191–200 of 246 posts
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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.
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Utter nonsense, and I say this as nicely as I can. Check the price of Russian gas before and after the invasion, and the resulting price of electricity: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... Combine with the fact that Russia and Ukraine are some of the biggest exporters of many critical raw materials, like importantly, foodstuffs (wheat, sunflower oil, etc), and steel, aluminium, oil, gas. H…
Bruh, 80% of all USD in existence was issued during the pandemic alone. How the hell can you tell me with a straight face that that didn't cause the inflation? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL
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>Bad faith argument again Stop saying this whenever somebody disagrees with you. That's not what that term means at all.
I'm not saying this because they're disagreeing with me. Inflation is probably one of the most talked about topics of the past few years, I find it impossible that people haven't heard about the multi-layered complexity of it, and thus anyone blaming it purely on "money printing" has to be acting in bad faith.
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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-o…
That said, I'd be curious to know why you seem to implicitly accept the Russian regime's currently stated (or reasonably inferable) terms as the only "workable" terms.
Is it because you think it has that much of an upper hand in the situation (to get its way no matter what the West does in the coming months) -- or because the Trump administration will likely simply cave in to pretty much whatever it asks for?
Given the latter's proudly and loudly stated "We don't give a fuck about Ukraine" stance, and all.
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And they conquered Crimea in 2014--partially, if I remember right, to get a port that doesn't freeze over in the winter, something they have wanted for literally hundreds of years.
They already had https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_of_Novorossiysk for that.
(Russia got into more trouble than it was worth it, even by their own standards, I'd say. And that's not even getting into the moral dimensions.)
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And they conquered Crimea in 2014--partially, if I remember right, to get a port that doesn't freeze over in the winter, something they have wanted for literally hundreds of years.
To be more precise, they already had the port, but were afraid to lose it to the new government of Ukraine. This is also a big reason why Crimea, by and large, supported annexation - it has very large proportions of the population that are either active or retired Soviet/Russian navy.
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Turkey dropped six zeroes off their currency in the 2000s. Technically, you could describe that as cutting 999,9999/1,000,000 of their money supply. (Especially if they had done a funny dance like the Finnish, where you would use some scissors to only keep the tiny top left corner of your old notes, and can exchange that for new ones.) In practice, people saw the Turkish currency reform as merely a cosmetic change, n…
>In practice, people saw the Turkish currency reform as merely a cosmetic change, not an actually reduction in the money supply. Because it is just cosmetic. Governments chronically think they can directly legislate more value into existence. They fail to understand that currency is just an intermediary for trading labor.
The extra zeros were just a bit of an embarrassing hangover from wilder times in the past.
Alas, the quality of Turkey's monetary policy has since dropped again.
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Was he really that wrong? Isn't a bond just another debt instrument? It's not obvious to me, that there is any fundamental difference between the operations that both comments describe.
While the effects may be similar, they are fundamentally different mechanisms. Also, this statement is incorrect: > Simplified: the central bank decide on an interest rate that they want to see. By itself that decision doesn't do anything. The Fed does in fact set interest rates and that decision directly impacts rates all down the line to mortgages and local loans. Intervening in the bond market is another tool that…
> 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…
That's just one mechanism, but not the primary way in which the Fed controls interest rates. The Fed is a large provider of short-term loans ("fed funds") to cover interbank exchanges. It also is the lender of last resort and lends to banks directly ("discount rate"). By changing these rates, the FED can influence the rates the banks charge each other for loans, and down the line to consumers.
Yes.
> The Fed is a large provider of short-term loans ("fed funds") to cover interbank exchanges. > It also is the lender of last resort and lends to banks directly ("discount rate"). > By changing these rates, the FED can influence the rates the banks charge each other for loans, and down the line to consumers.
And for those rates to take effect, the Fed still has to actually make (or receive) those loans at the announced rates. They don't just magically announce a rate, and then everyone charges that spontaneously.
So it's still about moving money in and out of circulation.
(Or at least the Fed needs to be ready to make and receive those loans, and anticipation does a lot of heavy lifting..)
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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...
The Fed still does purchases and sales, but not for the purpose of driving the overnight interest rates towards its target. The level of the overnight rate is not affected of any purchases or sales that the Fed does.