Rich Germans were super threatened by the ascension of labour movements (including socialism and communism). Hitler was basically the rich German's candidate of choice; he wasn't rich himself but the wealthy showered him with money to provide an effective counterpoint to populist socialism.

So how much you attribute the Holocaust to capitalism depends on your point of view. If you consider labour movements a totally necessary outcome of the extreme concentration of capital, and if you consider fascism as the natural reflex of the petit bourgeoisie when threatened by both capital concentration and organized labour at the same time, as Trotsky did, you probably believe capitalism is close to 100% at fault for the Holocaust - in the sense that, had there been an effective communist revolution, the Holocaust probably wouldn't have happened.

The latter.

Trump is the only politician in the world who won't say "I hate nazis" so you know maybe we shouldn't equate "not as politically skilled as Hitler" with him being an alright dude.

He's only 45-55% as immoral as Hitler.

"only"

I could argue it, probably, but not enthusiastically. People have been doing genocide for a lot longer than we've been doing capitalism. There's certainly an argument that profit seeking made the holocaust a lot easier to implement, and maybe Hitler wouldn't have had enough time without corporate help, or maybe wouldn't have ever thought about doing it if corporations hadn't asked for slave labour, but that seems an awful lot like making excuses for Nazis doing evil stuff and I'm not inclined to do that.

I'll blame capitalism for empowering the absolute worst of humanity, and entertaining the absolute worst impulses of those people. I don't even have to think twice. That is what capitalism does, that is why it is a bad thing and it needs to be destroyed. But a persons crimes are their own.

Yeah just keep trotting along with this

So... 65%?

35%? Ew Reid that's gross.

The last four pages of this thread are about Hitler.

Godwin's law?

*ahem*

Don't be such a topic Nazi!

Speaking of ways people shut down uncomfortable discussions, how about the fact that there's a whole internet meme dedicated to stopping people from talking about the return of fascism?

I guess 100 years is too soon for people to comfortably contemplate the similarities.

No, better to waltz into it blindly IRL and experience the real thing.

Just an observation, don't mind me.

Actually, I think the guy it is named after recently said something to the effect that he didn't mean it should mean we never draw the comparison, and that at any rate, recent developments render that idea null anyway.

We are basically one international crisis away. And there's no way the DOW is staying this high.

I was taking it lightheartedly. I'm glad they said that, because yeah.. there are times when the comparison is valid.

.

BTW before anyone has a panic attack, I'm NOT referring to genocide.

Do you have any reason to think that except that it's already really high?

I thinking you're confusing my disagreement with your account of the similarities for disagreement with making comparisons on principle (i.e., that any comparison would be invalid by definition).

That said, at least Reid is being mindful of Mike Godwin's original point about rhetoric.

[quote=Mike Godwin]
TIME: Any idea how to stop the glib references?
A lot of education reform. If I ran the world, I would strengthen both history and scientific education in the United States. If we fostered more self-criticism and self-skepticism, I think that would do much to prevent rhetorical meanness and mean spiritedness on the internet, of which Hitler comparisons are only a tiny part.
[/quote]

Incidentally, this point was the only thing holding me back from suggesting that Reid's stock market prediction would amount to a holocaust of DJIA stock points.

Which would be in incredibly bad taste if I actually wrote this.

Huh. I guess we could be nicer on the internet, lol.

We could.

But then we'd have to treat other people's ideas like they came from people, and not just hallucinated bats in need of being mercilessly swatted out of our imagination.

Where the **** would the fun in that be?

I'm not Reid, but if you are sincerely curious I can give you an answer. You aren't going to like it. I didn't.

The reason we can predict a massive stock market crash is because we are currently living in a stock speculation bubble of unprecedented acuity and duration. It is so big that most people can't see it anymore; it has changed our whole culture in a profound way, so much that now stock speculation is the normal way of saving for retirement, rather than the bizarre habit of a few ultra rich accredited investors like it was in the 1970s.

Pardon the unscientific image, but I'm on a phone. This is a graph of the DJIA since it began. Log scale, which means the red lines I drew show the DJIA history is split into two different exponential functions, with the change happening sometime in the early 1980s.

What happened in the early 1980s? Two things. The first is increasing public awareness of a Carter era IRC change that allowed income deferral using certain types of registered investment funds - named 401(k) after the article. The second change was Reagan era financial deregulations which allowed, among other things, stock repurchase by publicly traded corporations. I could go into a nauseating amount of detail, but I believe this should suffice. The result was and is a massive flood of money from retirement savers and mega corporations alike, all chasing after the same finite pool of stock.

The problem with this situation is that stock prices today are irrational. That means they are not grounded in any objective measure of the stock's market value, but rather by a fantasy that stock prices always go up eventually. Stock prices also get a helping hand by repurchase plans, in which companies buy their own stock at intentionally inflated rates in order to keep the stock prices artificially high, rather than reinvesting that money into the company and growing the economy.

Now, you can't ever time the market. Old saying, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. But we know there is a huge stock speculation bubble, we know why it's happening, and we know it's only a matter of time before the crash happens. The stock market "wants" to revert to that first red line, where stock price growth ~= population growth, that's where the rational price is.

What will that look like when it happens? See that grey bar and teeny downward blip on the right? That was the GFC. Now imagine what would happen if it dropped back down to where it should be. Financial holocaust maybe isn't a bad way of putting it....

Okay so starting in the 80s vast amounts of money floods into the stock market because deregulation allows corporations to pump money into the stock market, as do new instruments that allow middle class Americans to put their money in the stock market. There's a bubble because vastly more money is chasing the same number of shares (which, btw, isn't exactly true. Companies often issue new shares, companies fold, new companies IPO -- the pool isn't exactly "finite", in that there can be fewer or more in the future than there already are), raising the value of stocks even though the companies being traded aren't necessarily bringing in increasing returns commensurate with their raising stock prices (that is, they don't trade on the fundamentals).

I'm slightly confused by your argument about an "objective measure" of the market value of stocks. If there's more money chasing the same number of goods, the price of those goods are going to go up. There is no "objective measure" beyond the price point set where supply meets demand. It's not as if gold, for example, has some "real" specified value beyond what people are willing to pay for it. Your argument seems to hinge on the idea that stocks should not trade like other commodities.

I don't think he means stocks trade differently. I think it's just this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

But on an international level with stock.

Obviously. But the article says this:



"Intrinsic value" here is something like what Jon was referring to by the phrase "objective measure". But the phenomenon of the price becoming "unhinged" from the so-called "intrinsic" value doesn't seem to require that there must be a market correction at some later point. If other things about the market change -- for example, there's a massive influx of cash into the market because there are significantly more people trading, for reasons that are not liable to change, amounting to a "new normal" -- the rules can change, and the market can tolerate prices that are much higher than the fundamentals would have warranted beforehand. Demand for stocks is high independent of the fundamentals because there are many more people who want somewhere to park their savings/capital, and that demand will reliably continue to exist in the future. That wouldn't exactly be a bubble. That would be market price adjusting its relation to the fundamentals based on other variables.

Stock is not a commodity. Stock represents a share of productive capital, and there are standard ways of calculating the actual value of that capital. Before this bubble, stock was usually traded on these "fundamentals". Nobody rational would pay more for a percentage share of a mine, for example, than they would pay for percentage of the ore they expect the mine will produce. But today, it is not unusual to calculate that the stock market is putting a high multiple value on a company's cash reserves, or valuing a holding company above the stock they hold. In other words, they could get a much better deal by holding their own equivalent cash, or buying their own equivalent stock. The current arrangement is not rational.

That's why this is tulip mania, rather than a "new normal". If stock trading were banned tomorrow, and instead of buying back shares companies had to discharge your share of the profit to you via dividends, you would be very disappointed in the result. Real market growth tracks that left red line I drew. Those are the returns you would get, on stock you bought somewhere along the right red line. In other words, the bulk of the returns from stock trading today don't come from anything real, they come from the expanding irrational exuberance of other investors.

Stock is not a store of wealth. See also: Great Depression, The.

I agree that specific policy decisions have encouraged average people to speculate on stock. That is literally what I said in my first post, and increased activity in the stock market by non-accredited investors is probably here to stay. But that does not mean current pricing is.

The difference I think is - a stock has value exactly on what it returns, it's value is based in the value that can be extracted from it. Facebook's market cap is almost 500 billion right now. Ask yourself deep down: do you plausibly believe that every person demanding Facebook stock - fully expects that the business model of Facebook will bring in that much revenue?

IIRC - as the price increases for a stock increases - the dividend yield goes down, so it's probably bad for investors to increase the market cap of any stock they own (which pays dividends, unlike Facebook). Unless if the goal is to speculate on the value of the shares themselves...

Point being, why do people value Facebook? It doesn't provide a return. Owning it is speculative. Speculative against what? It's worth something only because it's worth something to other people, not because of any value the stock itself has - the value is that other people want to buy it enough to drive the price up. When the price of your stock is driven by nothing but others wanting to buy it..

Which isn't to say, Facebook has no value. What we mean is, the 500bn market cap is fueled by a bunch of people's expectations weighted against each others more than realistic expectation of the company itself.

It's worth noting that Facebook's share price has doubled in the past two years, without any significant nudge in revenue *.

* Actually not true.

https://ycharts.com/companies/FB/eps

It's not nothing, but it's only a 69% increase YoY. Do investors expect Facebook to grow 144% faster in the near future? Or do they believe "there's always a bigger idiot"?

Tulip bulb prices will never crash, there's too much demand and there are too many people investing their retirement funds into tulip bulbs. This is just the new normal*.

http://www.macleans.ca/economy/why-every-housing-bubble-looks-like-the-new-normal/

It will be morbidly interesting to see how governments try to react to a stock market crash of the likes Jon is alluding to. Or is the Fed already basically doing everything it can to prop it up?

If we see something like the Great Depression, maybe the next president can finish what FDR started and fully transform us into communism? :showerthoughts:

Yes, this is what Quantitative Easing was meant to do*. QE was an unprecedented last-resort monetary policy. The GFC showed that neoliberal countries are willing to do pretty much anything to prop up the stock market, no matter how destructive those policies are as a whole**.

(* QE was "meant" to stimulate the economy, but it did so by propping up financial instrument prices. Due to the wealth effect, it did actually end up stimulating middle class consumer spending, much like Keynesian stimulus would, so it's regarded as at least somewhat successful. I'm pretty sure it was an accident though.)

(** QE was a $12.3 trillion transfer from taxpayers to the global rich. QE also caused an international asset bubble to inflate, increased consumer debt, and greatly worsened wealth and income inequality, the costs of which are not included in the above figure.)

God willing. I'll take living next to a communist country over a fascist one.