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Alan Greenspan has died

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#71

Post by 9x39 »

byronic wrote: post #50
conductr wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a stimulus check that went out around that time. I felt it insane that I was receiving a check when nobody in my life was negatively impacted, the economy didn’t seem hurt (no more then when you’re up then down at a blackjack table), it was just a rebalancing of people’s portfolios values. Turns out that started the wave of completely untargeted stimulus/aide that would come at every economic faltering. I w…

TLDR - Why make it harder for people to get help on the basis that some people might get help who don't deserve it? means testing kills the usefulness of these kinds of stimuli. I completely disagree with your point here and the people buying Gucci/LV are a drop in the bucket compared to, say, Wal-Mart's yearly wage theft statistics. There is no simple means of identifying who is in need and if people get the help wh…

Because you can overheat the economy and cause more damage than good.

We "printed" a lot of money to stop the economy from seizing - the opposite problem - but kept going past what everyone was calling a "soft landing":

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL

Inflation hit pretty bad as a result:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FPCPITOTLZGUSA

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#73

Post by tennfown »

jandrese wrote: post #27
fouc wrote: post #7

Mostly I just know Alan Greenspan for being a disciple of Ayn Rand back in the 1950s/60s. Though the Objectivists didn't like his work at the federal reserve. In 2008 he admits to being shocked that banks weren't rationally selfish.

The libertarian community really thought they had their fox in the hen house when he was put in charge of regulation, and he did a fair bit of deregulation, but not nearly to the extent that they wanted. In the end it was enough to trigger a major financial crisis, but not enough to completely collapse the world economy and return to the feudalism they wanted.

> but not enough to completely collapse the world economy and return to the feudalism they wanted.

Don’t worry, wealthy drug addict pedophiles in Silicon Valley are carrying that torch now.

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#74

Post by magicalist »

enragedcacti wrote: post #43
brightball wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

39 trillion in debt with no Congressional stomach for... - spending cuts - stopping fraud - figuring out how the net worth of people in Congress increases from hundreds of thousands of dollars to 10s or 100s of millions of dollars - addressing wasteful and ineffective programs Given those issues, the only solution will be inflation. The circling the drain moment will hit with the associated welfare programs get a dir…

> - stopping fraud / - addressing wasteful and ineffective programs Good to know that this will be an evergreen argument despite an extremely well-supported project to do just that taking place in the last two years with nothing to show for itself other than hundreds of thousands of deaths.

>> stopping fraud / - addressing wasteful and ineffective programs

> Good to know that this will be an evergreen argument despite an extremely well-supported project to do just that taking place in the last two years with nothing to show for itself other than hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Not to mention the most prominent example of this this year sidestepped the Congressional stomach completely. An order of magnitude larger budget than all of the NSF grants combined spent on the war with Iran over 100 days.

Both wasteful and ineffective: it failed to achieve any of its goals and had a massive negative impact on the US economy that will continue for some time.

Does it count as fraud, though, or just gross negligence when experts had already warned that this would be the exact outcome ahead of time but were ignored?

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#75

Post by chadgpt3 »

greenavocado wrote: post #55
throw0101d wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He wrote about how the gold standard created responsible spending and more equality in the world: The Gilded Age, which had quite high levels of inequality, occurred when the gold standard was active: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age It should also be noted that the gold standard did not bring any kind of price stability: * https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/business/arch... Further, sticking…

The Great Depression was caused by France panic hoarding gold https://www.nber.org/papers/w16350 Semi-ironically France was the reason the US fell off the dollar standard after it panic hoarded gold AGAIN when the French government made one last, massive purchase of gold from the US using US dollars, paying $35/oz. A French warship arrived in New York in early August 1971 to load the gold and bring it back to France.…

This still happens today but with instruments other than gold, right? Like foreign owned shares. Today's equivalent would be China owning all the treasury bonds.

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#76

Post by chadgpt3 »

conductr wrote: post #66
byronic wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TLDR - Why make it harder for people to get help on the basis that some people might get help who don't deserve it? means testing kills the usefulness of these kinds of stimuli. I completely disagree with your point here and the people buying Gucci/LV are a drop in the bucket compared to, say, Wal-Mart's yearly wage theft statistics. There is no simple means of identifying who is in need and if people get the help wh…

There’s no need to make it difficult. All you have to do is publish sensible guardrails and force people to apply for assistance and it would shrink the public cost substantially. I have homeowners insurance, but if my home burns down today I won’t have any reasonable assistance deposited this week. There’s a claim process and I need to have an emergency fund to get my immediate needs met. Everyone should care. The n…

Imagine you're a middle class white picket fence guy, and your bank balance is a bit low. You apply for assistance.

Now imagine you're homeless. You don't apply for assistance.

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#77

Post by chadgpt3 »

bko wrote: post #39
bhouston wrote: post #5

I'm not a gold bug but Alan was a proponent of the gold standard. He wrote about how the gold standard created responsible spending and more equality in the world: https://ritholtz.com/2008/11/gold-and-economic-freedom-by-al... The world we are in now, especially in the US, is one where there is near unlimited government credit but it is, according to many, papering over deep structural problems. At some point, these…

I have come around to gold. Money shouldn't be dual purposes, we should apply single responsibility principal. Money should refer to some stable (albeit slightly growing by nature) account of measure. Prices should get cheaper. That's a progress dividend. We get better at growing food every year, why shouldn't food get cheaper? Imagine a world in which prices regularly go down. You're a passive beneficiary of technol…

I suggest a bread standard. It's more useful than gold, and it worked in Brazil.

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#78

Post by chadgpt3 »

kzrdude wrote: post #45

Greenspan was also the subject in the weird comics "h4x0r economist"/"haxor economist", which thankfully still live on since its early internet days https://www.rdwarf.com/users/kioh/ (NSFW language)

I don't get this comic at all but I really miss when random stuff like this got published online!

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#79

Post by wwweston »

bko wrote: post #39
bhouston wrote: post #5

I'm not a gold bug but Alan was a proponent of the gold standard. He wrote about how the gold standard created responsible spending and more equality in the world: https://ritholtz.com/2008/11/gold-and-economic-freedom-by-al... The world we are in now, especially in the US, is one where there is near unlimited government credit but it is, according to many, papering over deep structural problems. At some point, these…

I have come around to gold. Money shouldn't be dual purposes, we should apply single responsibility principal. Money should refer to some stable (albeit slightly growing by nature) account of measure. Prices should get cheaper. That's a progress dividend. We get better at growing food every year, why shouldn't food get cheaper? Imagine a world in which prices regularly go down. You're a passive beneficiary of technol…

Tech product price dynamics benefit from a bunch of things that food doesn’t: they’re optional purchases, they’re early stage developments which have more low hanging fruit, and purchase price can be subsidized with later plays (subscriptions, data sales, network effects, freemium to enterprise pipeline).

Also - I think if you look at the data you’ll find periods off the gold standard where food prices grew more slowly than inflation and even wages, ie food becomes cheaper. 80s and 90s for example.

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#80

Post by dh2022 »

chadgpt3 wrote: post #75
greenavocado wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Great Depression was caused by France panic hoarding gold https://www.nber.org/papers/w16350 Semi-ironically France was the reason the US fell off the dollar standard after it panic hoarded gold AGAIN when the French government made one last, massive purchase of gold from the US using US dollars, paying $35/oz. A French warship arrived in New York in early August 1971 to load the gold and bring it back to France.…

This still happens today but with instruments other than gold, right? Like foreign owned shares. Today's equivalent would be China owning all the treasury bonds.

China owns about 7% of us treasury securities and they stopped buying them I think around 2015L: https://ticdata.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-cent...
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