There has been an enormous amount of speculation that the US / world will enter a major recession in 2025. To be fair, I have seen calls for an “historic recession” since 2012, so I’m always skeptical when I see these claims by “experts.”
However, I do think a lot about the economic landscape today as compared to the bull run of 2021. Back then, people were locked down, staying at home, and receiving stimulus checks and unemployment benefits, which they spent on entertainment. At that time, Magic the Gathering / tabletop games / video games and consoles were selling at record numbers, and many states enacted temporary rent relief laws that prevented people from being evicted even if they could not pay. Liquidity was high and the markets were awash in excess cash. Gambling sites made record profits. Risk-on assets sold like hot cakes. Bubbles, bubbles everywhere.
Today is a pretty different situation: we’ve got a housing market squeeze / bubble that might be at the precipice of bursting (but again, remember those 2012 calls for a collapse). The labor markets have cooled significantly, and inflation has driven up COL / housing / groceries enormously. Everyday people – retail fish, as we call them in crypto – do not have the excess disposable cash they did a few years ago. Globally, there is a gigantic Chinese elephant in the room that looks ready to give up the ghost entirely, and more generally a worldwide population that appears reticent to spend money on anything but the essentials.
By now the crypto space has seen the effect of banks and asset management firms jumping into crypto: very little real price movement. It seems that retail, not corporate whales, is the true hope of degens for a massive run up.
What is the argument for a bull run this cycle besides “it always happens”? Do the bulls expect fed rate cuts to provide the liquidity needed to stimulate risk-on asset buying?
By the way, I know that a lot of people are hinging their bull run optimism on the irresistibly handsome, super-genius, incredibly emotionally mature, piously truth-telling, and psychologically VERY stable presidential candidate Donald Trump winning the election and creating a federal BTC reserve fund. But I daresay, there’s about a zero-percent chance he actually does that. So imagine a situation in which he loses or wins but doesn’t create the fund, at least for a few years. What then will cause the bull run?
submitted by /u/Nightmare_Tonic
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