'Block Everything' protests sweep across France, scores arrested

I do diversify (not precious metals or crypto though). Real estate, cash, bonds, stocks. (I could use more international index funds, but see below.)

Still, my sense is that there won't be any safe havens. It will be global, it will be stocks, everyone will be poorer so real estate will be unsellable, inflation destroying cash holdings…

Serious question (I am no scholar on history), where were the safe harbors during the Great Depression?

My ignorant notion is that there were none. But if you held on to your stocks for a couple decades, you did fine … just not during those two decades though.

Real estate ETFs are worthless, they contain all the risks of a real estate investment with none of the upside (leveraging with non recourse debt, 1031, potential property tax incentives, etc).

San Francisco public schools -- it was in the national news. Details of the theory associated with it include Stanford.. endless numbers of heavily slanted retellings, few primary sources. lots of obfuscated Board votes

None of that is correct.

If the market cap of Google is a million dollars and a sandwich is $5 and then tomorrow the market cap of Google is a trillion dollars because they wiped out all their competitors and took over the market, the price of a sandwich is still $5 because it's quite unrelated and not affected by the number of search engines or mobile operating systems. Larry Page isn't going to personally eat so many sandwiches that it affects the global price of sandwiches no matter how much money he has. Moreover, necessities generally have elastic supply -- even if demand increased, we could just make more of them rather than raising the price -- unless you cause artificial scarcity (as we do with housing), in which case that's your problem independent of billionaires.

What the consolidated market does affect is that market, e.g. the price and quality of phones and phone apps. But that has nothing to do with what proportion of the company's shares is owned by what number of people. It's just as much of a problem if it's a publicly-traded company whose largest shareholder owns less than 1% of it. And the problem goes away if the market is competitive even if there exists someone who has billions of dollars as a result of owning a fractional percentage of a million different companies -- although that usually isn't what happens anyway because the primary driver of the existence of billionaires is "market consolidates enough to cause one company's market cap to exceed a hundred billion dollars", not "someone invests a thousand dollars each into a thousand separate companies and every one of them beat the market by a huge factor without any of them becoming a megacorp".

Companies are mostly doing layoffs because interest rates went up and using AI hype as cover. The anti-inflationary force is the higher interest rates. And if AI was actually lowering the cost of that sort of thing then you still have to contend with the Jevons paradox.

Meanwhile the hype is causing things to be converted to "AI" even when it isn't any more efficient, which lowers labor demand (suppresses wages / increases unemployment, bad) and increases power demand (higher electricity prices, bad) and to the extent that hype causes adoption of inferior solutions, lowers efficiency (worthless AI customer service, bad). Some of the AI stuff is useful but the hype is causing folly.

Migration isn't particularly deflationary, especially with respect to housing prices since the new residents then increase housing demand, which is fine when construction isn't constrained by zoning but bad when it is, and right now, it is.

Most of the outsourcing that can reasonably happen already has, in large part because the US housing market (and therefore cost of living) has been out of whack for a long time, which makes US workers less competitive despite what would otherwise be various countervailing advantages. Things are made in China because they fit on a container ship, but that happened decades ago. Nurses and landscapers and firefighters and plumbers are still domestic and that isn't likely to change.

Out of curiosity I looked for the house that couple is selling. Believe it's this: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/30206-Telluride-Ln-Evergr... Notice the price history. 83k in '97, which is about 170k now. Being sold for a 10x profit. Sigh.

> there is simply not enough resources, land, high paying jobs for everyone to achieve a comfortable life

On the contrary, (in the US) I think there is at least enough land and resources (including food) that a modest haircut on the ultra-rich would go a long way for the lower-middle classes.

> Society seems to be self correction mode by not having nearly as many babies recent years.

An interesting factoid from the Roman Empire is that in their later years there was a major fertility collapse to the point that various laws were passed in order to try to motivate fertility in various ways, and they ultimately failed.

I don't know what to take from that yet, if anything, but I think it's obvious that we've similarly entered well into an 'end of empire' type era, and fertility rates have also again collapsed. So again, I think it's simply interesting to ponder.

> I often think about why this is happening now without invoking the default "evil rich people" hypothesis.

What do you mean? In the French protests, the "evil rich people" hypothesis is very present. Every other protester was brandishing "tax the rich" placards.

"The math".

We don't have issue with the math, we just disagree on what to fund to balance things out.

An example, 200+ billion euros are given yearly to large companies as tax breaks and the like, without the government asking anything in return. The senate had a report about it recently [https://www.publicsenat.fr/actualites/economie/un-cout-annue...].

Another example, the military and defense get a huge increase in budget. schools, hospitals, research, nearly every public service get a budget cut instead [ https://www.force-ouvriere.fr/non-aux-44-milliards-d-economi...].

There are plenty of people on every side of the problem. But it takes very few people to paralyze the country. (Even that is relative, it's not like nothing can run during these episodes. But the elected government certainly feels like they can't go forward.)

I have not seen any solutions by either the left or the right that mathematically solve it. In fact, the last time I checked, the far right was advocating for a lower retirement age and increased spending.

The left seems to want things we all want, but we're unsure how to afford them. They never seem to have math to back it up as taxes can only go up so much, and they are already some of the highest as a percentage of GDP in the world.

Can you point me to a real proposed solution by either side?

> a lot of people here are quite aware that we are in very difficult financial situation, from all side of the political spectrum

According to the votes that Le Pen and Melanchon are supposed to get, I would not say "a lot of people".

Just redistribute the resources, cap prices and let the economy prop up itself. The rich have to give it up for sake of stability and greater good. I'm sure they will understand lol

  Fundamentally the French economy isn't producing enough to support the current level of pension spending, due to a continuously falling ratio of workers to retirees.

Of course an influx of immigrants will cause other issues. But if wealthy people need more population to keep their wealth up, I don't think they care.

10 years of covering 100% of spending? That sounds like a really sweet deal to me, and more than enough to invest into the nation enough to go back to a balanced budget in that time frame.

I mean, try it with yourself. Imagine that you take your current salary, keep it for 10 years, and have 100% of your spending covered? How life changing would that be to you? Probably a lot.

Seems to be working pretty well in the Scandinavian countries.

The French Revolution is generally regarded as a good move. It did get rid of a lot of rich people.

> Why? What exactly makes it possible or impossible to have a coalition government, in your opinion?

Mostly because it is a different system. The parlement in France doesn't elect the government. The president choose the prime minister, and the prime minister form the government.

The parlement can, at basically any point, vote to "censor" the government, effectively terminating it if a majority is reached (they do stay in position until a new government is formed, but can only take care of the "affaire courante", i.e simple daily affairs, no big laws, reforms, policy changes, ...).

Indirectly, this means that the parlement can have a lot of power over who will be in the government. If one party has an absolute, or almost absolute, majority in the parlement, it more or less mean that they can decide who shall be in the government.

Due to the way our election works, the party of the president usually has the majority in the parlement. This is even more true since Chirac changed the duration of the presidential mandate to match the duration of the parlement mandate (and their elections are very close). This usually give a lot of power to the president, effectively making him the sole judge of who shall be in the government (since he choose the prime minister and the parlement member of his party follow his lead).

But what we have right now is a very unique situation. Nobody has even close to an absolute majority in the parlement. The left "union" (which is not really united, but that's another story) control roughly ~33% of the seat, the extreme right party control ~21% of the seats, the presidential party control ~15%, and the rest are various centrist and right wing party.

The issue is that there is no way to get a solid absolute majority with this assembly. For the left, even if they were to compromise heavily and add as much center-right as possible in their coalition, it would barely give them a majority, and the government would have to compromise so much, it would piss off all their voters, which would be a political suicide for the next presidential election. Nobody want to ally with the extreme right except a few members of some right party, which would never give a majority (and the RN would only go to the government if they don't have to make any important compromise, for the same reason). So, you have to remove the two biggest block. And so, even if all the other party would somehow make a coalition (which is more or less the government we had since the assembly dissolution), it would still give less than ~45% of seats in the parlement, not enough to ensure that your governement would not be censored (which is what is happening, we've had like 3 or 5 government since the dissolution, i can't even remember all of them).

This is an unprecedented situation in France and basically the achilles heel of the fifth republic. Our system cannot function without a clear majority in the national assembly, and the way the assembly is divided right now makes any majority coalition impossible (or a political suicide).

As Tocqueville writes in "De l'ancien régime et la révolution", centralization was already underway since Louis XIV, and heavily. Napoleon just picked up on it and continued the process.

>That doesn’t sound like a bad thing

Of course it doesn't sound bad but what do you do when you run out of money to pay for it?

Do we decide policies based on what sounds good or what we can actually afford?

But hey, if you wanna give boomers luxury retirement while immolating the economic prospects of future generations of workers in order to pay for it, go for it.

> Compared to?

It's EU peers.

If France wants to support Ukraine and rebuild it's army, it will be required to borrow heavily to purchase arms.

If France wants to rebuild manufacturing supply chains domestically, it will be required to borrow heavily to invest in infra.

The above two will be in the tens to hundreds of billions of Euros range.

France ALSO spends tens to hundreds of billions of Euros on social services.

France ALSO needs to pay it's existing interest on debt, which is in the tens of billions of Euros a year and rising.

France needs to cut 2 of the first 3 choices - they cannot cut the 4th one due to EU regulations and if France does not want to become the next Argentina.

Love it. the previous two parent comments place the cognitive dissonance of Anglo-Saxon economic narratives in stark relief.