Live data from Hacker News

Alan Greenspan has died

washingtonpost.com

171–180 of 274 posts

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Raising taxes” is a misnomer - “restoring taxes to the level they were when we were deciding how to allocate tax revenue” is more accurate. There’s plenty of other causes of the deficit, but “Congress deciding not to take money from wealthy people and corporations to fund the services they’d promised to the rest of us” is the core. We don’t have a budget deficit, we have a tax revenue deficit.

We have nearly doubled the federal budget over 10 years. It is a spending problem and a spending problem alone. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48633650

This presumes that federal spending is a bad thing.

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#172
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there evidence for this? A simple and logical pattern. 1) Unconstrained spending without commensurate taxation leads to a required inflation of the money supply 2) An inflation of the money supply with increase the price of assets relative to the value of the currency. 3) Asset owners thus become "more valuable" by measure of currency. 4) Renters / non-asset-owners have to eat the costs of inflation while benefi…

I would think it would be the opposite, as the old joke-y "Golden Rule" goes: He who has the gold makes the rules. > 3) Asset owners thus become "more valuable" by measure of currency. Under the Gold Standard the currency itself is also an asset, much more so than under (so-called) fiat. In a supply-demand situation where supply is finite, and demand is potentially limitless, then the suppliers can charge higher pric…

>If wages increase with inflation... Big "if", unfortunately.

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#173
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The separation of wealth during the Gilded age was caused by the same thing it is caused by today: rapid industrialization. This rapid industrialization began when the US was off the gold standard during the civil war. The 1920's gilded age was fueled by fiat money, the greenback. The great depression was triggered in part by imbalanced gold flows when we returned to gold back currencies. https://explaininghistory.or…

> The 1920's gilded age was fueled by fiat money, the greenback. So-called fiat money didn't become a thing until after FDR became president, which was after 1932.

> Greenbacks … a form of fiat money

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenback_(1860s_money)

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#174

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.…

> The Great Depression was caused by France panic hoarding gold https://www.nber.org/papers/w16350

France was not panic hoarding anything. It was converting its UK pound-sterling holdings to gold so that it could be more independent of other countries by having its own currency better backed without an 'intermediary' conversion through London.

There was no "panic" involved, just simple fairness: if the UK and US could have physical gold in their vaults, why couldn't France?

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am aware of today's inequality (e.g., I read Piketty back when he was making a splash). But the critique is that Greenspan argued gold standard = less inequality and that fails on the historical record. If we want to talk about the causes of the 'New Gilded Age' that's something else. As a general starting point I'd begin with: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan…

Gold Standard is probably a force that acts against inequality but the forces pushing inequality today are just much stronger. Technology that creates winner take all markets and incredible leverage with few people being one.

Historically, I'm not aware of a single major case of the Gold Standard helping with inequality.

In all cases where inequality went down, it was helped by inflationary spending.

Yet Gold Standard (and its intellectual descendants) directly led to several examples of stagnation. The most recent one was in Europe, it lost a decade of growth after 2008 by insisting on austerity.

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#176
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…

> 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…

There is an idea floating around that trade imbalances create global inequality (Trade Wars are Class Wars by Klein & Pettis) and the original sin was adopting the dollar as the reserve currency instead of something like Bancor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancor)

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold Standard is probably a force that acts against inequality but the forces pushing inequality today are just much stronger. Technology that creates winner take all markets and incredible leverage with few people being one.

> Gold Standard is probably a force that acts against inequality […] Is there evidence for this? During the Gold Standard era there were many periods of deflation, which is bad for people with debt: back in the day this was often farmers, nowadays it'd be anyone with student loans or a mortgage.

Two points I'd hit on:

1) Deflation causes debt to become more expensive. Inflation causes your money to become worth less. There's a simple solution to debt becoming more expensive, but no practical solution to you getting a pay-cut every year, especially when a sizable chunk of people don't even realize they're getting a pay-cut and don't want to be unthankful for a "raise." That issue alone already causally explains much of the rise in inequality. Cut people's wages in a stable or deflationary system and there will be hell to pay. Cut them in an inflationary system and they say thank you.

2) Changes in the past are exaggerated. The Fed did a study some time back estimating CPI levels since 1800. [1] They found that from 1800 to 1950 the CPI never shifted more than 25 points from the starting base of 51, so it always stayed within +/- ~50% of that baseline. That's through the Civil War, both World Wars, Spanish Flu, and much more.

It's even more interesting to contrast this from 1971 onward. 1971 is when Bretton Woods ended and the government was given a free hand to start 'printing money' so to speak, and inflation became the new policy. Since then the CPI has increased by more than 800 points, 1600% more than our baseline. So if the 'Gilded Age' saw deflation of ~30% over some decades, what will historians in the future call an era of thousands of percents of inflation over some decades?

[1] - https://www.minneapolisfed.org/about-us/monetary-policy/infl...

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#178
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gold Standard is probably a force that acts against inequality […] Is there evidence for this? During the Gold Standard era there were many periods of deflation, which is bad for people with debt: back in the day this was often farmers, nowadays it'd be anyone with student loans or a mortgage.

> Is there evidence for this? A simple and logical pattern. 1) Unconstrained spending without commensurate taxation leads to a required inflation of the money supply 2) An inflation of the money supply with increase the price of assets relative to the value of the currency. 3) Asset owners thus become "more valuable" by measure of currency. 4) Renters / non-asset-owners have to eat the costs of inflation while benefi…

You’re trying to make a logical argument from first principles about a complex, dynamic and ultimately social system that admits no such argument.

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And when production for a system I built burns down the month after I leave my job, the next guy they hire was actually the culprit! Greenspan was seen as responsible for the dot-com bust as well which was solidly in the center of his tenure.

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…

> rebalancing of people’s portfolios values It's not just portfolio value. It's well accepted in the economics that wealth impact's people spending (see wealth effect and its cousin negative wealth effect)

Re: Alan Greenspan has died

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Gilded Age, which had quite high levels of inequality, occurred when the gold standard was active I've got some news for you about modern levels of inequality.

Yea, that's his point. The gold standard neither prevents nor encourages inequality, except inasmuch as it limits policy flexibility (which, similarly, could be used to promote or limit inequality).

The gold standard mechanistically is a driver of wealth inequality, due to its deflationary effects and lack of a governmental mechanism to create more of it. It is not the only driver of wealth inequality, but when we used it that is what it did.
Post reply on HN