Earlier quoted context omitted.
They have debt, but they also have work contracts with out of date wages. But even in our sector, with the leverage that we as programmers have, companies don’t bother to match inflation. You have to make some risky or uncomfortable move to renegotiate your wage or find a new job. For many people it can be worse. So, everyone is under additional financial stress.
Inflation forces people to seek new jobs every few years. That is not necessarily a bad thing. The alternative is to have your boss decide for you when he wants to fire you.
Federal Reserve raises rates by 0.75%
551–560 of 593 posts
Re: Federal Reserve raises rates by 0.75%
#552Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fuck that. Stop thinking of yourself as an individual employee and start thinking of yourself as a member of a union . Then actually form that union. You don't get across-the-board raises by "generating leads". You get them by collectively bargaining. And I reject entirely the notion that one should be only looking out for one's own gain.
I went from washing dishes to six figures my way. Has your way done well for you thus far?
We live in a society, and we damn well need to start acting like it again, rather than the proverbial crabs in a bucket, desperately stepping on each other to try to get ourselves higher.
Re: Federal Reserve raises rates by 0.75%
#553The 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…
Re: Federal Reserve raises rates by 0.75%
#554Earlier quoted context omitted.
The dot plot indicates they want the funds rate around 3.75% by end of 2023 and over 3% by start of 2023. There is absolutely no reason to do 75 today, 75 next month and 50s the rest of the 2022. That pattern is actually more shocking than just a one and done hike. An analogy would be a bad tasting medicine - I don't know anyone who prefers sipping to just down the hatch. There is also nothing to say they can't lower…
To avoid reacting too late, maybe the Fed should have a policy of always adjusting funds rate every month, even in a stable economy. Like TCP congestion control, the funds rate would tack up and down around the "optimal" value. This would also reduce the market surprises because people would know the rate will go up or down every month. And with smaller, more frequent changes, people can more easily anticipate which…
Re: Federal Reserve raises rates by 0.75%
#555Earlier quoted context omitted.
I went from washing dishes to six figures my way. Has your way done well for you thus far?
The whole point is this isn't about you . This is about all of us . We live in a society, and we damn well need to start acting like it again, rather than the proverbial crabs in a bucket, desperately stepping on each other to try to get ourselves higher.
Re: Federal Reserve raises rates by 0.75%
#556Earlier quoted context omitted.
I went from washing dishes to six figures my way. Has your way done well for you thus far?
The whole point is this isn't about you . This is about all of us . We live in a society, and we damn well need to start acting like it again, rather than the proverbial crabs in a bucket, desperately stepping on each other to try to get ourselves higher.
Re: Federal Reserve raises rates by 0.75%
#557Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, I'll clarify. Do you have objections to it as laid out on Wikipedia? If you have something that you think more accurately delineates its tenets, I'll address that instead. I will give you a full answer once we've agreed on a concise explanation of it that you stand by, but the short version is that it mistakes effect for cause and assumes stability in various factors while undermining the bases for that very st…
Sure, the 5 principles seem good to me. The job guarantee is given not much prominence, but I can work with that. Edit: sectoral balances are not very prominent either, which are an important conceptual tool, though not really MMT per se (more an accounting identity that most people ignore).
(Wikipedia) MMT's main tenets are that a government that issues its own fiat money:
1. Can pay for goods, services, and financial assets without a need to first collect money in the form of taxes or debt issuance in advance of such purchases;
The intended thrust of this principle is that you can spend first and tax later because the monetary system is not about accumulation but about equilibrium, and the equilibrium isn't about total balance but about interest rate and employment. The first part is the assumption: fiat money will be able to pay for goods, services, and financial assets.
This need not be true, and particularly tends not to be true at the beginning and end of fiat currencies. At the beginning of a currency, the issuing entity has to establish faith in the system. And as a currency fails through hyperinflation, it ceases to have any meaningful buying power. The point where you call it failure is obviously a point for debate, but I would suggest that your currency has proceeded past the point of failure if, when transacting for normal daily purchases (food, transportation, small durable goods), money is exchanged not by reading face values but by weighing large quantities of notes or similar (e.g. bread costs two bundles of orange notes.)
2. Cannot be forced to default on debt denominated in its own currency;
The only situation where this ceases is to be true is one where the issuing government does not possess the resources to do the requisite printing or, probably even more unlikely, to declare new money supply digitally. For all intents and purposes, this statement is true, but again it doesn't acknowledge the fact that all lending to a hyperinflationary government will cease when there is no faith in the value of that currency. This drying up of credit has the same effect as default, particularly since the debt was never secured by collateral.
Nonetheless, the effect will be similar to defaulting on secured debts, since so little of an economy would be functioning at this point that the hyperinflationary state would require imports which could only be acquired through selling off of hard assets and land.
3. Is limited in its money creation and purchases only by inflation, which accelerates once the real resources (labour, capital and natural resources) of the economy are utilized at full employment;
This part is trickier to handle. We can probably agree that inflation means the widespread rise of prices across goods and services (though the measurement is a tricky issue that we should put aside for now.) Full employment is the sticking point, because MMT replaces NAIRU with NAIBER. NAIRU is a point of uncommon humility for economists, because it acknowledges that, if we push for zero unemployment, we get accelerating inflation. NAIBER, on the other hand, pushes to extinguish unemployment through job guarantees in the form of government jobs (the 'rate of unemployment' of NAIRU having been replaced by 'buffer employment ratio' in NAIBER.) So, why wouldn't this be inflationary just like in the other scenario?
Well, the NAIBER principle suggests that you pull people away from the inflationary sectors of the economy into lower-paid government jobs. In this way, there's less inflation because wages aren't being allowed to shoot up in booming sectors of the economy. The methodology for convincing people to make job changes away from their chosen work to something new and lower paid is a question I haven't seen answered anywhere, but I doubt that the changes would be effected peacefully or voluntarily.
In the meantime, all this government payroll for the lower-paid jobs will result in more inflation from the extra government spending required.
4. Recommends strengthening automatic stabilisers to control demand-pull inflation[10] rather than relying upon discretionary tax changes;
This statement just means that there should be a set of policies that can be set long-term which would be preferable to tax changes with the changing political winds. Every other political wind that comes along also agrees with this statement and, like MMT proponents, they think that their ideas are the right one.
This is basically arguing for the rule of law. The devil is in the details, but diving into those would require us coming to a common understanding of those details first. I'll leave off there on this point.
5. Bond issues are a monetary policy device, not a funding device.
This formalizes an underlying assumption of the modern US federal government that we can always borrow more money. That clearly works at present, but it is more prone to failure than MMT proponents acknowledge. If the government doesn't issue bonds to attain funding for (or to counterbalance, per MMT framing) spending, the currency is debased. There comes a time when that accelerates painfully and it becomes worth the world's efforts to disentangle from the USD.
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MMT is a theory that starts with the premise that there will be no catastrophic end times, but working under that premise is the surest way to bring them about more quickly. MMT has a long runway to failure in the US (if it is done slowly) because there is so much financial infrastructure denominated in USD, and there is a lot of underlying value in the US. There are much slower ways for a government to fail, and those are the ones I want. Businesses should have some acceptance of downside risk, because a failed business is only pretty bad. A failed country is a whole different level of catastrophe, and our governments should be accordingly allergic to government-ending levels of downside risk.
Edited for formatting.
Re: Federal Reserve raises rates by 0.75%
#558Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are half right. Per the article body, contradicting the headline, the rates increased by 0.75pp, which is equivalent to 75bp. The previous rates ranged from 0.75% to 1% making the 0.75pp hike a 75-100% increase, not the 0.75% increase you and the incorrect headline claim.
Nobody ever talks about rate increases in terms of their ratio to the previous rate (ie. talking about a 75-100% rate increase), this would be insanely confusing and irrelevant. To avoid confusion, people always discuss the absolute additive change in the base rate itself. ie., 75bp or 0.75%, which are equivalent.
Uncommon in finances, but quite common in other domains. The mathematics involved do not change across those domains.
> this would be insanely confusing.
What is confusing about it? Knowing that the rate increased by, in this case, 100% or 0.75pp provides the same information if you know the previous rate. You must know the previous rate in order to determine the new rate either way.
You are quite right that the percentage point (pp), rather than the percent (%), is often the exact information people want to know. It is why the information is provided as a percentage point (pp) and not a percent (%). It may be also be provided as basis points (bp), but that is the same as a percentage points (pp) except multiplied by 100 to make working with fractions of a percentage point (pp) easier.
> 75bp or 0.75%, which are equivalent.
They can be equivalent. An increase from 100% to 100.75% is a 75bp, 0.75pp, and 0.75% increase. However, that is not generally true. A 1% to 1.75% increase is a 75bp, 0.75pp, and 75% increase.
What is certain is that the difference between two numbers does not produce a percentage. That is not how percentages work.
Re: Federal Reserve raises rates by 0.75%
#559Earlier quoted context omitted.
If that's the case, why not just rent?
Because after 30 years of paying rent... you own nothing. After 30 years of paying a mortgage... you own land and a building.
Re: Federal Reserve raises rates by 0.75%
#560Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like my reMarkable tablet, thank you very much
Designed in Norway, made with low margin electronics and components from Asian supply chains. Either ways, 10 times more IPhones are sold in a quarter than ReMarkable tablets have ever sold in the entire history. This is not a knock against ReMarkeable, but the aggregate value-add of Norway is abysmally small compared to America. Are you wearing Norwegian made clothes ? Is your house filled Norwegian made appliances…
You do have a point, though think a comparison to Sweden (only double Norway’s population, but with many worldwide household name businesses) is more fair.