from Hacker News

How the mother of all bubbles will pop: betting against American exceptionalism

by buildfocus on 12/16/24, 10:22 AM with 4 comments

  • by neonate on 12/16/24, 8:25 PM

  • by TheBruceHimself on 12/16/24, 11:07 AM

    I feel it must fall at some point (I’m not sure I’m comfortable saying it’s a bubble tbh so I’ll stick with ‘fall’, not ‘pop’) but I’m not going to bet as to when. I thought the market would turn back in 2018 when my 401k was getting 25% growth year after year. I was certain of it, but it’s kept going… People just seem really bullish about US corporations right now, particularly tech, and that’s only been solidified moreso in recent times because people believing this made it so (okay, to an extent, the companies are decent too). I hear it over and over again one way or another: people don’t want to invest elsewhere because it’s the US companies that make the returns they like.

    It must be unsustainable on some level but what’s going to need to happen for people to stop thinking this way? I used to think it wouldn’t take much but now I think it might take a lot. It wouldn’t surprise me if this lasts another decade or more and all this looks like the Japanese economy of the 70s and 80s when it was the future, its corporations were taking over the world, and all its investments made the returns you couldn’t get elsewhere. The one day, suddenly, all that started to sound silly.

    Or it could all just pop tomorrow because some CEO sends a bad tweet. Heck, it’s all soothsaying.

  • by brodouevencode on 12/16/24, 3:27 PM

    > But every hero has a fatal flaw. America’s is its sharply increasing addiction to government debt.

    A problem so big that even a non-American takes notice.