Reddit mentions of Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises (Wiley Investment Classics)

> Right now ALL fusion work is in a research phase, trying to determine which approach will get to the basic goal of producing more fusion energy out of the device than is put in

Many university campuses (the serious ones anyway) doing fusion research are moving towards full life-cycle plant research. The fusion and energy gain is a given - it's a financial/engineering challenge, as opposed to speculation about how reactors will behave, with reproducible and reproduced results fitting the model - the research is how to we get usable energy out, how do we build reactors to be maintainable, what do we do with reactors at end of their lives.

Certainly it's true that ITER doesn't get us where we need in a reasonable timescale, that doesn't negate the value of tokamaks, nor the validity of the argument that they're probably the best route to commercial fusion power generation.

> This is all based on peer-reviewed publications

Peer reviewed publications funded by LPP's own shareholders? Written by LPP's own team?. This is not reassuring in any way. Who is reproducing LPP's results independently?

There are many red flags in this project but intentionally underfunding a project you know needs more money specially to avoid the regulatory regime that is there to protect investors is probably the most egregious.

I wish LPP every luck, but at the same time I wouldn't invest and nor would I suggest anybody else does. There's plenty of commercial funding for small fusion research projects floating around, it's actually in somewhat of a bubble right now, asking ordinary people to fund the research with no protection whatsoever is... alarming.

Couldn't fit it all in one reply so this is part 2 -

> Clearly it's important to distinguish between WHAT you're spending on rather than just how much you're spending. Osborne's mistake, (and also the mistake of government's before him) was that you can leave it all to the market. Clearly government's can take strategic decision's but obviously the risk is that there is no guarentee they will actually be able to generate value - and the consequence of failure falls to the tax payer in the end.

Agreed. See my earlier comments about our cowardly state and their utter refusal to take risks as you have described.

> This is simply poor analysis of how the housing market works and what the primary driver has been since 2008. If this is the case why does Berlin, Toronto, Vancouver, NY, ALL OF AUSTRALIA, Hong Kong, and Singapore also have massive housing bubbles? Clearly there's something bigger going on here.

Again you appear not to understand. See my earlier comments about sentiment. Yes credit availability is important but the key driver is sentiment. It's why after the dot.com bubble economies switched to housing bubbles. The bursting of the dot.com bubble drove sentiment away from speculation on IT industries. The same will happen after our housing bubble finally and truly bursts. People will not speculate on housing for a long time to come. However unless proper steps are taken we can expect a repeat in 2 decades or so as institutional memories fade and a new generation comes of age with no memory of the prior bubble. You can think of easy credit availability as applying heat to the economy. Bubbles then form on top of that economy with sentiment (e.g. you can't go wrong with property! and property prices always go up!) driving how, what, why, where.

> I agree that there's a debt issue with the consumer both here, and in the US (both Consuming economies) - Government's can't borrow in perpetuity and also can't borrow to fund public services and higher wages which have little to no ROI.

They clearly can borrow in perpetuity as they have been doing so. In fact the system is designed for continual credit growth, meaning that there are two options, either the forward economic gear or a system crash. However to make the debt sustainable there has to be economic growth to the extent that the debt is always sustainable. That requires enough of the borrowing be spent in ways that they generate an ROI and thus create the requisite economic growth.

> The issue is the lack of real wages increases, low interest rates encouraging borrowing, and poor decisions made by the governments to prop up the Financial sector (where I work) instead of skilled manufacturing, digital skills, and a range of other options they've had over the years. The other issue is the policies that we have pursued with monetary policy has encouraged debt build up in the private and public sector as the BoE has tried to eliminate the business cycle. I have news for everyone reading this. It's not possible. If we had more regular recessions and higher interest rates they'd be less severe and short in duration helping to encourage savings and stopping bubbles in their tracks.

> If you want to build up exports you need to make things that others want (or have a large pool of natural resources - clearly we do not).

100% agree.

> Final comments: Think we half agree, the strategic decisions by multiple government's have been poor. This is caused us to have a chronic CA deficit meaning that we need more debt to constantly grow.

> The issue with more debt is that it is inherently deflationary. It means you're stealing demand from the future to use now. That is what has happened - and it's the case whether you're a consumer, private company or G7 government.

> The other issue is the debt levels in the economy across the board mean that they've had to do all they can to sustain a recovery as each recession has been worse and worse. We were close to the entire financial system coming apart in 2008 and again in 2011.

Agreed. My own thoughts are we are heading towards a final denouement and then a paradigm shift. The neoliberal era is in its death throws. I just hope something worthwhile replaces it. I see it as a choice between the 1930's and late 1940's. Either we end up making a positive shift to a better economic framework or we shift to belligerence and nationalism. I hope we have learned enough from history and that the younger generations are loud enough in making their voices heard, that we choose the former rather than the latter.

> The answer however isn't that government's keep borrowing to sustain growth. Japan has tried this multiple times in the past and guess what? It didn't work.

Except governments can and do borrow in perpetuity. That's what we've done since 1945. There just has to be enough growth arising from that borrowing to make it sustainable. Japan is in different circumstances. It has a rapidly aging and shrinking population. This is fundamentally incompatible with a global economic system which they also use that has only a positive gear. Thus its not something related to gov debt per se. Its a system design fault. Economies either grow or crash, there is no managed slow economic shrinkage. At some point their economy will crash as a result.

> You're knowledge fundamentally only goes as far understanding how the accounting works for a country but lacks historical context and financial understanding to be thorough enough to come to proper conclusions. I'd spend a lot more time reading about history, the multiple times countries have gone bust in the past, and more about financial markets and the role they play as well.

Ahhh the arrogance of a financial sector worker. How do you know what I have read or have not read without asking me? And my knowledge of history is fine thanks. Though you do seem to be lacking knowledge of the history of mania's, bubbles, and panics, as you seem not to understand how sentiment drives them, and without that you fundamentally do not understand our current bubbles. This might be helpful to you in that regard.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Books/Manias-Panics-Crashes-Financial-Investment/0471389455

This might be the lay understanding of what a bubble is, but its incorrect. There's a certain post-housing crisis mentality to look for bubbles everywhere. It's still a big, salient part of everyone's cognitive toolbox. But something isn't a bubble just because the price is high. Bubble psychology actually does require that the participants be able to sell the asset, not just the rents from it. It's not a bubble when market participants are buying houses at high prices, under the assumption that they will be able to increase their NPV from the rents. It's a bubble when people are buying houses at high prices, under the assumption that they will be able to sell the asset at a higher price soon. Possibly too subtle of a difference for /r/economics. Kindleberger's Manias, panics, and Crashes is a good book to read for more background.