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It’s mostly a demand shock, not a supply shock, and it’s everywhere

bridgewater.com

221–230 of 478 posts

Re: It’s mostly a demand shock, not a supply shock, and it’s everywhere

#221
The more I read about this subject, the only thing that becomes reinforced is that nobody really knows what the hell is going on with the markets. The inflation / deflation debate has been raging on for years now, and it's still not clear what we are experiencing in this virualised economy of ours.

Gun to head? I think it seems that 'inflation' is not really inflation - but a kind of profit tax that seems to be being priced in to charge more for things because everyone else is doing it. A lot of debt was paid down with the stimulus, rents/real estate are frickin skyrocketing, so it's difficult for me to believe that there is a huge surge of demand because everyone is suddenly flush.

As for the the supply chain issues / trade war / materials shortage - again, that doesn't seem to be inflationary or a demand shock, but a temporal supply-side issue not being able to keep up with regular demand as things reboot.

Re: It’s mostly a demand shock, not a supply shock, and it’s everywhere

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean what percentage of all money being spent is being spent on cryptocurrency stuff? Surely that’s gotta be approximately 0%.

Don't know if percentage of money being spent is a good metric, but Bitcoin is 92.45% the market cap of silver, and 11% the market cap of gold.

Percentage of money spent ought to be significant if the claim is that demand for crypto is meaningfully substituting for demand for physical goods.

Re: It’s mostly a demand shock, not a supply shock, and it’s everywhere

#223
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And a rate of a trillion worth of goods per year will stop flowing into USA A 1% tax would not cause a trillion worth of goods per year to stop flowing into the USA. Honestly, I think you are reacting too emotionally. The nice thing about a tax is it can be gradually increased to reduce foreign investment. There are actually many that have discussed taxes on foreign capital inflows, it's not some random idea I just…

But the current inflow of goods has nothing to do with foreign investments, it has to do with the US government printing a ton of money and ultimately that money gets used to buy goods from other countries. And no matter what finance trickery you do, fact is that USA will need to stop consuming so much. Your solution would lead to the same decrease in consumption, just with different means. And when that happens it w…

Look, there are some table stakes before diving in with strong opinions, so the first thing to understand is the balance of payments identity, namely current account + changes in capital account = 0

http://www.econ.yale.edu/~ka265/teaching/UndergradFinance/Sp...

Now if there was zero foreign investment, then the U.S. deficit spending a lot (please don't use the word "printing money") would cause demand for foreign goods to rise. You are right about that!

But - does that mean that we buy more foreign goods or that the value of the dollar falls so that the money spent on foreign goods (in dollar terms) is the same as the money spent by foreigners on our goods?

You see, there is another degree of freedom, namely the exchange rate! The exchange rate is all that is needed to clear exports and imports so that there is no trade deficit, and that is true regardless of how much "money printing" happens.

So whether or not you get a (net) trade deficit is going to be determined by (net) foreign investment, which raises the dollar and prevents it from falling enough to equalize imports with exports. The residual is the trade deficit.

Viewed a different way, the demand for the dollar is the demand for american goods + the demand for american assets.

If the demand for assets is zero, then the price of dollars is whatever it needs to be so that our deflated dollar makes our goods sufficiently cheap and foreign goods sufficiently expensive so that the stimulus spending does not cause a trade deficit.

Trade deficits are always and everywhere determined by net capital inflows. That is what the Balance of Payments identity is telling you. They are not caused by deficit spending, declines in productivity, failures of our educational system, etc. It really is just capital inflows.

All the other stuff is important, as it effects the exchange rate, but it's not important for determining trade deficits.

Re: It’s mostly a demand shock, not a supply shock, and it’s everywhere

#224
post #214
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woah, what are you honestly on about? You can claim that the US is artificially raising natural gas prices, but the exact opposite is true. By chance of circumstance, we've historically underbuilt LNG processing facilities and that is isolating the US market from the rest of the world, so we have some of the lowest natural gas prices in the world right now. Please take your uninformed takes and cringey political rall…

I'm not the one ranting here. Biden has 1) put a moratorium on oil and gas leases in Federal lands and waters 2) cancelled one pipeline already and is about to cancel another (which means prices go up as trucks need to ship in the fuel) The above makes oil and gas more costly to extract and to ship, which raises the price. Moreover he is lobbying to remove all investment tax deductions for Oil and Gas (even though ot…

> The above makes oil and gas more costly to extract and to ship, which raises the price.

I'm not sure if you're just expressing your personal concerns over what you believe can hypothetically happen, or whether you're grossly misinformed.

Meanwhile, even though gas prices are breaking records all over the world, in the US they are still below the prices from 2010, back in the days no one in the US was concerned about gas prices because they were 3 times higher a couple years back during Bush2's presidency.

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/rngwhhdm.htm

Re: It’s mostly a demand shock, not a supply shock, and it’s everywhere

#225
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What everyone is going to have a real hard time wrapping their head around for the next few years: We built a highly efficient economy for a set of behaviors. A shock happened that caused a lot people to change their behaviors (probably for a long time, since they've had 2 years of 'practice'). Our economy, which was built for those old behaviors (living in cities, riding public transit, eating at restaurants, travel…

Didn't more Americans already live in suburbs then cities before covid? What percent of Americans were regular public transit riders?

Re: % transit riders, seems like not a lot except in NYC: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/07/who-relies-...

Re: It’s mostly a demand shock, not a supply shock, and it’s everywhere

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are wrong, 2010 wasn't enough, and now it is back to worse than 2007, USA is currently consuming goods from other countries and doesn't produce enough to sustain it, and it hasn't produced enough to sustain its consumption for 50 years now. USA is just continuing to borrow from the rest of the world (printing a reserve currency is the same thing as borrowing/taking), shipment after shipment of goods gets sent to…

Most of the economy isn't tradeable though, including major sectors like housing, education, health care etc. If other countries get sick of buying US bonds, the relative value of the currency might depreciate. But as long as it doesn't happen all of a sudden that might not be catastrophic - other countries having stronger currencies might reduce US imports and increase exports (narrowing the trade deficit). Plus inc…

But the cost of all of those things are tied to trade prices. Lets say we halve the value of a dollar, then we effectively halve the salary of every American worker relative to the rest of the world, and also halve the value of the American consumption market. That would massively reduce the stock value of all companies that mainly sells to the American market, which includes most big American companies. It would also mean that skilled workers would no longer be incentivised to move to USA to work since the salary is no longer better.

Or in other words, it could end the American dominance that has lasted since WW2. If it happens slowly enough it wont be a crash, but the American dominance will still end. I see no scenario where USA will maintain its current dominance, the living standards of Americans will get massively reduced and stocks will massively go down, it could happen quickly or slowly but either way it will happen.

Re: It’s mostly a demand shock, not a supply shock, and it’s everywhere

#227
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything the great depression supported this thesis of stocks always going up, and you can safely forget sweating the actual underlying economics. If you held through the crash or bought at the bottom you'd obviously be doing fine. Look at this chart (1). Seem familiar? Looks a lot like the great recession or March 2020 to me: a big plunge that took headlines followed by an unstoppable bull trend, in this case one…

USA losing its status as the world leader might change that trend though. Before the pandemic it could be a few decades away, but now? Possibly within even just a few years, if that happens I wouldn't want to be among those having my savings in American stocks.

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Re: It’s mostly a demand shock, not a supply shock, and it’s everywhere

#228
post #103
post #91

Just a warning that this is an article by a hedge fund expressing a view of our current inflationary period that I would argue is heterodox among the economic mainstream. I suggest reading Paul Krugman and Claudia Sahm for dovish views, or Adam Ozimek for a more critical view. In particular, the idea that “inflation expectations” can perpetuate inflation via a self-fulfilling prophecy effect has been called into ques…

What is most definitely a heterodox economic view is taking Paul Krugman seriously. He has fully become a newspaper opinion pundit, and very few people among academic economists pay much attention to him because of that.

This simply isn't true when it comes to the topic of economics, and there are heterodox-y economists (Tyler Cowen for example) who also respect Krugman as an economist even if they don't agree with him on everything.

As for paying much attention to him in academia, afaik he's not really active in the publish or perish academic game anymore so I don't get this as a criticism, but his influences are still there.

Re: It’s mostly a demand shock, not a supply shock, and it’s everywhere

#229
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the current inflow of goods has nothing to do with foreign investments, it has to do with the US government printing a ton of money and ultimately that money gets used to buy goods from other countries. And no matter what finance trickery you do, fact is that USA will need to stop consuming so much. Your solution would lead to the same decrease in consumption, just with different means. And when that happens it w…

Look, there are some table stakes before diving in with strong opinions, so the first thing to understand is the balance of payments identity, namely current account + changes in capital account = 0 http://www.econ.yale.edu/~ka265/teaching/UndergradFinance/Sp... Now if there was zero foreign investment, then the U.S. deficit spending a lot (please don't use the word "printing money") would cause demand for foreign go…

> If the demand for assets is zero, then the price of dollars is whatever it needs to be so that our deflated dollar makes our goods sufficiently cheap and foreign goods sufficiently expensive so that the stimulus spending does not cause a trade deficit.

This ignores the fact that dollar is used as a reserve currency. Since the dollar is a reserve currency people will want to keep it stable, so even though USA abuses its position as a keeper of this reserve currency by printing a lot of dollars other players still plays along and keeps sending goods to keep the value of the dollar high. But what do you think happens when they stop putting up with how USA abuses them? Well, they stop buying dollars, the dollar crashes, Americans can no longer buy Chinese goods and the American economic dominance ends overnight. Of course this would affect the rest of the world as well so they wont do it that quickly, but even if it happens slower it will still cause a massive crash.

I just don't understand why USA keeps digging their hole ever deeper, the more they dig the worse it will get, since right now they are building their economy on top of of a bubble that can be popped by China whenever China wants.

Re: It’s mostly a demand shock, not a supply shock, and it’s everywhere

#230
post #214
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woah, what are you honestly on about? You can claim that the US is artificially raising natural gas prices, but the exact opposite is true. By chance of circumstance, we've historically underbuilt LNG processing facilities and that is isolating the US market from the rest of the world, so we have some of the lowest natural gas prices in the world right now. Please take your uninformed takes and cringey political rall…

I'm not the one ranting here. Biden has 1) put a moratorium on oil and gas leases in Federal lands and waters 2) cancelled one pipeline already and is about to cancel another (which means prices go up as trucks need to ship in the fuel) The above makes oil and gas more costly to extract and to ship, which raises the price. Moreover he is lobbying to remove all investment tax deductions for Oil and Gas (even though ot…

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