I like how the wording here (Your voices) is giving off that sarcastic and patronizing "you're welcome" tone.
Like a religious person saying "I'll pray for you" to someone non-religious, where the undertone is an obvious middle finger.
It's pretty fun.
one (started here) was successful but one failed hard
I’d just be curious to trade stories to see if we can learn from each other
My handle@iCloud if you want to reach out
Do you truly believe in your heart of hearts that people posting neo-MOASS wish fulfillment suffer from a lack of a voice, and no place for them to be heard? Take this seriously. More important than "a voice" is consistency and clarity of communication. The people involved in occupy wall street in 2011 weren't occupying it because they wanted to eventually join it, and I don't think that their form of economic justice would be for Wall Street to lose money in a gigantic market crash that again would result in taxpayer-funded bailouts that spurred the first protests. For transparency's sake, what are your market positions today?
As an outsider to all this, it's funny how these movements always crumble as soon as there is any mainstream recognition.
You have X complaint against an institution. Let's say the institution accepts and reforms somewhat. It's pretty rare that the complainant will pat themselves on the back and say job well done. It's ultimately a game of diminishing returns.
If you have a hammer, it's not just that everything is a nail - you must find enough nails to justify continuing to use the hammer.
It crumbled when the physical encampments were forcibly removed by the police. I mean, even at the tiny encampment of UC Davis-- essentially a few camping tents-- the students got pepper sprayed and hauled off. Remember that meme? Many of those same students also faced serious jail time for a protest outside Washington Mutual Bank. It's probably difficult to sustain a movement under those conditions, no?
In any case, the message that resonated across the U.S. encampments is essentially what turned into Bernie Sanders two runs for president. That, the group behind AOC's House run, and many other important grassroots movements are the legacy of OWS. Whatever the deal is with jart's website is orthogonal to all this-- I've literally never heard about her association with OWS outside of HN.
Edit: clarification
Secondly a domain and a political movement are 2 different things. Either one can exist without the other.
The domain is not even a .org which would be befit a movement ownership
Source: trust me bro
Justine, do you think that readers here don't have eyes? The page linked is a call to financial action that, if the advice is followed, will result in yet another unsophisticated ETF pump and dump at best and a call to financial suicide at worst.
You are personally underwriting propaganda for something you are very likely invested in, targeting the most credulous. For it to appear on a site called 'Occupy Wall Street' is deliciously ironic.
Here's my disclosure: I am completely divested for both the US and Japanese market, except for transient USD cash holdings. I don't have a horse in this race. Will you follow suit?
I know very little of what happened in NYC years ago, but I would tell anyone reading the site now that it is run by actively malevolent speculators.
I do, however, know a few of your associates. Stop hanging out with grungy, unwashed sex pests, they aren't as smart as they pretend to be, and you should know that by now. It's unbecoming and frankly sad. You have the means to start life anew elsewhere, and you should take that opportunity now.
https://wiki.pumpingstationone.org/wiki/Do-ocracy
"Questioned on Twitter about her beliefs, she replied: "Read Mencius Moldbug.""
(Original source of that information, as cited by above paper, is https://thebaffler.com/latest/mouthbreathing-machiavellis ; I don't have a Twitter archive at my fingertips so I cannot pull up the primary source.)
I feel International coverage, and even academic studies on the movement, missed this completely at the time.
> This #ows movement empowers real people to create real change from the bottom up. We want to see a general assembly in every backyard, on every street corner because we don't need Wall Street and we don't need politicians to build a better society.
Maybe at some point those people will understand that high-school approach doesn't work in the real world.
Look at the amount of change they brought, look at the amount of change that a single person like Donald Trump has brought (for better or worse, this is not an endorsement).
Finance bros will make their way in here soon to give a better peanut gallery, but I think "is there something here" comes down to do you believe the final bit of the articles opening act:
> When correlations between historically uncorrelated assets (e.g. Gold, Bitcoin, Microsoft, and Silver) approach 1.0 during a sell-off, it serves as a distinct indicator that traders are not selling what they want to sell, but rather what they must sell in order to meet margin calls in a funding currency that is rapidly appreciating against their liabilities.
Financial doom porn sells well, but it's almost always wrong.
* They are investing in AI, both financially and by corporate communication, over and above everything else and pissing off damn near everyone in the process
* The XBox brand is tanking
* Windows is an utter disaster, according to Microsoft themselves, and Valve is so dispirited with it as the future for gaming that they've invested millions into a linux-based framework to run Windows games
Two words:
*New Coke.*
In retrospect, Coke made mistakes, but at the time their logic was kinda sound. Market was changing, people were changing, product tested really well, etc.
And they owned up to the mistake and reverted in under 90 days. Honestly, they probably came out stronger and re-affirmed the attachment that people have with the brand.
In addition, they haven't made that mistake again and have been much smarter protecting their core while chasing trends. Free-style is a brilliant bit of tech, marketing, and logistics combined.
I worked in what other calls "Adversarial Interoperability" [1] but the scale of Valve is on another level.
[1] https://www.nektra.com/main/2020/01/12/reflecting-on-16-year...
Key counterpoints:
- Global FX turnover runs near $9.6T per day (BIS, April 2025). A retail wave of calls will not move USD/JPY in a durable way at that scale.
- /6J options settle on /6J futures. When you buy calls, you mostly push dealer delta hedging into futures, then dealers unwind as exposure changes. No sustained spot yen demand comes from that flow.
- FXY calls track an ETF wrapper, not spot.
- “Widowmaker trade” most often refers to repeated losses from shorting Japanese government bonds, not a long-yen crowd squeeze.
Otherwise it would not take a day to swap $500 mil for commercial reasons (think buying a couple Boeing plane with Euros) to avoid too much market impact as documented in multiple interviews with currency dealers stating it takes them 1 day to "work" a $500 mil order.
Retail can move FX, if it piles into one pair. But unlike the Boeing order they will also need to exit the trade at some point, which makes them vulnerable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ws8Grsc4jU
Purposefully devaluing the dollar to make US goods more globally marketable and hide the Japanese debt crisis is an interesting but risky strategy.
Currently, I'm glad to see a correction without panic, but it's too early to make a call on the effect on the overall global economy. Xi's already suggested making the Yuan a global reserve currency, and seeing as much debt they're holding, I'm a little worried they're able to make it happen if this is the US financial strategy.
It appears they've been associated with a lot of hype/fear copy-paste companies that offer highly inflated monthly access to their trades and research. Note that they were named "Game of Trades" before rebranding.
I really wish that people would wake up to the danger posed by meme stock BS “leaking” into the general markets.
Just as voters are responsible for changes in society, uninformed investors can impact society too, especially when they’re amplifying their purchasing power via leverage.
For instance, I’ve been buying real estate forever, and I’ve enjoyed the Reventure app.
But I’ve REALLY noticed that his YT videos are exclusively doom and gloom.
This ceaseless negativity moves markets, just as the irrational exuberance for real estate in 2005 moved markets.
But the exuberance for real estate was driven by people who were buying real estate.
The endless doom and gloom of YT finance videos is for a much different reason:
It drives page views.
That’s not a good thing. Because it’s really easy to get swept up in the negativity. And that negativity has a downstream effect, where it’s often used to convince people to invest in things that the YouTuber is promoting.
Basically, I don’t know if we need an “SEC for YouTube,” but we might.
Yes, I know we already have an SEC for YouTube (it’s the SEC), but nearly none of the people doling out financial advice on YT are trained professionals. It’s the fundamental defect of internet advice; who to trust?
An “SEC for YouTube” can’t prevent shit if the lever of influence is already that long. It might be able to keep a lot of meme investor idiots from losing their shirts, but that has to be weighed against the historically evident risks of having what amounts to a ministry of truth/state propaganda regulator.
I'm not saying the article's thesis is incorrect, but its providing some data without context. I'm always leery of data presented without context.
Christ.
Find a professional fiduciary that doesn't have a youtube channel and never speculate more than you can afford to lose.
What is this crazy idea that every single country must act all the time in the same simplified way?
My understanding is that a reserve currency requires fluid markets and a stable, reliable, metrics-based currency policy. It's why the Fed is so stubborn about its relatively simple policy goals: 2% inflation and low unemployment.
China appears to be attempting to reproduce what the USD was before it was free floating.
USD is currently backed by debt and nominally military might. If the US defaults then all of the US bonds held by foreign banks become worthless. That is an enormous risk which is why countries have been divesting from US bonds. If USD was still gold, as it was before 1913, if you hold your money it cannot be made worthless by a third party. After 1913 USD became gold backed bills with partial reserve. It is why USD became the global reserve currency. But, reserve requirements were reduced and more paper was produced. In 1971 Nixon removed the convertibility of paper bills to gold metal effectively stealing the gold of any nation that asked the US to hold it.
One of my favorite bits of currency trivia is that a $20 double gold eagle coin used in circulation prior to 1933 had a gold content of 0.9675 troy ounces. Twenty dollars in your hand was literally nearly an ounce of gold.
I wonder why you’re worried. Regime’s change all the time. From a third party perspective, China is no better or worse than the US. Also, given how literally every country under the sun despises US now, this might just happen.
China maintains strict controls on capital flows in/out. A reserve currency requires free convertibility. Holders need to move large sums instantly without permission. China has repeatedly tightened these controls during stress periods (2015-16 devaluation fears, for example).
Limited access to Chinese bond markets and equities for foreign institutions. Reserve currency status requires deep, liquid markets where central banks can park hundreds of billions. US Treasury market is $26T and extremely liquid. Chinese government bond market is smaller and less accessible.
Reserve currency issuer must run persistent current account deficits to supply the world with currency. China's economic model is built on export surpluses. They'd need to fundamentally restructure their economy.
This is PRC's fundamental disagreement. US reserve currency morphed into high liquid, high speculative instrument to fund unsustainable debt, hollowed out domestic industry (triffin)... but this is not by design. It's the result of emergency adaptations moving off gold, then people post rationalize the trinity musts (open capital, floating rates, independent central bank) is what makes reserve when it's unintended structural outcome from failed gold peg.
Now we see hints of end stage USD reserve behavior, debt snow balls and reserve controller will pull the our dollar, your problem card. This US doing current conniptions trying to either reduce USD strength or inflate away debt... costly instability. People forget, liquidity / storage only matters to sovereign buyers who needs reserve for utility... everyone else (now plurality) are private buyers who buy for returns. If we enter end of dollar cycle and USD reserve cost them money, then they go elsewhere
Elsewhere is what PRC wants to offer, HIGHLY CONTROLLED, BUT STABLE reserve pegged to PRC industrial chains, i.e. real economy instead of speculative financialization. This what recent yuan reserve talk is from (note it was old Xi speech republished in Qiushi), so the propose model isn't even in response to current USD conniptions but prediction on end life of US behavior when USD reserve goes from exorbitant privilege to just exorbitant.
It's precisely because logical outcome of current reserve "musts", i.e. triffin charity/global good that makes it ultimately a stupid arrangement where the system breaks when US/owner can't afford to maintain or develops bad habits (deficit spending). Hence, what PRC plans to offer in parallel: stable regulated reserves for "real economy" financial utility. Stable Yuan "bank" reserve can coexist with volatile USD "casino" reserve. Now of course this all heterodox theory, but we are seeing theory of USD reserve limits peaking it's head, and PRC not retarded enough to pickup triffin baton. IMO PRC fine with US dealing with triffin headache and IMO betting US will fuck global creditors when shit hits fan, i.e. they waiting for USD reserve to implode due to inherent contradictions, to show world precisely why yuan reserve not modelled to repeat same mistake.
40% pullback but still up 150% over the past year..
Call To Action
This won't just be the big one. This could be the last one. If you've been preparing your whole life, knowing that something's coming, then this could be the thing you've been preparing for. One final opportunity to get the guys who did this. [...] The worst that can happen is you lose your monopoly money, but that's been happening anyway.My guess is that she did a lot of research on the topic with AI then created this article partially with AI generated text.
God job
That had the effect that their banks took huge amounts of government loans and used it to buy foreign assets. As returns are higher in countries with higher interest rates, and lots of assets are practically safe, like government bonds, that is close to free money for them, and a very cheap loan to the receiving country.
But last year their central bank made the interest rate positive. And investors are acting on the expected way, selling the foreign assets and paying off their government. The article is claiming that this is the cause of the recent turbulence in the investment markets.
The issue was the terms. There was a lot of logic inversion that someone who's much more familiar with the terms could probably follow, especially when trying to understand how an investment in Microsoft was loosing value when the investment was from a loan in yen.
Likewise, the end of the article uses a lot of abbreviations, especially when referring to Australian currency, which I just don't understand at all.
It is true that the yen carry trade is currently being unwound and that it has significant implications for nearly all holders of treasuries. But claiming that ALL of the recent volatility is due to this one event is ludicrous. There are some blatant falsities, like saying that gold and silver are historically uncorrelated??? And it’s clear that the author has a bias against the financial establishment (“monopoly money”), coloring the output.
That said, there are legitimately interesting bits here I didn’t know about, like the Japanese institutional liquidation of US treasuries. I would not repeat this information to others without fact checking it, but if accurately described it’s an important space to watch. It’s not surprising that the LLM would get some things right, of course.
One big problem with this article is the clear prompt given to connect x current event to the yen carry trade, like Warsh’s nomination and the Greenland nonsense. This creates a lot of noise. It’s basically the LLM looking for a pattern between these things instead of identifying a structural flow. It might not even be wrong, but it’s horribly biased towards finding a fake pattern, so I would never trust it.
For the tech heads in HN that are excited to see a Justine Tunney post: don’t go crazy. If you’re really interested in learning about the unwinding of the yen carry trade, there’s plenty of information from actual experts to read about, not this slop.
Ok I’ll bite. Where ?
You can start here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-02/yen-carry...
There were news articles about this "happening" but this event never realized.
Basically, when currency is scarce, its value goes UP.
When currency is plentiful, its value goes DOWN.
The first scenario lowers inflation, the second raises it.
After Japans bubble economy popped in the early 90s, they had asset values FALL.
So the BoJ began stimulating the economy - trying to push UP inflation - by adding currency to the markets.
The Carry Trade illustrates one of the dangers:
Japan was trying to stimulate their own economy, to counteract the deflation caused by their bubble popping.
But money doesn’t know borders, and though the money was intended to stimulate JAPANS economy, there was nothing stopping ANYONE from purchasing that currency. It’s not like you have to live in Japan to buy Yen.
So the money (yen) was created in Japan, but ended up all over the world.
This has consequences:
* Japan ended up with mountains of US dollars. This is one of the reasons that Japan has more US Treasuries than China. This mountain of dollars lowers YOUR cost of living. Because USD is being acquired for The Carry Trade. This creates artificial demand for USD.
* Because the yen is created in Japan but is then used for international commerce, it dramatically reduces the inflation that “printing money” would normally create. This is why Japan has more debt per capita than any country by far, by a factor of over 2X
I am just an I.T. dude who invests in real estate. So what I just posted may be completely wrong.
The carry trade has existed for about four decades; that’s my summary of how it affects us, from the perspective of a small time real estate guy.
Free money is never free.
> used by a generation of investors
How short is a generation for investors? Aren't we near 20 year highs as far as US bond rates?
I guess the point is that this is more about the Yen than about US bonds?
If you believe them, then you can hedge buy either shorting TLT(betting treasury yields will rise), or going long Yen (e.g. FXY shares/calls).
I bought some FXY calls but just enough to hedge the Yen prices of my upcoming Tokyo trip in case they're right.
Think you mean crypto currency here?
> To validate the thesis that the Yen unwind is the primary driver of volatility, we must examine the sequence of events. The crash did not happen in a vacuum; it followed a precise timeline …
> It wasn't just about rates anymore; it was about the stability of the U.S.-led global order
> The unwinding of a carry trade is not a monolithic event; it is a cascade that ripples outward
It‘s like almost in every paragraph. I don’t understand why this gets to be on the frontpage to be honest. It just reads horrible even if some of the points may be true (or hallucinated, who knows)
Because the fundamentals are basic:
Creating money out of thin air generally creates inflation, because theirs is more currency chasing the same amount of assets.
But the Devil is in the details, because there are hundreds of currencies, one currency can be exchanged for another, and interest rates vary all over the world.
Then once that starts to make sense, you open up a box called “derivatives,” and now the complexity just went off the charts.
I only need to understand it in the context of loans on assets, so I can do the math in my head or in excel. Occasionally I’ll vibe code this stuff in Python.
Because I’m not diving into the deep end of complexity, the books I absolutely LOVE are the cautionary tales of when it all blows up.
In that respect, I think “when genius fails” is an all timer.
Nearly everyone knows about the Great Recession, and the depression and the dot com bubble.
But the collapse of Long Term Capital Management was the canary in the coal mine.
LTCM blew up for all of the most predictable reasons, and as the name implies, nearly everyone involved in LTCM were at the top of their game.
Another book that is more folksy is “a man for all markets“, a book about the dude who revolutionized stock options, largely due to a fascination with Blackjack!
(The LTCM guys were big time gamblers too.)
https://www.google.com/search?q=a+man+for+all+markets+by+ed+...
It seems like their conclusion is "hold lots of yen"? We'll see I guess.
The real story isn't Tokyo, it's that Wall Street built a house of cards and ran out of steady hands.
I have a public ThetaEdge card that monitors margin debt and calculates the correlation with the S&P here:
https://thetaedge.ai/public/thetix-card/42d9c6de-218d-4627-a...
$566B in margin debt. Is that actually a financial black swan amount of money? If 50% of that got "corrected" into Money Heaven on Friday, would it be more than a bad day at the stock market?
I see visible margin debt as both a canary and a proxy. It's a canary because retail cracks first (less sophisticated risk management, stricter regulatory margin). It's a proxy because when visible leverage contracts, it usually means hidden leverage is contracting too. They're exposed to the same assets. When FINRA margin debt starts falling, it's not just a warning, it's confirmation that system-wide deleveraging is already underway.
That's my 2c. Does that make sense?
"support my thesis and ignore alternative explanations and contrary evidence on whether there's even a there, there" AI-research slop.
Is this true?
Absolutely.
And guys like Tim Poole got famous off Occupy, then parlayed that fame into building an audience for themselves.
The libertarians at OWS never went away, they just found new causes.
I was at the HUMONGOUS rally that Obama held in Portland in 2008.
The epicenter of OWS was based a few blocks away, years later, and reflected the optimism of 2008 hardening into frustration over Wall Street excess.
Tea party was the clear predecessor to the maga movement, with its nucleation point being simple racist backlash against obama and trump being personally & directly involved in stoking that racism. In retrospect it obviously laid the groundwork for trump's movement, and I can't see any direct link from occupy to tea party other than perhaps some individuals like tunney.
Trump told people "you're OK".
It is what people need to hear
* Pay your debts
* Own useful assets
* Live in a peaceful stable country
I'm aware of an "AI bubble" and the over-concentration on the "Magnificent 7".
What else is obvious to people and why is the timeframe (next 4 years) so obvious?
That's the obvious part. The consequences of that are anyone's guess, as is the timeframe. But it's not a sustainable situation, so something is bound to happen to change it eventually.
People have been claiming the end is near since forever; economists have been saying for months now that stocks should already be falling, but they are going up. And also, it feels good to be part of the in-group that just knows more than everyone else. Just ask a prepper: they will be equally convinced.
So in summary, even if we’re headed for another crisis, unless you’re only a few years from pension, you’ll just sit this one out calmly, just like all crises before. Unless the global economy breaks down for good (in which case you’ve got other things to worry about), your ETF will recover. Don’t let the fear mongers get into your head.
Should someone that calls 2.4 percent movement bloodbath be taken seriously?
Imagine how deceptive llm slop contents are to the general population.