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Comment by ramraj07 | Hacker News Reader

Why is it an absolute given that the economy is definitely going to flop? As the days pass I'm convinced more and more that the general economy (and the 1 or 2% of people who are directly benefited by it) will do just fine, even though the majority of the population is jobless and moneyless. This will finally lay bare that the contribution from the majority of the working population is quite optional for the GDP or any measure of economic productivity, and push comes to shove, the institutions (factories, offices) will start realising they can maintain or even increase productivity without involving the majority of the population in the process. Hence the people who have the money now (and are hence in positions that don't necessarily get lost in this process) are likely to continue prospering, while the people who are losing jobs and houses are never going to get them replaced.

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No, the robots haven't taken over, at all.

The reason Apple's share price is booming is because "consumers" are buying their products so their earnings were great. Many of them probably spending printed stimulus money. Same for Amazon.

There is really no magic here except the illusion of unlimited money through quantitative easing.

The QE is the only thing holding things together, if that stops, everyone is going down the same drain to poop town.

Edit: I should also mention many investors are probably putting a lot of money into Apple as it's seen as a safe haven for equities right now.

Apple earnings haven't really improved much in the past 5 years. Their EBITDA is essentially flat. They just buy back their shares aggressively and have a ton of cash. Also a lot of big holders (like Buffett) that aren't going to just drop the stock, so there is a limited supply with people chasing it.

Small businesses are getting killed because the government deemed most of them "non-essential" so big boxes and eCommerce were the only things available, so of course Amazon, Walmart, Target, etc are all doing incredibly well. Their small competition was killed off. This pandemic has definitely worsened the transfer of wealth from the small hands to the large hands, and it's 100% the government's fault.

side question , but do you happen to have any resources explaining what could be the limit to unlimited QE and what precise series of event will be triggered when that limit is reached ( knowing that everyone is doing the same at the moment, from us to eu to cn).

Like the other poster mentioned, we don't really know.

I'm not an economist, just an interested investor and from my understanding, using QE on this scale is just an easy short term solution to a longer term, hard problem.

Printing money like this has never really been done before on this scale, but the fear is that "printing money" like this will potentially lead to very bad debt and hyperinflation inflation crisis (maybe already started).

The limitations of QE aren't entirely known, but will be known as more money is printed and money becomes more worthless.

Will having a lot of "monopoly money" in circulation be a problem? Time will tell; however there have been many examples where hyper inflation has caused economies to fail, such as Venezuela recently and the Roman Empire in the past.

The US Federal Reserve should probably be careful with their actions because they wouldn't be the first country to run into dire issues doing this.

What I fear is, the people at the top of the US are blinded by greed and the desire to be reelected and aren't concerned about the lessons of history.

QE isn't really the same as direct money printing. Most of the money seems to find its way into financial markets rather than directly into peoples pockets. So people will see their retirement accounts or stock holdings doing OK and maybe even cash some in to spend, or at a minimum make them feel comfortable with their current level of expenditure.

But we've had QE for over a decade in various amounts and it didn't lead to inflation, unless there's direct monetisation (the fed prints money and gives it to the government to spend in an unlimited fashion) I'm not sure why the situation would change.

Inflation has been most focused in assets and investments. The government has gone at great lengths not to count these in their inflation measures, but all that QE going into stocks and housing bidding wars can’t be a good thing in the long term.

Housing is included in CPI.

"Didnt lead to inflation"

You are kidding, right?

have you seen what is happening in healthcare? Do you have kids in college? Have you tried to buy a residence in a large urban area like seattle, nyc, miami? Have seen what is happening to food package sizes ij most american supermarkets? Do you know the increasing rate of us retirees is no longer flocking to fl, but abroad? Do you realize that it is no longer possible for a working class family to sustain itself with 1 breadwinner? Do you wonder why?

Just because tech , internet, and freight efficiencies are keeping in check in some sectors of the economy doesnt mean there is no inflation.

We are heading into the lost decades of japan

Welcome to salaryman life , where you live in a shoebox amd expect no asset accumulation for the rest of your life

I don't feel comparing modern US economy to Venesuela / Roman Empire, which has to import almost everything, is fair.

That's the thing, nobody knows. QE is just the end state for Keynesian economics, at least as far as I can tell.

I'd be amazed if it ends well, we haven't invented a perpetuum mobile yet...

I'm not sure there's a limit, it's just perpetual shifting of value from people with savings to the government and financial institutions.

I tend to believe Ray Dalio's theory about the long term debt cycle but we will see how it pans out. If the oracle of Omaha is still of any value it also signals tough times ahead

> Many of them probably spending printed stimulus money.

$1200 issued months ago?

This. There is an election coming up, and (not trying to get political here, but) it is likely that a shift in power will occur. The current administration is trying to prop things up just long enough to set up a huge crash just after they lose power. It’s a fake recovery.

I don't believe the current administration are capable of mentally processing the prospect of losing, let alone that they want to lose.

I've been thinking along those same lines. Basically feels like we're returning to a form of feudalism, with a rather established aristocracy and nobility already in place.

I'm just waiting for the financially ailing counties to start selling themselves in their totality to corporations and those corporations begin providing employment in exchange for literal cradle-to-grave services.

The seignorialism aspect of feudalism is now absent though: the lord needed peasants to work his lands. This new ruling class doesn't need the labor of the growing unemployed and forgotten class - only their consumption.

The lords need some work done, but they're making sure people earn as little as possible, have zero ties, and no transferable skills. I'm thinking of McJobs; zero-hour contracts, contractors, gig economy work, that kinda thing.

This is IMO more what I see, we're all working harder, for less, but we're all still working.

That's the way of it, because automation makes things cost less, but only the things that get automated. But if things cost less then you can pay people less. So what happens is that all the money goes to the places with artificial scarcity.

We don't have meaningful scarcity anymore, not for the essentials anyway. There is a finite amount of land but not a finite amount of housing units, because you can build arbitrarily many of them on top of each other. We can produce more food than people have any need to eat and producers then spend rather a lot of money convincing them to buy more than that. Medicine is only genuinely scarce to the extent that it's limited by labor availability, which means labor should move there and drive down the price unless something is constraining it.

But if you can make something like housing or medicine artificially scarce, you can suck all the surplus out of everybody's paycheck. And that's the problem.

Can you name one industry where labor is truly no longer needed, where it once was (in recent times)?

Maybe an example of a person who makes a large some of money through having zero employees where they used to have many and where those people were replaced with automation and completely obsoleted.

Not challenging you, I'm just interested in your theory.

Pocket calculators. Paper calendars. Film cameras and film development labs. Alarm clocks. Analog telephones, one for every room. Pens and paper and correction fluid and typewriters and typewriter ribbons and typewriter repair service, as physical things that required labor to exist.

A phone/computer replaces all of those, but it's one product instead of hundreds. It doesn't take anywhere near the labor to produce as all of those things once did.

I would say IT is an industry that made itself, as well as other industries greatly reduce the number of employees.

Not quite zero employees but numbers were reduced greatly, ie accounting. Example: accounting, before you needed a team of accountants for a mid level enterprise, not sometimes even one is sufficient.

> Example: accounting, before you needed a team of accountants for a mid level enterprise, not sometimes even one is sufficient.

If The Office was made today, you'd just have Oscar in accounting and Jim closing deals alongside a robocaller

Essentially this!

To be fair, Dwight was likely modeled on a robocaller!

Do you work in IT?

Because I'm constantly gobsmacked by inefficiencies and companies that have too many people involved in achieving simple goals?

I do work in IT.

> Because I'm constantly gobsmacked by inefficiencies and companies that have too many people involved in achieving simple goals?

That is also true, by no means I am implying that. There is a lot of inefficiency in many companies, but at the same time what took X people in the past now takes X-Y people for many sectors, ie accounting. Another good example is website creation and development for Small-Medium Enterprise. In the 90-s/2000s you had to pay someone to create a website for you, where now there are countless website builders, some of which are really great.

It needs their attention more than their consumption I suspect.

I think this was already the case. This piece is from 2016: https://morecrows.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/unnecessariat/

> Here’s the thing: from where I live, the world has drifted away. We aren’t precarious, we’re unnecessary. The money has gone to the top. The wages have gone to the top. The recovery has gone to the top. And what’s worst of all, everybody who matters seems basically pretty okay with that. The new bright sparks, cheerfully referred to as “Young Gods” believe themselves to be the honest winners in a new invent-or-die economy, and are busily planning to escape into space or acquire superpowers, and instead of worrying about this, the talking heads on TV tell you its all a good thing- don’t worry, the recession’s over and everything’s better now, and technology is TOTES AMAZEBALLS!

> even though the majority of the population is jobless and moneyless

Unemployment is high, but much lower than the initial surge from coronavirus. It's likely we're still seeing significant hour/shift reduction, but as lockdown measures relax that will mostly let up or those workers will shift to different fields.

We are seeing things shift away from brick and mortars, but that isn't new just accelerated. It seems like ecommerce is eating everyones lunch now.

It's not all about productivity. Who is going to buy the new iPhone, or the new car, or an XBox?

The people in the newly wealthy countries like China of course.

But the same process can happen there. Then what?

You're retired as a CEO with plenty of investments by then

That’s easy - the ones with the money. If the wealth divides, so will the product offferings from those companies. A bit of an inconvenient truth for many of us.

So that implies that when companies keep the same revenue, their offering will become more expensive (Nobody needs 5 iPhones).

This also implies that the ones that are able to buy an iPhone, will pay significantly more for it. Which will make the ones that can afford it even more narrow.

There is something wrong with the reasoning that losing a big part of the market has no influence on companies and consumers that are still able to afford things. This impacts everyone, there is no question about that. Maybe some more than others, but everyone will feel it.

That makes no sence, many demands are not elastic. You are bot going to buy 10x mor macbooks, shoes, and baking powder if you are 10x wealthier.

No, but you might buy that $1200 iPhone instead of the $400 model.

Okay, how large % of your total expenditure is iPhones? do you buy them weekly?

> though the majority of the population is jobless and moneyless

This doesn’t match the actual unemployment numbers.

You could categorise lots of zero hour contracts and self employed folks as jobless and moneyless. I would say that most people living from paycheck to paychek are moneyless.

The economy as a whole? Probably not, because it's more measured according to the country's whole GDP and stock market instead of personal tragedies like getting evicted or bankrupted.

(disclaimer: not an economist, just a dude in an armchair with an Opinion)

But if ‘personal tragedies’ make up a quarter of your country’s population, it starts to look more like a whole-economy issue, right?

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