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Comment by dustingetz | Hacker News Reader

Real central banks share an incentive to inflate asset prices just as much as Crypto exchanges do (altcoin exchanges take profits in crypto and thus are exposed). The parallels to central banking are astounding to me. Except in crypto this happened at internet speed instead of over 50 years.

(I am not talking about money printing and interest rates, I'm talking about actual assets in bubbles like houses and stocks and cryptoassets. Central banks = nation states and nation states want growth in assets)

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Real central banks regularly raise interest rates to prevent over-inflation of asset prices.

Well, they used to...

Rates in the US were raised 3x in 2017, and we're reportedly getting the second of 2018 today.

I think banks have an equal and opposite position. Our debts are their assets. Inflation reduces the value of their assets.

>Our debts are their assets. Inflation reduces the value of their assets.

And our assets are their debts.

So for states which have net debt position (including the US), it is to their advantage to have steady price inflation (i.e. currency value steadily being worth less and less in purchasing power), so that the debt is steadily reduced in "real terms" size. And this is in fact exactly what many/most governments seek to do, using a combination of fiscal policy levers, including issuing debt (government bonds) and also measures such as QE.

Note the "steady" in the above - part of the value of a fiat currency is in its price stability (which is linked/coupled to the confidence people have in it and in the issuing government).

In both direction (inflationary Vs deflationary) and in stability, this is markedly different from what is happening with BTC.

I think you can factor inflation out of it at the international level; USA wants more things priced in dollars (like oil) because we can manufacture dollars but nobody else can – an enormous edge. Which explains why USA foreign policy is what it is in one sentence.

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