Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Dollar Is Dead

mathmeetsmoney.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 367 posts

Re: The Dollar Is Dead

#251

Post by [deleted] »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #78
Workaccount2 wrote: post #29

The country is getting forced by markets into realizing pain for overspending, and only congress can manage this pain. Manage the pain, not remove it is key here. Manage it. Conrgess is totally inept and ridiculously politicized, so it's unlikely they will do anything except make the problem worse. That leaves only the natural fall out of refusing to acknowledge a financial injury before going out on the field to pla…

There is no "overspending." There is only undertaxing. The debt is literally just the accumulated difference between spending and taxation. If extreme wealth was taxed, the debt would be zero. The point isn't even to "pay for spending" but to enforce a functional social contract, and to limit the political and democratic distortions created by extreme inequality. "Markets" should not have a veto on policy in a democr…

[deleted]

Re: The Dollar Is Dead

#252

Post by tomhow »

lawlessone wrote: post #27
water9 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

>Biden was president for all but nine months of Covid but don’t let facts get in your way Yeah and? It's easier to turn a bike than a containership.

Someone has emailed us to point out the inflammatory, politically-charged commenting you've been engaging in lately, and I agree that it's not what we want to see on HN.

Comments like the ones you've been posting in the past few days that are low-effort but highly reaction-inducing for people across the political spectrum are the very kind of thing we're trying to avoid here.

A particularly bad one was this one [1], five days ago:

> You don't like being reminded of the results of your decision?

> Not generalizing, i mean you specifically.

It attacks someone for doing something without any evidence that they did that or agreed with people who did it.

You're a long-time user here and you've posted plenty of good things too, and we don't want to push you away from HN. But we need you to make an effort to use HN in the spirit that's intended, which means taking care to observe the guidelines and respect other community members.

We know we can't be a politics-free zone and it would be futile and counter-productive to try, but we can all make an effort to hold ourselves to a higher standard and make political discussions here higher-quality than what is found elsewhere, if we choose to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44729698

Re: The Dollar Is Dead

#253

Post by senectus1 »

nilsherzig wrote: post #191
simonpure wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He also published animated video versions: 45min https://youtu.be/xguam0TKMw8 5min https://youtu.be/BB2r_eOjsPw

So this guy just takes the time and money (I guess that part doesn’t hurt if you’ve got 15 billion) to write a book and produce an excellent video version for a broader audience, just for … what exactly? According to his Wikipedia his employees are forced to agree to continuous recordings, the NYT claims he does some sort of (i assume perfectly legal) insider trading and just acts like he’s got the perfect system in…

I work with a fellow that raves about this guy and his "historical views on empires".

I'm not convinced, history is written by the surviving victors and revised by those with a narrative.

I'm a firm believer that the market is not logical predictable or rational, but it is game-able.

Re: The Dollar Is Dead

#255

Post by frnkng »

chasing0entropy wrote: post #237
declan_roberts wrote: post #48

The idea that a basket of foreign currencies or "BRIC+" will replace the dollar is absolutely not going to happen. If the dollar goes down it takes the entire world with it. Nobody is insulated from the risk of a dedollarization.

It's which came first the chicken or egg? The fall of the dollar will happen because anyone(everyone) with significant wealth will divest from the dollar CAUSING the de-dollarization. That's the point of the indicators.

Don’t forget that you also can invest in negative dollar by taking loans. Then, the reduction of purchasing power does actually benefit you.

So, whoever has significant wealth will do exactly this and take out loans to purchase productive assets and then, later on, pay back much less because the dollar lost value in the mean time.

This works out as long as the interest rate is lower then the actual annual loss in purchasing power.

Re: The Dollar Is Dead

#256

Post by withinboredom »

amy_petrik wrote: post #240
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no "overspending." There is only undertaxing. The debt is literally just the accumulated difference between spending and taxation. If extreme wealth was taxed, the debt would be zero. The point isn't even to "pay for spending" but to enforce a functional social contract, and to limit the political and democratic distortions created by extreme inequality. "Markets" should not have a veto on policy in a democr…

>"Markets" should not have a veto on policy in a democracy. capitalism is meant to be organic thing like a bacteria. a self-organizing network. one cannot legislate nature, one cannot legislate human nature. Imagine making crimes illegal and then nobody committing crimes. Imagine making it illegal to change lanes without using your turn signal. a democracy can give an antibiotic by dr. democracy to clear the infectio…

LOL. The US is not purely capitalist. It is a mix of socialist capitalism.

Re: The Dollar Is Dead

#257

Post by senectus1 »

s_ting765 wrote: post #246
declan_roberts wrote: post #48

The idea that a basket of foreign currencies or "BRIC+" will replace the dollar is absolutely not going to happen. If the dollar goes down it takes the entire world with it. Nobody is insulated from the risk of a dedollarization.

> If the dollar goes down it takes the entire world with it. This has happened before. GFC 2008 comes to mind.

yeah but that was a hiccup compared to what may come.

Re: The Dollar Is Dead

#258

Post by herbst »

daft_pink wrote: post #14

I think that people and countries not wanting to purchase 30 year long term debt in a zero interest rate environment is perfectly natural. There is far more potential downside than upside and not evidence of demise. Reality is that there is little motivation to invest in long term debt under 3%, normal motivation to invest in debt between 5-10% and huge appetite for debt above 10%. Debt with a sub 2% interest rate ca…

Not wanting is good. From Europe POV the countries got pressured into contracts that they know were bad.

It's closer to a cold war situation than just "selling dept"

Re: The Dollar Is Dead

#259

Post by berdario »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #248
amy_petrik wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Markets" should not have a veto on policy in a democracy. capitalism is meant to be organic thing like a bacteria. a self-organizing network. one cannot legislate nature, one cannot legislate human nature. Imagine making crimes illegal and then nobody committing crimes. Imagine making it illegal to change lanes without using your turn signal. a democracy can give an antibiotic by dr. democracy to clear the infectio…

Capitalism isn't meant to do anything. We have a system of laws that undergird the economic system - the legal protection of private property being the main one. Private property requires a monopoly of violence to enforce. When capitalism colonizes a legal system, it necessarily creates the incentives for the legal system to adopt laws to maintain itself. If for some reason private property was not legally enforceabl…

> Capitalism isn't meant to do anything.

It was probably meant in the manner of: "the purpose of a system, is what it does"...

I.e. regardless of how it evolved (system of laws written with good intent, or system of laws organically grown out of corruption and lobbying...) what capitalism does now is its purpose, and we shouldn't expect it to be meant to do anything different.

> capitalism [...] necessarily creates the incentives for the legal system to adopt laws to maintain itself

Agree

> If for some reason private property was not legally enforceable, capitalism wouldn't get off the ground

I think this makes as much sense as saying: "if money wasn't a thing, capitalism wouldn't get off the ground".

Technically true, neither capitalism nor feudalism would be able to get off the ground, but "private property not enforceable" evokes images of thugs stealing your property... The truth is that the first few people (or group thereof) who accumulate a commodity (grain, livestock, widgets, etc.) would also be the first who would be able to bribe/pay thugs with a small share of their commodities, to help protect from (deny access to) others in the community.

The monopoly of violence (and legal authority) would grow out of the initial group.

In the same way, even if money was going to be abolished, any other commodity would just take its place, and rebuild capitalism with it. It is tricky to wrestle democratic control back, and move on from capitalism.

Re: The Dollar Is Dead

#260

Post by robocat »

mritterhoff wrote: post #223
robocat wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be interested to see if we could create an hours-worked currency. Every person is given a similar amount of lifetime (only a few countries are exceptions). Time can't inflate or deflate, is understood by all and easily measured, and it can't be stored. Taking it from others or trading it between people is difficult (we use money as a proxy instead). Some obvious problems: quality of time, the value of differe…

Sounds like "time banking", which has myriad flaws. One of them is that your time is cheap when you're young and unskilled, and grows valuable as you grow old and become skilled (and have less time left). Each isn't equal for the same person, much less between them. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-based_currency

Yeah, we have 3 Time Bank organisations in my city (I'm not sure how they manage their economy internally): https://www.cinch.org.nz/categories/421/441/entries In New Zealand you can't put your professional work into the time bank (unless everyone wants to declare it as taxable).

I was probably thinking more along the lines of: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Freedom_Day

Post reply on HN