491–500 of 593 posts
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Mind you, I think the electric future s 15-30 years away, not 8-15 - but the lifetime of a refinery is 40-50 years. Thats the issue, it wont pay for itself on a conventional amortization schedule.
Disagree. We’re already past peak combustion vehicle sales per Bloomberg NEF, and the rate of EV sales will only increase based on operating costs versus combustion vehicles. Lots of folks interested in EVs when fuel is $5-6/gallon, which will remain for some time. Gotta scale up faster, build the machine that builds the machine and whatnot. https://e360.yale.edu/digest/new-analysis-suggests-we-have-p... https://abou…
Don't get me wrong. I WANT an EV, but there isn't one out there I would buy. No way am I getting a 1st, 2nd, or 3rd year EV. I'm not going to be a beta tester. No way am I getting an EV with just touch screens. No way am I getting an EV which is a pain to maintain or repair.
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The Norway example is really annoying. It keeps coming back as an example to follow, when everybody knows it is a complete outlier that cannot be reproduced elsewhere. Norway is sitting on a gigantic pile of offshore gas that it uses to generate massive profits that go into a huge fund they don't know what to do with, all of that for a 5M population that drowns into social programs. There is literally no country in t…
> Yet, when you look at what Norway has actually produced over the past few decades in terms of innovation, companies, etc. the picture is very, very empty. Do you have anything to back this claim up? Most of what I've searched about the Nordic countries in terms of innovation seems to disagree with this assertion. https://voxeu.org/article/nordic-innovation-cuddly-capitalis... https://www.ft.com/content/e3c15066-cd7…
If you look at your first link Norway is explicitly excluded. In the third link Norway is 20th while Sweden and Denmark are 2nd and 9th.
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No! And in fact most economists consider this to be an extremist fringe theory. A quick counterfactual here is, if the US's inflation is caused by its "money printing" (a term that is used quite loosely here, the vast majority of this money never makes it out to the general economy), then how does one explain the inflation experienced in other nations at the same time where no money was printed?
I don't think the stimulus being one of the drivers of inflation is an 'extremist fringe theory' at all. I thought the consensus was it was one of many factors, and the exact contribution of the different factors (stimulus, supply issues, etc) was up for debate. US inflation is higher than other wealthy nations and the US also did a larger stimulus. So there is evidence that the additional stimulus may have created g…
Canada gave a lot more in stimulus checks (with respect to GDP) than the US but is experiencing less inflation than the US.
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Why? That puts more of the tax burden on those with the least
No it doesn't. Those with less to spend also spend less. Contrary to popular belief, the so called utopias like Sweden, tax the poor at almost comparable rates as the rich.
The poor already spend all their money on necessities. If you go to a flat sales tax it will hurt them more than the current progressive regime and favor the wealthy.
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The M1 jump is not new money for the most part, it's a reclassification of things that used to be M2 as also being M1 (liquid) https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2021/05/savings-are-now-more... M2 increased in 2020, but not by as much as you're saying https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
Thanks for sharing. I never knew that. The post says savings accounts were moved into M1 because they're pretty liquid now. But what was the real rationale or implications? Odd time to do that move (April 24, 2020)
https://www.federalreserve.gov/supervisionreg/caletters/calt...
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A much greater proportion of this inflation is due to supply side shocks, and very little (if any at all) has to do with QE. COVID simultaneously destroyed supply chains while shifting consumer from spending on services to spending on goods which, by the laws of supply and demand, meant prices for goods went up: inflation. Energy and locomotion are core aspects of the US economy that factor into just about everything…
While supply chain problems were real during the pandemic, especially w.r.t. automobiles, QE is by far the driving force of our current economic situation. Here is some data to put your talking point into context. Look at the recent production some of the items being severely impacted by inflation. Now look up their price charts (you can use February before Putin invaded Ukraine to eliminate another variable). Wheat:…
You can argue either side to this, and make a good case. My personal preference is to trigger a recession and reduce inflation. The easy cop-out solution is to say a "big f*ck off" to pensioners, lower middle class, and poor people and let inflation soar, but I believe that long term this would be more destructive to the general economy. Better take the long term view here and not kick the can down the street.
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While supply chain problems were real during the pandemic, especially w.r.t. automobiles, QE is by far the driving force of our current economic situation. Here is some data to put your talking point into context. Look at the recent production some of the items being severely impacted by inflation. Now look up their price charts (you can use February before Putin invaded Ukraine to eliminate another variable). Wheat:…
You’ve said QE is the cause, but provide no evidence to back up these claims. Considering QE occurred multiple times after the 08 crisis, what makes this time different? Bold claims without much substance.
If there are 3 potential logical causes being discussed (QE, reduction in supply of commodities due to covid, and reduction in supply of fossil fuels from Russia since the invasion of Ukraine), and I provide data that suggests that 2 of them could not be significantly responsible, that leaves only one.
The difference is the magnitude. Never before in US history has the government expanded the M2 money supply by ~20% in a matter of a few weeks. This is the chart that sums it up [0]. That was significantly by direct cash injection/expansion of the Fed's balance sheet. Combined with ultra low interest rates (also the most significant in US history) and the elimination of the reserve requirement, M2 has been growing at an incredible rate ever since. When you have 1 gold bar worth of value in an economy and 100 dollars, a gold bar is worth $100. If you print 20 more dollars, well, that gold bar will soon be worth $120, and not because the inherent value or usefulness of the gold bar changed.
The returns that capital demands (and the government obliges to) are ultimately unsustainable. That's the core problem here. Rising wages? There has been no meaningful real increase in wages in 40 years despite a massive increase in productivity. Profits keep going up and up. The expectations for profits keep going up. The problem here is that the people who make companies possible don't get to share in the proceeds…
Meanwhile the rest of the economy de-industrialized, manufacturing jobs became more scarce because technology increased productivity, whatever was too labor cost intensive went overseas, and whatever jobs couldn't be offshored, retail and service jobs, aren't capable of having the same productivity gains as what was happening in tech. There are pretty hard limits to what restaurant staff, or retail employees, or other regular jobs can do to become more productive. That is why their wages are stagnant, the only reason those jobs exist is because they can't be exported, in some places they even import foreign workers to do those jobs to keep wages low. This is why unions fell out of favor, labor has no leverage anymore since their jobs can just be exported, or they cant but they are low skill jobs so employers can just churn people or grab import immigrants to do it because employees are nothing more than cogs in a machine that Amazon hasn't figured out how to automate yet.
Keep in mind that this is all by design, capital was liberalized, economies globalized, college loans guaranteed, nimbys limiting development in real estate and energy, these were all policies that people wanted and politicians enacted, whether or not they were fully aware of the second order consequences which are why things feel so messed up now.