Is that 2008 based on data immediately before or after the largest economic catastrophe sine the Great Depression?
U.S. Is World’s Most Competitive Economy for First Time in a Decade
71–80 of 124 posts
Re: U.S. Is World’s Most Competitive Economy for First Time in a Decade
#72That economic growth came at a pretty severe cost though. The budget deficit blew out by 17% in 2018 as a result of the tax cuts.
For a long time I couldn't wrap my head around why defecits matter to the US when we print our currency. To be honest I still don't fully understand the hand wringing over a balanced budget and reading more about modern monetary theory is leading me to believe that for a superpower which issues it's own currency the defecit is more of a political issue that a concrete one. The defecit just keeps ballooning but the on…
The US can also borrow at really good rates. If a business could borrow that cheaply it would be a no-brainer to take debt and build a new factory or whatever. Similarly, it makes a ton of sense for the government to borrow and then invest in future economic growth.
Re: U.S. Is World’s Most Competitive Economy for First Time in a Decade
#73That economic growth came at a pretty severe cost though. The budget deficit blew out by 17% in 2018 as a result of the tax cuts.
For a long time I couldn't wrap my head around why defecits matter to the US when we print our currency. To be honest I still don't fully understand the hand wringing over a balanced budget and reading more about modern monetary theory is leading me to believe that for a superpower which issues it's own currency the defecit is more of a political issue that a concrete one. The defecit just keeps ballooning but the on…
The deficit mainly matters because we have to pay interest on the loans we take out. If the rates are good, it's actually a great investment. If the rates are bad, it hamstrings future growth, because now the budget is spent paying back old loans instead of building new things.
Well, why can't we just print money? We can, but it runs the risk of inflation. Inflation is historically low, so yes -- we could totally just print a bunch of money to pay back our debts with relatively little risk of inflation in the short term.
Essentially, debt doesn't matter, except that we have to pay interest. Interest doesn't matter because we print money, except that it might cause inflation. Taxes "destroy" money to dampen inflation. Thus, we can pay off our loans, but that might cause inflation, which might require us to raise taxes not to repay the loans, but to prevent inflation.
Re: U.S. Is World’s Most Competitive Economy for First Time in a Decade
#74Meanwhile, household debt is at it's all-time high, $13.3 trillion... surpassing its previous peak in 2008. https://www.newyorkfed.org/microeconomics/hhdc.html This article seems like fluff/propaganda.
The total level of household debt has grown, but
- the ratio of debt to personal income, and
- the ratio of debt to GDP
Households owe more, but they are also making more money and creating more value.
Re: U.S. Is World’s Most Competitive Economy for First Time in a Decade
#75Meanwhile, household debt is at it's all-time high, $13.3 trillion... surpassing its previous peak in 2008. https://www.newyorkfed.org/microeconomics/hhdc.html This article seems like fluff/propaganda.
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Re: U.S. Is World’s Most Competitive Economy for First Time in a Decade
#76Meanwhile, household debt is at it's all-time high, $13.3 trillion... surpassing its previous peak in 2008. https://www.newyorkfed.org/microeconomics/hhdc.html This article seems like fluff/propaganda.
The total level of household debt has grown, but - the ratio of debt to personal income, and - the ratio of debt to GDP has decreased steadily and significantly since the financial crisis. These ratios are now the lowest since 2002. Households owe more, but they are also making more money and creating more value.
Yep. Inflation. Stock market, movie revenue, cost of bread. It will always peak like this.
Re: U.S. Is World’s Most Competitive Economy for First Time in a Decade
#77Is it just me or has the HN front page been more overtly political in the last few days? This is #1, some fear-mongering about China from Bloomberg is #2 (as if we forgot their technical fear-mongering about China the other day), and both of the stories are mainstream news (explicitly discouraged in the Guidelines) and have no particular "hacker" angle, except insofar as many hackers participate in the world economy…
There are now 5 million visitors a year. So it's not really shocking that more "mainstream" stuff does better these days than it might have done back in the day. I tend to feel like I have no idea whatsoever what will do well here. I sometimes decline to post some article because I think it's not HN worthy, only to see it on the front page later. I sometimes get accused of posting political pieces when, to my mind, t…
> I sometimes get accused of posting political pieces when, to my mind, they are interesting for sociological reasons.
As politics has become more contentious in recent years, both parties have staked out more and more things as "theirs", which promotes people seeing information that is for or against (or even just about, and confirmation bias does the rest) one of these areas as being political.
There's likely also an increased number of political articles as well, which contributes it's own little bit.
Re: U.S. Is World’s Most Competitive Economy for First Time in a Decade
#78Is it just me or has the HN front page been more overtly political in the last few days? This is #1, some fear-mongering about China from Bloomberg is #2 (as if we forgot their technical fear-mongering about China the other day), and both of the stories are mainstream news (explicitly discouraged in the Guidelines) and have no particular "hacker" angle, except insofar as many hackers participate in the world economy…
If we have a sufficient corpus of flagged and flagged killed submission. Maybe we can train a classifier for it. And maybe send for review if the confidence of the classifier is high enough for a new post.
Re: U.S. Is World’s Most Competitive Economy for First Time in a Decade
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
For a long time I couldn't wrap my head around why defecits matter to the US when we print our currency. To be honest I still don't fully understand the hand wringing over a balanced budget and reading more about modern monetary theory is leading me to believe that for a superpower which issues it's own currency the defecit is more of a political issue that a concrete one. The defecit just keeps ballooning but the on…
The deficit mainly matters because we have to pay interest on the loans we take out. If the rates are good, it's actually a great investment. If the rates are bad, it hamstrings future growth, because now the budget is spent paying back old loans instead of building new things. Well, why can't we just print money? We can, but it runs the risk of inflation. Inflation is historically low, so yes -- we could totally jus…
Yes but we also have an instution that controls interest rates, The Federal Reserve! As a poster mentioned earlier, the US also gets really good rates. Turns out being a superpower helps your credit score.
There has been lots of ink spilled with respect to lagging productivity gains and I think the at this point concern about the budget may be a factor. There are enough big problems that can be addressed (infrastructure, health care, homes, etc.) if there was enough government spending to spark to investment and growth.
I'm starting to believe that the real balancing act is a matter of controlling inflation rather than controlling the defecit.
Re: U.S. Is World’s Most Competitive Economy for First Time in a Decade
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are now 5 million visitors a year. So it's not really shocking that more "mainstream" stuff does better these days than it might have done back in the day. I tend to feel like I have no idea whatsoever what will do well here. I sometimes decline to post some article because I think it's not HN worthy, only to see it on the front page later. I sometimes get accused of posting political pieces when, to my mind, t…
Yeah, HackerNews seems to be getting closer to Reddit by the day.
It really depends on the topic. Certain topics get very tribal, and generally the snarkiest, least useful comments float to the top.