Live data from Hacker News

US Federal Reserve raises interest rates for first time since 2018

theguardian.com

631–640 of 693 posts

Re: US Federal Reserve raises interest rates for first time since 2018

#631
post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a lot of people that just dumped their stimulus checks on memecoins or wasted it buying spurious goods By contrast, when the Bush tax cuts were passed all that money was used for tasteful, ethical spending

At least those tax cuts were on income, by definition money earned through productive activity.

Oh good. I was worried that there were still people earning income from exploitation, rent seeking, monopoly, cronyism, and leveraging principal-agent conflicts of interest but looks like that’s all over now.

Re: US Federal Reserve raises interest rates for first time since 2018

#632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or alternately raise taxes in the good times (rather than interest rates) and pay down that debt... which at least in the US we've got one political party dead set against at all costs.

I assume you're taking a swipe at Team Red, but do remember that the recent TCJA had a provision that removed the ability to deduct state/local (SALT) taxes from your Federal taxes due, above a certain amount. One could consider this very fair: if you argue for higher (Federal) taxes, you should pay what's owed, regardless of what you paid to any local governments, especially since you have much more control over whe…

Then how did the high tax states get high tax?

Re: US Federal Reserve raises interest rates for first time since 2018

#633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theories that are dismissed by the vast majority of the mainstream experts are often simple, yes. It turns out that the real world is complicated, and thats why we have experts in the world.

The world isn't that complicated. Its brutal and uncaring. We make up complicated systems beacuse we'd rather not face the pointless brutality of it all. Contrast the complexity of religious faith in life after death to the biological reality on the ground for the best example of this.

[deleted]

Re: US Federal Reserve raises interest rates for first time since 2018

#634
post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where in the world would raising taxes on a dime be perfectly acceptable? Imagine you have a rent or mortgage payment, but inflation hits 10% so your taxes go up 10% month over month to counter it. Your costs were fixed, the inflation affected other things besides your long term agreements, and yet, you would default on your payments because you got 10% less that month after taxes. Who would not want to burn the whol…

> Where in the world would raising taxes on a dime be perfectly acceptable? Any place where the no-taxes-ever party doesn't have a permanent stranglehold on at least one branch of a deadlocked government. The United States is an outlier in this. > Imagine you have a rent or mortgage payment, but inflation hits 10% so your taxes go up 10% month over month to counter it. If inflation is that high, the real cost of maki…

> Where in the world would raising taxes on a dime be perfectly acceptable?

"Any place where..." Noted that you couldn't conjure a single example.

> If inflation is that high, the real cost of making your mortgage payment is shrinking in real dollars.

This assumes that inflation is evenly distributed in all sectors. It isn't. Your CPI inflation rate is a proxy, a rough index, an average, and a dubious one at that prone to all sorts of bad signals.

Tax rates are evenly distributed (even if a higher tax bracket results in a higher rate, it's still evenly applied across the population).

Inflation isn't. Wages don't move in lockstep with inflation, particularly across all sectors and across all jobs. It moves in fits and bouts, and a raise may only come once a quarter or once a year for many (since businesses need their expenses to be predictable).

This idea that taxes could be unpredictable based on some rough, government sponsored index of inflation is quite silly on deep inspection. It completely upends the predictability of doing business.

And the cost of that unpredictability would be a contraction in the economy from less spending to hedge against the uncertainty of income.

Re: US Federal Reserve raises interest rates for first time since 2018

#635
post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not the person you are replying to, but perhaps the cleanest indication of what "the bond market" "thinks" is to look at the Eurodollar futures quotes at https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/interest-rates/stirs/eurodo... It is hard to define exactly what a "Eurodollar" is, but for now assume that a Eurodollar is a bank deposit in a jurisdiction not subject to the Fed's authority. ("Eurodollar" has nothing to do wit…

Thank you for this. I learned something new today. Any books/websites you could recommend to learn more about this sort of stuff?

Good question. Those who understand this stuff (not me) are busy making money and don't write about it. Nevertheless, I think that these papers [1,2] by Pozsar offer a fabulous overview of the contemporary money market.

[1] https://www.financialresearch.gov/working-papers/files/OFRwp...

[2] https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff...

Re: US Federal Reserve raises interest rates for first time since 2018

#636
post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Um, what? The Bretton Woods agreement was part of "the fiat currency situation we now find ourselves in" (just an earlier stage of it where the government was still trying to pretend to some sort of "linkage" with gold, If USD was not linked to gold, why was a multi-country agreement needed to change the value of the US dollar to gold? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smithsonian_Agreement > To call the monetary reg…

For a different take on types of money and the money supply, here is an article by David Friedman: https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa017.pdf Note in particular this at the end of the section on fractional reserve money: > Before leaving the subject of fractional reserve systems, I should mention one particularly bizarre variant -- a fractional reserve system based on fiat money. I call it bizarre b…

> Note in particular this at the end of the section on fractional reserve money:

> (By "this country" he means the US, although the US is not the only country with such a system.)

Actually the US is a country without such a system, i.e, the US (and most countries really) are not fractional reserve systems, and have not been in decades. James Tobin called this "The Old View" in 1963:

* https://cowles.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/pub/d01/d0...

Fractional reserve banking is a nice 'Econ 101' way of thinking of the monetary system, but in no way does it match reality. It should really be stopped being taught because people hold onto the paradigm and it causes faulty analysis:

* https://www.pragcap.com/r-i-p-the-money-multiplier/

Most modern economies are based on credit:

* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1905625

Re: US Federal Reserve raises interest rates for first time since 2018

#637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of the 80 million single family homes in the US, how many are sold each year? For your math to work (80,000 as 1%) it would have to be 8,000,000 or 10% of the overall supply. I can actually answer for you - roughly 820,000 single family homes were sold in 2020. So if BlackRock bought 80,000 homes then, that'd be about 10%.

You're conflating some figures -- 820k new homes were sold[1] -- along with roughly 5.6 million existing homes[2]. [1] - https://www.housingwire.com/articles/new-home-sales-historic... [2] - https://cdn.nar.realtor/sites/default/files/documents/ehs-01...

ah, you're right, it was 5 million existing single family, I was pulling from the census and misread. My mistake.

Re: US Federal Reserve raises interest rates for first time since 2018

#638

Recession is inevitable. If you’re only considering interest rates, you haven’t bothered to look at the Fed’s balance sheet or FOMC meeting minutes from 2020. We bailed out the world through currency swaps, corporate bonds, and MBS purchases and we’re still doing it to the tune of $120B per month.

can you post links? hard for learning layperson to identify the right sources

https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/fomccalendars....

2022 March 16 press release https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/files/monetary...

No minutes yet for March 16

Slide deck materials i think - https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/files/fomcproj...

Re: US Federal Reserve raises interest rates for first time since 2018

#639

An interesting aspect of this is that the endless printing of money in the last few years was a sort of stress test of modern monetary theory, which has been seeing lots of discussion in those same years. I never quite understood how this theory would work while avoiding inflation, and what's happening now seems to at least be related - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/06/business/economy/modern-m... Conceptually the…

Here are the first two paragraphs on the MMT Wikipedia article: > Modern Monetary Theory or Modern Money Theory (MMT) is a heterodox[1] macroeconomic theory that describes currency as a public monopoly and unemployment as evidence that a currency monopolist is overly restricting the supply of the financial assets needed to pay taxes and satisfy savings desires.[2][3] MMT is opposed to the mainstream understanding of…

> and that the primary risk once the economy reaches full employment is inflation, which can be addressed by gathering taxes to reduce the spending capacity of the private sector.

I don't understand this. Increasing taxes reduces the spending power of the individuals who pay the taxes. But that taxed money doesn't evaporate. The government spends it or redistributes it. It ultimately makes its way back into the private sector.

Re: US Federal Reserve raises interest rates for first time since 2018

#640
post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you're taking a swipe at Team Red, but do remember that the recent TCJA had a provision that removed the ability to deduct state/local (SALT) taxes from your Federal taxes due, above a certain amount. One could consider this very fair: if you argue for higher (Federal) taxes, you should pay what's owed, regardless of what you paid to any local governments, especially since you have much more control over whe…

Somehow the Red "cut the taxes and spending" never give back the net inflows they take from Blue states.... Blue states have higher taxes to care for their citizens so they have to take less in Federal handouts.

But that's not how the federal government is supposed to work? The whole point is for them to engage in redistributive policies, which means you inevitably have "never give back the net inflows they take". I'm sure economically unproductive areas (eg. rural areas) "never give back the net inflows they take from" economically productive areas (ie. major cities), but we don't give people living in cities a tax credit.
Post reply on HN