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The Ultimate Guide to Inflation
161–170 of 364 posts
Re: The Ultimate Guide to Inflation
#162Mentioning M2 without mentioning the accounting change that completely changes the graph starting May 2020 is very odd. Of course the percent change is large when you start measuring a different thing from before. The simplest explanation of accounting change can be found here: https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/the-fed-isnt-printing... But the St Louis fed also publishes a disclaimer at the bottom of their graph…
Are you sure that's correct? If I'm reading the article you linked correctly, they basically decided to count savings accounts as M1 instead of M2. But since M1 is included in M2... this shouldn't change the total value of M2? So all of the increases in M2 were actually due to printing of more money (among other things).
Re: The Ultimate Guide to Inflation
#163Time to buy gold.
Problem with gold is that it is also inflationary only difference is it is mines that "print" more gold instead of a central bank. Cryptocurrencies are better since they have geometric decay built into the algorithm to make them deflationary by default.
Precious metals are also risky long-term in that we don't know how "precious" they truly are in a solar system-wide context.
We can make well-informed guesses, but until there are boots on the ground of the Moon, Mars, and the asteroid belt, we can't know for sure.
Re: The Ultimate Guide to Inflation
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
tracing back to the source of the chart... >Cass calls this calculation the Cost-of-Thriving Index. It measures the median male annual salary against four major household expenditures: > • Housing, defined as the annual rent for a three-bedroom house in the 40th percentile of the local housing market. > • Health care, defined as the annual premium on a typical family health insurance policy. > • Transportation, defin…
Development and economic growth. In the Roman Empire, people lived 30 years and died. Most were illiterate. As a society develops, and has more excess resources, allocating more and more of those resources on keeping people alive, healthy, and educated seems reasonable. What's missing from the charts is quality. We spend a lot on healthcare, but we also now have multi-million-dollar MRIs machines and similar magic.
What you said is WILDLY wrong.
People in Roman empire lived until 90 just like us. For example Seneca de Elder was 92 when he died.
The reason why "life expectance" was 30 years was because child deaths, since that number is just an average.
If you have 2 people living in a country, one is 100, and the other is 0, and the child dies, life expectancy is 50.
Re: The Ultimate Guide to Inflation
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
I presume you are in the USA. I watch and marvel at how the USA has such expensive health care and yet apparently has poorer outcomes than other G10 nations, in aggregate. The NHS in my home country is undergoing privatisation of the more lucrative or self-contained components. But it seems important for other countries to watch and learn from this example because free market economics are so often heralded as a solu…
>>yet apparently has poorer outcomes than other G10 nations I assume you have data for this? Something more than the flawed infant mortality rate that is often cited but is a very poor judge of a health system in reality? Something like 5 year cancer survival rates. Time a person waits on Specialist Wait List, the time it takes a person to get a replacement Hip, MIR, or Heart Stent. All of which I believe the US is v…
The US does really well at high end care. It does less well in terms of overall agregate health outcomes. As I recall last time I saw a really good analysis if this posted to HN, You have to take into account a few other risk factors (obesity etc) in addition (to how infant mortality it reported) to get the US health outcomes inline with other developed nation. Even then, the US ends up paying way more to achieve that level of care per capita.
Edit: Took me a bit but I tracked down the article that my recollections are based on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21737795
Re: The Ultimate Guide to Inflation
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
With ACA that’s only really a problem for those just over the income cliff. Health insurance costs after subsidy for most retired folks pulling, say, 50k-60k or so per year from retirement accounts and social security are pretty low.
Social security does not (currently) start until 62 or 63, and that’s with a hefty reduction in benefit. I expect by the time I retire, full benefits won’t be available until 75 or something, and it will be means tested (and/or the value of the benefit decreased via decreasing value of USD). I do not know what the ACA subsidies are for people, but the ~$17k annual out of pocket maximum is what kills you. A single hea…
OOP maximums can be the real killer for those with chronic conditions. But at lower to middle income levels even OOP max isn’t always that bad in ACA plans.
Re: The Ultimate Guide to Inflation
#167I've wondered what the effect our modern digital economy has had on consumer price inflation. Normally, an increase in money supply would cause consumer goods to increase in price, since more people are able to buy them and there is a limit on how much of any particular physical good is available. This isn't the case, however, for digital goods. If there are suddenly 100 million new people who want to buy a Netflix s…
>The marginal cost for a new subscriber is practically zero, so there should be no price increase caused by a shortage. Yeah, I don't think that that argument works at all. The price does not increase due to "shortage", it increases due to an increase in consumers' willingness to pay. Going by the Netflix example, if Netflix realizes that not too many people will cancel their subscriptions if they were to increase th…
It takes time to produce physical widgets to meet demand, for manufacturers to scale, and then start benefiting from economies of scale.
With Netflix, a million people can sign up immediately, supply adjusts instantly and economy of scale is locked in earlier.
For digital goods you also have huge companies investing for the future. Your local hardware store need to continue to make a profit, whereas Amazon can absorb or push back on cost pressures for much longer.
I agree with OP that this must put upwards pressure on inflation of physical goods even if it’s a medium term thing.
Re: The Ultimate Guide to Inflation
#168I've wondered what the effect our modern digital economy has had on consumer price inflation. Normally, an increase in money supply would cause consumer goods to increase in price, since more people are able to buy them and there is a limit on how much of any particular physical good is available. This isn't the case, however, for digital goods. If there are suddenly 100 million new people who want to buy a Netflix s…
>Normally, an increase in money supply would cause consumer goods to increase in price, since more people are able to buy them
Not if the increase in money supply goes from the banks to the already wealthy (as cheap loans), which don't use the extra money to consume, but to invest, buy land, and fund small-competition-crushing rent-seeking endeavours.
Then the money supply increases, consumer goods remain more or less the same price, but some stuff like rent goes up.
Re: The Ultimate Guide to Inflation
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Businesses charge what customers are willing to pay. If they have more money, they are willing to pay more. Competitiuis the countervailing force, but Netflix has exclusives and serials and network effects (fandoms and friends)
If you permit me to be terribly econ 101 about this, if netflix had a perfectly elastic supply curve (because the marginal cost of an extra netflix subscriber is fixed and doesn't increase with high numbers of subscribers) then an increase in demand would lead to an increase in quantity supplied but not an increase in price.
If you're going to be "terribly econ 101", note that Netflix is not in a perfectly competitive market and almost certainly encounters a downward sloping demand curve... and that its maximum profit point is not going to be at the point where the most units are supplied and may indeed shift as the demand curve shifts.
Re: The Ultimate Guide to Inflation
#170I've wondered what the effect our modern digital economy has had on consumer price inflation. Normally, an increase in money supply would cause consumer goods to increase in price, since more people are able to buy them and there is a limit on how much of any particular physical good is available. This isn't the case, however, for digital goods. If there are suddenly 100 million new people who want to buy a Netflix s…
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