#financial speculation

[crooked-wasteland]

What were the financial signals you mentioned about spindlehorse?

Mostly tinkering with hypotheticals in the past to estimate the financial health of Spindlehorse remaining indie or not, and I didn't think it was going to remain profitable based on YouTube views and the state of the SharkRobot merch store and how many items were still available after seasonal sales as well as how long the merch had been listed for.

If there are preorders for certain merch and it is still for sale after the seasonal drop has ended, then there was a base amount of stock purchased and the presale was a "Just in case we sell all of our stock" which they didn't. And for cheap items like pins to be both limited presale and still for sale a year later, that's not looking all that good.

I basically said that Spindlehorse can expect to make just enough to pay for an episode of Helluva Boss based on views, but that the supplemental pay from merch sales were looking dismal, so it wasn't looking profitable and her best bet in the next year or so (it was 2024 at the time when Oops came out) was to sell the show.

[docdust]

Trump's tariff Coup

Were you surprised by Trump's radical U-turn on announcing tariffs?

THAT was the coup! The Trump Media and Technology Group closed up 22.67 percent after the announcement that the tariffs will be suspended for 90 days. Trump's 53 percent stake in the company rose by 415 million US dollars that day.

This jump in Trump Media's share price was only surpassed by government advisor Elon Musk's Tesla shares. Tesla's share price rise of almost 23 percent on Wednesday increased Musk's fortune by 20 billion US dollars.

[the-funtime-autocrat]

This is in the nature of capitalism. Because capital is not money. It's not like cash in your pocket. Capital is money meant to make more money; cash in your pocket is not. It could -- you might use it to bet with, or something like that -- but when you have the cash in your pocket, it's because you're going to spend it. The way capitalists spend money is not the same as you or I buying a coffee, because of the speculative dimension -- the investment dimension. You're spending that money so that more money can be made. And there's no end to that process. There can't be.

Mark Fisher, “Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures” (2021/2016).

[howieabel]

"It soon became apparent that financial speculation, unmoored from any legal or community restraints, was capable of producing results that seemed to verge on insanity. The Dutch Republic, which pioneered the development of stock markets, had already experienced this in the tulip mania of 1637 - the first of a series of speculative 'bubbles'" - David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, page 341

[the-funtime-autocrat]

With its ceaseless boom and bust cycles, capitalism is fundamentally and irreducibly bi-polar, periodically lurching between hyped-up mania (the irrational exuberance of 'bubble thinking') and depressive come-down. (The term 'economic depression' is no accident, of course). To a degree unprecedented in any social system, capitalism both feeds on and reproduces the moods of the populations, Without delirium and confidence, capital could not function.

Mark Fisher, “Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?” (2009).

[the-funtime-autocrat]

The power dynamic implied by fictional capital (Money-Money Transactions) is not a straightforward dichotomy between agents: while personal domination by definition occurs at the level of direct interaction, debtors are mainly not individuals but banks and hedge funds speculating on future production. And, in effect, are the operations of fictitious capital not made more and more without any direct involvement at all. i.e. simply by computers acting on their programs? However, these operations somehow have to be retranslated into personal relations, and here abstraction appears as personal domination. If capital is financialized and increasingly fictitious, so that relations between people are less and less mediated through commodification, than what happens to these relations?

Slavoj Žižek, “Like a Thief in Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism” (2018).

[bluesdelprisionero]

Hoy, la tiranía económica global del capitalismo financiero especulativo, que utiliza a los gobiernos nacionales (y a sus políticos) como capataces de esclavos y a los medios mundiales como sus distribuidores de droga, esta tiranía, cuyo único fin es la ganancia y la incesante acumulación, nos impone una visión: un diseño de la vida febril, precario, despiadado e inexplicable

John Berger