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Inflation is at a 40 year high. What can history teach us?

yarn.pranshum.com

141–150 of 550 posts

Re: Inflation is at a 40 year high. What can history teach us?

#141
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but why now? Why not 14 years ago, or 10 years ago, or 5 years ago? We've been in a zero-interest-rate, QE world for quite a while. Somehow I do not think it is as trivial as your 8th grade econ textbook might suggest.

No one wants to talk about the actual problem, and will blame government printing money. What’s different now from any point in the last 12 years is that we are at full employment. Going over that causes the economy to overheat. As a study partner for an economics course put it (he took more economics than I did): too many hands competing for goods, the prices go up.

> Going over that causes the economy to overheat

The notion of an "overheating" economy always sounded like nonsense to me.

> full employment

Those figures are misleading because a great many people permanently left the work force during the pandemic and are not counted as unemployment.

Re: Inflation is at a 40 year high. What can history teach us?

#142
post #129
post #21

> But if the main driver of inflation is the demand side, or inflation expectations, history indicates that a painful recession could be the only way to curb inflation. That's certainly the expected path forward, at least in the circles I associate with. "When the tide goes out, you find out who's swimming naked" seems a reasonable guess as to what's going to happen. Both at larger bank/investment firm scale and at t…

Where are you at? I ask because I have 2 mortgages and a car loan in the US and 2 are fixed rate for the entire lifetime of the loan and 1 I have 10 years until the ARM starts applying so I'm laughing all the way to the bank. 90% of US mortgages are fixed for the entire loan.

I'm in the US. I certainly could do something like that. I just won't.

I hope it works for you. That's a level of debt-based risk that neither myself nor my wife have any interest in. There have been a lot of people throughout history who thought similar arrangements were "sure things," and they were, up until they weren't and it all came down around their ankles.

We live in a very modest (manufactured, gasp!) home for our income, our "new" car is a decade old, with other vehicles ranging far older (the tractor is about 80), but still maintained in perfectly good condition and they all do exactly what we ask of them. Mostly. One of the Urals got demanding lately.

It's low stress and high slack/flexibility. Those seem useful to us.

Re: Inflation is at a 40 year high. What can history teach us?

#143

History teaches us that inflation will continue as long as the government keeps printing fiat money with no backing. For a historical example, the Confederacy had high inflation. The printing press was in Richmond. When Richmond was threatened with a siege, the Confederacy hustled the printing press out to get it to a new, safer location. Confederate inflation paused during the move. The reason is pretty simple - the…

No - this is completely false. As an economy expands, it needs more currency to facilitate growth. A 'very hard currency' would strangle an economy with ugly deflationary issues. Moreover - with a 'hard currency' the system will fail and collapse when it faces an existential shock such as an internal failure (bank collapse), war, pandemic. The objective is to provide 'the right' amount of liquidity for the economy as…

> A 'very hard currency' would strangle an economy with ugly deflationary issues.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33087419

Re: Inflation is at a 40 year high. What can history teach us?

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s also a tipping point where inflation is self propelled because everyone is used to it so they just proactively raise prices on a regular basis. I experienced this growing up in Brazil in the 80s and 90s. It’s hard for Americans to relate, but essentially the mentality is spend/invest every penny you get before it loses value. Took some creative policy to break the cycle: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plano_…

> There’s also a tipping point where inflation is self propelled because everyone is used to it so they just proactively raise prices on a regular basis. This is called cost-push inflation. Unfortunately, that theory doesn't explain where the extra dollars come from.

AFAIU from reading about the Plano Real and some other cases, the extra dollars come from the central bank being stuck between a rock and a hard place. If they don't print the extra money, then inflation accelerates--a scarcer dollar increases in real value, but non-intuitively this doesn't produce deflation unless you're prepared to hold your ground while the economy and society incinerates in the chaos.

EDIT: I think this is one of the primary phenomenons creating the dilemma for the central bank and government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_inflation But IIRC from the Brazil case, informal expectations and pricing strategies in the supply chain (from factory to corner store) were at least as important as contracts.

Re: Inflation is at a 40 year high. What can history teach us?

#145
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more currency flooding the economy, the less wealthy the rich people are. Inflation occurs because the owners need to remain wealthy, hence prices go up everywhere. If it were possible for the top few to do with a little less, prices wouldn't have to skyrocket.

> Inflation occurs because the owners need to remain wealthy, hence prices go up everywhere. The fun thing about HN is I hear all sorts of unique economic theories not found in any econ book. P.S. If the wealthy (or everyone else) needs more money, and just raising prices will work, why don't they do that anyway? The answer is Supply & Demand, it's the Law, and is in every econ textbook.

> why don't they do that anyway?

Ever heard of a company called Apple?

They raise prices all the time because they can.

Same with AT&T, or banks ATM Fees, or gas prices.

Right now gas prices are at an all time high, and so are gas profits.

> The answer is Supply & Demand, it's the Law, and is in every econ textbook.

Also, that's Econ 101. Which isn't quite reality, it's idealized for simplicity because it is an introduction to macroeconomics. But I don't want to digress into Austrian vs. Modern theory because neither of us will do justice to that.

Re: Inflation is at a 40 year high. What can history teach us?

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not very versed in economics, but can you explain "No inflation is bad because the economy stops."?

There are some other comments that probably described it better, but as an example: let's say inflation is negative. That means it is good to keep cash. What happens is everyone starts hoarding cash under their mattresses and there is no liquidity around to help exchange goods, and everything slows down. With a small inflation, there is no incentive to hoard cash, and there is enough liquidity to make sure goods get…

> ... and everything slows down.

Agree.

And ... this is exactly what the ecosphere needs right now.

People continuing to consume all the usual necessities as they always have and always will. And consuming less of all the extra wasteful unnecessary stuff that gets pumped out of factories because of a destructive culture of "increasing GDP is good".

Re: Inflation is at a 40 year high. What can history teach us?

#147
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some other comments that probably described it better, but as an example: let's say inflation is negative. That means it is good to keep cash. What happens is everyone starts hoarding cash under their mattresses and there is no liquidity around to help exchange goods, and everything slows down. With a small inflation, there is no incentive to hoard cash, and there is enough liquidity to make sure goods get…

But, the economy doesn't stop when there is no inflation or deflation. Well, I suppose that depends on your meaning of the word economy.

Certainly I was wrong if you take those words literally. You got me. At the end of the day hopefully you got positive insight out of it. :-)

Re: Inflation is at a 40 year high. What can history teach us?

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> History teaches us that inflation will continue as long as the government keeps printing fiat money. Of course, that is almost a tautology. The devil is in the details. No inflation is bad because the economy stops. High inflation is bad because of erosion of purchasing power and negative impact on nearly every participant in the economy. So what do you do to get that sweet spot of about 1-2% inflation? I'd say rai…

> Of course, that is almost a tautology Inflation lags the money printing, so it isn't a tautology. > So what do you do to get that sweet spot of about 1-2% inflation? I'm amazed that propaganda of a sweet spot gets so heavily embedded into the popular wisdom. If there is a sweet spot for inflation, it's 0%. Note that the US had net 0% inflation from 1800-1914, while growing from subsistence farming to superpower.

I don’t know, the concept just makes sense to me intuitively. There are enough weird effects in systems and math when things are at zero that I just can’t tell what would happen. Example, in queueing theory when input rate is equal to output rate under reasonable randomness you get large backlogs. When everything drains at just a few percent over zero it just seems like a better system.

The US also had a civil war during that period. And then repeated brutal boom and bust cycles until Breton Woods.

Re: Inflation is at a 40 year high. What can history teach us?

#149
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some other comments that probably described it better, but as an example: let's say inflation is negative. That means it is good to keep cash. What happens is everyone starts hoarding cash under their mattresses and there is no liquidity around to help exchange goods, and everything slows down. With a small inflation, there is no incentive to hoard cash, and there is enough liquidity to make sure goods get…

> ... and everything slows down. Agree. And ... this is exactly what the ecosphere needs right now. People continuing to consume all the usual necessities as they always have and always will. And consuming less of all the extra wasteful unnecessary stuff that gets pumped out of factories because of a destructive culture of "increasing GDP is good".

Yes this is a great point. I wonder if to achieve that, a back pressure is required in the system that we are just not willing to put up with. Example, cruel warlords keeping the serfs in misery, or hunter gatherer tribes annihilating each other. Or more modern, some central authority allocating resources.

Re: Inflation is at a 40 year high. What can history teach us?

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the 'simple straight forward explanation' doesn't make much sense. As economies grow and expand, they need more money supply to keep prices stable. If you're using 100 tons of Gold as your 'fixed money supply' then you run into deflationary problems. Also, if there is a crisis in which people get really anti-liquid and tend to hoard and do other bad things, and/or the system needs to allocate resources somewh…

Some good questions. The answer isn't simple, but I'll try. It comes down to how banks work with fractional reserve banking. (To keep this post short, I'll refer you to google if you don't know what it is.) Banks loan out a multiple of their deposits. In other words, banks create money when they make loans. Amazing, isn't it? But, banks don't loan money unless there is collateral . The next part is tricky to understa…

I think you are misunderstanding fractional lending and collateral.

Fractional lending seems a bit odd, but it's not like there is 'no collateral' - rather, there ends up being 'partial collateral'.

As it turns out, that 'partial collateral' is enough - it's actually reasonable thing to do, because the vast majority of loans are repaid, it's not necessary to fully collateralize everything on the whole.

Banks have to have some capital requirements, which means, if they 'screw up' too badly, then they go bankrupt! So they are acting in a capitalist manner and have to be careful about how they lend, and at what rates. If random bank acts irresponsibly, then random bank will go kaput by regular market forces.

Instead of thinking of fractional lending as 'missing money' think of it more like leverage.

Basically - the effect of fractional lending is that it's a 'multiplier' to whatever the Central Bank decides to do.

So it exacerbates effects in one direction or the other but on the whole, it doesn't change the real nature of the system.

The way we manage money is sound.

We need money to expand and contract, and we have good ways to measure that.

The 'danger' of fiat of course is political intervention, or a failure of controls.

We had a broad intervention in 2008 that favoured home owners over others, and there are attempts to use the Central Bank to do 'Social Justice' type things, which I think is very risky.

It's a bit like Nuclear Energy: it's very potent, you just have to watch it responsibly.

Finally - currency should be a 'current' asset, not a store of value. We just want it as a medium of exchange. So as long as it's not shifting too much one way or another, then it should work.

For 'stores of value' there are other things, like real estate etc..

"Inflation happens when the government prints money that has no collateral, and has no correspondence to added value in the economy and so it dilutes the value of the money that is already in circulation. "

This is misleading.

The 'government' does not print money, the Central Bank does. And as you indicate, the bank ultimately creates credit via fractional lending.

'Inflation' happens when the cost of goods rise faster than the money in circulation.

Thus 'inflation' can happen because 'stuff is more costly to make'. Like gas in Europe, is more expensive, not because 'money printing' but 'Russia'.

Also, inflation can feasibly happen without money printing or even a rise in inherent cost of goods, if the economy shifts in a way that ends up in excess cash.

But ultimately, if during normal course of 'growth' if there is no expansion in the monetary base, then you'll have deflation, which has bad externalizes.

So the goal then is to adjust interest rates / print or extract money from the economy so that prices stay roughly flat, with just a tiny bit of inflation. That is a dynamic process, not a static process.

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