Hacker News Reader

Comment by Esophagus4 | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, that seems to be happening already.

YTD, US equities have underperformed most other equity indexes.

The argument is that a weakened dollar, political / economic unpredictability, politicization of the fed, and big spending bills are starting to weigh on investors’ minds.

Personally, I don’t think a dramatic “crash” is the most likely outcome. I think it would look more like a slow erosion of US growth and dominance compared with other economies.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-11/a-great-y...

View on HN

> I don’t think a dramatic “crash” is the most likely outcome.

There's lots of crashes, but they're over-predicted. A quote I can't remember perfectly, "we predicted 10 of the last 3 stock market crashes".

That said, if the levers of power in the USA stop being independent, if they all become bound to the will of the President, there's a strong risk of someone — could be the President who ends their independence, could be a successor — crashing it all very hard. If whoever is in charge at the time hates intellectuals, I mean it can be Pol Pot hard; but even if the leader at that point tries to do it all right and listens to sane advisors, it can still crash as hard as the Chinese famine resulting from the Four Pests campaign.

The USA isn't there yet. That's the direction of motion, but even with the current speed of change, there's enough independence that it's not even close to that bad yet.

Gives me the goosebumps.

I hope we never get there.

Monarchists-esque governments arguably have a stronger incentive to preserve and generate wealth than elected officials, so it's not really a given that a dictatorship style government would be bad for equities.

Take a look at Dubai, for instance.

The UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Saudi monarchies, all around 10x higher GDP per capita than Arab non-monarchies Egypt, Lebanon and Yemen. The exception being Jordan, an Arab monarchy that still manages to be relatively poor.

Are you normalizing by oil per capita?

Holy confounded variables, Batman! You're measuring oil wealth, not government organization.

And at least arguably, the causality goes the other way: restless populations in poorer nations are more likely to drive democratic reforms, where wealthy folks tend not to rock the boat.

Yeah I kinda regretted writing "crash".

Your comment lines up with my sentiment, though I don't put a ton of stock (pun somewhat intended) in mine due to "amateur" status.

But I guess the "if not US, where?" question remains for me. Diversity "everywhere", try to be smartly selective?

I am not a CFA, and this is not financial advice (and I believe you learn what people really believe by what they hold, not what they say :) )

So telling you what I hold: I’m long the market, mostly in US equities (60%), developed economy international equities 20%), and intermediate term US bonds (20%).

My investment horizon is 20+ years, so in general, I don’t pay attention to the short term vol.

That's not too dissimilar from mine.

I have cash I need to invest. I'm not looking to change any of my existing investments, so it's more a question of what the right move is there, with the wrinkle that I now live in the EU (again) after spending my whole adult life in the USA.

I don't believe (or have interest) in making any short term moves. I don't think I need to (and feel very fortunate).

We have the same 20+ horizon, but I guess the crux of the issue (and the point of my initial entry into this thread) is: how different do I think the world will be in 20+ years, and even if I'm confident it'll change, do I know what it'll become to make the right moves now?

I don't think I do (and I'm somewhat skeptic anyone else really does either).

If you ever figure out what the future holds, let me know :)

Best I can do is I know that the future holds that I don't know what the future holds.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com