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I don't have any problem with you being here.
Question for you tho. One of the ways that the US has maintained the value of our fiat currency is "to export our inflation" to other countries. Thoughts just on the quoted part there? And no, I dont necessarily agree or disagree with the morality of it either.
1776 > 1984
The FAILURE of the United States Government to operate and maintain an Honest Money System , which frees the ordinary man from the clutches of the money manipulators, is the single largest contributing factor to the World's current Economic Crisis.
The Elimination of Privacy is the Architecture of Genocide
Belief, Money, and Violence are the three ways all people are controlled
We can always count on Zippy to deflect, conflate and confuse the issue.
Dude. I was talking about the rate of interest banks and finance companies charge on loans, and you post a chart of the various rates of interest T bills have paid over time. What has that got to do with anything? Surely you're not going to tell us that the rate banks charge for interest on loans is tied by statute to the rate of interest paid to the holders of bonds.
As for the second graph, I wondered if you were going to post that old standby again. As I have mentioned, oh, about the last thousand times you posted that chart, it does a nice job of demonstrating the problem with fiat currency. Yes, the value of sound money fluctuates. But it fluctuates both directions. It goes both up and down. And in the end, it generally winds up about where it started. A person is born, and learns the value of a dollar. At the end of his life, perhaps a century later, he still knows the value of a dollar because it has evened out, and is about the same. This is demonstrated by the left hand portion of the chart, where we see both blue and green. But after the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, and more particularly after Nixon completely decoupled the currency from gold in 1971, where does the green go? Simple. The green evaporates, just like the value of your greenbacks evaporates. The people who print the money always print enough to ensure the value of the money goes down, because they like making money the old fashioned way--printing it--and always print as much as they can get away with printing.
So, as always, that particular chart proves my point. It isn't the fluctuations that steal all your savings and turn your middle class salary into starvation wages. All that bad stuff happens when all the fluctuations go the same way, and the dollar never, ever recovers the value it lost.
The middle class has been disappearing, and the working poor have been working themselves into abject poverty, since 1973 or so. Have decreases in investment and spending been the rule that whole time? Hardly. The 1980s and 1990s were spending and investment sprees. So, your theory holds no water.
What has been constant in those four and a half decades is dollar devaluation. And what's more, you have admitted repeatedly that the value of the dollar has a real impact on the wealth of wage earning workers.
Bully for you. Will you admit that not everyone is? Do burger flippers have a right to expect that if they do their hot, sweaty job sixty hours a week, they should be able to put a roof over their heads and feed themselves? Well, they could forty-five years ago, and they cannot today. What has happened in the meantime? Hard to tell, with the government--and people like Zippy--cooking up meaningless numbers for us, but the minimum wage has certainly not sextupled the way the price of an entry-level new car has.
Is there no way to ensure stability in wages? Well, if an employer had to go to his employees and ask them to take a cut in pay in the event the dollar fluctuated up in value, that might help. As it is, you may have skills sufficiently in demand that you can get a raise whenever you feel the cost of living has left you behind, but that makes you a minority, not the majority.
So, what skin is it off your nose if burger flippers starve? Since you seem not to believe in taxes, you must not think Section Eight and Food Stamps come out of your paycheck, so the burger places can continue to pay the people who do the work for them less than a living wage and it does you no harm. That makes it so easy to say you shouldn't be expected to negotiate with the bank for a lower interest rate on your loans, and should have the guilty pleasure of repaying that loan with dollars which are worth less than the ones you borrowed...
Economics is a visceral subject around here because some of us know and care about burger flippers, and hate to see them bust their asses all day, only to go online and beg the government for enough benefits to live in the evening. There's no pride of self-sufficiency in it, though some of us are old enough to remember when a burger flipper could enjoy that luxury. And there's certainly no future in it, especially with Social Security threatening to collapse. What has McDonald's stockholders done that they deserve this kind of corporate welfare, or that they deserve to profit on the very destruction of the people who work for the money the stockholders pocket?
You say I don't know you. I say you, like millions of others, know not what you do to people. So the question then becomes, do you want your study of economics to remain a dry, amusing study of a game with anonymous winners and losers you can laugh at, or would you like to see the real results of this casino gambling that all of us are forced to play? Because people are getting screwed, and I still maintain that the Incredible Shrinking Dollar is the dildo which is screwing people.
Do you want to pave yourself a road to hell with your good intentions?
This republic does not need more people blathering about economics. This republic needs more people of conscience discussing economics in a clear-eyed, responsible, compassionate manner. You have the brains to rise to that challenge. Do you have the sense of responsibility, the compassion, and the clear eyes?
No, they didn't teach you that in college. They taught you that fiat is necessary to prevent recessions which happen anyway, or soften the effect of recessions that run deeper and last longer than they ever did during the run of the gold standard. So, how long are you going to keep believing the tripe they fed you?
Serious question, dude.
I dont blindly accept or reject any of it. Thing is, we need minds like yours to call out the inherit problems in the system that we all have the potential to miss. Its why I post, I try to defer to your better judgement to challenge such ideas. Other parts I omitted in abbreviating your quote (with the ...) do address this, such as the overall long term negative effects that it has on the burger flippers. I know enough that ANYTHING from the MSM to be utterly deceptive twaddlespeak, but, the "alt media" can have just as many things that are wrong also.
Mostly, lack of data on my part, data that I think you have, so Im honored to have the ideas I put up challenged by the data you have. Believe me, it HELPS. Not just for me, but for other people that read your posts also.
1776 > 1984
The FAILURE of the United States Government to operate and maintain an Honest Money System , which frees the ordinary man from the clutches of the money manipulators, is the single largest contributing factor to the World's current Economic Crisis.
The Elimination of Privacy is the Architecture of Genocide
Belief, Money, and Violence are the three ways all people are controlled
Mortgage rates tend to closely follow ten year Treasury notes. Things like auto loans tend to follow the rates on three year Treasuries. It is a good guide to what banks were charging.We can always count on Zippy to deflect, conflate and confuse the issue.
Dude. I was talking about the rate of interest banks and finance companies charge on loans, and you post a chart of the various rates of interest T bills have paid over time. What has that got to do with anything? Surely you're not going to tell us that the rate banks charge for interest on loans is tied by statute to the rate of interest paid to the holders of bonds.
https://finance.zacks.com/treasury-y...ates-2835.html
More at link.Basics
There is a strong correlation between mortgage interest rates and Treasury yields, according to a plot of 30-year conventional mortgages and 10-year Treasury yields using Federal Reserve Economic Data. Mortgage interest rates are higher than Treasury yields because mortgages are riskier than Treasury bonds. The risk is that some homeowners get into financial difficulty and default on their mortgage obligations. The difference, or spread, between Treasury yields and mortgages interest rates is the risk premium.
Nothing can prevent recessions.No, they didn't teach you that in college. They taught you that fiat is necessary to prevent recessions which happen anyway, or soften the effect of recessions that run deeper and last longer than they ever did during the run of the gold standard. So, how long are you going to keep believing the tripe they fed you?
Have they been deeper and longer?recessions that run deeper and last longer than they ever did during the run of the gold standard
Last edited by Zippyjuan; 04-06-2018 at 05:22 PM.
One, I didn't say anything could prevent recessions. I said that was one of the several false selling points used to sell the Federal Reserve to the American public.
Two, I can not believe you had the chutzpah to stick a chart in our faces that claims that there was no recession or depression in 1934, 1935 and 1936. Or 1938 and 1939 for that matter. Not to mention 1919, most of 1958, 1975 through 1979, 1987, or any of the time TARP bailouts were being handed out. That's not merely comedic. That's insane.
Somebody's using an awfully narrow definition of "recession". Is "unless it occurred in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries" part of that definition?
TARP bailouts would be part of the 2007 recession.
What was this recession in 1987 or 1975 though 1979?
1958 recession started in 1957 (August)- that is on the list.
1938- that one started in May 1937. On the list.
1919 recession began in 1918 (also August)- listed.
List of recessions in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o..._United_States
Source for the chart posted: http://avondaleam.com/average-durati...mic-recession/
You missed the ones also listed in the 19th Century on the chart which goes back to 1857.Somebody's using an awfully narrow definition of "recession". Is "unless it occurred in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries" part of that definition?
Last edited by Zippyjuan; 04-06-2018 at 06:49 PM.
If it only lasted 18 months, why were they still shelling out bailouts in 2012? Were we ripped off?
You tell me. A stock market crash of historic proportions that happened in a vacuum, with no recession attached?
Are you trying to tell us you never heard of stagflation? Are WIN buttons something your history teacher overlooked? If so, why are you here professing to be a fount of economic information?
So 1939 was a year of prosperity and growth? And what about the first period I asked you about--1934-1936?
None of the people I know who were there considered it to be over by spring.
And lasted well into 1921. It was blamed on the end of the war, but it had more to do with Wilsonian socialism, including the disastrous nationalization of the railroads. It was continuous. They have fun dividing these recessions after the creation of the Fed into two or more recessions. I don't see them doing the same for the recessions in the nineteenth century. Is that the trick? The Fed changes something they use as an "indicator" of recessions, and this allows them to divide one long recession into two or three short recessions? Cute trick.
Sounds like somebody's creating "recoveries" that aren't quite taking hold. Seems to argue my point for me--that allowing a proper, natural recovery to happen works better.
Shall I change the edits you just made to that page? Or was that some other member of the Fed Propaganda Team? If I did straighten it out, how long would the Team let those improvements stand?
It's bull$#@!, Zippy. You're shoveling bull$#@!.
What bailouts were going on in 2012? TARP ended in 2010.If it only lasted 18 months, why were they still shelling out bailouts in 2012? Were we ripped off?
So now I am a Wikipedia editor. Edits to the page:Shall I change the edits you just made to that page? Or was that some other member of the Fed Propaganda Team? If I did straighten it out, how long would the Team let those improvements stand?
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php...action=history
"Stagflation" was slow economic growth accompanied by high inflation. A recession is two consecutive quarters of declining GDP.Are you trying to tell us you never heard of stagflation? Are WIN buttons something your history teacher overlooked? If so, why are you here professing to be a fount of economic information?
Last edited by Zippyjuan; 04-06-2018 at 07:08 PM.
Back to wikipedia for you, Zippy.
And high inflation disguises recessions as economic growth, Zippy. The economy doesn't grow, but the dollar devalues, so the numbers do grow. Which sounds like the very trick the chartmaking propagandists used to divide one long recession into two or three short ones--and to make some seriously painful recessions disappear from the history books altogether.
TARP ended in 2010. What bailouts were going on in 2012?
https://www.thebalance.com/tarp-bailout-program-3305895
Definition: The Troubled Asset Relief Program was a $700 billion bank bailout. On October 3, 2008, Congress authorized it through the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. It allowed the U.S. Department of the Treasury to infuse cash into the nation's banks to keep them operating. Congress approved $350 billion for use in 2008. President Obama chose to not use the remaining $350 billion. TARP expired on October 3, 2010.
I'm sorry, did I say 2012? Silly me. Disbursements were still going out in 2014.
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/45260
Or do you consider the Congressional Budget Office an unreliable source?
Bull$#@! artist.
According to that report (PDF: https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/fi...45260-tarp.pdf )what was still going on (since ended) is some money being used for mortgage adjustments- the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), which was established to provide direct payments to mortgage servicers to allow them to modify mortgages so as to help homeowners avoid foreclosure. All the bailout programs had zero dollars spend in 2014 according to that pdf.
Last edited by Zippyjuan; 04-06-2018 at 08:34 PM.
You didn't - but glossing over (or simply ignoring) such niceties is part of Zippy's modus operandi.
And not only can nothing prevent recessions, but their prevention shouldn't even be attempted in the first place.
Such attempts will only serve to deepen, lengthen and otherwise exacerbate them (e.g., compare 1920-21 vs. 1929-39).
Recessions are unpleasant but necessary purgatives. They flush out of the system the built-up toxins of malinvestment, which are most often (perhaps always?) the result of artificial expansions of credit. Stimulating further such expansions in response to recession is a "hair of the dog" that will only make things worse by feeding the original infection. (e.g., the transition from bad "dot com" bubble to worse "housing" bubble).
IOW: Recessions are the cure, not the disease. But this is not, in their hubris, what politicians (or wanna-be social "engineers" armed with some theory or other) wish to hear ...
The Bastiat Collection · FREE PDF · FREE EPUB · PAPER Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850)
- "When law and morality are in contradiction to each other, the citizen finds himself in the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense, or of losing his respect for the law."
-- The Law (p. 54)- "Government is that great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
-- Government (p. 99)- "[W]ar is always begun in the interest of the few, and at the expense of the many."
-- Economic Sophisms - Second Series (p. 312)- "There are two principles that can never be reconciled - Liberty and Constraint."
-- Harmonies of Political Economy - Book One (p. 447)· tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito ·
Disrupt, Deny, Deflate. Read the RPF trolls' playbook here (post #3): http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...eptive-members
I've read several of your posts and while there have been ideas I disagree with, I applaud your demeanor. You seem sincere and willing to listening new ideas knowing that when you entertain an idea, even ideas that you might disagree with, this is not the same as acceptance of an idea.
Moving on.
That is an interesting and thought-provoking question.
First, let's address the issue of inflation. Austrians tend to view the currency from a fixed perspective as opposed to a floating perspective. The policy prescriptions and descriptions Austrians offer are true if a currency is fixed. Thus the discussions about inflation and the cause and effects that occur are true depending on how you view the currency.
However, the currency isn't fixed and this matters with respect to your question.
That's not to say that there is no inflation or that dollars aren't held by foreign interests devalue over time, but given the reasonably predictable nature of inflation over the last 30 years, if a foreign business agrees to take US dollars in trade, it also knows how many of those dollars it will save over a given period and can estimate losses due to inflation. Those costs are factored in and included in the final cost of products sold here in the US. That is, if a business, using their own estimates, determines that they predict a 2% loss in the value of the dollars they hold, they can add 2% back into their prices. Less value per dollar earned, but earn more of them.
At the end of the day, it really doesn't matter the arbitrary number of currency units we assign to the value of a good or service IF the currency can be created without any real cost (as is the case with a floating fiat currency). What matters is the time/ effort it takes to acquire enough units to pay for expenses and make a profit. That is to say, that the value of a transaction is measured against prices which can adjust just as easily as the number of units of currency.
In conclusion, the answer is no, I don't think the US exports inflation in order to maintain the value of the currency. However, I eagerly await your argument, as I assume that disagree.
One more unrelated thought. I want to make it clear that I'm not arguing that I believe that currencies should or should not be fixed (at least in the arguments I've had so far). That's not to say I don't have an opinion. I just think that most Austrians fail to understand the implications of a floating fiat currency vs. a fixed currency and as a result, they draw improper conclusions about floating currencies. The best example I can think of is the implication of interest rates. Most Austrians believe that the government manipulates rates downward and that this skews information and misallocates fiscal resources. This is false, the truth is exactly the opposite, in a fiat system, the "natural rate of interest" is zero and in order to get the rate above zero the government must manipulate the currency. Again, that's not to pass judgment on fixed vs. floating currencies, but just to point out that most Austrian's I've run into don't understand this and draw erroneous conclusions as a result, even IF, at the end of the day, Austrians are right and fixed systems are better than floating systems.
Respectfully,
E4E1
While I admit that Wikipedia isn't always a perfect resource, did you consult the references given for the statistics given at the bottom of the page before accusing Zippy of manipulating data on Wikipedia?
Maybe this will help?
National Bureau of Economic Research.
Disrupt, Deny, Deflate. Read the RPF trolls' playbook here (post #3): http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...eptive-members
I dont think it does any good to be mathematically correct about anything if I am a dick about it. It is one of the things that can make Freedom unpopular.
Your idea makes decent sense. Also, it is appreciated that you are also saying you dont have any bias for or against, its just an idea to be debated.
1776 > 1984
The FAILURE of the United States Government to operate and maintain an Honest Money System , which frees the ordinary man from the clutches of the money manipulators, is the single largest contributing factor to the World's current Economic Crisis.
The Elimination of Privacy is the Architecture of Genocide
Belief, Money, and Violence are the three ways all people are controlled
The Federal Reserve Un-Discussed Structure
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/w...sed-structure/
Pfizer Macht Frei!
Openly Straight Man, Danke, Awarded Top Rated Influencer. Community Standards Enforcer.
Quiz: Test Your "Income" Tax IQ!
Short Income Tax Video
The Income Tax Is An Excise, And Excise Taxes Are Privilege Taxes
The Federalist Papers, No. 15:
Except as to the rule of appointment, the United States have an indefinite discretion to make requisitions for men and money; but they have no authority to raise either by regulations extending to the individual citizens of America.
Why We May Be Headed For Another ‘Minsky Moment’
jessefelder April 12, 2018
I recently ran across a terrific chart in Grant’s Interest Rate Observer that got me thinking about Hyman Minsky and The Financial Instability Hypothesis. After remaining relatively unknown during the course of his lifetime, Minsky really came to fame in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis as his hypothesis helped to explain what left most economists baffled: the fundamental cause of the crisis. Clearly, though, he has been forgotten just as quickly because, considering where we stand today, it’s obvious the economists with the greatest power to prevent another crisis have still not adopted his insights into their frameworks.
To begin to understand the current situation in Minsky terms we must first understand the hypothesis:
The first theorem of the financial instability hypothesis is that the economy has financing regimes under which it is stable, and financing regimes in which it is unstable. The second theorem of the financial instability hypothesis is that over periods of prolonged prosperity, the economy transits from financial relations that make for a stable system to financial relations that make for an unstable system. In particular, over a protracted period of good times, capitalist economies tend to move from a financial structure dominated by hedge finance units to a structure in which there is large weight to units engaged in speculative and Ponzi finance.
Next we need to understand what these financing units are:
Hedge financing units are those which can fulfill all oftheir contractual payment obligations by their cash flows… Speculative finance units are units that can meet their payment commitments on “income account” on their liabilities, even as they cannot repay the principle out of income cash flows… For Ponzi units, the cash flows from operations are not sufficient to fulfill either the repayment of principle or the interest due on outstanding debts by their cash flows from operations.
And this is what reminded me of Minsky when I read the recent article in Grant’s with the accompanying chart below. It shows the percent of companies in the S&P 500 that would fall into Minsky’s “Ponzi unit” category. Specifically, Bianco Research defines these “zombies” as companies whose interest expense is greater than their 3-year average EBIT (earnings before interest and taxes). Currently, we face the greatest percentage of “Ponzi units” in at least 20 years.
This should be worrisome to investors and even more so to those managing monetary policy because it suggests that financial instability within the economy may be greater than any other time over the past couple of decades. Minsky again:
It can be shown that if hedge financing dominates, then the economy may well be an equilibrium seeking and containing system. In contrast, the greater the weight of speculative and Ponzi finance, the greater the likelihood that the economy is a deviation amplifying system.
Those last three words are critical. “A deviation amplifying system,” simply means an economy built on a virtuous cycle that risks evolving into a vicious one. So long as interest rates remain low and investor risk appetites remain strong zombies will thrive and the economy will, as well, relatively speaking of course. However, should interest rates rise and risk appetites reverse course the risk of a self-reinforcing downturn grows. Minsky explains:
In particular… if an economy with a sizeable body of speculative financial units is in an inflationary state, and the authorities attempt to exorcise inflation by monetary constraint, then speculative units will become Ponzi units and the net worth of previously Ponzi units will quickly evaporate. Consequently, units with cash flow shortfalls will be forced to try to make position by selling out position. This is likely to lead to a collapse of asset values.
Interest rates have been rising for nearly two years now and the Fed seems to have turned its attention from cultivating a wealth effect in the economy by supporting asset prices via quantitative easing to reining in inflation by unwinding those policies and raising the Fed Funds rate. In the process, by way of the Minsky Hypothesis, they may end up undoing everything they strived so hard to achieve over the better part of the past decade.
It’s not hard to imagine just how vulnerable these zombies might be to rising interest rates and waning risk appetites. Should they be forced into liquidation a resulting collapse in asset values could present a major problems for the economy as there are plenty of reasons to believe the wealth effect may be even more powerful to tåhe downside than it was to the upside. Either way, the threat to the economy posed by the greatest corporate zombie army in history is surely enough to make Minsky roll over in his grave.
https://thefelderreport.com/2018/04/...minsky-moment/
Pfizer Macht Frei!
Openly Straight Man, Danke, Awarded Top Rated Influencer. Community Standards Enforcer.
Quiz: Test Your "Income" Tax IQ!
Short Income Tax Video
The Income Tax Is An Excise, And Excise Taxes Are Privilege Taxes
The Federalist Papers, No. 15:
Except as to the rule of appointment, the United States have an indefinite discretion to make requisitions for men and money; but they have no authority to raise either by regulations extending to the individual citizens of America.
Perhaps you should look into Steve Keen, a brilliant economist who has followed Minskey who correctly points out that the real risk in our system is private debt.
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/
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