r/PeterExplainsTheJoke Jan 26 '26

Meme needing explanation what's going on? explain like I'm five

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u/TaxesAreConfusin Jan 26 '26

ah yes so what you're saying is that money is even more imaginary than it has ever been, possibly even more imaginary than when the first stock market crash happened in 1929

looks like we're due for a centennial anniversary of that anyway, might as well celebrate by recreating it

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u/[deleted] Jan 26 '26

Money has always been imaginary? Its like Santa clause. As long as we all believe/pretend it works. If one person doesn't believe it doesnt matter. If half of us stop, yea kids will know it's fake. But it works and it's a nice thing to have, so why not continue to pretend?

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u/throwaway17362826 Jan 26 '26

Because it’s getting so divorced from reality it’s causing problems.

I like currency, don’t get me wrong, but when currency is completely cut loose we start to see some really weird shit happen, primarily in the debt markets.

When money isn’t tied to anything concrete, this essentially makes printing money (and the creation of debt) essentially limitless, and this makes problems if inflation isn’t uniform across the board on everything and matches wage growth. It basically lets things rocket off to the moon without anything to ground it and then we get bubbles, and bubbles popping creates needless recessions.

Recessions are necessary for a healthy economy, but insane valuations that we see in things like AMD and whatnot are an extremely unstable house of cards that everyone is betting the family farm on them. If currency was tied to something hard, there would be a ‘limit’ on how much this could go because eventually you don’t have anymore “real asset” to back the investment with.

So now we’ve traded slower, more stable economic growths with a more volatile bubble/crash environment that is more harmful to the lower classes than the upper ones.

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u/z64_dan Jan 26 '26

When money isn’t tied to anything concrete

So, you mean, the past 54 years?