you get into a hyperinflation situation, right?

You need a sharp drop in available commodities, services, and investments to achieve hyperinflation. It's a phenomenon mostly confined to countries trapped under sanctions or trading in very low volume circulation currency.

The US petrodollar balances supply of money against supply of oil (and other major benchmarks - US real estate, US financial debts, etc). This guarantees a strong global demand for dollars, even (perhaps especially, with respect to debt) during downturns.

And Trump and co have been doing a lot to destroy the underlying productivity of the us economy over the last year.

He's been undermining the global trade economy. But it's a big rock and even the President only has a small hammer.

What has historically triggered big contractions in the US economy has been large scale debt defaults - '20 COVID induced oil price shock, '14 government shutdown, '08 Lehman/AIG massive fraud, '01 Enron/Worldcomm fraud, '87 S&L fraud + oil price shock, etc - all resulted in industry wide credit failures on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars.

What rapidly ended these rescissions was direct intervention by the federal reserve, flooding the financial sector with money and devaluing all that bad debt.

Trump's a dummy, but he knows this One Neat Trick.

would like your take on the Buffett Index topping 200% for the first time (total stock market value vs. GDP). It was around 130% in 1929 and 2008.

I mean, Berkshire itself is trading at 15 p/e. So if you take the index seriously, it's a good place to shelter your money when the storm hits.

But Buffet was a value investor and we're in a growth investor economy. I wouldn't say the index is a good indicator of a pending crash any more than it was three years ago.

Considering the disproportionate amount of stocks in AI, and, so far, no clear path to investors seeing a return, I’m scared shitless.

Bulls make money

Bears make money

Pigs get slaughtered

Diversify your portfolio, understand why you think an investment has a bright future (and when that future has dimmed), don't try to time the market, and don't beat yourself up if you're wrong.

I don't see anything in this market to be afraid of. I see a plethora of opportunities to generate healthy returns long term.