jiltedjen

My view is that the forming stock market crash is somehow catching them with pants down. So a raise would be a saving face, it would be at attempt at controlling the narrative. it would be sold as ‘deliberately taking out excessive speculation’ so the inevitable crash, would seem ‘controlled’ maintaining faith in central banks. if enough people believe the crash is caused deliberately by the fed, then enough people will also believe the crash is over when the fed says it is (limiting damage/falls) Instead of everything being chaos and bubble speculation, and fully out of control.

Trillion dollars lost out of hype tech/AI stocks in the last week.

Best things in life are free. most people just cannot break spending habits. No amount of money will ever be enough for them. cheap coach trips to UK locations as deals, allotments, gardening, reading, walking, playing music, fish and chips on the seaside. we live in a mostly beautiful country. holidays abroad are a pretty obscene luxury, both in cost and resources. you can have a cheap runabout car, and a stunning classic in the garage. a huge ‘cost of life’ is work, with commuting costs and everything associated with it, even to being too tired to cook and get a take away. you can do a lot with limited resources (and paid off house and modest income) especially these days, you just need to adjust mentally what an ‘event’ is. So instead of a weekend blowout. Instead look forward to that special home cooked meal, the treat of a steak. its not depressing, its the opposite, its having the time and energy to appreciate and ‘take in’ each tasty meal, each sunny day, changing of seasons. yeah you will be grey, and deeply uncool. but your status and ‘usefulness’ in life has ended, why fight trying to be relevant in a world which no longer needs you? Why buy a flash landrover, why not take it easy and lean into it. don’t rage against the dying of the light, enjoy it. time is all that we have, some don’t even have that.

The more distant future pensions will be a bleak picture, but those 5 or 10 years away probably don’t need to worry too much. equally as bleak as I think it will be, anyone with half a brain can prep to retire early even with really old retirement dates and less state freebies. people are their own worst enemy. how many in my generation will get their stolen wealth back via inheritances? Many will, all they have to do is be sensible with it. sadly I have not really known anyone who received a lump sum from somewhere or other use it in a sensible manner, they still end up struggling from pay cheque to pay cheque only they are struggling in a slightly bigger house. as a managed population we are really good at putting ourselves in chains, even if not visible. we are chattel. we are still surfs. we are wage slaves. many can sacrifice and break the chains but don’t. the issue is what happens when we have a load of 65 years olds saying they just cannot face work anymore, and having nothing to fall upon? Will my generation just burden our children? do we need to prep our kids to cover the costs for 5 years?

Also just to add. It won’t just be required NI qualifying years which will go up, but also what counts as NI qualifying years. so thinking ‘ah sod it I will coast 2 days a week doing something easy to see out my later years’ also won’t cut it. we have had the overly generous pensions, and it’s going to swing back to the pensioners eating dog food years again. as a society we are getting meaner, it’s going to get bleak.

I pay up to employee match. never more (not higher rate tax payer yet). two things will probably happen: - the date I can access private pension will rise in line with state pensions, so I probably won’t be able to access private pension until something like 60 and state at 70, at at 60 won’t be enough to retire on given it needs to cover 10 years at that point. - the contributing years will inevitably increase, as a double whammy, it will act to cut pensions (as many won’t reach the required years) but also act to keep people in work (further decreasing life expectancy), probably meaning working past 60 anyway the combination of moving retirement age past say a good percentile of the populations death rate, and increasing contributions via increased NI contribution years, will act to bail out previous underfunding, and also make what’s left of state pensions viable. which is partly why the access date to private will increase. it’s quite simple, they want most of us to be forced to work right up to 70, and die shortly after. thus most of my aggressive savings are geared towards generating a steady modest passive income. to brute force my way out of work. not only do I have to cover living costs from day 50 or 55 I have to pay for not receiving say half of my state pensions (as qualifying work years required increases). I’m lucky that my peers are sunk with mortgage costs, and know nothing about investments, those who do are emotional investors (better to not invest at all when your handing money to someone else). thus I feel I can thread the needle on this one, FTSE100 is unfashionable, yet is one of the few places with reasonable dividend yields, and not subject to imminent bubble collapse with the magnificent 7. when the flight to safety occurs FTSE100 fortunes will be detached from American markets, and rest of the world will be due a 10 year run. also politically my cohort won’t have the numbers compared to the boomers, AND the future voters (not born yet) will care less and less about the future UK’s old population (which by then will include me). the only option for anyone my age is to brute force it. and those who cannot, frankly are doomed. at the same time many of the ‘just go off sick’ loopholes are being closed.

in the dot.com burst, it was hype about the internet. the internet did change the world gradually over 25 years, and yes we all use it frequently. however the speculation was completely out of whack with its eventual growth and take-up. people wanted all the gains of the new tech right there and then, and got burnt. sure there will be huge AI companies worth as much as countries in 25 years time, growing gradually. but all that money isn’t gathered over such a short period. it’s a bubble. as humans we cannot help but get greedy as get FOMO, especially when the underlying world economy is stagnant, it adds fuel to greed when ‘need’ is higher. no-one wants to admit that we are suck on a post growth world for another 15-20 years. Little or no improvement in prospects, little hope. it’s like how the poorest like to gamble for some break from their chains, bubbles are just greed and FOMO for something to bail them out. if we face stock market growth closer to 5% annually for the next 20 years instead of the 9% of the previous 30 years, for most that’s just not enough, it locks them in to monotonous lives, where nothing comes for free. people feel they have to gamble and lie to themselves as they actually need the money. they make up narratives about how it’s all fully sustainable, and put more money in. AI is new tech, but it’s just a speculation vehicle which is benefitting from pretty bleak circumstances where people desperately need a win. it won’t just be young people gambling house deposits, but boomers who didn’t save enough trying to have a win before retirement.

Flight to safety with US stocks looking scary (small bounce today) UK looks very cheap compared to overpriced US. Generally markets swing to American out performance for an extended period to rest of world, we are overdue rest of world out performance.

Yep seen plenty of people on here who have noticed the bubble. it’s very strange seeing people try and justify it, or claim it’s not a bubble, like it’s odd, I guess people said the same with with the dot-com bubble also. looks like it might of begun its collapse now. seems humans cannot have new tech without going balls-out mental about it, far and above it’s actual impact on the world.

a drastic stock market fall may trigger an interest rate cut. its going to take a fairly drastic cut or many cuts to continue this bubble. given the underlying stagnation of the economy the valuations just don’t make sense. we have already had a few big falls like Tesla, which will remind people that you can actually lose money. the big 7 have been sucking money from other areas of the economy and other world markets, for years now. when there is new tech people always assume it will change the world, and completely go mad with outsized expectations of what it can do, from the 1920’s with new tech, to the dot.com bubble, this has all the hallmarks. Not to mention all the inevitable leverage being deployed expecting this to be a blip, which only accelerates the falls. The week coming should be interesting. it’s typical miss-allocation of capital. in times of stagnation and poor conditions safety stocks should do well, stocks where people can’t choose to avoid spending, like energy shares, food shares, utilities. just a lot of funny money sloshing around. it’s been chasing growth which will be a horrible mistake for those who don’t get out while they can.

Yes that is a worry. Housing does feel quite tapped out.

6 days in a row of falls, probably due some slight bounce for a day or so until it gains speed rapidly. have seen many YouTubers with portfolios who have been determined to stick to UK stocks finally in the last month or so start to buy S&P500 right as it peaks. each time I shout at the screen “morons!” it’s all basic human phycology. Most gains are just betting on the greater mass of fools doing something silly for a few years, ignoring fundamentals, and buying with momentum. which is fine, but unless you actually exit, then the whole thing is just taking wealth from you, it’s just transferring money from the thick emotional investors to the smart. when all that’s left of emotional investors, (smart money already left) the falls can be rapid indeed and fast!

Saw an interesting fact that a lot claiming sickness benefits are actually mostly in the 50-60 age group NOT the younger age groups. basically the group that cannot be bothered anymore, perhaps also the same group who through poor choices didn’t reap the benefits on the best economic conditions known to man for the last 40 years, and have seen their peers do extremely well and retire very wealthy. Must be pretty gutting to see your peers retire out and holidays etc, and you pissed it all away, and you’re stuck working. For most of that cohort all you had to do was be reasonably sensible and retirement at 55 would have been easy, it’s only either the greedy or the thick who work on. i have a relative who did exactly this. bought cheap houses, pissed it all away. went on the sick late 50’s as why bother? (It’s their fault), they didn’t have any savings to act like a bridge to state pension, and not enough private savings. so the dole on the sick it is. at that age usually you do have the odd ailment sure, so you ham it up to claim to be more debilitating than it actually is. probably made much much worse as the wealthy old who were holding on to work due to greed, when faced with maybe actually dying due to covid chose to retire, suddenly leaving their more moronic peers stuck at work and jealous. the ‘hidden wealth’ suddenly became very very obvious. so perhaps the plans to force the lazy old back into work makes sense. They should target the old if that is where most of the issues lie. I guess when you have some limited savings, and you have less years to cover, it becomes much much easier to ‘get away with it’ for 5-10 years. i guess for the young is much much harder to lifestyle it.

It’s already started!

You beat me by like 3 minutes! I just posted a thread about the obvious collapse of the AI bubble and end of American out performance!