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The Everything Bubble [infographic]

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Re: The Everything Bubble [infographic]

#101

Post by bubbleRefuge »

abakker wrote: post #76
bubbleRefuge wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is factually incorrect. No funny money is put in by QE. QE is an asset swap, treasuries for reserves, and it nets to zero. The goal of QE is to lower the price of money in hopes that people will borrow more but they are not. All of the lending/borrowing aggregates are going sideways and down. The reason that the stock market is up is the expectation that QE will someday work to bring get the economy growing fast…

I wonder when we’ll admit wholesale that interest rate and money supply just aren’t very good economic levers in the absence of fiscal policy? Re tax cuts, instead of tax cuts on the middle class, make wage increases tax deductible for corporations. As someone in the middle class, I don’t care what my rate is, I care what the take home is. Reward corporations for passing more money through to employees by lowering th…

Its not that complicated. We could just have the fed pay everyones payroll taxes including the corporations share. This would jack up the economy. The problem is getting this policy through congress. The entire macro-economic problem is a political problem.

Re: The Everything Bubble [infographic]

#102

Post by saint_fiasco »

Nokinside wrote: post #88
WhoIsSatoshi wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

healthcare sucks a lot more out of the customer in the US than elsewhere in the world, so the fact that the US spends more is combined with healthcare patients spending more money per capita in the US. Having experienced both, I can tell you that I am terrified of having a motorcycle accident in the US. Or breaking a leg.

There is this weirdly strict moral aspect of what someone 'deserves' in the realms of public policy. In private finances, deserving is not an issue at all. If pure cold economic calculation would be applied to public policy, it would become clear that healthcare is not just personal issue, good healthcare provides positive externalizes for all. Your neighbors good teeth are not completely unlike investing in a bridge…

To be completely fair, we don't actually know that health care pays for itself. The RAND Health Insurance experiment and the Oregon Medicaid experiment found little improvement in health outcomes and a significant increase in medical spending when insurance was expanded.

Those studies are hard to make because it's hard to measure medical outcomes. For example, for the Oregon experiment they couldn't look into differences in death rates because death rates were too low even among uninsured people. They had to look at cholesterol, blood sugar and other proxies for health outcomes, instead of the outcomes themselves.

This suggests that at some point further spending in health has diminishing returns and we don't actually know if we reached that point yet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Medicaid_health_experim...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Health_Insurance_Experime...

Re: The Everything Bubble [infographic]

#103

Post by bubbleRefuge »

roymurdock wrote: post #85
bubbleRefuge wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is factually incorrect. No funny money is put in by QE. QE is an asset swap, treasuries for reserves, and it nets to zero. The goal of QE is to lower the price of money in hopes that people will borrow more but they are not. All of the lending/borrowing aggregates are going sideways and down. The reason that the stock market is up is the expectation that QE will someday work to bring get the economy growing fast…

"The underlying problem is structurally deficient demand caused by thirty years of neoliberal economic policies that have undermined the income and demand generation process (Palley, 2009). However, rather than fixing this problem, policymakers are again turning to ultra-easy monetary policy in the form of QE. Viewed from this perspective, QE can be interpreted as a form of asset market trickledown whereby supporting…

Yes. Neoliberalism is the problem. We need to go back to pro Keynesian solutions. But we need togo through Congress. Thats the problem as well.

Re: The Everything Bubble [infographic]

#104

Post by gok »

twobyfour wrote: post #35

The reason? Too much capital, not enough growth to invest in because demand isn't growing. Demand isn't growing because 60% of the population is barely scraping by. How do you increase demand? Roll back the tax cuts to the wealthy who have nowhere to put that money except into speculation and bubbles. Redistribute it back to the working class in the form of tax cuts, credits, higher minimum wage, and social programs.…

> Roll back the tax cuts to the wealthy who have nowhere to put that money except into speculation and bubbles.

This is pretty directly contradicted by the post. The real estate markets that have higher taxes on the wealthy are showing more bubbly behavior.

Higher taxes on high earners may be a good idea but they’re not a solution to bubbles.

Re: The Everything Bubble [infographic]

#105

Post by saint_fiasco »

kps wrote: post #87
saint_fiasco wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Among the things that people can't afford and really need, the most common ones are healthcare and housing. The problem with giving people more money to stimulate demand for those things is that it only solves half of the problem. Healthcare is limited by the supply of doctors so no matter how much government subsidizes it, the amount of people who can be seen by the constant number of doctors will be the same. In pr…

The problem isn't money for doctors, it's money for administrators (including insurance). Same as education. In any field x , you have people who specialize in x and people who specialize in extracting money. It's no surprise where the money ends up. (This is independent of particular mechanisms for extracting money that vary across economic and political systems.)

If more money is put into the healthcare system but the amount of new doctors per year does not increase, of course the money is going to go to administration. It has nowhere else to go.

That's also why the US spends so much on drugs. Doctors are overworked, so they are forced to depend on prescribing more drugs, the most time-efficient tools for them.

Re: The Everything Bubble [infographic]

#106

Post by saint_fiasco »

speby wrote: post #99
saint_fiasco wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Among the things that people can't afford and really need, the most common ones are healthcare and housing. The problem with giving people more money to stimulate demand for those things is that it only solves half of the problem. Healthcare is limited by the supply of doctors so no matter how much government subsidizes it, the amount of people who can be seen by the constant number of doctors will be the same. In pr…

> The problem with giving people more money to stimulate demand for those things is that it only solves half of the problem. Healthcare is limited by the supply of doctors so no matter how much government subsidizes it, the amount of people who can be seen by the constant number of doctors will be the same. In practice, this means the price will increase every time you try to give people more money for healthcare. Th…

It's not just like computer science because those are cheaper to train, their work can be outsourced if their wage rises too much and immigration is not as restricted as it is for doctors. Computer scientists also don't have to do residencies.

More should be done to speed up the supply of new doctors.

Re: The Everything Bubble [infographic]

#107

Post by Nokinside »

mabbo wrote: post #97
Nokinside wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value of your condo going up gives very limited information if there is bubble or not. If you want to figure out what the correct price level is, find statistics that compares price of housing to median income in your area over time. That's the single most important metric determining the correct property valuations. Prices can go up as long as incomes go up. Major cities have higher productivity and prices can g…

Wages did not go up by 60% in two years. They barely went up at all.

Of course they didn't. But that's not the issue.

What is the price/income ratio now compared to long term average? How much of the 60% can be explained with prices rebounding to long term normal.

ps. I'm almost sure that house prices in Toronto are exceptionally high compared to income. I'm not arguing against that. I'm arguing against people using wrong numbers to measure things. Find relevant numbers and use them.

https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/rankings.jsp

Re: The Everything Bubble [infographic]

#108

Post by geogra4 »

sol_remmy wrote: post #77
twobyfour wrote: post #35

The reason? Too much capital, not enough growth to invest in because demand isn't growing. Demand isn't growing because 60% of the population is barely scraping by. How do you increase demand? Roll back the tax cuts to the wealthy who have nowhere to put that money except into speculation and bubbles. Redistribute it back to the working class in the form of tax cuts, credits, higher minimum wage, and social programs.…

I like how you think comrade!

Keynesianism (or MMT) isn't socialism, bud.

Re: The Everything Bubble [infographic]

#110

Post by rainbowmverse »

Chathamization wrote: post #86
saint_fiasco wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Among the things that people can't afford and really need, the most common ones are healthcare and housing. The problem with giving people more money to stimulate demand for those things is that it only solves half of the problem. Healthcare is limited by the supply of doctors so no matter how much government subsidizes it, the amount of people who can be seen by the constant number of doctors will be the same. In pr…

> Without reforms to medical school and medical residency programs, healthcare might never be affordable. That's important, true. But that's not the only thing that would increase the amount of healthcare available to people. Dean Baker, for example, makes the important point that we could greatly increase the supply of doctors simply by allowing qualified foreign doctors to be certified in the U.S.[1] Lower class wo…

Doctors saw what happened when every factory worker in the US was forced to compete with every factory worker in North America after NAFTA, and later the world. Unlike factory workers, no one's spent decades dismantling doctor unions and organizations, and they actually have the money and influence to resist attempts to break protectionist barriers. This just isn't going to happen.

Rapid, careless globalization was an interesting experiment, but it's left a lot of people with no hope for the future. Do we really want to repeat it?

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