Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The fraying of the U.S. global currency reserve system

lynalden.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 367 posts

Re: The fraying of the U.S. global currency reserve system

#331

Post by HexagonalKitten »

imtringued wrote: post #326
HexagonalKitten wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, all you have to do to dodge inflation is dump your idle currency into literally anything else. Rich people hang in the circles where these plans are made so you'll never take them by surprise. (It'd be interesting to look at Cyprus' banking records and see who would have been impacted had the haircut happened suddenly, two months earlier.) So inflation is irrelevant for the little guy, and easily dodged by…

>Actually, all you have to do to dodge inflation is dump your idle currency into literally anything else. It doesn't work that way. If you want to protect yourself from inflation you have to deploy that capital productively or alternatively be close to the source of the inflation (the central bank). If you are actually doing productive work then workers will see their incomes grow and if workers are underpaid relativ…

It sounds like you're saying that to avoid drowning you merely need to swim upstream carrying all your workers. Anyways, by rich I mean the 3%, not the 0.001%. Those who are very comfortable, but who aren't captains of industry. Professionals vs business people.

Can't they (and this is an honest question) do well by locking their income into things that will get more expensive, when measured in currency? Sure their purchasing power will fall, $ for $ with everyone else's, but by selling that real property when needed they'll have more of those $s than people who rode the currency into the ground. Right?

Re: The fraying of the U.S. global currency reserve system

#332

Post by slaw »

NZGumboot wrote: post #296
umvi wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some regulations save a thousand lives at a 0.02% increase in costs. Repealing those is bad. Enacting them is good. Some regulations save two lives at a 5000% increase in cost, which could equally be saved by some less expensive regulation. Enacting those is bad. Repealing them is good. Not to get political but this reminded me of covid-19. Masks and social distancing are an obvious 0.02% increase in costs that sav…

I totally agree that lockdowns are super expensive, and should only be used as a last resort, but I think you're missing the purpose of lockdowns. The purpose is not to save the lives of . The purpose is to bring the R number https://www.bbc.com/news/health-52473523 > below one, so that the number of sick people doesn't increase to the point where the health care system is overwhelmed (which would lead to a substanti…

The purpose of lockdowns and other methods to fight with covid-19 was to keep old people alive for few more months.

'The observed temporary excess mortality likely arises because people in vulnerable groups die weeks or months earlier than they would otherwise, due to the timing and severity of the unusual external event.' https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.11.20229708v...

Re: The fraying of the U.S. global currency reserve system

#333

Post by ldng »

slaw wrote: post #332
NZGumboot wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree that lockdowns are super expensive, and should only be used as a last resort, but I think you're missing the purpose of lockdowns. The purpose is not to save the lives of . The purpose is to bring the R number https://www.bbc.com/news/health-52473523 > below one, so that the number of sick people doesn't increase to the point where the health care system is overwhelmed (which would lead to a substanti…

The purpose of lockdowns and other methods to fight with covid-19 was to keep old people alive for few more months. 'The observed temporary excess mortality likely arises because people in vulnerable groups die weeks or months earlier than they would otherwise, due to the timing and severity of the unusual external event.' https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.11.20229708v...

That is not the point and never was ! When your hospital is saturated by people that ultimately will survive but need 3 to 4 weeks to recover, you're going to die from anything but covid.

You're in a car crash? To bad hospital is saturated. You got 4th degree burn in a burning building? To bad hospital is saturated.

Do you realise that is the problem?

Re: The fraying of the U.S. global currency reserve system

#334

Post by ketamine__ »

m-ee wrote: post #314
ketamine__ wrote: post #250

Peter Thiel bet against the US dollar and lost big. > Subsequent down years have reduced the fund's assets under management to $681 million as of December 2010.[4] Clarium Capital Management was reported to have had big losses in 2010.[14] The firm has continued to struggle with bets that it made on inflation and the US dollar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarium_Capital

I interviewed there years ago, at the time it solely managed Peter Thiels personal money because all the other investors had pulled out. Strange and funny dynamic, I’ve never heard of someone running and staffing an entire hedge fund just for themselves. Traders said that you had to be on call at all times in case Thiel called you from some other time zone to execute a particular trade he wanted.

It makes me wonder if there is a bias that says day trading and risky investments aren't risky when one is a billionaire? Magical thinking abounds when one crosses a threshold?

Re: The fraying of the U.S. global currency reserve system

#335

Post by a3camero »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #76
lettergram wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My father was one of the last tool makers in the US working for Molex. They spent years teaching the Chinese, the Chinese would disassemble all molds sent over to China and often break them, so my fathers team would have to fix / rebuild them. They spent years training the Chinese side-by-side in the US. In the end they still haven’t exactly caught up to the quality we had in the US. However, they now have 5x the too…

> To compete, you really do have to cut minimum wage. You have to loosen regulations, and importantly, you have to do massive tariffs / sanctions on China for the next decade. Part of the problem here is that the existence of some kind of universal "more regulations / less regulations" slider is an illusion. It allows the problem to be cast in partisan terms when that isn't the problem at all, because the problem isn…

Rules on paper aren’t rules in reality. Enforcement of law, and the way it’s experienced (or not) is far more important than what’s written in the law books, and the enforcement part is much less transparent, and impossible to know at the time the rule is passed.

Re: The fraying of the U.S. global currency reserve system

#336

Post by slaw »

ldng wrote: post #333
slaw wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose of lockdowns and other methods to fight with covid-19 was to keep old people alive for few more months. 'The observed temporary excess mortality likely arises because people in vulnerable groups die weeks or months earlier than they would otherwise, due to the timing and severity of the unusual external event.' https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.11.20229708v...

That is not the point and never was ! When your hospital is saturated by people that ultimately will survive but need 3 to 4 weeks to recover, you're going to die from anything but covid. You're in a car crash? To bad hospital is saturated. You got 4th degree burn in a burning building? To bad hospital is saturated. Do you realise that is the problem?

Sweden's hospitals were never saturated despite no lockdown. Italy's hospitals are saturated every flu season.

Hospitals are saturated, because we want to keep these people alive for few more months. Younger people don't need hospitalization.

You are in car crash, too bad hospitals are only admitting people with covid. This is current situation in Poland.

Re: The fraying of the U.S. global currency reserve system

#337

Post by TruthHurts44 »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #69
CoffeeDregs wrote: post #12

"Instead of drawing down our gold reserves, however, we gradually draw down our domestic manufacturing base and it gets replaced piece-by-piece in foreign countries." To me, this is the money shot. I hadn't seen this expressed before and it makes perfect sense. I'm baffled that we (the US) caused this to happen to the US. I'm (unhappily) registered Republican but I argued vociferously to a Dem friend in 2000 that our…

There was a recent youtube of a Chinese professor discussing how china has gotten along so well with the US while the great migration of manufacturing occurred. It boiled down to wall street being fine with moving manufacturing abroad, as they don't identify with, and in fact despise, the American working class. Pretty depressing.

If they despised the working class they would've pushed for removal of the useless rules the West has - health and safety, generous pensions for hard jobs(like miners), minimum wage, etc.

Re: The fraying of the U.S. global currency reserve system

#338

Post by simonh »

pnutjam wrote: post #282
simonh wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren’t slaves, they’re just people extremely happy to get a wage of $10k per year, which would be unobtainable for most of them any other way. The fact that this means they under cut US manufacturing wages by more than half isn’t really their fault. As for bringing back manufacturing home, you need to find two things to make that work. First massive subsidies and tariffs to drive up the cost of foreign imports,…

I say taxes aren't necessary. Just hold companies accountable for every step in their manufacturing chain. They need to audit and ensure factories address meeting or standards for the workers. I don't mean wages, I mean safety, overtime, etc. Labor needs to be valued at home and abroad.

I'm all for holding companies accountable for their supply chain management, but within reason. I can't see the US government accepting EU employment contract, health, safety and business practices imposed on the US arbitrarily. There has to be some flexibility. Let's be clear, the west has reaped _staggering_ economic benefits from opening up China. Of course there have been costs too, some of them painful, but that's always the way with economic change.

Re: The fraying of the U.S. global currency reserve system

#339

Post by TruthHurts44 »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #87
tastyfreeze wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Default is another option. Inflation hurts everybody. Cutting spending is the only way to start repairing the economy for the long term. Government consumes 31% of the fruit of our labor. Money that could be left in the hands of people to drive the economy.

The beauty of inflation is that it hurts you in direct proportion to how well off you are, and it can't be dodged (i.e. it's like a wealth tax, only actually achievable). We could drive inflation while also ameliorating a lot of the pain it would cause by implementing UBI (in fact, I'm pretty sure big deficit spending is the only way UBI will ever happen). Defaulting would screw a lot of institutional pension investo…

The beauty is that you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.

Re: The fraying of the U.S. global currency reserve system

#340

Post by jtbayly »

mbesto wrote: post #276
jtbayly wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t mind eye rolling at corporate handouts and deals that are mirages. But the parent comment only seems to be mocking the idea of bringing manufacturing back and saying how dumb Republicans are for wanting to do it.

> mocking the idea of bringing manufacturing back and saying how dumb Republicans are for wanting to do it. At what point did I ever say Republicans were dumb for wanting it? I'm mocking the idea that Republicans actively denounced corporate welfare (saying it's a Democratic thing), yet just do it themselves (and then fail at actually make the change for that matter). Take your triggered self over to Reddit.

The discussion was about manufacturing and whether it was a good idea to bring it back and if so how.

I don’t think your comments have added anything of value to that discussion, just bringing politics in for the sake of mocking.

Post reply on HN