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Sri Lanka is having a textbook currency crisis, triggered by policy mistakes

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Re: Sri Lanka is having a textbook currency crisis, triggered by policy mistakes

#371

Post by midasuni »

dmix wrote: post #136
lkrubner wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current spike in inflation is a world-wide phenomena, effecting every country on Earth, and therefore it seems unlikely to have much to do with the USA's creation of new money. The USA printed trillions of dollars of new money after 2008 and yet inflation remained very low for the next decade. If, now, the USA's printing of money is having some new effect, you have to explain why Argentina, South Africa, India, V…

Is there a single western country which didn’t print massive amounts of money following COVID and prior to that with 2008? I remember seeing tons of economics articles talking about how the consequences of monetary expansion were historically being overrated by economists in the past and that countries have far more capacity than previously thought. But that was easily said during the good times when spending is high…

We’ve seen inflation in different areas for two lears - lumber (both supply side by mills shutting down from covid , and demand side from people doing construction projects due to covid), imports (shipping chaos from covid and the evergiven didn’t help), silicon chips and their knockons into things from cars to network switches due to china’s covid policies, to oil (demand evaporated due to covid, then when demand came back supply didn’t follow), then Russia caused more supply constriction in both oil and grain supplies.

Re: Sri Lanka is having a textbook currency crisis, triggered by policy mistakes

#372

Post by midasuni »

nibbleshifter wrote: post #229
bergenty wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Organic agriculture is where it belong. Mom and pop farms sold in stores where it costs 3x as much for no particular increase in nutritional value. Fertilizers are tangentially bad for the environment but not directly, only in that it causes algal blooms in water bodies. Pesticides are bad yes but the research should concentrate on finding pesticides that work well with the environment. We got close with glyphosate b…

If you use fertilizers and expect a bumper crop every harvest, eventually the soil gets fucked to a point where amendments to make it viable are too expensive, getting to a point where the soil loses integrity and is unusable. To keep land arable in the longer term, you need to do crop/usage rotation, no-till farming, etc. Agriculture is fun.

> To keep land arable in the longer term, you need to do crop/usage rotation

It’s not like we’ve known this for 8,000 years

Re: Sri Lanka is having a textbook currency crisis, triggered by policy mistakes

#373

Post by BaseballPhysics »

kumarvvr wrote: post #15

The drastic move to organic farming is puzzling. Any level headed person , forget a politician , would want to experiment first, see the results, gauge and then expand selectively. That is common sense . I guess when you are a dictator ish government and you rule the country with an iron first, the institutions of the state stop being anything and simply become rubber stamps. This also underlines the importance of se…

> The drastic move to organic farming is puzzling.

That's because it was a desperate response to a currency crisis.

They couldn't pay to import fertilizer, so the government trotted out the absurd idea of using domestically produced fertilizer.

The whole "organic" thing was a red herring to dress up what was a last ditch attempt to compensate for gross mismanagement of the economy.

Unfortunately, a lot of politically motivated folks have bought into this narrative--either deliberately or unwittingly--and are using it to attack sustainability initiatives, not recognizing that they're falling for simple propaganda (see cloutchaser's comment in this thread for a good example of that).

Re: Sri Lanka is having a textbook currency crisis, triggered by policy mistakes

#374

Post by Armisael16 »

anu7df wrote: post #278
freemint wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the result of worldwide efforts to limit the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis. > overheating of the market. Citations needed.

> This is the result of worldwide efforts to limit the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis. This needs citation? > overheating of the market. I did say "My theory"

You gave a theory for why it took a decade. You stated the cause as fact.

Re: Sri Lanka is having a textbook currency crisis, triggered by policy mistakes

#375

Post by mjevans »

oblio wrote: post #303
mjevans wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably countries are on a logical trajectory to consolidate into economic superblocks, if not in literal than in defacto status. Gundam 00 comes to mind as an example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Suit_Gundam_00 , one of the main characters is a former child warrior from the then severely economically depressed post-oil 'middle east' region, while each of the three economic superblocks has it's own space el…

I mean, Gundam 00 is cool and all, but it's from 2007 or so. Nineteen Eighty-Four (from 1949) literally has Oceania, Eurasia, Eastasia :-)

I read that book (when forced to while in school), and I mostly only remember Big Brother and that dystopias suck. Also I would take everything stated about everyplace, inside the fictional regime or not, with a huge grain of salt. I probably did at the time, which is why the specific world state just never stuck with me.

Re: Sri Lanka is having a textbook currency crisis, triggered by policy mistakes

#376

Post by themitigating »

brigandish wrote: post #50
walrus01 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's funny is the deepest red counties in the reddest states are also the largest recipients of US domestic agriculture subsidies and benefit programs. Then you have other things like Walmart and similar McJobs where the government is indirectly subsidizing the companies, by various child food aid, healthcare and benefits to employees because the company doesn't pay enough for its employees to live without aid.

That's why subsidies bad and subsidies good are a false dilemma. "Spending money well" might seem like an obvious solution but it runs up against the problem of corrupt politicians, of which there are many. Hence, we have (worldwide) politicians handing out money to places they are (probably) needed (in your example, the agriculture subsidies) and places they are not (Walmart and similar McJobs), and it's possible th…

The Democrats don't believe in subsidies for everything all the time, nor do they ever campaign on that. Some republicans simply say "stop government handouts" they don't say "Some government handouts are good but we need to control it"

Re: Sri Lanka is having a textbook currency crisis, triggered by policy mistakes

#377

Post by 01100011 »

TMWNN wrote: post #270
01100011 wrote: post #142

Sri Lanka is the first of possibly many countries to fall or suffer serious consequences in the next year or two. Inflation, coupled with a rally in the strength of the US Dollar, is going to push many smaller nations into resource shortages and ultimately towards revolution. Even many of the major world currencies are doing poorly. The Euro is tanking(back to parity with the dollar, for now, but it may go lower). Th…

>Industry in Germany and much of the EU about to grind to a halt. It's been striking how little discussion there is of this in /r/europe and /r/germany. (The latter has pinned a megathread for the topic, the classic way of killing discussion.) /r/de is slightly better, if only because of the absence of the constant "I don't know German but want to move to Germany and get a job" posts. I don't mean to say that there's…

Wow, looks like you got quite a lot of downvotes. I'm guessing it's just an emotional reaction because your post is accurate. The Germans will have to cozy up to the Russians and/or burn one hell of a lot of coal and trees to make it through the winter. They'd be doing better if it wasn't for the major accident which took out the main US LNG export terminal a month ago.

Re: Sri Lanka is having a textbook currency crisis, triggered by policy mistakes

#378

Post by sam_lowry_ »

johng4lt wrote: post #324
sam_lowry_ wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the end if 70-ies and beginning of 80-ies agruculture was booming in USSR. Read your book until the end.

Is that why they were importing grain from the US and Canada?

Booming != effective. Look around SV, how many companies produce genuine value?

Anyway, even agricultural output grew in USSR until mid-80ies and, importantly, salaries were at least double of city workers' salaries.

Re: Sri Lanka is having a textbook currency crisis, triggered by policy mistakes

#379

Post by sam_lowry_ »

pjc50 wrote: post #256
londons_explore wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK has a whole government department to answer your questions: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/united-kingdom-food... Result: The UK grows enough wheat alone to give enough calories to support its population, with plenty to spare. It also produces all the major food groups in quite large quantities. If cut off from the world, the UK people wouldn't starve, but they might have to switch out their caviar f…

That's quite an impressive report and it's good to see someone's taking this seriously, even if they might end up ignored by whoever the agriculture secretary of the day is. > but they might have to switch out their caviar for something else That's frivolous: the report talks about meeting 100% of caloric requirements from grain in an emergency scenario. The mostly-bread diet would be comparable or worse than WW2 rat…

UK was in EU until recently. 40% of EU budget is dedicated to food security under the name of Common Agricultural Policy. In practice, this is an extremely complex pool of regulations and subsidies that work really well to ensure that the EU can feed itself.

Pretty much every investment in agriculture, from buying tractors to the collection and distribution of organic fertilizers is heavily subsiduzed and controlled.

Re: Sri Lanka is having a textbook currency crisis, triggered by policy mistakes

#380

Post by drited »

nisa wrote: post #367
drited wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just a dictatorship problem. Look at the halting of nuclear in Germany - a decision made by Angela Merkel after a bottle of wine with her husband according to The Atlantic. I would argue that the current energy crisis was also partly caused by the ESG drive which while laudable in aspiration got ahead of physical practical implementation capacity.

The amount of shilling for nuclear energy on this site is never ceases to amaze me. It's just more expensive than alternatives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla... and the costs related to storing fuel, decommission old reactors and so on are also huge and paid by the taxpayer.

Are you seriously claiming that saying closing existing nuclear is stupid is 'shilling' for nuclear?

New nuclear is expensive. Existing nuclear is not.

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