This is from the FT today:
We face a climate crisis that most of the companies cannot comprehend, let alone as yet react to.
Brexit is about to disrupt markets.
The world's economies are massively unstable due to inequality.
But stock markets reach record highs.
And people ask whether capitalism is sustainable. Isn't the answer obvious?
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There is only one thing we can latch onto when it comes to the climate change.
And that thing is BREXIT.
As time has gone on, the risks to our country of BREXIT have to some degree come out into the open more and people seem to be changing their minds.
This gives me some source of hope when dealing with climate change. I think that as the climate begins to become more extreme and unpredictable only then will they get it. It’s a shame that it has to be this way (maybe) but that is how it seems to be because no one wants to accept the worst at the moment.
Of course, the issue with BREXIT now is that the politicians cannot agree. I think that if Parliament takes us out of the EU either soft or hard, the economy is going to dip. Not a good idea to be coming up for re-election post BREXIT where I am sure the voter will tell politicians what they think.
I can see the same effect concerning climate change with our politicians. Action will only become relevant to the political class when it becomes more relevant to the voter.
This is the world we inhabit unfortunately but it is better than nothing.
There is a lot of lip service to acknowlege climate change in the corporate sector but it seems companies only act when faced by crisis. They do not see the crisis coming, as long as they are doing very nicely, thank you, profits and sales continue, they feel safe. Things can change of course as the recent Extinction Rebellion protests have show, the executives’ children get it but their fathers don’t. With uncertainty both domestically and globally on the political fronts, underlying social unrest, possible imminent financial crashes al la 2007-9 we may be in for a rough ride.
is the current state of affairs swelled by QE with negative interest rates capitalism in any meaningful sense?…
Quite possibly
And that was the wrong form of QE
What we needed was Green QE – which is a very different thing in its impact
Teflon Don says:
“…is the current state of affairs swelled by QE with negative interest rates capitalism in any meaningful sense?…”
I would suggest not. It’s the end game of capitalism where it has ceased to be a productive economic strategy in the real economy, and been entirely usurped by financialisation. In so far as it can be described as capitalism it is ‘Casino Capitalism’.
That graph trace has a way to go in all probability. Maybe as far again as from the last big dip. This is the ‘melt-up’ perhaps, but there might be a few faltering corrections on the way. The balloon is being hyper-inflated. This is the chicken run. FOMO time where the whales and sharks pig-out on the little fishies; all the people who think this time it really IS different 🙂
Crash about October ????
So if Capitalism is not sustainable and therefore ( by implication) needs to be replaced what do we replace it with. IMO the only system capable of replacing Capitalism is one where people not shares have votes. The contributions of entrepreneurs and investors need to be rewarded, but this is not the same as continuing to leave the control of our economy solely in the hands of the super rich.
Oddly I have been invited to consider this big issue today….
Do you think markets will crash?
Yes
Sometime