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Why is everything going to shit? (feddit.de)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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???

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago (12 children)

It's cyclical and it's been happening for thousands of years. It's part of our human nature.

We all work together and build systems, societies and civilizations and do great things. We become wealthy and then slowly concentrate that wealth to smaller and smaller groups of people. Eventually the majority of the wealth is controlled by a very small group of people and everyone else has nothing. The system at this point can not sustain itself and collapses. Then the whole human system restarts again from the bottom.

It's happened many many times throughout human history.

We are just at the height of one of those cycles.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What exactly do you mean by system collapsing and restarting? How does it look?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Oooh! I got this one! There’s an excellent YouTube channel called “Fall of Civilizations” that show all the different ways this happened in the past.

https://youtube.com/@FallofCivilizations

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