Also some EU pension funds are already in the process of divesting from US markets...
And where will they go to?
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/124-trillion-global-stock-m...
Amazon is worth $2.81T right now and only represents 4.03% of the S&P500.
So a $1T share would represent less than 2% of the S&P500. This is significant for a single company, and 6% for 3 shit-tier companies (SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic) is even more significant, but we're far from "losing retirement if they go bust"-levels.
It is especially telling if we try to list out all the psychological biases at play:
- Availability & salience bias - vivid, memorable things feel more important than they are
- Narrative bias - humans tend to think in stories, and AI tells plenty
- Recency and novelty bias — new things feel more consequential than established ones (this one already drives like 80% of all HN content btw)
- Proportionality neglect - people are bad at intuitively grasping what percentages mean, even if they see the stats
- Social proof and reflexivity - coverage signals importance, and drives more coverage
- Status quo invisibility - things that work reliably become invisible (surprisingly, HN is really good in terms of working against this bias, I feel like at least 5% of all posts are some niche "inner daily workings" topics)
- Speculation premium in attention - uncertainty generates more discussion than certainty
- In-group signaling - cutting-edge things are status markers among influencershttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_float
I hear S&P 500 is weighted on float rather than on market cap, while Nasdaq 100 is based on market cap.
> most share indices weight firms in proportion to the value only of shares they have released for public trading (the “free float”). For SpaceX, this means just the $75bn or so of stock it intends to issue in June—so its initial weight in the S&P 500 will be around 0.1%. The NASDAQ 100 is an exception, and has changed its rules to weight companies at up to three times their free float, in an apparent effort to woo Mr Musk. Even so, SpaceX’s probable initial weight in this $40trn index will still only be around 0.5%.
NVIDIA Corp NVDA 8.02%
Apple Inc AAPL 6.53%
Microsoft Corp MSFT 4.84%
Amazon.com Inc AMZN 4.01%
Broadcom Inc AVGO 3.36%
Alphabet Inc GOOGL 3.32%
Alphabet Inc GOOG 3.09%
Meta Platforms Inc META 2.23%
Micron Technology Inc MU 1.71%
Advanced Micro Devices Inc AMD 1.19%
Oracle Corp ORCL 0.99%
That's 40% of the S&P 500.
And if anything happens to the AI bubble all of these go down together. While they won't all go to zero and cause a "-40%" overnight, Nvidia's rise is so meteoric that they will trigger a -8% and the rest's valuation has more than doubled since 2023. Even Apple, which isn't much of an "AI company", is still following the AI-tech hype.
If Nvidia eats shit, and the others go -50%, that translates to an overall ~-24% on the stock market.
Before any contagion outside the tech industry is considered. Look at the Dotcom Bubble and a -40% to -50% crash is quite plausible.
I do not want things to go kaboom, the CAPE index seems to indicate that what I want isn't relevant.
And that is on top of the IPO companies losing value themselves, this seems likely to trigger a doom-loop until the market reaches a low enough value. This will likely trigger layoffs and companies reducing spending and investments further depressing the economy. Added inflation from oil prices and war.
This doesn't seem like one big balloon ready to burst, but more like a house suspended by hundreds of balloons and they are about to be ran over by an airplane.
You mean our pension funds?
Firstly, pension funds hold some share of stocks, but far from all. Second, pension funds hold a share of a pie that's not all that came out of the bakery. The bakery made a lot more dough, but much pie was spent (horribly mixing metaphors) to buy assets like property and private investments. So in reality pension funds hold a fraction of a fraction. Third, pension funds invested in equity is a replacement for the old pension systems of yore where companies were forced to set aside money and invest smartly to fund guaranteed income pension plans. They don't have to do that anymore. Instead they contribute to a 401(K) or similar in other countries, which lowered their costs and reduced company risk. For listed companies, those savings went to the shareholders, of which pension funds were just a fraction of a fraction.
I hope this illustrates that we, the salaried workers, see only a small fraction of the value created by increased productivity.
"Reasonable" is doing herculean amounts of work as usual, as it is implicitly operating under a thief's logic that the target didn't really deserve it anyway therefore if I steal all of it I will be justified.
We see the same shit when regiemes 'nationalize' segments of the economy and then wonder why instead of miraculously getting better without the 'exploiters' things turn to shit and absolutely nobody wants to trade with them. Empathy such a foreign concept to them that they don’t understand why merchants refuse to trade with those who steal businesses wholesale. Whose only response when confronted about their crimes is lame whataboutisms and victim blaming.
Let's say, "If we had a tax system that captured a greater share of the increase in profits resulting from higher productivity (which mostly goes offshore and does not in fact "generate more jobs"), then we'd have no problem at all funding the pension systems, and much more."
But this doesn't solve the problem in any way; it simply leads to production drop.
I mean, this is literally the logic of every communist government in the 20th century. They had the same logic that "given the mechanization of agriculture, food practically produces itself; you just need to throw a seed in the ground and give it a couple of tractor rides, and the earth will do the rest. Therefore, we need a tax on such activity, because we have enough resources to feed everyone".
In other words, it's literally a pure tax on automation. The results were mass deaths from starvation every single time.
There has yet to be an attempt at a centrally planned economy that actually had accurate data to plan with.
Not advocating for central planning but the important point is that these failure modes are possible under any tyrannical regime. For an example of where capitalist competition fell down in a similar way, look no further than the Irish potato famines.
Actually, no. What you're describing is more of a part of the next stage, designed to solve the already existing problem of famine, rather than its cause.
When communists come to power, they don't try in the first place to reorganize food production under strict centralization; this directly contradicts Marxism, according to which the state gradually withers away as a communist society is built. They simply try to redistribute what is already being produced in a more fair manner, to force peasants to contribute their "fair share" to society.
This causes production to plummet, people are dying of hunger, and only then the government takes control of organization of food production, and only after that do the factors you mentioned become relevant.
But the famine itself under communism, at least in its initial, most massive iteration, is not a consequence of a tyrannical regime, but is a consequence of the "taxation policy" being pursued.
It's absolutely correct that we can easily feed, clothe, house everyone. We can even give everyone comforts. It's mostly greed that prevents it. Greed that capitalism spends $trillions cultivating by brain-washing us all to want more and never be satisfied.
> It's mostly greed that prevents it
Greed is a human axiom. Anything that depends on humans not being greedy isn't worth the paper it's printed on. That's why capitalism won, despite its many faults: it requires human greed to function.
No, I don't think so. From a historical point of view, everything is quite clear: after communists came to power, the most severe famines occurred even before this totalitarian dictatorship is build, as a consequence of these very tax policies, the purpose of which is "easily feed, clothe, house everyone".
Totalitarian dictatorship comes later, as the problem transform to "we can easily feed, clothe, house everyone, but they don't want to, so we should force them"
The fact it became an all-inclusive all-year-round vacation reward is an anomaly which is getting corrected. Too bad for us we're the generations holding the bag.
Caring for grandchildren, running clubs and societies, giving their experience to local politics.
At 60, women who had daughters at 30, whose daughters just had children would be well placed to help with childrearing.
These sorts of things got lost in UK with equality and the pensions crisis.
I suppose when we look at things like the 4-day week, we imagine more time and energy available for social cohesion. Or I do at least.
Current system: Work until you die.
New system collapses: Work until you die.
New system lucks out: Probably get returns (pension).
Current system isnt great but works. Just fear uncertainity doubt here.