Was just trying to explain to someone why everything is going to shit, specifically companies, and realized, I don’t fully get it either.
I’ve got the following explanation. The sentences marked with “???” are were I’m lost. Anyone mind telling me, if they’re correct and if so, why?
The past few years, central banks were giving out interest rates of 0% or even negative percentages. Regular banks would not quite pass this on, but you could still loan money and give it back later with no real interest payments.
This lead to lots of people investing in companies. As long as those companies paid out more money than those low interest rates, it was worthwhile. But at the same time, this meant companies didn’t have to be profitable, because they could pay out investors from money that other investors gave them???
This has stopped being the case, as central banks are hiking interest rates again, to combat inflation???
The problem is that money is permited to generate money. So the more you have beyond the threshold to sustain yourself the more you can generate without labour. The business with no interest loans accelerates things but it isn’t the problem. It is that the system rewards idle investors at the expense of those whose labour actually generates value.
Capitalism wasn’t fine until someone broke it. The core concepts behind it are flawed.
I’ve said this plenty of times but it bears repeating, the problem isn’t capitalism or the type of social structure, the problem is people. Capitalism is a simplistic and ultimately ineffective solution, because it doesn’t account for the human problem.
People will always try to game the system. We need a system that recognises and accounts for that.
But capitalism is so much easier to game than, for example, market socialism.