We used to call them Ponzi schemes. This is the same but in slow motion. People are going to start taking their profits at some point and whoever takes them last will be holding the bag.

Or just lottery tickets, which are mostly purchased by low income folks, and legal/state-sponsored, no less.

Counterpoint: People are going to start getting rid of their dollars at some point, and whoever gets rid of them last will be holding the bag.

It's weird because last time I joined a conversation about BTC on this very website pro BTC posters were insisting on the fact that nobody ever said BTC would replace dollars.

When you tell them BTC is slow and expensive they tell you BTC will never replace dollars so it's not a real issue, when you tell them BTC is a ponzi scheme they tell you that it will replace dollars. Even in the pro BTC group nobody agrees what it is, what it should be and what it should become.

As Keynes said: "In the long run, we're all dead". USD has intrinsic value as the reserve currency of the largest economy in the world and is actively managed by the Fed. Which is a thing most people like despite what you may read online. Dollars will eventually be worthless but not in our lifetime.

CPI inflation is extremely low. This should be worrying to anyone who thinks that the value of a dollar is going down as much as the housing, stock and cryptocurrency market imply. No, this is an indicator for a large scale bubble in the financial system. Once interest rates go up again there will be a correction.

Ponzicoins :)

Obviously this was actually a thing. The whitepaper is really entertaining. https://ponzico.win/ponzico.pdf

I personally think that the huge increase in the money supply and all of the stimulus money that has went out to people is the primary fuel to speculative investing (like GME and Crypto). Savings rates in the pandemic have never been higher.

I see it less as desperation and more of 'whoa, i have more money now, i want to put it into things that go up in value!'. I haven't seen the data (so do correct me), but I would suspect that less sophisticated retail investing is on the rise over the last year, correlating with increased savings.

But that’s not even remotely true. People’s standard of living is better than ever before and their chances of success higher than ever.

The narratives we craft define how we move in this world. This is a toxic way of thinking. It takes about $500/month throughout a working life to retire comfortably investing in just VTSAX.

Household debt increased is past pre-2007 levels. https://www.newyorkfed.org/microeconomics/hhdc.html

People have certainly paid for a better standard of living, but they didn't get there with just wages.

Here's some related data that may help expand our understanding:

Household debt service payments as a percent of disposable personal income are as low as they have ever been: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TDSP

Personal savings rate has never been better: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT

Household debt to GDP saw a spike at the beginning of the pandemic, but still is much lower than we were coming out of the last recession: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HDTGPDUSQ163N

Disposable income has never been higher: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DSPI

$500/mo for 40 years is only $500K at 5%/yr ROI. Good luck retiring on that. At 4% drawdown that's only $20K/year