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Comment by KozmoNau7 | Hacker News Reader

I'll admit it's my personal estimate, looking at last decade's constant up-up-up of US stocks, especially the tech sector, and (as mentioned in the article) the widening gap between the value of U.S. household assets and GDP growth.

It's unsustainable growth, and I'm afraid the crash is going to happen sooner rather than later.

Will it be as bad as in 2008? I don't know. But it's going to hurt (except if you're wealthy enough to invest heavily right after and ride the wave back up again).

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I'm not an economist. But here is my arm-chair philosophizing about what is happening. To combat the economic crisis we started printing a lot of money. This had two effects: the interest on savings went way down, and the loans became very cheap. Having money = bad, having debts = good, at least for those who can carry the burden. This was done in order to incentivize investing, thus growing the economy. Obviously, that worked: property price and valuations went way up. But those are driven by the future-promise of debt repayment. The moment we stop printing the money, people will get wise and try to sell off those assets again. Because then having money is cheaper than having debt. So now there's a bit of problem: we can't keep printing money faster than the economy grows due to hyperinflation, but we can't /really/ stop doing so either because people will sell off their debts in order to cash in on cheap investments. This to me, seems problematic.

What rate do you consider hyperinflation? Are we in it now? What measure are you using? Afaik we’ve been running under 2% inflation for quite some time.

I think we're hiding the rate of inflation in overvaluation of property and stocks, because money is cheap.

Stuff we dont need have actually been decreasing in prices (tv, electronics)

Stuff we actually need like housing, healthcare (in the US), and education have been rising faster than 2%.

Assets too like stocks have risen much higher as well.

Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTUY16CkS-k

You've got some causality backwards, there. Interest rates were at basement levels before QE. QE was an inflationary measure in part intended to keep rates from going even lower into the negative.

QE was a reaction and counterpressure to low rates, not the cause.

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