221–230 of 619 posts
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So what do you use that's better? Your personal experiences don't tell us much about the other 320+ million people.
> So what do you use that's better? If the government would stop trying to micromanage the economy, then it wouldn't need to find some aggregate statistic to use, no matter how misleading or counterproductive it was.
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>> The more money the banks print, the richer they get This is wrong. You’ve misunderstood the creation of credit and money. See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105752191... - but then spend time reading the relevant legislation pieces. You can safely ignore most of the mainstream economist schools of thought since the actual operational side of money as required by law is mostly a blind spot for t…
Although a great deal of smoke and mirrors is used when justifying the banks unique right to print money, and it's easy to miss the wood for the trees as you get lost in the details, the bigger picture is quite simple: 1) the banks print new money every time a loan is taken out and charge interest on that money 2) the amount of money loaned out is increasing every year 3) the total amount of money currently loaned is…
The consequences of this are wide ranging, but relevant to this thread, it means a bank does not get richer when creating money, it gets richer when you pay interest in excess of its costs of providing you with money. Although the bank created the loan money from nothing, it still ends up with significant costs to provide that money, for example through capitalisation regulations on the asset.
Another relevant consequence of this is that a bank is not incentivised to have a huge balance sheet - which it would have if it only made loans. Instead these loans made are securitised and removed from the bank’s assets. This means interest paid on the loan no longer goes to the bank but to whoever bought the loan.
Yellen supposedly told Greenspan & co in the mid 90s that 2% was a good way for companies to be able to adjust labor costs down if needed (if you don't give someone a raise when inflation is 2%, you're effectively lowering their salary). It was the only way to have some flexibility there. If you admit that this is a desirable thing, this is defeated by wage negotiations (or say, benefits) than tend to be indexed to i…
This is why I think CPI numbers are all hogwash All the younger people I know in less than stellar jobs are really hurting. These people were never well off but were comfortable before the pandemic. But now they’re making hard decisions for basic necessities and grinding down the quality of their lives.
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This is why I think CPI numbers are all hogwash All the younger people I know in less than stellar jobs are really hurting. These people were never well off but were comfortable before the pandemic. But now they’re making hard decisions for basic necessities and grinding down the quality of their lives.
The lowest income workers have seen the largest wage gains over the course of the pandemic.
The more money the banks print, the richer they get, with the side-effect that prices rise (they make the monetary units less scarce and worth less). 2-3% just happens to be the most they can get away with in the long term without the population getting concerned. What the general population don't realise is that the value of goods and services are going down over time, due to efficiency increases, at a rate of aroun…
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This is key. Due to hedonics/replacements inflation hasn't reflected what people actually feel for a while now.
> Due to hedonics/replacements inflation hasn't reflected what people actually feel for a while now. The hedonics/replacements occur in the data because what is looked is taken from surveys of what people buy: * https://www.bls.gov/respondents/cpi/ I just happened to answer a question on the CPI in Canada in another forum: The CPI you see in the headlines is made of of various components (Shelter, Food, Transportatio…
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This is why I think CPI numbers are all hogwash All the younger people I know in less than stellar jobs are really hurting. These people were never well off but were comfortable before the pandemic. But now they’re making hard decisions for basic necessities and grinding down the quality of their lives.
The lowest income workers have seen the largest wage gains over the course of the pandemic.
Yellen supposedly told Greenspan & co in the mid 90s that 2% was a good way for companies to be able to adjust labor costs down if needed (if you don't give someone a raise when inflation is 2%, you're effectively lowering their salary). It was the only way to have some flexibility there. If you admit that this is a desirable thing, this is defeated by wage negotiations (or say, benefits) than tend to be indexed to i…
Why are inflation truthers so resistant to spending even the tiniest amount of time learning how inflation is computed instead of repeating nonsensical conspiracy theories that match their ideological priors? Replacing porterhouse with hanger steaks in the basket simply means giving the change in price of hanger steaks a higher weight than the change in price of porterhouse steaks in the basket. It does not mean reco…
People's lived experiences in many parts of the country don't match what they're being told. If macro trends go one way but microtrends all over the country go the other way, then the macrotrend analysis is functionally meaningless for millions of people. That's not a conspiracy theory, and hand-waving so many people's lived experiences away because it doesn't match YOUR ideological prior is not taking the discussion seriously and fundamentally and possibly wilfully misunderstanding the issue. Insisting that people everywhere saying life is harder than it was pre-pandemic or 10 years ago or whatever are wrong "because the charts say so" is silly.
Inflation is entirely a monetary phenomenon. It is the result of the government creating money to fund the deficit. There's around a 13 month lag between the creation of the money and the inflation. It's the Law of Supply & Demand in action. More money representing the value of goods & services in the economy means each dollar is worth correspondingly less. The 2% inflation being "good" for the economy is propaganda.…
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> Technology and innovation has made people’s lives better at the same time that politicians and bankers have made them worse. That's the SV fantasy!: I'm awesome and a super-genius, everyone else is useless, dumb and annoying, and therefore I should be all-powerful!. It's like they're all still 13 year olds hacking on their computers, where they finally feel really powerful. It's almost as if they've never learned a…
I can't tell if this is satire, either way I had a good laugh.
> On the other hand, our political institutions did an amazing job of getting the US through a global pandemic without even a recession. There are serious problems, such as housing and education prices, but I don't think anyone could have predicted how well things went economically.
Just wait lol ..