101–110 of 136 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, it is true that probably 100% of my BOEC calculations are done entirely without the use of a physical envelope, so I couldn't disagree with you.
Since the arrival of e-mail, I keep my envelopes in the same drawer as my slide rules.
However, I do keep one non-virtual slide rule around just to whip out and show the kids now and then. Nice mahogony base, teflon slide, the works.
Heh. I always assumed that the name of the currency, real, has the meaning "royal". Instead, it's literally the same as the English word. What an interesting story. Have any other governments suffering from high inflation tried this? Instead of calling it a fictional unit, they could also just use an existing currency like the euro for the transitional period, then switch to a new national currency that has an initia…
Opposition politicians looking for ammunition to attack the plan -- correction: looking for ammunition to attack the incumbents; they might have had little interest in attacking the plan otherwise -- would denounce the insult to national sovereignty.
That's surely why Brazil called it the URV - unit of real value - instead of admitting that in effect they repriced in Yanqui imperialist dollars. That's not in the linked NPR transcript but was mentioned in the longer NPR Planet Money podcast, linked at the bottom of the transcript.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The people who are asking for more inflation in the USA are asking for something in the 2% range, or (for those who are truly bold) asking for prices to rise to the level they would be at if inflation had remained in the 2% range for the past five years or so. Stable money is good, but so is providing people with an incentive to spend and invest, rather than incentives to hoard cash and default on their debts.
The party was had, the hangover must be endured. Bad investments were made, they must be liquidated and written off, and these are deflationary. True inflation (not the manipulated government statistics) is really a measure of the market. To say that inflation is at the wrong value is to say the market is wrong. The Fed has been striking matches for a while now trying to get inflation to catch on and stand by with th…
One liberal wonk wonders if this is a sign that the country is facing a consumer debt bubble. (http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/10/tomorrows-credit-b...)
Wow. Last night I was thinking... if I was a supermarket manager in an inflation-ridden country, how would I save money by not changing price tags everyday? And my answer was to set one of my products as "1 Unit" and just price every other product in multiples of that "Unit". That way I only had to change the price of a single product! And then today I read this! What a coincidence! I never would've thought you could…
The best solution is the one my current supermarket uses - the price tags on the shelves are a cheap LCD display, so all they have to do to update the prices are to push the new prices from a database.
I don't understand something about this story. Hyperinflation is primary caused by government printing money right? So if switching to another currency helped stop this...I get how it could help people changing their perceptions, but wouldn't the root cause be that the government stopped printing money with the new currency? It seems like it would have been almost as effective if they had simply stopped printing more…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The people who are asking for more inflation in the USA are asking for something in the 2% range, or (for those who are truly bold) asking for prices to rise to the level they would be at if inflation had remained in the 2% range for the past five years or so. Stable money is good, but so is providing people with an incentive to spend and invest, rather than incentives to hoard cash and default on their debts.
We already had way too much government investment encouragement with artificially low interest rates for years. People do not need more incentives to spend. btw, we still have rockbottom low interest rates. What happened in this crisis is over-investment and over-supply. That waste needs to be rolled back and we need to get back to a balanced budget - which is what Brazil did - it's not even mentioned in that article…
The numbers disagree with you:
Heh. I always assumed that the name of the currency, real, has the meaning "royal". Instead, it's literally the same as the English word. What an interesting story. Have any other governments suffering from high inflation tried this? Instead of calling it a fictional unit, they could also just use an existing currency like the euro for the transitional period, then switch to a new national currency that has an initia…
You can decide to peg your currency against a more stable one eg west Africa and the French Franc - but unless the owners of the hard currency have some political reason to support your then you have to persuade the world's traders that you flobble-bead is actually worth a Euro.
Hopefully the U.S. won't ever have to deal with this type of issue (out of control inflation). I'm very surprised that inflation hasn't hit the U.S. yet in a big way, but from what I hear that is because China and the U.S. are buying U.S. treasury bonds in a big way.
Why on earth would inflation hit the US? Leaving aside the oh-shit-we-are-all-fucked scenarios (ie, collapse of trust in the US currency or maybe another 70's era oil shock) what on earth could cause inflation at the moment? Sure, your interest rates are low, but domestic demand levels are so low that everyone are desperately cutting prices to try and create some demand. Combine that with very high unemployment and i…
http://blogs.forbes.com/greatspeculations/2010/10/04/looking...
Adding more currency without backing is a sure way to cause inflation, I hear. How they've been avoiding this is by China and then the U.S. sinking money into U.S. Treasury bonds, I hear also. When the U.S. makes claims that the economy is not good (which they've done quite a bit), I wonder if they are trying to influence investors to invest in these bonds rather than stocks, or if they were really trying to warn us that something bad is coming. Either way, as a consumer, I'm worried.