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Setelinleikkaus: When Finns snipped their cash in half to curb inflation

jpkoning.blogspot.com

171–180 of 246 posts

Re: Setelinleikkaus: When Finns snipped their cash in half to curb inflation

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was no "workable peace deal".

What makes you so confident in the absence of something? In particular given that there is a massive amount of reporting that conflicts with your single sentence assertion?

I'm Russian, and I've been following the mess in Ukraine very closely since 2014.

The key word in my single sentence is "workable". All Russian peace deals so far essentially amount to 1) they get all the territory they claim, and 2) they pinky promise to not invade Ukraine again, but 3) Ukraine is forbidden from taking actions - such as joining NATO - that would actually guarantee that such an invasion wouldn't re-occur.

Knowing Russian politics and discourse inside the country around imperial ambitions in general and Ukraine in particular, I'm firmly convinced that any peace deal that would be signed on these terms will last only as long as it'll take for Russia to build up enough to resume hostilities with a much stronger upper hand. Most Ukrainians seem to be of the same opinion.

Re: Setelinleikkaus: When Finns snipped their cash in half to curb inflation

#173
post #25

> It's not just the size of Operation Gutt that is striking to the modern eye. It's also the oddity of the tool being used. Today, we control inflation with changes in interest rates, not changes in the quantity of money. To soften the effect of the global COVID monetary overhang, for instance, central banks in the U.S., Canada, and Europe began to raise rates in 2022 from around 0% to 4-5% in 2024. It's a bit more i…

"What happens next is that they buy and sell government bonds in the open market." This describes how central banks operated in the U.S. before 2008 and in Canada before the 1990s. The Federal Reserve and the Bank of Canada both set a target for the overnight interest rate, and then they hit that target by doing open market purchases (or sales) of bonds, effectively adding funds to (or draining funds away from) the o…

You make it sounds like they aren't doing regular open market operations, but as I understand it... they still do?

https://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/domestic-market-operation...

Re: Setelinleikkaus: When Finns snipped their cash in half to curb inflation

#174
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct. Striking how many HN commentors are so often confident and yet wrong...

You are wrong. Striking how many HN commentators are so often confident and yet wrong in their assumption that everything is about the US.

> Central banks work this way

>> Here's a biggish counter-example, setting fiscal policy for 25% of the world's economic output

>>> Right! How could the other poster have possibly missed that?

>>>> There are other central banks. Ignorant Americans...

Re: Setelinleikkaus: When Finns snipped their cash in half to curb inflation

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody has sabotaged European energy security more than European governments. The divestment from nuclear and reliance on LNG was an obvious disaster in the making. Taiwan has made a similar blunder and will pay the price at the next whiff of geopolitical instability.

You've just read how Russia literally sabotaged European energy security and you compared this to... some European countries taking a suboptimal decision? And Europe is not a single country. My country still happily digs out and burns tons of coal (annoying our neighbors in the process). I hope you're proud of us.

It's not suboptimal, it's a geopolitical disaster that people in 50 years will look back on and ask "how did this happen?"

Re: Setelinleikkaus: When Finns snipped their cash in half to curb inflation

#176
Interesting read but the theory about cash going away in 10 years

> Cash, which is awkward to immobilize for policy reasons, will be gone in a decade or two

Is a risky one. The are many culture where cash is the way to pay, you use credit card for internet but everything else is cash. I'm thinking of North Africa, which we have many of these people in Europe. There are also the old people, of course they will be gone in 10 to 20 years but then then I'm not sure it would be ok with the general population. Removing cash would have to bring advantage to be accepted.

Re: Setelinleikkaus: When Finns snipped their cash in half to curb inflation

#177

Interesting read but the theory about cash going away in 10 years > Cash, which is awkward to immobilize for policy reasons, will be gone in a decade or two Is a risky one. The are many culture where cash is the way to pay, you use credit card for internet but everything else is cash. I'm thinking of North Africa, which we have many of these people in Europe. There are also the old people, of course they will be gone…

Yet, in Sweden, I have legitimately forgotten how money looks.

I haven't handled cash in about 7 years (I’m not even embellishing).

Re: Setelinleikkaus: When Finns snipped their cash in half to curb inflation

#178
Indonesia's government also implemented this exact policy in 1950. The policy was called "Gunting Sjafruddin" or "Sjafruddin Cut" after the minister Sjafruddin Prawiranegara. Not sure about the impact though.

This article wrote about it: https://yohanesnuwara.medium.com/most-thought-provoking-mone...

Re: Setelinleikkaus: When Finns snipped their cash in half to curb inflation

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bunker full of gold bars. Or foreign currency. Or silver.

The problem with all these is that money is kinda worthless if you're unable to spend it, and regimes that are likely to enact such monetary policies will often regulate the use of gold etc as well. A bunker full of gold bars does you no good if actually trying to spend any of it is a crime in and of itself.

It's not a fantasy scenario that we need to speculate about. Currencies collapse all the time, just pick any country and it has happened to them within the past 200 or even 100 years. There's millions of people alive right now who avoided having their life savings destroyed by having foreign currency or bullion or both.

Re: Setelinleikkaus: When Finns snipped their cash in half to curb inflation

#180

A recent similar example was the Indian move in 2016 to demonetize the ₹500 and ₹1,000 notes with very little notice, which is in retrospect widely viewed to have been a disaster. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Indian_banknote_demonetis...

IIRC the reasoning was that only criminals have large amounts of valuable notes and by demonetising them they'd hit the criminals where it hurts. But it turns out that tons of people in rural India had their life savings under mattresses in large denomination bills...

It essentially forced people into getting a bank account.
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