301–310 of 393 posts
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> If US prints money, the wealth of all countries holding USD goes down. While the wealth of US increases. True, yet average Americans lose out because their savings get eaten away by inflation
Real interest rates have been positive. Unless you were saving in a mattress, your purchasing power increased.
I've been saying this for the last 5 years. People don't realize how powerful the 'money printer' is. All the money which exists in the system was created out of nothing and injected into the economy through a few specific channels (mostly as credit backed by debt). IMO, everything in modern society is influenced in some way by interest rates; even culture and morality. Money printing can distort the market pricing m…
Yes, am raising cash and looking for US government debt to go 10%+ to lock in some sweet risk-free yield.
Given that putting interest rates up is an artificial intervention into the market for money, what if your worldview is based around allowing financial institutions to extract rent by taxing people for setting up home? Why is setting the price of money artificially - which gives free government money to financial institutions - better than the alternative: setting the base price of labour by guaranteeing people a job…
>setting the base price of labour by guaranteeing people a job?
Minium wages are setting a floor to the cost of labour. "Guaranteeing jobs" is totally meaningless inside a somewhat capitalist system. People work if and only if there is an employer paying them a wage the person deems adequate for the job. If a person wants a compensation nobody is willing to offer they won't get a job. The only thing the government can do is either create fake jobs for the person to do give them welfare, which are the same thingv but the later is far simpler and cheaper.
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Well that makes a lot of sense for fiscal policy, but what about monetary policy? A professor explained it "lower rates make it easier for businesses to get loans, so they can create jobs!" This seems wholly and obviously short-sighted to me. Where does the theory address whether those jobs create anything worthwhile? Inflated valuation of suboptimal or unprofitable business? These are really elementary questions/con…
> A professor explained it "lower rates make it easier for businesses to get loans, so they can create jobs!" [...] Where does the theory address whether those jobs create anything worthwhile? Economics 101 books assume every business is a medium-sized family-owned manufacturing company. If you're a medium-sized family-owned manufacturing company, your growth might be constrained by access to capital - there might be…
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An artificial job does not produce value from which others would benefit. A real job that produces value would not need to have been artificially created!
A contract of employment is a contract for time. Giving up the hours is all that is required. It's the job of capitalists to extract value from that time. If they do they get paid. If they don't they go bust. The number of 'artificial jobs' is entirely in the gift of capitalists. If they don't like them, all they have to do to make them go away is hire the people's time and use it better. If they can't do that in agg…
It's your job to take the most value out of your time, either selling it to someone else (getting employed) or helping a grandma across the street.
Hiring a bag stuffer is less of an artificial position than hiring eleventh construction worker on a project for four.
Artificial job - A job that doesn't produce value for the employer
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> Stock buybacks are therefore not equivalent in any way to paying of dividends. They are extremely similar. The differences are around timeline and tax advantages, none of which you covered. In a buyback, your percent ownership in the company will go up and the price will go up (barring other factors). You can sell some stock to keep your percentage flat and get some cash, making it like a dividend. Or, you can make…
If and only if people previously holding stock sell back to the company. Regardless, you realize no gains if you do not exit your interest on that stock. The exit is non-optional, and often not reenterable from.
This is trivial. They just buy it on the open market. This is public stock, people are always buying and selling.
> Regardless, you realize no gains if you do not exit your interest on that stock.
This is the big advantage of buybacks for shareholders! It is taxed as capital gains, and you can completely defer taxes by not selling. And "exit your interest" makes it sound like you have to sell all of it. You can just sell a small portion to make it like a dividend. You don't seem to be getting this.
> The exit is non-optional, and often not reenterable from.
Nonsense. It is optional. You can choose to keep it as stock or turn it into cash. And you can totally re enter. It's public stock.
Are you mixing up publicly traded stock buybacks with something in private companies?
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I think a lot of HN adjacent engineers are going to have a rude shock over the next few years as there are several pressures working against them. The first is that companies that have been trading debt for growth are not sustainable in a high interest rate environment. The second is that the shift to working from home has meant that employing remote teams, be they in other areas of the states or overseas has become…
I completely agree with this. COVID + everyone refusing to go back to the office means nobody needs to be in a specific place anymore. I've changed my hiring strategy to cultivate talent elsewhere and pay 1/3 of what is paid in the US.
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How did Bernie sell out?
They told him he was a Kremlin asset in 2016 and he believed it. They gave him committee chairmanship as a consolation prize and now he’s one of the biggest hawks for the Dems’ proxy war in Ukraine. Even called out the CPC letter calling for diplomacy alongside military aid.
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What are some the skills or things you know that make you successful in this new environment, if I may ask? I think I might be one of those, but I lack the contextual information/knowledge to act on it.
Well I can't be sure I will be successful in this new environment. Surely there's always luck involved. But I suspect that I will benefit from an environment where capital is spent more carefully. As someone who always bootstraps, it's been tough to compete against large amounts of capital. Too much capital flowing into an industry creates competition which drives up advertising CPC and crushes profit margins in that…