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Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

It feels overwhelming that there are so many arbitrary, seemingly pedestrian articles of this world being boosted in value to such stratospheric heights. Society's measures just keep seeming so out of balance, so wildly over-inflated, on so many accounts, & it just seems like, with valuations, there's almost never any means for these belief structures to be countered. The structures of faith supporting these valuations have no maintenance costs, & any element of scarcity fuels a FOMO that further stratifies. Everything feels unmoored, decoupled, floating off the planet. I hate that I yearn for reckoning, on so many areas, but economically, faith only ever accrues, builds, escalates.

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Read an interesting theory that this "missing inflation" from all the money printing is already here - it just affects things that people with money buy, so stocks/real estate/collectibles/cryptocurrency basically. Reason being all the printed money went straight to the rich. The CPI is untouched.

I feel this in my bones. Some part of this is not new - from the tulip mania to beanie babies - but there definitely feels like more abstraction creeps in every year.

I like concrete things. Rugged tools, reliable cars, but these are boring. You can't build a bubble on boring, moored ideas, you need hype.

> You can't build a bubble on boring, moored ideas, you need hype.

...except for houses

Touché! Although if you are referring to the the great housing bubble, I think a big contributing factor was financial instruments and practices which enabled more "bubbly" behavior. Giving people access to mortgages that historically would likely not have been given, and in hindsight absolutely should not have been given, injected a ton of cheap and easy money into the system. The more degrees of indirection, the more unhinged it can become.

Concrete to abstract:

- make a house yourself

- buy a house with cash

- buy a house with a mortgage with a large down payment (low risk, easy to back)

- buy a house with good credit and less down payment but PPI (riskier, the bank needs to hedge more)

- no down payment, less than stellar credit, more house than you need, etc.

The latter is super high risk and normally would not be underwritten. But someone figured out you could bundle the risk in order to distribute that risk, surely only a collapse of the whole housing market could make them massively default! Oops.

I feel like this phenomena really can only happen in 'first-world' countries like America -- in fact, maybe it's almost a uniquely American thing driven by our culture of optimism... combined with the need to look trendy, which doesn't really have any geographical boundaries.

Veblen goods are not exclusive to america.

for. sure. 100% ridiculous, yet not a problem that couldn't use a solution in its context.

You said a lot of words that can simply be countered by a 22yo saying "yolo" and they aren't exactly wrong either. As an individual, you do only live once. How do you want to spend that time? Being upset at the way things are, or enjoying it to the extent that you can? I'm not advocating for this thinking, just saying it is valid point of view. It is actually helpful to cut off you criticism of things at a certain point and focus on a realistic balance of concerns, cause, you know, yolo ;)

I got a lot of advice on how I should opt not to care yesterday too on HN. I'm tired of being berated for being a human, with senses, who perceives things, and tries to discern order. That I care is not a fault.

But yes, sure. I do try to allow others, to permit the flourishing, wild world around me. I don't take umbrage with this unreason. But it does feel like so many cycles have such poor self-correction, and that does cause a generalized concern.

There are lots of fun things in the world, but if you buy investments because they're fun, you're usually the sucker.

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