The stock market

[mordant]

Perhaps this means the entire system is idiotic? 

I have evolved a theory in the period since Trump's election that the stock market has gone from being the sort of thing Ordinary People didn't invest in (pre-1990) to something that, due to information technology advances, anyone could invest in almost as easily as opening a savings account; to something that is once again the playground of corporations and the elites.

True, "ordinary" people have skin in the game indirectly, through whatever mutual funds their retirement funds are invested in. And anyone can invest $100 or more on any of several web sites, if only they had $100 to spare.

But they are mostly unaware of that and are docile enough to accept that their retirement funds may well not be there when they reach retirement age. Increasingly, even I don't really count on actual retirement actually happening anymore.

But more and more in recent years, there's no middle class with any extra funds to invest in markets or in anything else.

So it's plausible to me that the stock market has continued to ride pretty high. It was of course doing well when Obama left office to begin with, and has enjoyed that momentum (somewhat blunted and stretched out from that slow recovery). But there was also corporate euphoria at the massive deregulation and the dismantling of what corporations see as odious and unworkable environmental regulations and other oversights, etc. That pushed it along. The markets kept going up when from my point of view there's no reason to be optimistic about the long-term viability of the markets or of most anything else, given that we're doing exactly all the wrong things to have a sustainable and prosperous future. We're literally turning the clocks back to the 1950s in terms of policy.

From the point of view of the oligarchs, therefore, life is good and looking better all the time and that's what the stock markets pretty much reflect.

But this can't continue. Pretty soon there will be no one with $$ to buy what the oligarchs sell and the "irrational exuberance" that sustains the markets will implode. At that point the markets will fall, maybe in fits and starts, maybe all at once. Trump may be able to finagle at least plausibly propping them up until after the 2020 election so that claims of unprecedented prosperity can be made. But after that, look out.

What will the plutocrats do at that point? Retire to the bunkers they've been building in New Zealand and protect themselves from being tarred and feathered, with the notion that after the smoke clears they will pick up the pieces and start over again. New opportunities and new fortunes to be made. So it goes.

I am not saying that we're necessarily looking at an overt dystopia, post-election, of the sort that's usually depicted cinematically. We plausibly could be, but we might also make a softer landing where the human want and misery will be spread out in ways we can tell ourselves aren't Really All That Bad. Climate change, in particular, is a slow-motion debacle that would be decades in the making. It's not like half the land currently above sea level in Florida will disappear all at once in the next hurricane. It will just gradually flood and dry out, then flood a little more each time, and the new coastal reality will not be set in stone until maybe as late as the year 2200. We'll gradually move population centers inland, leaving behind the most impoverished and vulnerable to die a slow death, and we will accept that as the New Normal. The ones that will be left will be the top 1 to 2 % in terms of income and net wealth, and the open question is whether the other 98% are containable and otherizable enough to be kept to their ghettoes or if they will die off enough to be manageable.

If I'm even one-fourth correct about the above, the next century is not going to be pretty.