521–530 of 774 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Context is everything. In an economic discussion, one would use the economic meaning.
I know. It was a joke. I thought someone with the username compiler-guy might appreciate it but I guess not. Edit: otoh I've been a bit grumpy myself this week so who am I to judge. It wasn't a very good joke. I'll tell you the "youthful porpoise" one next time
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is due to tax policies reducing the revenue pool. This makes it easier to judge individual divisions of the total because there are necessarily fewer outlets, and since it's a smaller pool there's more reason to fight. The idle rich who can't find anywhere worthwhile to play with their nearly-free money (until recently ZIRPish) are a bug in the system. Oh, but lets pretend we are captains of industry by saturati…
I don’t think the government being inefficient is good. It gives ammo to those who are ideologically opposed to government doing things. We should strive to improve government efficiency, especially those of us who think the government should be taking on more tasks.
It's fascinating to trace the genesis of present crash to Fed's policies post 2008 crisis. The interest rates were kept artificially low to prevent another Great Depression. 2010s saw an unprecedented rally of tech/growth stocks, fuelled by cheap capital. Growth at all cost was the mantra, hoping companies will turn profitable at some point á la Amazon. Uber's CEO hit the nail on the head when he wrote "The average e…
Inflation metrics show that the economy post 2008 was in fact under stimulated, which is why the recovery from the financial crisis was so slow. The recent COVID-related stimuli are what went too far.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fed actually has more tools than the ones it currently uses, some of which have been used in the past. Robert Hockett has written a lot about productive investments via the federal reserve banks, and how that could be used to transform the economy. Here's one recent paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4023614 He wrote a short book about it as well: https://www.amazon.com/Financing-Green-New…
Thanks for the links. I'll pick up that book. One thing I've been a long-time advocate for is States setting up their own banks akin to that of North Dakota's. If for no other reason than to have a way to leverage national monetary policy for regional aims, so that when the Federal government rushes to the aid of Wall Street (e.g. by flooding it with cheap liquidity) there's a way for State governments to more direct…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People keep using the DMV as an example of government inefficiency, but my state has made it run so painlessly I don't think I've spent more than 15 minutes in an office over the last 5 years. I think government can be efficient if you put technocrats in charge of implementation rather than elected officials who are subject to the electoral whims of the uninformed masses. The problem with the above is it weakens demo…
The DMV in my state requires you make an appointment 4-6 months out right now. Walk-in appointments are unavailable or only available during a few hours a few days a week, if they happen to have staff that day. Good luck if you have your drivers license stolen. I sold a car of mine to Carvana in October. I returned the license plate to the DMV immediately, which is how they're notified that you no longer own the vehi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. A developers job is not to write code. You happen to write code as part of your job, but your core responsibility is to implement solutions to business problems. Sounds simple, but it's harder to realize in practice. Case in point was a recent freelance job I took on. This client had paid some devs for months of work on a Stripe integration. They had built all this custom code on the front-end and back-end. I came…
> . A developers job is not to write code. You happen to write code as part of your job, but your core responsibility is to implement solutions to business problems. My job is to write code. Nobody is interested in my opinions about business problems. I have to be aware, of course. I propose code to write some times, and I have to have some idea that it is a vaguely practical thing in business terms. I want to write…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Over a long enough time frame the stock market and even the whole economy behaves like a pyramid scheme as it is dependent on new generations to be more people than the previous one.
I think you're right but I don't think it has to be that way. Like others, up until a few years ago, I was a Keynesian. But then I realized that if you allow inflation you're not just "rewarding investment", but you're taking non-participation off the table -- and that's a big problem. Because then people participate in markets not based on value but because they have no choice. That means that you go from value inve…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> non-productive Speculative investments tend to get punished at the end of the cycle by losing all value, thus punishing those invested in it and restoring order. To be precise, the investors who are left holding at the end of the cycle get punished. The early investors who got out make out like robbers. This system incentivizes pump-and-dump.
That is "the market" working for you! We could allocate resources to productive assets by fiscal spending, but that is prevented by politics. Only when "the market" gets its cut can any infrastructure be built in the US. That's also true for much of the medical establishment and pension/retirement systems. If the market was efficient, we wouldn't be complaining about it. Unfortunately, a "free market" and an efficien…
The government has heavy handed regulations distorting the market and spent the last years creating money out of thin air and killing small businesses.
The government propping the market up during the pandemic kept alive the myth that the market is always growing but also caused a terrible inflation.
Now that the market is going back to reality the government can't just print more money again - or inflation will kill the entire country.
The incoming crash will hopefully pop some of the bubbles the government created in the last 20 years. But it will be painful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They mean paying in full themselves, not backed by mortgage.
Even if you get the mortgage, it's the same as cash to the seller. The bank just cut's them a check right away. The mortgage is between the bank and the buyer.