Asklemmy

44149 readers

1520 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

378

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

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

118 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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???

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Most of these businesses operated at near unsustainable levels with almost negligible interest rates on loans, and now they're panicking because their business model is shit and they're trying to recover however they can by enshittifying everything.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I think it's cultural. An entire generation has now been raised to believe that capitalism is inherently oppressive. Therefore they unconsciously or consciously believe that they must oppress their customers as part of the money-making ritual. And since capitalism doesn't inherently produce that oppression, they have to add it in the form of products getting worse.