinction between the American class system and our system of white supremacy is a fool's errand, IMHO.

I'm not advocating parsing society down to the individual level, but I think we need multiple axes to understand the ways in which Americans make implicit "class" distinctions we're often not fully conscious of.

 

He wrote The Communist Manifesto as a direct reaction to the failure of the 1848 revolutions, as well.

 

I disagree. What the 2016 election showed us is that race matters as much, if not more so, than economics. Those who are afraid of being taken over by non-White foreigners are real, and we need to be honest that they really have that fear. And it is legit, from their standpoint because it is going to force them to change their way of life, a way of life they are not comfortable changing. But even if those people end up being Republican, there are Dems who have similar views. As an example, I was talking to somebody yesterday who is very much an environmentalist and a "lefty." She is also an ELL teacher. But we go into a discussion about the cycle of poverty/incarceration, specifically for Black males, and she put it on "life choices." She also said that the state government should not increase funding to urban (in the context of the conversation, Black school districts). And while that is a singular example, she has no clue as to how poor minorities struggle in the urban area, because her focus is not in that part of the world. And that is quite common. And that is the problem being on the left. Even though we all are anti 1%, we still hold some tribalism which makes it difficult to comprehensively unite.

 

Explain. Has nothing to do with what I mentioned. Are you going to imply that due to this hypothetical class war Nobody except the rich will be able to invest?

please elaborate

 

I thought the release of The Communist Manifesto preceded the 1848 revolutions.

 

I'll be damned--you're right. It was released at the beginning of the revolutions, so written ahead of time.

That's a lazy assumption I've always made--thanks for setting me straight.

 

Don’t forget our promising Space Force!!

 

Is it possible to change the title of this thread to "Elon Musk's Tesla is unstoppable" or are there too many short sellers around here for that?

 

And in any event, if you read what Krugman actually wrote, I don't see what he is wrong about.

Of course he didn't anticipate the Trump bump as the markets reacted eagerly to the promised free for all in FS etc - traders knew about this stuff but Krugman is an economist.

But as far as fundamentals go I think he is still correct.

How will the markets recover from the incoming recession where all the fiscal tools are already deployed?

 

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IMO that is pretty much still the risk of what can happen.

It’s true that we’ve been adding jobs at a pretty good pace and are quite close to full employment. But we’ve been doing O.K. only thanks to extremely low interest rates. There’s nothing wrong with that per se. But what if something bad happens and the economy needs a boost? The Fed and its counterparts abroad basically have very little room for further rate cuts, and therefore very little ability to respond to adverse events.

Now comes the mother of all adverse effects — and what it brings with it is a regime that will be ignorant of economic policy and hostile to any effort to make it work. Effective fiscal support for the Fed? Not a chance. In fact, you can bet that the Fed will lose its independence, and be bullied by cranks.

So we are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight. I suppose we could get lucky somehow. But on economics, as on everything else, a terrible thing has just happened.​

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive...-night-2016/paul-krugman-the-economic-fallout

 

One of the great ironies is the GOP/Trump have basically done huge stimulus since Trump was elected, but at the top of the cycle.

So it hasn't moved the needle much

 

Yep - its another gerrymander

GOP Potus gets stimulus

Dem Potus gets austerity