Live data from Hacker News

Statement from Jerome Powell

federalreserve.gov

261–270 of 871 posts

Re: Statement from Jerome Powell

#262
post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there some well of non-rabid Trump supporters that I'm not aware of? I'm always open to the idea that I'm in a bubble, but my experience is that even the least rabid Trump supporters are completely unwilling to criticize him or oppose something he wants. Did any Trump supporters, for example, criticize the prosecution of James Comey?

>Is there some well of non-rabid Trump supporters that I'm not aware of? I'm always open to the idea that I'm in a bubble, but my experience is that even the least rabid Trump supporters are completely unwilling to criticize him or oppose something he wants. In the context of the previous comment, the "non-rabbid" (and probably median) supporter would be someone voting Trump because they think they trust him more on…

Right! With a non-fascist politician, what you're describing would be extremely abnormal; the median Biden supporter, Obama supporter, or Bush supporter would routinely take positions their guy didn't agree with even though they supported him overall. But the range of Trump supporter opinions stretches only from "politely support everything he wants to do" to "be performatively mean about everything he wants to do".

Re: Statement from Jerome Powell

#264

[flagged]

You should read up on some market history, if you’re making ridiculous claims like this. > The interest rate can be set via an algorithm. Who writes this algorithm? Are algorithms without biases?

Do you know anything about how data science works? The algorithm is to be tuned over historical data to optimize for an unchanging reward function. The problem isn't that complicated if you think about it.

Re: Statement from Jerome Powell

#265
I’m a little shocked to see the quality of some comments here - I would expect a more grounded discussion. This is like Reddit / YouTube comment history. Someone please tell me this is a Wendy’s.

Sure the Fed isn’t perfect. But we don’t really have a better solution as of now because our financial systems are extremely powerful and anyone in office would love to abuse it if they can.

Sure, the renovations are ridiculous. But it’s not like this administration is austere in the slightest, so that’s a bit rich. Not to mention the cronyism prevalent across the cabinet.

Re: Statement from Jerome Powell

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I implore you to stop being credulous before it's too late. Trump supporters deeply believe, and are not shy about saying, that anyone who stops Trump from achieving his political goals should be imprisoned or murdered.

Holy shit. If you believe even a small minority actually want that, please unplug and talk to real people in meat space.

Look what's happening to real people in meat space in Minnesota right now

Re: Statement from Jerome Powell

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In his first term, he probably didn't yet understand how much power the office truly holds and how to wield it and just how far you can go with that. Because the main restriction on all of that power has always been convention rather than any actually robust guard rails. But no one, not even someone like Nixon, has ever dared to truly test that out.

He knew how much power he had back then. The difference was that the government bureaucracy worked hard to counter his agenda throughout his term. It’s why The Heritage Foundation came up with Project 2025: an organizated and cohesive plan to dismantle the bureaucracy and consolidate power. And it is working.

The first term laid a lot of the groundwork for this term as well - had he not appointed three SC Justices, things would look very different. This court has said basically that all executive actions including pretextual investigations via the DOJ are legal and that there is no such thing as agency independence, even when written into the laws that created the agencies.

Re: Statement from Jerome Powell

#268

I dislike the existence of the Fed, but I dislike the idea of the executive branch being in control of monetary policy even more. I'll be tuning in to see how the case progresses.

Do you have an alternative to the Fed? Likes and dislikes has nothing to do with it. Or let me ask you another way — why do you dislike the Fed?

I believe the fed replaced the gold standard.

Re: Statement from Jerome Powell

#269

this is a big deal, markets gonna tank tomorrow morning... and then realize AI is still a thing and recover

AI is a bubble; well, the stock market as a whole is, being led by an AI boom. At the end of a bubble (and it's not clear if we're there yet) markets find ways to self-finance. A crash means not just that the value is lower, but that the leveraged bets are now due, and those have to be paid by selling more.

When it crashes (and it's not clear when that will be), it will crash back to a cash-value baseline. And, sigh, it's not clear where that is. But it won't magically start going back up. The cyclic reinvestment engine needs to be reinvented every time.

Re: Statement from Jerome Powell

#270

I’m aghast but numb to this now. The biggest question for me now is how the usual defenders of this lawless administration will try to defend this or both sides it.

The defense is that the status quo has become archaic and self-serving instead of serving the public so the current operations people doing some house cleaning and tossing a few rooms to see what’s going on in there is overdue, changes need to happen and power structures need to be shaken out a bit to make sure they are not getting in the way of the people they were created to act on behalf of, and scatter the ones who are “helping themselves” to the public coffers.

This just needs to happen every across all government, it’s like brushing your teeth to kick out the bacteria, but each individual institution needs a different kind of “floss” depending on the nature of the ways they have strayed from their original purposes.

Post reply on HN