251–260 of 560 posts
A friend of mine is leaving HK today - he lives there, so this is not a casual trip abroad. He said the level of fear is making it impossible to live there as a single person. The shops and restaurants are closed. Even his own employer shut its doors indefinitely - and they’re just a video production company. The virus won’t be what ruins China. It’s the panic itself.
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>I think Obama was a great President, but he was also very little different than George Bush except in his oration Talk about revisionist history, my goodness.
It is certainly not a popular opinion. But as diametrically opposed as they appear, there are plenty of problematic issues under Obama that Dems (and Republicans) conveniently ignore. My biggest disappointment at the time: Obama kept all of Bush's economic team intact when he came into office. Yes, the same people who enabled the housing crisis and had strong ties to Goldman Sachs. Probably it should have been the bi…
I grew up during the Clinton/Blair/Merkel era. I thought socialism was defeated in 1991. Everyone understood that markets and the private sector, with some levels of “nudges” as necessary, were the solution to everything. “Politics” was about how much you thought we should nudge in various directions, and whether you thought kids should learn about condoms or abstinence in school. So when Obama initially ran for office, I didn’t perceive Obama’s fundamentally neo-liberal capitalist world view as being a profound similarity between him and Bush. It wasn’t until people like Sanders and Corbyn started getting substantial traction that I realized we weren’t yet at the end of history and a commitment to the current economic world order was actually not universal.
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I lived under the USSR, American and European propaganda machine, they are all the same. You get tired of them as you get to my age. I'm pretty sure that rayiner's comment exists mirrored on a random Chinese forum. Someone being offended by a comparison of China and US (implying China is better). We're all the same.
No they aren't the same. The Americans and the Europeans didn't have a gulag. The Chinese are "reeducating" millions of people right now. I hope when I get to your age I don't magically forget that slavery and concentration camps are bad.
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Stongly disagree. The relevant (and enormous) difference is that Americans are empowered to learn of and discuss their sordid affairs, without fear of punishment by their government. Just like we're doing right now, with me using my real name. In contrast, people in countries like China and the old USSR are empowered only to learn of and share state-approved knowledge, in a state-approved manner. Stepping too far out…
The repercussions were social mostly, your boss would not promote you anymore, your neighbours would avoid you. Only in cases of high-treason, such as Assange from WikiLeaks, you would get "imprisonment or worse". Think to how PC culture works in the US. If you're misoginistic, your friends will start avoiding you, you might even get fired.
And no, people did not learn through state-approved knowledge, we had conspiracy theories, we had friends, uncles and friends having friends working inside the government.
I wish western world central banks were as competent. In a situation of sudden supply constraints, prices are supposed to adjust up. This is basic supply and demand. Western world central banks tend to pressure prices down during economic shocks by withholding liquidity. This puts private markets in a gridlock and causes untold amount of damage to people's careers.
Liquidity has been anything but withheld in the western world. Look at the G4 balance sheets and interest rates in the past decade.
They kept them super high at 0%, up to 4% higher than the equilibrium estimate, which caused inflation to perpetually undershoot and people's careers to be stunted. On top of that, they started giving out interest on reserves which further contracted liquidity.
The growth in excess reserves happened because money being made artificially too good at retaining value compared to private assets, caused people, businesses and banks to hoard it. If central banks would have been sufficiently aggressive at giving it out, they would ironically have given out a lot less because people would not have event wanted that much and instead would have continued keeping their savings in better functioning private markets.
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While this might be true I’m not sure if we chalk this one up to the CCP. I mean it’s not like a viral epidemic can’t originate from other countries.
> I mean it’s not like a viral epidemic can’t originate from other countries. In authoritative countries the messenger of bad news tends to be 'disciplined', and so bad news is not delivered. It still exists, but no one wants to be the individual that creates the (negative) feedback loop that may be contrary to the diktat that came down from on high. Of course hiding bad news happens in less authoritative countries a…
Imagine if things went the other way. Big announcements of a new virus, people panic and hoard food and supplies. Travel gets restricted and Wuhan gets quarantined. And not much happens. A few people get sick and quickly recover. I’m not sure if the guy will get praises for acting swiftly.
I wish western world central banks were as competent. In a situation of sudden supply constraints, prices are supposed to adjust up. This is basic supply and demand. Western world central banks tend to pressure prices down during economic shocks by withholding liquidity. This puts private markets in a gridlock and causes untold amount of damage to people's careers.
"Western world central banks tend to pressure prices down during economic shocks by withholding liquidity."
Well, we have seen gigantic quantitative easing in the US and the EU and also in China. Inflation - I assume that is what you mean by "pressure prices down" - keeps elusive. Japan has tried for decades to create inflation.
The only thing that the central banks in the world have managed is to create a gigantic asset bubble, via the so called "asset price inflation". They basically build a cash pipeline to all the asset holders. Make the rich richer and the poor poorer.
Ask HN: Should I be worried about the PANIC around the current situations, will they act as a rescission trigger? Can I assume a proportional impact on crypto-currency market as well? More importantly, I'm considering a move from a Bn$ organization to a safety concerned mobile-app product startup, How to access whether a start-up can survive if the situation end-up on the negative side, in the next 6 months.
People have been saying they expect a recession in the next 2 years for the last 2 years and now is no different. If it was easy to predict when the least risky time is to make a risky decision, then it wouldn't be risky, gambling wouldn't be a thing, and life would be forever boring.
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Wondering aloud if the Soviet system might not be better "because at least people were aware of it" is shocking and cruel.