It’s mostly a demand shock, not a supply shock, and it’s everywhere • Hacker News Board

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

#451

Post by asdff » Tue, Nov 09, 2021, 10:58 PM UTC

option_greek wrote: post #261

asdff wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone is a homeowner and on top of that not every homeowner has refinanced their home during covid. I don't think people are borrowing money to buy toilet paper or a golf club. How do lower rates for corporate loans affect behavior that's at the consumer level? I'm trying to understand this relationship better.

It doesn't directly go from fed to toilet paper. It starts with fed, inflates assets like real estate, stocks, commodities and leaks into actual economy due to the expected returns on these assets. For example, rents, prices of hardware and capital intensive sectors, oil all go up because on one hand these are getting indirectly pumped up by suppressed yields on bonds thanks to fed while on the other hand they are al…

Are people actually seeing higher wages on the whole? Some cities have raised minimum wages like a few dollars more an hour but minimum wages have not been keeping pace with inflation as it was. Has median wage gone up in this time? My understanding has been that wages have been pretty flat for middle income earners for years despite cost of living increases rising over these same years.

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

#452

Post by asdff » Tue, Nov 09, 2021, 11:05 PM UTC

imtringued wrote: post #398

asdff wrote: 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…

You're misinterpreting the situation completely. China is running a trade surplus vs USA which means China has lots of dollars. Because of foreign exchange policy it will not use the dollars on imports. The only thing the money can be spent on is financial assets. All the Fed does is lower interest rates in response to this "savings glut" and that is the right thing because oversupply should result in lower prices fo…

With every government in the world buying US finantial assets that should lend even more support to the idea of loading up on assets yourself and riding the wave indefinitely, if the whole entire world is so overleveraged in American markets they will also do nothing to rock this boat since everyone around the world has been eating well betting on the market.

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

#453

Post by PeterisP » Tue, Nov 09, 2021, 11:30 PM UTC

throwaway894345 wrote: post #200

rsj_hn wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Natural gas extremely expensive? Let me introduce you to renewables, which btw are getting better and better every year. Shutting down a natural gas pipeline that people depend upon just before winter, and then lecturing them about solar panels is not a good look. Artificially increasing the price of natural gas causes famines, it causes food and fertilizer to be more expensive, and it makes it hard for people to h…

I sympathize with this, but if climate experts are to believed, we’ve stalled to the point where we have perhaps a decade to get emissions under control in order to meet targets, and most countries haven’t even begun to make significant changes. At some point there will be pain. The question is, “do we want a little pain now or a lot of pain down the road?”. And to be clear, “wearing a coat inside during winter” may…

In democratic countries, the answer to the question of "do we want a little pain before the elections or a lot of pain down the road?" is quite clear - if you accept the pain now, you'll get voted out and get replaced by someone who will proclaim that the pain isn't needed, promise to undo your measures and kick the problem even further down the road to some other future government.

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

#454

Post by UncleMeat » Wed, Nov 10, 2021, 12:33 AM UTC

leereeves wrote: post #443

UncleMeat wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool. I think you'll find that a large number of climate activists are very on board with pretty extreme policies pulling from the rich. The people calling it "superstition" tend to be people who don't support high taxes on the wealthy.

That may be true at the grassroots level, but I've never seen it materialize at the policy level. Perhaps I've missed something. Could you cite an example of an actual (not merely theoretical) climate policy that pulls from the rich without hurting the working class?

I mean, there is barely any climate policy at all in the first place.

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

#455

Post by bubbadoo81 » Wed, Nov 10, 2021, 3:32 AM UTC

Maarten88 wrote: post #329

Freskis wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"we have perhaps a decade to get emissions under control" Every year we're told it's our absolute last chance. Environmental brinkmanship hasn't work and the tune needs to be changed. Literally no economies are planning for mass famine or wars because no-one actually believes that is going to happen, except religious cults.

> no-one actually believes that is going to happen That is the problem exactly. We do not listen to scientists, because it's more convenient to ignore it. And when their models become reality, we'll just blame them for it, as they "knew" and did not prevent it.

All I'm going to say is always look at where these 'scientists' are getting their funding from. I'm not a climate denier, but realize much of the NGD is really a redistribution of funds. Driving EV machines will still require electricity, most of which is still generated by fossil fuels. Then there's the quagmire of what to do with spent batteries. The Earth has heated and cooled over millions of years, so I really doubt we're at the point of no return.

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

#456

Post by adrianN » Wed, Nov 10, 2021, 4:47 AM UTC

nostrebored wrote: post #448

jaggs wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The IPCC does not make predictions. Never has, never will. The whole point, which real climate scientists repeat as nauseum, is we can never know absolutes because of the huge number of variables and timeframes. So what they do instead is provide scenarios. And each scenario has a series of weightings or probabilities. The summaries spell these out in rough terms, the full reports go into intricate detail and sources…

Thousands of researchers making predictions with ever shifting probabilities is what you call unfalsifiable. The predictions we’re talking about play out over decades. The sources cite other predictions. It’s a feedback loop of assumptions and peer review from people who you know already share the same assumptions. Climate science is much more akin to sociology than a hard science.

Except climate science has tons and tons of hard data that the models need to agree with to be publishable, whereas sociology has questionnaires administered to a group of 20 sociology students.

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

#457

Post by adrianN » Wed, Nov 10, 2021, 4:47 AM UTC

leereeves wrote: post #425

UncleMeat wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Climate change is indeed a justice problem and we should optimize for justice rather than just raw temperature management. There are "solutions" that cause more injustice by denying efficient energy to the global poor. But the wealthy people who make this argument tend to argue for total inaction rather than a justice-focused approach where they sacrifice greatly in order to permit the global poor to have access to e…

It's difficult to believe the working class in America should bear the sacrifice when the richest people in the world just flew their private jets to a lavish climate conference thousands of miles from home to discuss how much the working class should sacrifice. Any sacrifice that is called for should start at the top.

The working class in America is part of the richest people in the world.

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

#458

Post by MisterMower » Wed, Nov 10, 2021, 5:24 AM UTC

throwaway210222 wrote: post #277

nostrebored wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your mistake is weighing superstition vs tangible harm. Eliminating fossil fuels will condemn large swathes of the living population to true poverty and kill many more. How do you think things like hospitals in the developing world run? And the infrastructure that lets them be created to begin with? The idea that we should eliminate fossil fuels is truly a privileged take.

> Your mistake is weighing superstition vs tangible harm. Care to share which of the thousands of peer-reviewed papers on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's website, you have: a) read b) understood c) found errors in d) brought to the world's attention? 500, 10, 1, ? I thought not. And yes, of course it sucks - no one wants this. You seem to think the unpleasantness of the diagnosis and remedy gives you…

The settled science used to be that leeches were a valid cure for a ton of medical issues. Lots of peer reviewed research on it at the time, I’m sure.

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

#459

Post by MisterMower » Wed, Nov 10, 2021, 5:28 AM UTC

adrianN wrote: post #457

leereeves wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's difficult to believe the working class in America should bear the sacrifice when the richest people in the world just flew their private jets to a lavish climate conference thousands of miles from home to discuss how much the working class should sacrifice. Any sacrifice that is called for should start at the top.

The working class in America is part of the richest people in the world.

How many of them have a private jet? Your working class American might make 5 times as much as a person living in the third world, but the clowns at this climate conference are easily 1,000 times as rich. Your comparison is meaningless.

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

#460

Post by mariojv » Wed, Nov 10, 2021, 5:35 AM UTC

m0zg wrote: post #155

I smell BS. I'm buying a lot less stuff now even though I'm financially very comfortable. Not to mention I rarely go out, as well. People who are struggling financially are now buying a lot less in real terms because of inflation and pandemic-related unemployment and under-employment. We're looking at 75 dollar turkeys this Thanksgiving, folks. A lot of people will not be able to afford the whole thing and gasoline a…

75 dollar turkeys??? Where in the country are you?

Turkey here is retailing for $1.51/lb grocery brand, $1.94/lb here for brand name with curbside pickup. Slightly higher than normal but nowhere near $75 for a turkey.