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I don't understand why people think the economic situation in the US is bad enough to warrant a civil war. This "prediction" doesn't seem to be based in any type of logic at all – mostly fantasy.

alt-righters love to larp about civil war, ton of them in this thread

>alt-righters love to larp about civil war, ton of them in this thread

Oh, yeah, they sure do. What happens when everyone eventually figures out politics is pro wrestling, and the same donor class runs the whole show? The fake left/right divide goes away, and the rich find themselves outnumbered, and their money won't buy them a way out.

> What happens when everyone eventually figures out politics is pro wrestling

Cheer louder? People love that stuff.

I'm more worried about the people who think the pro wrestling is real and end up storming government buildings on that basis.

> their money won't buy them a way out.

It definitely will. The only civil war could be working-class cops and PMCs against people who are paid by the hour, who have to show up with an hour's notice, who have their urine tested, who have their complaints about discrimination and dangerous conditions ignored, and who are fired at will - and that war is always going on.

Wealthy people will (do) rely on people with guns to protect their physical vicinity, and the technology, organization, and propaganda provided by the people posting on this thread to multiply the effort of the people with guns.

edit: I bet you could have a civil war in the US that wouldn't affect the financial industry or the wealthy at all, even while the war was going on. Personal security would just become one of those things that people looking for jobs at FAANGs would expect as part of the package.

While full blown civil war is unlikely, there are good conditions for nasty stuff to happen. Political hypocrisy, dehumanization of the other tribe (both sides), coupled with worsening economic conditions and lots of young men that can't participate in society is rarely recipe for prosperity. Throw in some two years of lockdowns and a lot of tensions everywhere - chances for low key violence increasing across the board are not low.

Biden couldn't deliver one of his most important implicit promises - that will deescalate the culture war and return to normal. So far things has intensified.

We are in for a bumpy ride.

Don't know if I agree that things have intensified since Biden came to office...in my anecdotal and possibly siloed experience it feels like things have calmed down significantly for one side and stayed about the same or decreased slightly for the other side. Maybe it's recency bias, and I'm comparing too much to 2020 when everything was extremely heated. But generally I feel like the left and right were both screaming in 2020 and now it's like 10% of the left and 90% of the right.

If we were still on the gold standard there would be a civil war. Right now the debt backed fiat system is flexible enough to avoid such a worst case scenario.

Savings accounts only ever paid like, 2% above inflation, right? I wouldn't advise keeping so much money in a savings account you thought you could live off the interest -- you'd be way above the FDIC insurance limit.

The transfer from the young to the old in the form of federal support of stock and real estate prices, and various subsidies to health care, is probably larger than the 2% interest and 1% CPI the old have lost.

Savings accounts used to pay anywhere from 5 to 8 percent back when inflation was 1 to 2 percent. You didn't expect to live off the interest, but you did expect the drain rate to be far less than with effectively zero interest.

In India it used to be common for elderly to live of interests from fixed deposits, or other instruments of this kind.

From a few years Mutual funds have been quite famous, but inflation is so high, nothing really works.

Here in India only safe source of income is rent income.

They haven’t paid that much for well over a decade. If you’ve failed to take a hint by now and are still keeping all your savings in a bank account, you have no one to blame but yourself.

>Savings accounts used to pay anywhere from 5 to 8 percent back when inflation was 1 to 2 percent.

source? using the data from FRED https://i.imgur.com/O6EdHco.png, the periods where that was true (ie. interest rates being 4-6 percentage points above inflation is few and far between.

For most retirees, inflation doesn't hit nearly as hard. No transportation to work every day, no kids to feed or clothe, home often paid off, generally lower expenses all around. Earning 5-7% off of a savings account, or maybe municipal bonds, was once a huge, reliable supplement to Social Security.

As far as the second part of your comment, you should get your head out of the clouds and look around at working-class America. Perhaps 20% of retirees own a significant amount of stock, or own a house worth enough to cash out of. The US median home price didn't even cross $250k until 2018. https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/

> As far as the second part of your comment, you should get your head out of the clouds and look around at working-class America. Perhaps 20% of retirees own a significant amount of stock, or own a house worth enough to cash out of. The US median home price didn't even cross $250k until 2018. https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/

Those "retirees" also do not have enough money to retire. To retire and live off the interest of a theoretical 5% interest savings account for 30 years requires you to already be wealthy. If you're a working-class baby boomer, you may have gotten that from your house when you sold it and moved into a bad neighborhood or an apartment. But that's just about the only way other than Social Security and old pensions that you're going to keep eating.

The trouble is that there is no secret pool of wealth that can somehow give people the living standards they expect if only it were prised from the hands of the super-wealthy, and populist politicians and activists have been taking advantage of people's lack of understanding and desire to blame someone to lie about this. Everything that ordinary people need requires scarce real resources like land, raw materials, equipment, workers' time, etc. The super-wealthy do not use such a disproportionate amount of those that redistribution would help the rest of the populace. Which is why demagogues like to compare ordinary wages to their wealth instead - but although they're measured in the same dollars, one is measuring real stuff ordinary people buy and the other the shareholdings in companies times the last price shares traded and there's no way to transmute the latter into the former. Sure, many of those companies produce real things, but the general populace is already receiving those things, generally with very efficient pricing and use of limited resouces so there's no magical savings there either.

> Many older people saved large amounts of money in their bank accounts, and were expecting to live off the interest in their savings account once they retired. The interest they were due was effectively stolen when the central banks started giving away free money, it was a massive transfer of wealth.

The transfer was from people relying on interest/bonds to people relying on stock returns. Far more old people rely on stock returns than savings account interest. The transfer of wealth was actually from future taxpayers to stockholders.

> our near peers will funnel weapons into the US

The US is the arms dealer of the world. It is American weapons going into Mexico and other Latin American countries that are causing problems there.

The lawful/licensed gun owners in Canada have to put up with potential bans because of the too ready availability of guns in the US that are smuggled over the border and make headlines.

I assume GP was talking about serious crew served weapons like artillery, MANPADS, and the like. You are correct that the US is already set in terms of small arms, with its civilian population owning more guns than all the militaries of the world combined[0].

That being said I think GP's prediction of a civil war triggered by inflation is hysteria.

[0]https://www.smallarmssurvey.org/sites/default/files/resource...

Boring explanation: The return on investment in developed nations is much lower than in developing nations. Companies invest abroad and avoid hiring domestically. This has resulted in a flood of cheap consumer goods from China and other Asian countries which enters developed countries. Americans don't have to work but they also don't get paid unless they own stocks in these multinational companies. Interest rates go down as inflation goes down. The country now has a surplus population of low skill labor that simply isn't needed anymore. As I said, if they don't work they also don't get paid which kills consumer demand and the lack of consumer demand then further reduces the need to invest. The winners of globalization end up with more money than they know what to do with so they just invest it at any yield. More investment with the same returns just means less yield. This means interest rates must go down as well.

Now here is a problem. We live in a physical world. Monopolies, extortion and violence exist and if you use them properly you can force yields to be roughly constant. You can achieve higher yields by screwing over other people. The most common examples are housing and medical bills. If national yields are 0% and your house gets 3% yields because it's location is a monopoly then you got those 3% at the expense of another person who is losing those 3%. Since the level of production and amount of money did not change, inequality must grow.

In that sense interest rates aren't the problem. The real problem is that there are investments whose yield does not follow the interest rate plus a risk premium according to the asset class. If housing yielded 0% then only those who actually want to live in it or rent it out (for a fair price) would buy it.

> our near peers will funnel weapons into the US

There are enough weapons in USA, no need for anyone to do that.

> A rebalancing is going to have to take place, and somehow the wealth needs to be transferred back to the working class

Inflation is the traditional way that wealth gets transferred to the working class (besides higher marginal tax rates - but that seems to have gone out of fashion). While inflation hurts everyone it hurts especially savers and especially old savers who have most of their wealth in assets with a fixed interest rate. Workers can renegotiate higher salaries so in the long run they are less affected than somebody with lots of savings during times of high inflation. Very low inflation for the past decade are a big part of the reason why the wealth gap has increased so much.

Transferred to the working class, but from where? From people with savings, but not people who own assets. So this is a redistribution between the lower castes, not from the higher to the lower caste.

I know the official inflation numbers for the past decade were small, but this highly depends on what you put in your basket. The rise of stocks, real estate, education and health over the past decade shows that inflation was there all the time. Therefore I do not see why low inflation would increase the wealth gap.

The wealth gap always increases without external disruptions (world wars, strong government) because the return on capital is higher than the growth of the economy as a whole.

> and were expecting to live off the interest in their savings account once they retired. The interest they were due was effectively stolen when the central banks started giving away free money, it was a massive transfer of wealth.

Well, it goes to show that the economy and financial system shouldn't be based on interest does it not? Something we've known for thousands of years now with the prohibition of interest/usury in Islam, Christianity, and Judaism.

It won’t happen. We’ve now seen companies literally shitting away their good will to avoid paying people more. They will not do it, period.

I think, at least for small businesses, if the owners don’t feel like they are overwhelmingly wealthy, they’ll just tank the business and move on, maybe go back to working for someone. And big businesses have cash reserves like mountains. They’ll play chicken until people beg them for jobs.

> literally

No, figuratively.