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Comment by tobmlt | Hacker News Reader

Yep. The fed is an engine, whose purpose is to move wealth silently from the masses to the powerful monied few, via time-asymmetric inflation. (Mostly Inflation of assets presently) The resulting data looks like corporations have used their power to directly disenfranchise/disempower workers, and so the mass clamber for protective laws. More laws will be enacted by those in power. The time is certainly right for it. The laws will be constructed such that they will entrench the existing power structures, and meanwhile the fed will motor on, unaffected. Nothing changes for the good while this engine continues to run. And it will run at ever increasing rates, because it has to, in order to continue to do its work of supercharging the economy from the top down. Get on the train (Ride the coat-tails of the great and powerful as best you can by investing) or be left behind in a wake of generally stagnant wages (stagnant for lots of reasons), and mildly rising prices. Meanwhile housing prices (housing costs to you) and stocks are off on a rocket-ship to the stars.

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The Fed is stabilizing the price of the USD because of the coronavirus pandemic. If it were not printing money, then there would likely be a deflationary spiral that would cause a depression.

That's one of the reasons why the Great Depression was so bad: the US was on the gold standard at the beginning. The US can't create gold out of thin air, so the USD started deflating, people stopped spending, and capital stopped flowing. Companies went bankrupt, people lost jobs — all because much needed dollars were stuffed in people's mattresses instead of being spent.

The Fed is increasing the money supply by purchasing bonds because corporations need cheaper capital to pay their workers and their bills. When the pandemic is over, it will sell back these bonds the banks it bought them from. Without the Fed's intervention, this recession and pandemic would have been far, far worse.

Of course, helping corporations also helps the people who own the corporations: the rich. That's a distributional issue, and the main solution is tax policy. We need to raise income and estate taxes on the rich, increase the tax on capital gains, and institute a wealth tax.

The Fed is like an engine. But engines are a tool. Tools can cause good things and bad things. Right now, the Fed is causing good things by providing liquidity, which has the side effect of causing bad things because it lets the rich accumulate wealth.

If the Fed is like an engine, then it serves to move a train — the economy. If the train is runaway — if the economy benefits the rich far more than normal people — that doesn't mean engines are bad. It means we need to stop the train, fix it, and start the engine again.

If we restructure our economy, the Fed will still continue to do good things, with fewer negative side effects. That would be, on net, good. So the problem isn't with the Fed, it's with the economy. And claiming that the Fed is the root of all our problems misses the bigger picture.

> The Fed is stabilizing the price of the USD because of the coronavirus pandemic. If it were not printing money, then there would likely be a deflationary spiral that would cause a depression.

And by doing that, we have the Cantillon Effect [0].

> The Cantillon Effect refers to the change in relative prices resulting from a change in money supply. The change in relative prices occurs because the change in money supply has a specific injection point and therefore a specific flow path through the economy. *The first recipient of the new supply of money is in the convenient position of being able to spend extra dollars before prices have increased. But whoever is last in line receives his share of new dollars after prices have increased*. This is why when the Treasury’s deficit is monetized, inflation is referred to as a non-legislated tax. In these cases, the government has seized purchasing power (rather than physical bills) from its citizens without congressional approval.

[0] https://www.aier.org/article/cantillon-effects-and-money-neu...

What's a good hedge against the Cantillon Effect?

My own personal favorite notion of a hedge for this is wages. Boost wages to match the money supply, and most of those wages will get spent across the economy as well as providing for the wage earners. Of course, this is what many more economically-educated people than I warn against.

Employees can't control their own wage increases though..but it explains why job hopping is prevalent and understandable nowadays as the only realistic way to keep up.

Increasing minimum wage would definitely increase money spent throughout the economy, but I think business owners would offset that cost by creatively reducing/stagnating pay and benefits for middle-class type roles. And the resulting extra demand (without extra supply) would prob lead to higher prices for common goods/services (even more inflation), therefore compounding the issue we are discussing now. On top of that, a big chunk of the extra minimum-wage money spent (by the employees) will end up in the pockets of the richest as they "reinvest profits back into the business". IMO this is essentially transferring wealth from the middle-class to the upper-class via extra money paid to the lower-class.

My personal favorite way for boosting wages would be a job guarantee. Hand-wavy explanation: Having the government hire people who can't find work elsewhere puts a floor on both unemployment and on the minimum that other entities have to provide in a job. More detail in this interview [0] of Pavlina Tcherneva, author of 'The Case for a Job Guarantee' by Mark Blyth (the most entertaining political economist, IMO.)

[0] https://soundcloud.com/rhodescenter/is-now-the-time-for-a-fe...

Having more injection points, for example, UBI.

I think the best option is to stop the injection and let the natural price inflation (from raises in population and efficiency) catch up.

Inject the money somewhere else? UBI perhaps?

I mean as a personal investment hedge to protect against the artificial inflation

IMO the way to decide that follows from questions like: What does the Fed buy? Second question: What do the sellers to the Fed buy (where do they spend the proceeds?), and wherever the spending chain goes from there. To my eye, stocks and real estate, at least right now.

Borrow money.

And invest it in startups

Just invest in the stock market. That protects you from inflation.

Lobby for the government to use use as an injection point?

I would guess owning assets?

There are differences of opinion on what is the cause and the effect [1]. There were deeper reasons for the deflation and by cutting production and preventing deflation, it made it much more difficult for small businesses and individuals to buy food or continue business. That benefited large corporations at the expense of the smaller ones. The government taxed the poor, then subsidized farmers to stop producing, which made the food more expensive which further hobbled the poor.

The Fed benefits banks and the wealthy. Inflation and increasing money supply makes labor cheaper for businesses and hurts those on fixed salary or wage by decreasing the real value of wages over time.

[1] https://mises.org/library/how-fdr-made-depression-worse

> When the pandemic is over, it will sell back these bonds the banks it bought them from.

This remains to be seen, the market had an absolute fit when they said QE was tapering in 2013, and also had an absolute fit when Powell was raising rates in 2018, particularly in December.

The Fed may have painted themselves into a corner here, nothing is certain with regards to unwinding QE or raising rates.

I've heard (from finance professionals) that big elephant in the room is corporate debt. Corporations need to roll over their debt when it comes due, and a fair amount of it is short-term paper. If interest rates rise, that debt will become a lot more expensive, which will make many of the more marginal companies insolvent. Not software companies, which are sitting on hoards of cash, but all of the ordinary manufacturing/retail/service/financial companies that employ millions of Americans. If they go bankrupt we'll see unemployment worse than the COVID lockdown, but moving up the income ladder into what's left of the middle class. This was why the Fed flinched in 2018.

To me (and this is a minority viewpoint - my finance industry friends disagreed), the way this plays out is both obvious and terrible. The Fed knows that if they raise interest rates, very large American institutions are going to go bankrupt and millions of Americans will be thrown out of work. The Fed's primary mandate is full employment (adjusted last year from a dual mandate of "full employment and low inflation"). Therefore, the Fed is not going to raise interest rates. We'll see this first as a massive asset bubble during the early 2020s, and then as rising inflation in the later 2020s, and then finally as hyperinflation. When it gets to the hyperinflation stage the Fed will take notice and raise rates, but it's too late by then. Hyperinflation is characterized as a sharp increase in the velocity of money, which makes traditional monetary policy tools ineffective for curbing it. You have to ditch the currency and start over with a new one.

large institutions going bankrupt doesn't mean millions of americans will be thrown out of work. that's a boogeyman used by economists to short-circuit that line of thinking because it threatens moneyed interests. the value of those businesses remains and they'll be quickly bought up and revitalized by excess capital looking for returns (part of the problem is concentrated wealth that doesn’t know what to do with itself). let that excess capital be unleashed rather than sitting sidelined. we need more bankruptcies at the unproductive top-heavy end of the economy.

So true. The Fed is essentially a dam built to stop the existing machinations of capitalism from flowing as they were intended. The longer it remains in place, the harder it will be to prevent these forces from occurring until eventually (like now) the economy no longer resembles a capitalist system.

This!

which is highly dangerous to the general stability of society. When economic policy results in massive finanicial instability for the common worker (thanks to hyperinflation and insane asset prices) it creates a power vacuum which can be filled by those promising to fix the problem quickly and swiftly.

Yes. But hyperinflation and insane asset prices aren't required. You simply need a highly dissatisfied and highly motivated "fringe group" to set off a chain reaction. We're flirting with that now. The next POTUS election is the one to watch. 2020 was overrated in terms of significance. The next vacuum filler(s) will have intent and focus. They've seen what's possible without out really trying. The market hasn't improved; the "competition" remains blind and/or in denial. There's still plenty of opportunity.

Yeah, interest rate risk and increased debt service costs bankrupting companies is a bigger issue than slowing or stopping QE. I hope the Fed can figure a way out of this without hyperinflation, but it’s a distinct possibility. I agree that they’ll wait to raise rates until inflation really starts cooking above 3%.

So, we need to see loan-forgiveness for businesses then?

Trying to figure out how you unwind it slowly when apparently "slowing raising rates" still destroys many businesses with a lot of debt...

I don't like loan-forgiveness for all the reasons brobdingnagians mentioned. Also, it introduces moral hazard into the economy: companies assume further loan-forgiveness is coming, so they think nothing about taking on unsustainable levels of debt. (To a large extent, this is what's happening now: after the 2009 bailouts companies figured they were too big to fail.)

The root cause of this is that our economy has become hyper-optimized around monetary policy that's unsustainable. With markets trending toward efficiency, all major companies that exist today build in the assumption of 0% interest rates into the cost & capital structures of the business. Many activities they engage in would probably become unprofitable at higher interest rates, which means mass layoffs, restructurings, different business processes, possibly adoption of different technologies, products & services going away, etc. Change the monetary environment and you get different companies, different technologies, different supply chains. But the current monetary environment means that whenever there's a demand shock, the Fed has nowhere to drop rates, and whenever there's a supply shock, there's a potential inflationary price spiral.

The Fed, to their credit, recognizes this predicament. That's why they're targeting > 2% inflation, so there's room to raise rates. They've also said that any increase in rates will be well-telegraphed, to give companies time to adjust.

But I have doubts that this'll work. Simply because this isn't a tweak now, this is an existential change to how companies structure their operations. And any company that prepares for it before the Fed actually raises rates will be outcompeted by companies that do nothing, so no company is going to take the mere warning seriously.

It occurs to me that post-Volcker monetary & government policy has basically served to weld the economy & government together so that it's impossible for one part to fail without it all failing. We used to have recessions every 5-10 years; these would clear away uncompetitive businesses so the capital could be recycled into new ones. In trying to "smooth over" these recessions, and then outright bailing them out in 2009, and then failing to raise rates in 2013/2015/2018, we've coupled the whole economy's fortunes together, and then coupled it to the government. As a result, we can't sweep away companies that are doing the wrong thing without widespread civil unrest.

The issue with loan forgiveness is that it is a massive wealth transfer from creditors to debtors. People who made bad bets by getting deeply in debt are rewarded, while people who saved and loaned money get shafted. That unbalances the economy and misallocates resources. Which could do even more damage. There isn't really a clean way out. If businesses started preparing & managed their money better while paying off their debts, that would probably be the safest way out.

Why would you prepare and manage your money better when you can always just get another loan at a great rate? It makes no sense to save when borrowing is more profitable.

I'm starting to think that it's time to let the unproductive businesses that have blossomed over the last 12 years go bankrupt and be removed from the system. Unfortunately a lot of productive businesses that are temporarily unproductive had been using their cash for stock buybacks and using easy corp debt to run operations, and so with the pandemic, those wold get washed out too. Maybe the laws banning stock buybacks prior to Reagan weren't such a bad idea?

On the other hand how can the fed buy bonds from the "good" companies worth saving, and not from the "bad" companies that can freeride until "eventual" profitability?

I suppose you let the market decide - let the bonds float, and anything worth saving should be bought back up by the people enriched by the buybacks, right? Isn't that what efficient markets and capitalism are all about?

Save the people (using unemployment) and ditch the hollow husks of marginal companies that have rotted from within?

Dumb idea: maybe if you had a published interest rate schedule that planned out 10 years, 15 years, whatever. So everyone knew what the bond/loan base interest rates would look like for the next 15 years.

years 0 - 7: base interest rate ramps up from 3% now to 10%

years 8 - 15: base interest rate ramps down from 10% to 3%

years 16-21: repeat

years 22-28: repeat

Downside I'm sure is that people who come of age during high-interest-rate periods can't get car loans or education loans that don't eat them alive...

This seems sort of like what the Fed intends to do now, only with maybe lower rates overall - 0 for a few years, ramping to a target of 2 or 3, but I guess no real guidance after that. Unfortunately the Fed has pretty blunt tools, even after their upgrade back in March 2020. Using some of the surplus wealth from the asset holding class (top half of the K) to implement UBI, healthcare education, for the class that has most of it's wealth tied up in future wages (bottom half of the K). This would take congress though, and I'm not confident that we'll see anything recurring after the next round of stimulus.

There is risk here though - bottom up stimulus comes with it's own moral hazard issues, but then again I don't know what the net drag / benefit is compared to zombie companies getting infinite credit moral hazard we have now. I suspect UBI for individuals leads to fewer systemic risk sorts of issues, but I really don't know, it's very hard to envision what actually ends up happening due to lack of having ever experienced anything like that in my lifetime.

It would be nice if we could try it out - but there's probably a momentum term hidden in there somewhere - give an inch take a mile sort of thinking. Is UBI like corporate debt backstopping? Once you get a taste you can never go back?

I really don't see any good answers here other than "try to be on the top half of the K, and also try not to get eaten".

The 30 year rate has been dropping at 2% every decade for the last 5 decades at a steady rate[0]. If the fed attempts to taper inflation by increasing the interest rate above the 30 year, we will hit a yield curve inversion and trigger another recession, just like every previous recession in the past 50 years. So no, we can't go back to 2 or 3. And by 2030, we can't even stay at 0.

The big problem with bottom up is that you need a lot of it to continue the money supply expansion, and money created that is given to spenders as opposed to savers triggers inflation at drastically higher rates.

[0]:https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=AzYM

Yeah, that's sort of the conclusion I keep coming to. If I understand correctly, I'm assuming that when you say that bottom up triggers inflation, you're referring to price inflation / core CPI / any of the other 20 measures of inflation in physical consumable goods required for survival. Whereas top down (as we have been doing because fed and treasury can't seem to work together) tends to keep price levels for core CPI constant, but does lead to monetary expansion, or the multiplier between higher M's like M3 M4 and total assets over base money to grow, putting most of the price inflation into financial assets instead (My house is up 30% compared to bread this year from pre-pandemic prices, my 401(k) is up 80% investing in "low risk equities" compared to the same).

What are other alternatives? More of the same and hope technological multipliers for productivity continue to outpace CPI inflation so that there aren't bread lines? Charity? I suppose you can keep doing monetary stimulus without fiscal, and then increase taxes, and spend it on infrastructure that improves everyones lives?

You don't just have to watch out for CPI inflation to be outpaced by productivity. The money supply needs to also outpace productivity if you want the same status quo.

I've built up an intuition that the money supply should match changes in productivity, and that if it doesn't it will eventually lead to problems. But it's also notable that the trend is extremely important. If you do match, everything should be fine and this can last forever. If the money supply rises faster than productivity, you see what we've seen these past 50 years since we've been off the gold standard, a huge surge in asset prices. And if productivity rises faster than the money supply, people flee assets and into money. This is called a Deflationary Spiral. But the opposite state is basically an Inflationary Spiral, with people unwilling to spend their assets.

Dalio in his "Explaining the Economic Machine" video talks about a "Beautiful Deleveraging". My thought currently is that such a thing isn't possible. If you wait for the debt to get so bad that you have to do something, you can't match productivity anymore. Therefore the only thing you are left to do is grow the money supply less than productivity. And that changes everything. Suddenly the trend is to money. And once the money managers work that out, they all rush out of assets and into cash. This triggers a crash. So it's the trend that dominates, and there is no way to balance the deleveraging.

So the way I see this going is in any of these scenarios

1. Negative rates. All pretext is lost.

2. Repeat of Japan. Government ends up owning half of the stock market.

3. Mild to extreme bottom-up during a planned crash of assets. In this path you will see the stock market crash at the same time inflation soars.

Number three is the hardest but also the one that will end up with the best productivity. When you see stories like Bill Gates being the largest private farmowner[0], you might see it as an ominous warning that the rich are hedging this possibility and are making sure they end up okay.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-land-portfolio-bi...

> The Fed is stabilizing the price of the USD because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The pandemic is a case of exactly when the gov. should step in. Unfortunately the gov. is slow and takes so much time to do anything.

> That's a distributional issue, and the main solution is tax policy.

Exactly. I think a better argument could have been made by looking at the tax cuts a couple of years ago. Companies didn't go on hiring sprees or even keep any money in the bank. They did stock buy backs, paid bonuses, etc...so that when the pandemic did hit they had nothing to fall back on (see the airlines).

CEO bonuses, not always a good thing. Buybacks are not always good (because stock-compensated corporate managers sometimes abuse them to increase the stock price), but for airlines, buying stock was the right choice. You can read Matt Levine's argument, but basically:

If airlines didn't spend money on buying back stock, they could have:

1. Invested it in growth. But if they had invested it in all the normal things an airline might invest in, they would still suffering because of the pandemic.

2. Saved it for a rainy day.

You're arguing (2) should have happened. But an important thing to remember is that companies' savings are not like your savings — companies have far more reliable future cash flow, which means that they can borrow at much lower rates than you can through the equity markets.

If airlines had saved their earnings, maybe they would have grown at bond rates (investing the company's savings in the stock market is too risky and unorthodox for corporate finance officers). That's not good for investors who are looking for 1) return on capital and 2) higher exposure to travel. By returning the capital to investors, airlines increased their exposure to airline-adjacent things and their return on capital. That's a good thing for investors because it gives them more choice! If an investor wants a safer investment, they can create their own basket of bonds and airline stonks.

Similarly, now that the coronavirus has hit, investors know that airlines' fundamentals haven't changed — they're just hitting temporary turbulence. So, to raise capital, airlines can issue stocks and bonds to temporarily get them through 12-24 months. And that's exactly what they did last May: https://www.wsj.com/articles/aviation-industry-races-for-cas...

Basically: corporate finance is not like personal finance, and it's a mistake to think that companies need "rainy day funds." They don't: that's what the equity markets are for.

What about paying dividends to stockholders or (heaven forfend) raising wages?

As for "rainy day" uses, giving the company pension fund a windfall would probably qualify.

Paying dividends to shareholders accomplishes the same thing as buying back stocks: both return capital to investors.

Increasing the company pension would not have saved them from their current woes: they would still need to issue debt or equity.

Not exactly, because share buybacks are optional. A shareholder can decline to participate, increasing their stake in the company (meaning the investor believes that the net present value of the shares is higher than the price offered under the buyback).

It’s not common, though (and for the purposes of the comment you responded to, the distinction isn’t relevant). If management are saying “we can’t think of anything to do with this money”, most investors won’t disagree with them.

A shareholder can also reinvest dividends. Doesn't that accomplish the same thing as not participating in a buyback?

Only if the company allows them to (or is simultaneously raising capital). Also I believe (though not 100% sure, depending on where you are) that income tax is paid on dividends, irrespective of whether you subsequently reinvest.

Basic financial planning. Unstable cash flow (for example the cyclical airline industry) requires cash reserves and ideally a cost structure that emphasizes variable costs tied to actual units (passengers) to lessen impact of up/down cycles. Bailouts short-circuit this type of healthy planning.

Can you link to Matt Levine's argument? (I googled a little but didn't see what you were talking about)

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-17/the-go...

I appreciate your counter argument and am familiar with it. I disagree about the Great Depression and pretty much everything else you’ve said, but I mean no disrespect, only contend that there is a whole body of economic thought that agrees with me, and that mainstream Econ (recognizing the plurality of schools of thought here) has swept under the rug, because it’s inconvenient. I know “my side” is unpopular and “discredited”. I think it happens to mainly be right, simpler, and generally disabling to the status quo, which I’d characterize as built to enable active interventions. I’ve said nothing about what to Actually do to fix this all, because that is more complex, and not addressed properly, in the main, by anybody. I think one has to recognize the pain that unwinding all of this must cause, and not just “switch it all out”. Heck of a mess!

I’ll be happy to get my (Of course discredited) books out and recite the counter case about the Great Depression if anybody really wants me to later. Basically the fed and various policies caused what should have been a short sharp correction/stock-crash (at the end of a runaway fed built stock market streak) to extend into a long drawn out mess. Forgetting innumerable details I am sure. But yeah, I know you don’t agree. I do not find your case compelling.

While I have a chance, here is a good book on the Austrian case against the status quo narrative on the great depression:

https://cdn.mises.org/Americas%20Great%20Depression_3.pdf

This is, in the main, what I allude to on that one point (caveat, I am not a gold bug and of course Rothbard is. I think focusing on specific instances of "the way to implement an idea" allows people to laugh at the specific to forget/discredit the greater idea itself. Similar issues arise with Austrian rejection of stats and involved mathematical analysis.). I do not subscribe to those ideas, but find the bulk of the economic analysis itself compelling.

If you're talking Austrian economists, who are the primary proponent of the "fed is the bad buy, bring back the gold standard" argument, they explicitly reject any attempt at modeling or mathematical analysis. They are only interested in arguments based on "self evident" axioms.

I've read many of the books you're talking about, and there's a reason they are "unpopular" and “discredited".

There is no need to throw out the baby with the bathwater here.

Who cares about gold? Who cares about avoiding math? Not me. I guess I am no Austrian for those reasons. I do care, however, about restraining the inflationary tendencies of governments because I believe they are an engine of wealth redistribution from the poor to the rich and powerful. And sure, I suppose I do care about avoiding mathematical naval gazing, or statistical hackery. But those are side-issues.

But where's your evidence? For any economic school of thought to be a good approximation of truth, it needs to be able to make models that both describe what has happened, and predict what will happen. Any economist that can't do that is ultimately a quack.

Where are the Austrian models that describe and predict accurately?

I think local predictions are hard for any school to make accurately in economics, but broad swath stuff is doable. So, to have a decent shot at a good theory, you need to figure out what the most important drivers are in your situation of interest. In business cycle theory, I think it is the action of the interest rate over time which is the most important thing that gets short shrift in the main, and which drives the dynamics I speak about above.

I can make a regression say anything, but I predict the fed continues to operate, and the status quo of wealth flow from poor to rich continues. Now it can be modified by laws, and certainly will change with time, but the dynamics are there. You can superimpose other things on top and the results will vary. You can then make a model that focuses on one thing or another, and evaluate it statistically, and again, results will vary. This is some of how we ended up with a pluralist economics today.

I wrote up some other stuff about my anecdotal experience with modeling and searching for "good governance" in grad school, and how I disagreed with methodology of the papers I was reading, before abandoning the enterprise for a return to physical engineering, but I guess this is my chief point. Methodology designs in what you want to see. Economics is not a controlled science (I mean mostly the studies can have no actual control group), and therein festers a great rub. Good fun learning the statistical analysis methods though.

>Who cares about gold? Who cares about avoiding math? Not me. I guess I am no Austrian for those reasons.

The people who wrote those books that you said would support your argument certainly do.

>I’ll be happy to get my (Of course discredited) books out and recite the counter case about the Great Depression if anybody really wants me to later

>I do care, however, about restraining the inflationary tendencies of governments because I believe they are an engine of wealth redistribution from the poor to the rich and powerful.

Are you basing this belief on anything other than gut feelings and the work of Austrian economists who's books you've read? von Mises is an absolute crackpot, but he does a very good job of making you "feel" that his arguments are valid.

>And sure, I suppose I do care about avoiding mathematical naval gazing, or statistical hackery.

That's different than the Austrian position that mathematical analysis is impossible and harmful. Without accepting the basic premise of Austrian economics that "no measurement is possible" and everything can be derived from the first principle of "humans acting with purpose", the rest of their "proofs" are worthless. You can't just accept (and cite) their arguments while also acknowledging the fundamental flaws with the axioms they use to reach their conclusions.

I think their main point is that mathematical models, without connection to reality and logically tracing out the fundamentals of how and why people act, are dangerous in isolation. Statistics is useful, but statistics can lie. Having a conceptual framework of why people do things is valuable. Then add the mathematical models on top.

Sure, but having a conceptual framework of why people do things, with models on top [theoretical and empirical] is how mainstream economics works. Pointing out conceptual flaws in each others' models and how that leads to prediction error is how economists debate.

The Austrian School on the other hand, is centred on Mises, whose magnum opus insisted that all his conclusions were logically deduced from the premise "humans act with purpose" and therefore unfalsifiable, stated that "no measurement is possible" in the field of economic activity (!) and who later described econometrics as "childish play with figures". That's a very different position from the many other mainstream and non-mainstream economists who simply think other economists' models are insufficiently connected to reality .

The problem is that mainstream economics fails to accept that the choice of metric to perform their analyses encodes biases. Ivory tower economists don't really grok what affects the working class. (I can't say I totally do myself, but at least I drove for Lyft full time for a year and a half).

Mainstream economics says that monetary intervention is necessary to "stabilize" the economy, as measured by metric X Y or Z. Who benefits from that stability? I would say mostly the upper echelon status quo. And what is the social cost of the stability? Mainstream economics also measures the widening wealth gap but it's incredibly infuriating that they can't fucking put two and two together and understand that the gap is the social cost of their stability measures. Especially so since there is a clear straight line mechanism for that to be the case.

> Mainstream economics also measures the widening wealth gap but it's incredibly infuriating that they can't fucking put two and two together and understand that the gap is the social cost of their stability measures.

Because it's not. It's the cost of fiscal policy decisions made overtly to aid “job creators” in the supposed hope that the wealth they drink in will trickle down as a golden shower for the rest of society.

https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/the-case-for-hi...

"Even in the long run, it's really really hard to cut nominal wages..."

Don't get it wrong. Inflation is a tool to cut wages. It is fundamentally anti-labor.

And yet [ceteris paribus] a wage rise for a proportion of workers literally is inflation.

It is difficult to paint the alternative of artificially restricting the money supply to a level where the private sector [as a whole] must reduce some employees' nominal wages or fire them every time it offers pay rises to its most in-demand staff as more pro-labour. It doesn't sound any more pro-labour when people preferring that arrangement argue that recessions are a more appropriate mechanism to hold down wages, and acknowledge the purpose of zero inflation [and acceptance of economic downturns] is to allow wealth to be preserved for years or even generations without the need for it to be used in job creation.

Yes, it makes real wage cuts instead of catastrophic job cuts more practical when particular forms of work lose market value, which also reduces the degree to which future risk of decline needs to be built in up-front to wages.

But it's a blunt instrument. Providing tools to aid those workers adversely affected by those market shifts, whether by declining real wages or lost jobs, is the role of fiscal, not monetary policy.

It's really presumptuous to say that it's better to cheat the labor class out of its earnings than have them deal with job losses (which you don't even know would happen).

> Mainstream economics says that monetary intervention is necessary to "stabilize" the economy, as measured by metric X Y or Z. Who benefits from that stability?

The people who lose absolutely everything they've ever worked for in the event of a sustained recession. They tend not to be rich, nor comfortable with the rival Austrian solution of waiting it out because if wages drop low enough the rich might eventually deign to act by unburying their gold and investing in capital formation and job creation again.

> it's incredibly infuriating that they can't fucking put two and two together and understand that the gap is the social cost of their stability measures

It's incredibly frustrating when the school of economics most founded by a man who stormed out of a meeting of the right wing Mont Pelerin society screaming "you're all a bunch of socialists" for discussing possible solutions to income equality masquerades as egalitarian. Other economists can and do discuss causes of and solutions to inequality, including establishing the fact "the rich get richer" was a truism when gold standards were everywhere. Austrian economics doesn't even acknowledge the possibility of "social cost", rejects the possibility of making meaningful claims about some people needing a dollar more than others and wants to set a floor on how much of the future economy the 1% control by ensuring their 'sound money' is still good for that share of future economic growth even if they impede that growth by withdrawing it from circulation.

But yes, it's very good at scapegoating the Fed as the root of all evil as its oil baron funded adherents join often successful lobbying efforts against every single policy that might make working class people's lives less uncomfortable.

You don't have to be an austrian to acknowledge that some of what they say is sensible. Discarding a theory in toto because it's adherents are odious is exactly the sort of hubristic political bullshit that results in you fucking everyone over.

Sure, but you don't have to take any notice whatsoever of Austrian economics to critique the biases encoded in an economic model (indeed not being overtly hostile to the concept of economic modelling per se leads to much more parsimonious critiques of models and explicit identification of second order effects). I'm not really sure that Austrian economics has much to say that is sensible beyond illustrating basic microeconomic concepts and noting that inflation can [sometimes] be bad, business cycles are a thing and the predictive power of equilibrium models is limited, and you get all that in a mainstream undergrad textbook.

Not being an Austrian helps you conclude that their arguments that economics isn't quantitative, positivism isn't useful and reducing income inequality is actually a goal a government might wish to consider wrong though. :)

I'm not austrian (for example, I believe that the velocity theory of monetary value is partially true). You're the one that boxed me into that category. Only about 20% of what they say is any good, but those parts are definitely not being said by anyone else.

I didn't say you were an Austrian, though I must admit I'm intrigued by what you think they are saying that is useful and nobody else says (even arguments favouring gold standards are not unique to Austrians; a priori praxeology, perhaps, but I would have difficulty concluding their a priori praxeology was "any good"). At a stretch, maybe Hayek's free banking, but then others have described natural experiments with free banking but just reached somewhat different conclusions...

s/nobody else/the major economic schools/

So like chicago, keynes, socialism, mmt (which admittedly is niche)

Better?

This is an inaccurate narrative. The more wealth inequality there is in a nation, the less that increases in the money supply effect the economy. This is why we have no inflation with trillions injected. The rich simply store the money in assets like stocks and houses and it never touches consumption.

The only thing that needed to happen to keep the economy afloat was the Congress passing their bills.

> The rich simply store the money in assets like stocks and houses and it never touches consumption.

But these do affect consumption.

1) Stonks going up means that companies have more capital (through stock issuances and equity raises). Companies use this capital to buy things and pay workers, so the dollars end up recirculating through the economy just like if a regular person spent it.

2) Buying houses is consumption. And increases in housing prices causes more building of houses. Which leads to people getting paid for building houses and creating materials which leads to money circulating.

Wealth inequality is bad, and Congress should have done more to help the American people. But the populist "rich people hoard money in stonks and houses so it doesn't recirculate" is also a complete misunderstanding.

1. When the money supply is increasing at a rate faster than stuff, the best use of capital is to hoard it. Can you show me examples of major companies issuing stock right now? Looks to me like they are all buying back their stock, which has the opposite effect.

2. Buying houses is an investment and is specifically carved out in the CPI. Consumption is Owner's Equivalent Rent, buying is not.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/08/tesla-to-raise-up-to-5-billi...

https://www.ft.com/content/a59c2a9d-5e0b-4cbc-b69e-a138de76a...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-21/u-s-stock...

Stock and bond issuances are at all time highs.

Housing is an investment in the CPI because most people don’t buy houses as consumption. The CPI aims to create a basket of consumption for normal people. Rich people do consume houses, and their consumption leads to money circulating.

Should rich people be rich enough to buy houses willy-nilly? That’s a different question. Maybe they shouldn’t, to the current degree.

> highest-profile recent example of borrowing for buybacks: > Apple (ticker: AAPL). The tech giant sold $14 billion in bonds this month, and said it would use at least part of the proceeds on buybacks and dividends.[0]

Kinda problematic when one large company doing buybacks dominates over thousands doing issuing reversing your entire narrative. Taking out bonds to give to shareholders is not something that helps main street.

[0]:https://www.barrons.com/articles/debt-fueled-stock-buybacks-...

I post this here for posterity:

Within ten years a film will come out about the next economic disaster and everyone will be saying "how could we be so stupid to allow firms to buy their own stock with debt?" much like the housing crisis.

> buy their own stock with debt?

why not? What's wrong with altering a company's capital structure to be more efficient?

Stocks have a cost (aka, cost of equity), just like debt. Sometimes, cost of equity is higher than cost of debt (aka, the interest rate). Sometimes, the cost of debt is higher than cost of equity. This is determined by the general market conditions and economic environment.

A company may find itself in a situation where the cost of equity is very high, and cost of debt is very low. In this case, it makes a lot of sense for the company to borrow to reduce the amount of outstanding equity on the market. There is an equalizing point, where the total cost of capital is lowest, and that is where the company's money source is most efficient.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with company buying back stocks, if this is the case. The only problem, really, is that buybacks gives capital gains for stockholders, and this is taxed lower than normal income. This is a question of taxation policy, not stock buybacks. Is it fair that capital gains are taxed less than earned income?

If the firm instead took out loans to pay out dividends would you feel differently? Now what if they did it every year at a increasing pace to the point where it's expected that firms take on debt to support ever larger dividends? That bubble pops eventually and is what I see happening with buybacks.

taking out debt to pay out dividends does not make any change to the capital structure of a company (i.e., the debt load increased, but the equity structure stayed the same). This basically means the company is losing that money paid out, and thus, the equity's price would drop by that equivelent amount, and then added a debt obligation (so an even more loss).

This, no shareholder controlled board would ever authorize taking out debt to pay dividends, unless there's some special circumstances for which this makes sense (i can't think of any atm).

The difference with buybacks using debt is that buybacks changes the capital structure. I suppose if the debt is artificially cheap (say, the gov't is forcing interest rates down to lower than what the market rate _would_ be), then it makes sense from a financial perspective, to borrow money, and pay (to the shareholders) the difference between the "real" market rate and the artificial rate. But this predicates that the real rate is much higher (transactional costs, and other overheads might easily dwarf this difference in rate).

> This, no shareholder controlled board would ever authorize taking out debt to pay dividends, unless there's some special circumstances

Energy (oil & gas) companies certainly did last year. Those stocks are a little different than the broader market, in that investors in them generally aren't looking for appreciation in share price, they want consistently high dividends. Exxon is a good example of this.

“... taking out debt to pay out dividends does not make any change to the capital structure of a company (i.e., the debt load increased, but the equity structure stayed the same)”

Sorry, but this is nonsense. Increasing debt and giving the proceeds away to shareholders definitely alters the debt ratio of a company ... basic financial accounting concept.

I am pretty sophisticated in terms of my acceptance of modern finance but I am a heels-dug-in naysayer when it comes to buybacks. I hate them and I think they are evil. But what can you do

> But what can you do

you can try to convince people that buybacks are evil, and if enough concensus is reached, it will be outlawed.

The problem is that there's no good evidence that it's evil in the general case, and it's hard to convince large portions of shareholders that it is.

I don’t think the average person really knows how stocks work and isn’t even aware firms are able to buyback stock with debt.

How many knew about CDOs before The Big Short?

Or how to run a baseball team before Moneyball

You're right: even though $2 trillion of bonds have been issued by US companies, one $14 billion ($0.014 trillion) issue to buyback stocks completely reverses my entire narrative.

The pandemic has not hit Apple as hard as other industries, and they're taking advantage of low interest rates by issuing debt.

And there's nothing wrong with buying back stock. It's bad when managers use it to boost their personal compensation. That's not happening in Apple's case; they are just returning capital to investors because Apple is doing well and is sitting on a huge balance sheet.

One company(like Apple) negates thousands of small companies. There are many large companies like Apple. The Market Cap of the S&P 500 is up $4 trillion. All of those bonds went straight into the market.

Why not just show me the increased consumption? Show me these increased workers. Show me the raises.

CPI is up 1.5%, due directly to Congress, not the Fed. Unemployment is at 10%. The money supply is up 25%. The velocity of the M2 is down 21%. Straight into assets.

There's nothing wrong with using debt to buyback stock because the environment is corrupted. That's the problem. Fix the environment.

Apple is kind of a poor example here because they're borrowing money at extremely low interest rates and the collateral is all the money they have overseas. They took advantage of that one time 15.5 percent rate after the TCJA passed but they didn't stop earning gobs of money overseas. They're not taking on actual debt to finance buybacks, they're just creatively getting around tax laws.

1) No.

Stock prices only directly impact companies when they actually sell stock. So, propping up the market has zero long term impact as the value of future cash flows is unchanged. It’s simple a handoff of money from the government to people selling stocks over a short period.

It’s popular because it keeps highly leveraged investments viable.

It has a huge long term impact. There's been hundreds of near dead companies that have had their stock prices pumped and have raised loads of money through an at the market offering or secondary offering which would've been impossible a year ago.

AMC is the most public example, where they dumped their at the market offering into retail investors. But there's hundreds of other examples.

Big caps: CCL, TSLA both with multi billion at the markets with little dilution thanks to stock price being propped.

Small caps: Literally hundreds of names, check DilutionTracker on Twitter.

The parent post is correct in that an increase in the stock price in the secondary market has a material impact on the prospects of the company, especially if it's struggling. Raising money isn't the only mechanism, employee retention is another. In this sense, Soros' positive reflexivity has some merit.

And conveniently for my point, 2020 saw the largest stock and bond issuances of all time.

They get the same amount of money from issuing bonds independent of the interest rates they pay. Injecting money into the bond market reduces their costs, but doesn’t directly hand them more money any more than a home loan at a lower interest rate does.

In terms of stock issuances that’s surprisingly nuanced. Delta Airlines for example has 2.7% fewer outstanding shares in Dec 31 2020 vs Dec 31 2019.

Or adequately addressing the pandemic; the gravest error of our time.

> And claiming that the Fed is the root of all our problems misses the bigger picture.

I think you are missing the bigger picture here, When Fed steps in to bail out failed companies, it increases the moral hazard, there is no reason to be responsible when you know the Fed will bail you out.

> ...increase the tax on capital gains...

How about proportionally? Stock trading apps now make it easy enough for Joe 6 pack to invest in the market at any income level. I could see a x% higher tax if you're buying 10,000 shares of Amazon, but it seems to me like putting < $1,000 in the market a month should be somewhat painless.

Capital gains is still a percentage of earnings and currently caps out at 26%. Hold your stock for a year, and it drops to 13%. Increasing cap gains could be as simple as taxing it the same as regular income.

It became easy over 25 years ago when the first brokerages went online. Is it easier now? Yes. But it's been simple and painless for years.

You know most American's can't cover a $400 unexpected bill. Try <$100, which is still a stretch for many.

Agreed. The problem is that the Fed only has the power to inject dollars at the top of the economy, yet sales taxes and the IRS drain dollars from a broad base of the economy.

I think an MMO designer would suggest two options:

A. Nerf the Fed, which would have the problems you note.

B. A balancing mechanic -- Some more universally-accessable way to inject income at the base of the economy.

B. I've been contemplating a mechanism based on mandatory minimum paid vacation days per year - fed provides free access to the money, corps borrow it or whatever to earn some interest -- but corps must pay employees a minimum days off per year (a large amount -- like 1-2 months per year)

The value of currency and debt has diverged too far from quality of life concerns -- days off seem a direct way to inject quality of life capital into the system and, I think, could prove an investment able to unearth very new and effective social transformation capabilities ... as well as a new shared basis from which to renegotiate and rebalance our social contracts.

> B. A balancing mechanic -- Some more universally-accessable way to inject income at the base of the economy.

Something like, for example, giving $1000 to every adult?

Possibly, though printing off $40,000 for every tax payer then cutting them a few thousand is probably not going to be the best approach.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1REAL

Where did you get $40,000 from?

5.3 Trillion in stimulus divided by 150 million people who pay income tax in the US is actually $35.3k USD. The final stimulus toll may be higher and taxes come from a variety of places so that may be high for the final burden per person, but I think it will be close by the time all is said and done.

The stimulus checks, unemployment benefits, at least 85% of PPP money, and education funding all solely benefit regular taxpayers. Large corporations got the equivalent to subsidized loans. Let's say that random pork projects benefit both groups equally. I don't see how regular taxpayers are losing out here.

This is risky, because if the fed accidentally injects too much money by buying back too many bonds, they can always un-inject it by selling the bonds back (and banks are compelled to buy). This lets the fed be more aggressive because it knows that if it goes too far and starts seeing more inflation than it intended, it can always walk back its decision. But there's no realistic way to do that after having given $1000 to every adult.

Taxes?

The Fed can't make taxes. Congress makes taxes, but Congress is subject to popular approval, and the population don't like tax hikes.

The Fed also can't give $1000 to everyone.

Changes in tax rates require Congress to act. Too slow moving to be a money supply control.

> The problem is that the Fed only has the power to inject dollars at the top of the economy

No, that's not the problem.

The problem is Congress [0] has been asleep at the switch on fiscal policy since the administration of George W. Bush.

[0] in the sense of “the body that legislates, including the effect of the President acting in his legislative role”.

The Fed printing money isn't the engine, it's the throttle. The engine is powered by a treadmill that requires everyone to run, i.e. being consummate consumers. Throttling up requires running faster, thereby increasingly consuming more.

I hope we don't exhaust ourselves to keep up.

This is one of the worst takes I've read in awhile.

First off, there is no general consensus about the exact cause of the Great Depression and the cause of the recovery. If you're going to make an attempt at a history lesson, at least get it right. We know that the stock market crash and banking panics played a large role in the contraction of economic activity, but there is absolutely no general consensus for the exact causes. Your theory, that was portrayed as a fact, is solely an opinion that is disputed by many economists and historians. Academics are split as to the exact cause of the great depression and stopping deflation made possible by the gold standard is not an accepted fact in any economics or history debate. [1]

Secondly, the Fed providing liquidity is not "stabilizing the price of the USD", as you say. Printing money out of thin air at extreme rates (22% of all dollars were printed in 2020) is massively devaluing the USD and is borrowing against the future of the country, thus ultimately destabilizing the USD. Just like how many things that feel good in the short term are unhealthy for us, providing artificial short term liquidity that ends up destabilizing society long-term is not healthy or intelligent. As we add trillions of dollars of debt to the US balance sheet, we will soon get to a point where the vast majority of federal expenditure will be on interest payments (it is currently less than 10% but increasing exponentially). At that point, the US will either be forced to hike taxes to ridiculous levels to pay down the debt, or will essentially be bankrupted, and the country's assets will be taken over and dissolved to pay back its lenders by some supranational organization.

The only thing you said with a hint of truth was that the Fed is like an engine that serves to move a train. However, the train is off the tracks, not moving the economy forward. The fed is actively destroying the economy by devaluing the USD and destroying the future of this country. Look around you - companies have already started hedging against the dollar and moving into anything that won't surely be devalued at dangerous levels like the USD in the next decade (i.e. Bitcoin). The Fed is being disrupted, similarly to how Amazon disrupted Barnes and Noble, Netflix disrupted BlockBuster, Uber disrupted Taxis, AirBnB disrupted hotels, and so on. The Fed is NOT a not a net positive on society and people are waking up to it. Hence crypto (deflationary in nature) being the highest returning asset in the last decade, appreciating at 200% each year against the dollar, which people are flocking to. The economy will surely be destructured, but it will be away from centralization and the Fed, because it only serves to enrich the monied interests, while putting on a facade that it exists to 'lower unemployment' and 'stabilize the USD'.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/story/causes-of-the-great-depress...

I didn’t say the gold standard caused the Depression; I said it exacerbated it. This is well supported by your link and other historical sources.

The point is, without control of the money supply, a government cannot prevent deflationary spirals. Since Fed can print money temporarily, that makes recessions much milder.

You're right, in a sense, that money printing is inflationary. But when money printing happens, it's to avoid a far greater evil: severe deflation.

https://www.history.com/news/how-did-the-gold-standard-contr...

I disagree with your take, I think its wrong and misleading.

Perhaps the causes of the Great Depression are unknown, but there is consencus that had the Fed stepped in to prevent monetary deflation, the Depression would have been much less severe and ended much earlier.[1]

As for your second point, I would like to point out two things: first, it is indeed possible for the Fed to greatly increase the money supply without causing inflation if the velocity of money decreases, as tends to happen during a pandemic when people cannot go out and buy things in person. Secondly, the US dollar exchange rates have not deviated in a radical manner compared to other currencies, which would imply that things are relatively stable. (besides bitcoin, which I will get to later)

As for the US debt, there is no arguing that it is not a problem, however should the Fed not have acted, it is likely that a Depression would have happened, and the resulting doom loop would have made it impossible to ever pay our current debts, since without stimulus you would never leave the recession.

Now comes the elephant in the room: bitcoin. The only non hedge fund company I know of that actually bought bitcoin is Tesla, which is certainly not a figurehead for other corporations considering how its valuation is larger than the largest carmakers in the world put together despite having a small percent in the market.

Now Im going to be a bit more speculative from here on but I think its an important point.

Bitcoin only proves the supremacy of the dollar, since all people care about is how many dollars they can get from their bitcoin. And indeed, there are no signs bitcoin will actually be used for anything other than speculation, especially since I doubt anyone can tell me how much bitcoin my sandwich would cost.

You're right though about bitcoin being deflationary in nature. Imagine if everyone finally bought into bitcoins incredible returns, and billions of people put their savings into the coin, watching as their wealth grew and grew... except wait a moment, what's this the financial system is hollowed out! Theres no money to make loans with, no money to invest with, not even the most profitable of opportunities? Perhaps people should be lending out bitcoin? But wait we can make more money just sitting on it cant we? After all the less we spend the more money we have?

[1]http://www.employees.csbsju.edu/jolson/ECON315/Whaples212377...

-see the page marked 143

> but there is absolutely no general consensus for the exact causes

Yeah, in such a complicated system there are so many parties involved that trying to break down one cause seems like an impossibility. All one can do is look at effects and try to speculate backwards from there to see whose incentives may have aligned and who might benefit from the outcomes we got. Maybe nobody, since accidents happen, but in the case of the Great Depression I think it's very interesting to learn how the 1929 stock market crash stemmed the tide of people leaving the south for better-paying industrial jobs in the northeast cities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Migration_(African_Ameri...

"Between 1910 and 1930, the African-American population increased by about forty percent in Northern states as a result of the migration, mostly in the major cities. The cities of Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Baltimore, and New York City had some of the biggest increases in the early part of the twentieth century. Tens of thousands of blacks were recruited for industrial jobs, such as positions related to the expansion of the Pennsylvania Railroad."

Everything you just said is basically wrong.

There IS a consensus understanding to what caused the Great Depression, they only folks who disagree tend to be charlatans pushing Gold or other deflationary bubbles such as Bitcoin.

The world is not going to adopt deflationary currency away from central banks - that would be suicidal.

I upvoted you

Perhaps, but printing money is effectively a tax. And it's not going to be the ones who are benefitting the most who are going to be paying that tax proportionally. There's no honest and justifiable reason The Feds efforts should be so top heavy.

> by providing liquidity, which has the side effect of causing bad things because it lets the rich accumulate wealth.

curious, what if the people driving that engine opted for wealth tax instead? Wouldn't that be a win-win and your phrase could have been instead:

> by providing liquidity, with no side effect such as causing bad things because it lets the rich accumulate wealth.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The Fed doesn't the power to enact a wealth tax. It's powers were delegated to it by Congress. Congress does have the power to enact a wealth tax. But it chooses not to. The way to change that is by voting.

Every indicators point to precisely that. Tax rates are too low. It's extremely unpopular but we have to say it and repeat it. They are far too low for the highest earning quantiles but they are also too low for the rest of the population. They are at their lowest for the last 70 years in most western countries. We need to increase tax.

housing is in a gigantic bubble now, I have owned my house for a few months, I had to go 15% over asking just to get it(against 15 other bidders), and I checked its value recently and it jumped another 8% in the few months I have owned it. (socal location). Another house in my neighborhood sold for a similar amount as the new value so its spot on. With '08 you had housing in a bubble, this time I feel like cars, housing, medical, college, stocks etc are all way overvalued. I don't know how this will end but I think it will be alot worse than the 2008 crash.

It feels like the several times that I have been going very quickly on my bike, then crashed. It feels amazing and thrilling for a few seconds while you are soaring, then there is a moment when you realize that there is only pavement underneath you and there's no way to avoid the pain, but in the moment you are just magically floating.

The Fed only has a certain set of levers it can pull and boosting wages isn't one of them. During the 2007 recession and now the Fed chairs have begged Congress to take the necessary actions that they can't. Now that Yellen runs Treasury we'll see how things work out.

Crypto, decentralized, the fed is done and done should they be foe good reason.

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