It’s been at least a year since people started talking about a possible recession. What Causes a Recession? Youtube 19.31, Second Thought 2023
These crises where profits go down are, counter-intuitively, a good thing for capitalists. ibid.
We could stop recessions almost entirely if we wanted to. ibid.
There’s a recession every four-to-seven years on average. ibid.
It’s cyclical and that’s we know recessions are always on their way. ibid.
2008: The world would go through one of the biggest crises it had ever witnessed. $19.2 trillion of household wealth would be lost. The Death of the ‘Real’ Economy, Youtube 38.48, Cold Fusion 2022
Speculation started to migrate from stocks into real estate. ibid.
The ratings agencies completely screwed up. ibid.
These products created no value in the economy but were making banks a whole bunch of money … There was no-one supervising any of these products. ibid.
These banks became extremely vulnerable to financial shocks. ibid.
One subprime lender after another files for bankruptcy. ibid.
Wages and incomes continued to languish: the ‘real’ economy was limping … 6 million Americans lost their jobs and 8 million Americans lost their homes. ibid.
These stupid financial experiments aren’t helping. ibid.
Printing trillions of dollars as the economy was slowing to a halt. ibid.
Von Hayek was wrong. In strong and vibrant democracies, a generous social-welfare state is not a road to serfdom but rather to fairness, economic equality, and international competitiveness. Jeffrey Sachs, article Scientific American, ‘Beyond Ideology’, 2006
Anyone who believes in infinite growth on a finite planet is either a madman or an economist. David Attenborough
We just our economy not by the presence of billionaires but by the absence of poverty. Jeremy Corbyn
So why does everything feel so rubbish? Many of us are struggling to pay for food and houses … Something has gone wrong. Dispatches: Skint: The Truth About Britain’s Broken Economy, Tim Harford reporting, Channel 4 2024
They refuse to talk about the deep problems the country faces. ibid.
The number of people sleeping rough has doubled since 2010. ibid.
We’re in the longterm and we’re dealing with those problems right now. ibid.
Taxes: Forecast to rise no matter who is in power. ibid.
Investment had fallen far below Europe. ibid.
Building the essential infrastructure we need … is going to be expensive … We don’t invest in our smaller cities. ibid.
This growing idea that the government is too big and too restrictive. And there’s no clearer example of this than Elon Musk’s Doge Department, leading to a revolution of sorts with dudes with bad haircuts holding chainsaws coming to free the handcuffs of government bureaucracy from the people. However, is this concept really new? JimmytheGiant podcast: How the Elite Engineered Britain’s Collapse (And Blamed You), Youtube 2025
Oh yeah, loads of cuts to social welfare spending … This ideology is known as neoliberalism. ibid.
Government debt continued to rise because they needed to borrow in order to allow for major tax cuts for the rich. ibid.
Neoliberalism – this ideology which was ignited by Nixon, exploded under Thatcher and Reagan, and then accelerated under Blair and Bush – had led to this zombified mantra of deregulation, selling off of state assets to private individuals, and massively cutting welfare spending. ibid.
The UK and the United States bailed out the banks to the tune of £500 billion, with a guarantee of £1 trillion. That is taxpayer money, our money, paying to keep banks alive. Also known as Socialism for the Rich. ibid.
We launched our very own DOGE department, or as well call it, Austerity. Austerity was being euphemistically sold to as as, Fixing the Roof While the Sun is Shining. ibid.
The entire Theory of Austerity was built on incorrect maths. ibid.
Even our refugee system is privatized. ibid.
This wasn’t like sustainable real economic growth, this was wealth extraction from the ordinary people and the state into the hands of the ultra-wealthy. And so our whole economy, everything, our public services, everything, got shitter and shitter but more expensive. ibid.
This is the Big Scam. ibid.
I studied hard, managed to get into LSE. Gary Stevenson, interview Owen Jones, Capitalism: Doomed to Crisis, Youtube 52.23, 2024
Short-term interest-rate lending: The trading of short-term loans … anything up to two years … one day loans, one week loans … These guys said I could trade from day one. ibid.
You can already kind of see they didn’t really know what they were doing, with the banks that blew the world up. ibid.
The geniuses don’t know what they’re doing. ibid.
My parents are Mormons. I was raised like almost in a religious cult. So I think I had to accept early on the idea that sometimes millions of people don’t really know what they are doing. ibid.
How the post-2008 period was really horendously redicted. ibid.
9 out of 10 people said, ‘Gary, I don’t have any more money.’ ibid.
Economists were then, and I think still are now, diagnosing a terminal cancer as a series of seasonal colds. It was a fundamental structural crisis here, which is we are bankrupting our middle class, we are bankrupting our governments. ibid.
There is a structural crisis in inequality. ibid.
Quantitive Easing: The central bank buys government bonds. ibid.
If you give rich people a bunch of cash, what they do they buy the assets. ibid.
A massive blind-spot … Who are the winners and who are the losers? ibid.
You can see the loss of wealth of the middle class. ibid.
The rich will take everything. ibid.
A crisis of inequality looks good from the perspective of the rich. ibid.
Whose job is it to protect the economy? ibid.
Economic growth has kind of become a code word for I am an idiot with no plan. It’s become a mantra. ibid.
You need to deal with the growing inequality. ibid.
Within ten years we’ll be in fascism. That’s my concern. ibid.
People want an alternative. The centre is collapsing. ibid.
[Gary]: It’s going to get worse … If we keep going in this direction, poverty will get worse. More and more people will be in poverty. Gary Stevenson, Gary’s Economics, with JimmytheGiant, Youtube 1.06.21
If things keep getting worse, people demand some sort of change on the economy. ibid.
Anyone who’s really smart realises we’re going downhill. ibid.