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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12528 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 8, 2026

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Does anyone else feel like we're heading for a good old-fashioned, 2008-tier, financial crash? I recall people bringing up the possibility ever since Covid bucks started rolling out, but even though we were due for one, and even though the money printer was going brrrrr, the crash has so far failed to materialize.

At the time, I was of two minds about this. On one hand, all the libertarian theory I used to subscribe to said money-printing => boom, boom => bust. On the other hand, the problem for me was it never felt like a boom, and I think this is changing now. A key feature of the pre-crash boom is "malinvestment"; capital going into often downright deranged projects, that are later abandoned half-finished. Well, I feel like the datacenter craze qualifies, and with the wave of AI IPOs that are coming just as major indices are changing their rules, to allow for these companies' near-instantaneous inclusion (an investment so good, you can't pass up on it. Literally, if you're American), it seems like we're solidly in the "irrational exuberance" phase.

Add this to the list of things I hope I'm wrong about, because if we get a proper crash, the political fallout is going to be massive. The script writes itself: Trump / tech bros / capitalism bad, even more gay race communism now.

To whitepillers: is there an argument for why I'm wrong that doesn't boil down to "you don't get it, chud, it's the New Economy! The Singularity is just around the corner! All the rules are obsolete!"? This argument is verboten, because this is pretty much what people say with every bubble.

To fellow blackpillers: any ideas on how to brace for impact? Any IT guys here old enough to make it through the dotcom bubble? How did you do it? Any advice you would have given your past self?

Actually, no! I really like how this article, a book review, summarizes it:

[Goodspeed] wants to see if the data supports theoretical accounts of recessions that locate the cause of the downturn in the preceding expansion. His antagonists are two celebrated Austrians: first Friedrich Hayek… whose prominent account of business cycles rivaled Keynes’s in the 1930s; and second, Joseph Schumpeter, who saw in recessions the opportunity to sort out the mistakes and misallocations of the boom. Goodspeed’s main goal in the 200 or so pages of the book is to ask whether the data supports these theories, or their modern variants, or whether it is consistent with a much simpler story. The short answer is no.

…Goodspeed shows that British and American expansions do not resemble Dorian Gray, looking beautiful but hiding an inevitable accumulation of malinvestments (objectively bad investments that are destined to fail) and distorted decisions (mistaken economic decisions taken on the basis of bad regulation or flawed prices) that make a correction inevitable. If they did so, he argues, one would expect that as expansions get longer they get more and more likely to end. In his data, however, the relationship between the age of an expansion and the probability of death is essentially zero. Nor do measures of increased investment during the boom correlate with the severity of a downturn. Nor do longer expansions have longer recessions after them.

This is why recessions remain essentially unpredictable. Any perceived regularity is likely to be a statistical illusion.

On top of all this, he finds no evidence that recessions are corrective. Reallocations tend to happen more aggressively during expansions not contractions, contrary to the arguments that Joseph Schumpeter famously made. Similarly, he finds that contrary to common belief recessions tend not to be contagious but rather are mostly patriotic, usually confined to a single country like the modest 2001 downturn in the US (which did not spread to the UK).

I also find myself in strong agreement with the reviewer:

Personally, Recession strengthened my prior beliefs that policymakers simply don’t have enough information to even distinguish between a robust expansion and a speculative bubble in real time, let alone the tools to safely tame any bubbles that they did find. Rule-based monetary policy, which allows market participants to form stable expectations about what its response will be, while still allowing flexibility in the event of shocks, might be the best we can hope for. Here Goodspeed’s advice is sensible: policymakers should first do no harm before thinking that they have the ability to entirely tame the business cycle.

In short: crashes happen, but attempting to pop them early can only do more harm than good.

Goodspeed shows that British and American expansions do not resemble Dorian Gray, looking beautiful but hiding an inevitable accumulation of malinvestments (objectively bad investments that are destined to fail) and distorted decisions (mistaken economic decisions taken on the basis of bad regulation or flawed prices) that make a correction inevitable. If they did so, he argues, one would expect that as expansions get longer they get more and more likely to end

It sounds like he didn't understand the argument he's disputing. Malinvestments aren't necessarily "objectively bad investments that are destined to fail", their failure and "badness" stems from whether the current interest matches the market time preference, so I don't see how "one would expect that as expansions get longer they get more and more likely to end". I heard about Schumpeter, but I don't recall anything specific he said, so I don't know if he was portrayed accurately.

In short: crashes happen, but attempting to pop them early can only do more harm than good.

Maybe. I can easily imagine people doing even more harm, but I don't see what it has to do with what I asked. My question was about what I, personally, can do to brace for impact, not for policy recommendations.

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