You sure inflation isn’t here?
Houses are up massively, land, cars, stocks, crypto, etc.
The inflation measurement is off. But the inflation is here.
Houses are up massively, land, cars, stocks, crypto, etc.
The inflation measurement is off. But the inflation is here.
* https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2021/01/inflation-truthers/
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25644580
If you don't believe the government-published CPI you can confirm their work, as others have done:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Billion_Prices_project
For your items:
* Monthly carrying costs haven't changed much: prices up, but mortgage rates are down. Plus average square footage has gone up, so you're getting more.
* Land depends on location, and urban prices have gone up because it's more cool to live in the city now than in the 1970s and 1980s. I live in Toronto, so I know all about land/housing prices over the last 10-15 years.
* Modern cars have more power, while burning less fuel, and being safer, and on average lasting longer, for the same money. I own a 2003 Golf that I paid $30K for (in 2003). What's available for $30K is a lot better, and the equivalent dollars today is closer to $40K—which gets you some sweet things.
* I was invested in 2008: I've seen stocks go up and down.
* Crypto is a Ponzi scheme.
> Is there a framework we should be describing this with besides the broad “inflation” term?
If asset prices are higher than what they "should" be, then one generally calls that a bubble.
Further, the resources needed as raw material are finite (unless we start asteroid mining), as is the energy needed in the process: we have only so many gigawatts we can produce at one time.
More plants can be built, but those take resources as well: some of the very same resources that are needed to build the cars we're talking about.
I agree but that doesn't explain why Bitcoin had multiple bubbles and survived all of them. Bitcoin is highly deflationary. Bitcoins are lost all the time. The supply is only growing very slowly. It's also an "immature" asset compared to gold so a large influx of a new class of investors can drive the price up.
For the same reason people still go to astrologers or think that during the playoffs the can't shave or their favourite team will lose: cognitive biases and wishful thinking.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
The fact that the bubbles happen so often and and so drastically is another reason that I avoid it: volatility is generally a proxy measurement of risk, and what reward am I gaining by taking on this risk?
Everyone is bullish on it at >US$ 40K, but people seem to have forgotten that it dropped by half in two days in March 2020:
* https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/13/bitcoin-loses-half-of-its-va...
If someone wants to have it in their 'portfolio' at some small percentage as part of their "play money" that's one thing, but to make it a significant portion seems foolish to me.
I do feel a bit of FOMO, and may eventually create a trading account with like 5% of my portfolio for playing around in WSB and Crypto and such, but right now I'm fully invested in index and bond funds (80/20), so don't really have spare cash available for any of these temptations.
I've never heard anybody educated on the matter make this statement. It's always from someone that doesn't understand it and therefore thinks it's a scam.
It has failed as a payment system, as a currency, as a reserve currency, a remittance channel, a timestamping service, a settlement layer, a bank for the "unbanked", a cypherpunk liberator, a money laundering tool, a drugs-by-mail tool, a unit of accounting, a store of value, and as a "disruptive" fintech technology.
What exactly is the value in holding Bitcoin (or whatever)? My only hope is having someone in future come along and take it off my hands at a higher value than I bough it.
When I think of crypto/Bitcoin, I am reminded of Warren Buffett's view on gold:
> Today the world’s gold stock is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $1,750 per ounce – gold’s price as I write this – its value would be $9.6 trillion. Call this cube pile A.
> Let’s now create a pile B costing an equal amount. For that, we could buy all U.S. cropland (400 million acres with output of about $200 billion annually), plus 16 Exxon Mobils (the world’s most profitable company, one earning more than $40 billion annually). After these purchases, we would have about $1 trillion left over for walking-around money (no sense feeling strapped after this buying binge). Can you imagine an investor with $9.6 trillion selecting pile A over pile B?
[…]
> A century from now the 400 million acres of farmland will have produced staggering amounts of corn, wheat, cotton, and other crops – and will continue to produce that valuable bounty, whatever the currency may be. Exxon Mobil will probably have delivered trillions of dollars in dividends to its owners and will also hold assets worth many more trillions (and, remember, you get 16 Exxons). The 170,000 tons of gold will be unchanged in size and still incapable of producing anything. You can fondle the cube, but it will not respond.
It is more akin to tulip mania, dependent on inflated futures with diminishing utility.
Presently though, it's better than cash, which finds itself in a similar position.
As someone with another couple of decades until retirement I'd love a crash about now so that I could "buy low".
I bought it when I graduated and my first job was in an office park with little transit. Since then I've mostly worked in more urban areas, so I've been able to take transit or pedal, and so mostly use the car on weekends.
A lot of younger people don't seem to realize that this is new. That you used to be able to put your money in a bank and not lose it. While rock-bottom interest rates are good in some ways, I don't see this as a positive trend overall, especially given how shark-filled the financial waters are for most people. I'm a big fan of the Vegas dictum - "there's a patsy at every table, and if you don't know who the patsy is, it's you". As a retail investor, you're pretty much always the patsy.
Unfortunately we're seeing land prices and stock prices and crypto (etc) bid up instead of, say, a massive build out of factories and solar farms and multistory houses. (EDIT: We are seeing lots of houses being built, actually. Lumber is near all-time highs.)
But why did this apparently only become the case after 2008? Positive real returns without gambling were acceptable before that, and we still got a gigantic speculative bubble, so why does it suddenly become reasonable to encourage bubbles even more? Was it just a coordination problem? An initial panic reaction to slash to zero, and then no central bank being willing to go first and unwind it?
As you say, the other major part of this problem is the inability or unwillingness to steer money toward productive investment rather than speculation. Here in the UK it's housing that's the killer; my suspicion is that governments have become addicted to the jam-today enabled by the money created for mortgage loans, which will then have to be paid off on some other poor sucker's watch.
The Fed provides loans to banks who then provide loans to companies so that they can grow faster. It's about increasing efficiency, not about total possible upside.
However, there is a point after which businesses have enough loans for all the investments they have planned. Every single dollar after that is too much and does nothing.
The next step is to spend money in a way that creates more investment opportunities for those companies. In short you want to balance supply and demand.
The simplest spending target would be to pick a industry that is not in competition with private industry. My personal favorite are renewables and other infrastructure because you will not displace existing companies through government spending.
Carbon taxes also create an incentive to borrow more money and do productive work but they do gnaw at CO2 spewing private industry which is the entire point but there are vested interests that don't want to lose their money.
What you are calling inflation is actually the opposite. It's deflation. When hoarding assets becomes more profitable than working, the real world economy starts dying and CPI reflects that very well.
Workers benefit from inflation because inflation is generally followed by productive investments. Driving prices of consumer goods up makes it profitable to produce them which makes it profitable to employ people to produce them.
Deflation makes it harder to run a profitable business but it also makes it easier to run a non profitable business (that also includes overvalued businesses that do not earn enough to justify their valuation).