The worst economic crisis that's ever been seen. Global turmoil and revolts. USA splits in multiple countries.
Ask HN: What are your 2022 predictions?
111–120 of 273 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are your 2022 predictions?
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Timing the market is a hopeless task. We do not know yet if our treasuries will make an attempt to wean themselves off cheap credit or not. I am afraid they won't, but even then the curve may vary a lot. I know this isn't a very good prediction. The only thing that bothers me is that the contemporary ruling class seems to operate as if the borrowing could go on forever.
What precisely is going to stop it? Where else is the safety-seeking money going to go? Even the periodic threat of a gratuitous default doesn't rattle US bond prices.
The U.S. might be a special case, with the dollar being a reserve currency.
Italian lira was weak and Italians used to buy a lot of property. Until today, an average Italian family has much more real estate than an average German family.
Polish zloty went into a tailspin in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 1995, they decided to start again and remove four zeros off the new zloty. IDK what happened to all the debt held in non-zlotys.
Re: Ask HN: What are your 2022 predictions?
#113Hackernews comments will continue to devolve and become more Reddit-like on the whole. Someone will begin working on an alternative that will make them rich in 2024.
Re: Ask HN: What are your 2022 predictions?
#114Prince Charles will die, followed shortly after by the Queen. King William will begin the process of ending the British monarchy.
Chris Pratt will be in the highest-grossing English-language film.
A novel virus worse than Covid will arise, and humanity will succeed in containing it, but at great cost.
Tampa Bay will lose in the Super Bowl.
Re: Ask HN: What are your 2022 predictions?
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that will happen even without the lockdowns. The states that tend to lock down seem to also have the highest housing prices. And with millions now free to work from wherever they like, they will seek out cheaper shores. When I moved, someone at my old office said, "How can you stand to live in a state represented by Senator X?" I told him, "When Senator X picks up my dry cleaning or valets my car, I'll care.…
It must be nice to belong to a demographic that is unaffected by politics.
90% of Americans aren't wrapped up in the manufactured anger industry. They just want to feed their family.
Re: Ask HN: What are your 2022 predictions?
#116People will make a big deal about a date that is all zeros and twos. Eg. 02/02/2022 or 02/20/2022 or some other variation.
Other people will make fun of weird Murrican date ordering and propose some other date.
Arguments will be had about which datetime(s) should be considered palindromic given the different orderings, or some such nonsense.
Re: Ask HN: What are your 2022 predictions?
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
The population of the United States was around 331 million per the 2020 census, so $1T is a little over $3000 per resident. The GDP of the United States was approximately 21 trillion in 2020 (a pandemic year) per World Bank, so a $1T loan is about 5% of gross annual income. It's not that hard for an individual or business with good credit history to get such a loan. Comparing things on the scale of the national budge…
so a $1T loan is about 5% of gross annual income No, this is not right at all. The total income of the United States government is $4 trillion per year. So a $1 trillion loan is 25% of gross annual income. The $3 trillion being added to the debt is 75% of gross annual income. GDP is not the income of the United States government. But this new debt will be debt of the United States government. The reality is that we a…
GDP is the gross income of the United States. The revenue of the federal government doesn't quite have an individual analogue, because it's somewhat arbitrary (it is effectively a fraction of GDP that can be unilaterally increased or decreased by Congress, though doing so has side effects).
If you're trying to make a comparison with an individual, you'd need to come up with such an analogy. Gross income isn't it.
Re: Ask HN: What are your 2022 predictions?
#118- COVID will continue to be a thing. Some new variant will come along and force everyone to lock down again. - The fed will have no choice but to keep interest rates low. This means we will have another year of rapidly rising asset prices. - Supply chain issues will get worse throughout 2022, massively fueled by US-China tensions and COVID related shifts in demand. Major inflation like we haven't seen since the 1970s…
> Crypto will undergo a major crash in 2022. It follows predictable, cyclical patterns, and we are nearing the end of the classic boom/bust cycle. It is unclear whether this will cause the Tether situation to blow up. Crypto and stocks seem to be correlated at this point. Both are considered risk on assets by institutional buyers. I don't anticipate crypto to crash unless stocks start to crash. If the Fed keeps inter…
> Crypto and stocks seem to be correlated at this point.
A bunch of folks from the Man Group and Campbell Harvey published a paper saying that Bitcoin specifically seems to have a positive beta with the US market:
> Finally, we are in the midst of another technological disruption in the form of the cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin. Some have advocated the inclusion of bitcoin into a diversified portfolio as an inflation protection asset. However, caution is warranted given that bitcoin is untested with only eight years of quality data – that lack a single inflation regime. Moreover, bitcoin is more than five times more volatile than the S&P 500 or gold. This high volatility could lead to bitcoin being an unreliable hedge. In addition, there is increasing evidence that bitcoin is a speculative asset and it has a positive beta against the US market.
* https://www.man.com/maninstitute/when-inflation-hits
* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3813202
It's still early days, so more evidence certainly needs to be gathered, but so far as a hedge against inflation crypto doesn't look too good (especially because of volatility).
And Campbell published a pro-DeFi book recently, so it's not like he's against crypto generally:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57720429-defi-and-the-fu...
* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3711777
Re: Ask HN: What are your 2022 predictions?
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
- COVID will continue to be a thing. Some new variant will come along and force everyone to lock down again. - Supply chain issues will get worse throughout 2022, massively fueled by US-China tensions and COVID related shifts in demand. Major inflation like we haven't seen since the 1970s. - Crypto will undergo a major crash in 2022. It follows predictable, cyclical patterns, and we are nearing the end of the classic…
Crypto can't be a real inflation hedge because it's not a productive asset (this is not a criticism). It may be going up because people are worried about inflation and so are moving some money to riskier assets that offer a higher return, but if inflation were to continue people would be forced to move their crypto assets to things like food, housing, equipment, that are actually productive, which would drive down th…
This doesn't sound exactly right to me. "forced to move their crypto assets to things like [x]" just sounds like a different way to say "buy [x] with crypto" instead of with USD.
Edit because I was downvoted:
This genuinely goes against my intuition. The recommended alternatives were housing, food (don't know if the parent meant stock up on nonperishables or buy farmland & livestock), and equipment. This sounded like preparing for complete economic collapse. If that's the level of inflation we're talking about, then we have much bigger things to worry about than how crypto will be doing.
Re: Ask HN: What are your 2022 predictions?
#120- COVID will continue to be a thing. Some new variant will come along and force everyone to lock down again. - The fed will have no choice but to keep interest rates low. This means we will have another year of rapidly rising asset prices. - Supply chain issues will get worse throughout 2022, massively fueled by US-China tensions and COVID related shifts in demand. Major inflation like we haven't seen since the 1970s…
> Major inflation like we haven't seen since the 1970s.
The (demand-pull) inflation of the 1970s started because there was many years of war spending because of the Vietnam War. Once that wound down, then there was (supply-push) inflation of OPEC's oil embargo.
What we're seeing now is a sudden spike because of concentrated spending, much like happened due to the Korea War, where inflation lasted between 12-18 months:
* https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/in...