Not the Onion

It may have cost us everything, but for one brief, shining moment in human history, a handful of investors made a grotesque amount of money.

World war three be lookin more and more like it’s gonna be a class war with the way these morons like to piss the rest of us off.

Europe had been moving towards the slaughterhouse for years, and by 1914 a conflict was all but inevitable—that, at least, is the argument often made in hindsight. Yet at the time, as Niall Ferguson, a historian, noted in a paper published in 2008, it did not feel that way to investors. For them, the first world war came as a shock. Until the week before it erupted, prices in the bond, currency and money markets barely budged. Then all hell broke loose. “The City has seen in a flash the meaning of war,” wrote this newspaper on August 1st 1914.

Apart from this, nothing in the article is worth reading.

Reading the actual article instead of just the headline, here's a summary of their arguments. There are multiple powder keg situations around the world that are either exploding or simmering. Iran and its proxies, Russia and Ukraine, China and Taiwan. They could all turn into an interconnected war at any moment. Yet markets, which supposedly factor in these possibilities, are still very high.

What this is not saying is that another world war would be secondary to investor yields. They make that explicit:

This scenario would of course place financial damage a long way down the list of horrors.

They're not wrong though.

If China attacks Taiwan, the first thing I'll do is to buy a high end graphics card and CPU. These parts will be impossible to buy for at least a decade. (should Taiwan be actually occupied)

As a German it's also one more reason to hate Hitler. Supposedly he liked Germans. But what he actually did was fuck Germany so hard, we would not recover for decades. Just imagine the advancements if Europe were not destroyed in WW2! So much value was lost. Most importantly the knowledge of people who died or were forced to flee.

Website called "The Economist" talks about the economy.

Lemmy.ml users: shocked-Pikachu-face

This is a great reminder regarding class: the rich do not die in the wars. They can only lose a bit of money.

I have no words left to describe what I think of this

People who are conditioned to only think ahead to the next quarter surprised by the real world

The Economist is known for being over-the-top dry almost to the point of humor when talking of horrible thing and how they affect economy.

Hasn't the Third World been at war for like a century now?

Yes, I remember the emotional end to the directors cut of Planet of the Apes well, in which Charlton Heston bemoans the loss of value in his portfolio.

If anybody needed further proof that capitalism leads to brain rot, this is it.

One could imagine that already with all the human loss we have lost some technology maybe for decades. Like some of those fallen to the hands of ruzzia could have been the only ones in the world who understood a particular scientific problem. There's probably technological loss already that will affect the world.

I can only assume this was written with tongue firmly in cheek.

I vote we force anyone whose incomes is more than 35% of their income is investing to be either sent to the front lines or be used for military testing.