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Comment by dls2016 | Hacker News Reader

dls2016

Who exactly thinks that inflation is going to happen? The nytimes had a crazy article the other day (well they have one everyday about inflation it seems), where the “inflation fears” are attributed to wall street and political commentary. Yet the article ends with Jamie Dimon (quoted throughout the article) saying, “I dont really think we should worry about it.”

Also there’s a perfunctory mention of gas prices but nothing about production. I could go on about how bad the article is.

Give tax breaks to the rich and we hear nothing. Give working class and poor people a few thousand dollars and we get to hear about all their moral failings: the money will be spent on GME! Some people just saved their stimulus (NPR)! Inflation!

The source of all this hubbub seems to be, checks notes: Larry “women cant do math” Summers.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/10/business/economy/inflatio...

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> Larry “women cant do math” Summers.

This is such a gross misrepresentation of his statement that it makes me doubt every other point you’re trying to make.

I know, if you overlay two Gaussians with different means and standard deviations... I get what he was trying to say (not that I agree the situation is so simple). Yes, I was being sarcastic.

But to redirect, the point of my sarcasm is: what sort of track record does he have at predicting these things? He's the one who gave us a turd stimulus last time. And now he's putting his views on stroll again, why believe him?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/ja...

History hasn't treated him nicely and virtually no one is backing him up this time. And if he's so good at math, then what is the mechanism by which a few thousand extra dollars per family will lead to long term inflation problems? The whole thing is farcical and reeks of class warfare.

That hardly matters when you're talking about one of the all time greatest crooks who got away with it (and still does) [1].

[1] https://prospect.org/economy/falling-upward-larry-summers/

Global stock markets drop as inflation fears prompt sell-off

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/feb/26/global-stoc...

Inflation Fears Will Settle, But Only If Growth Continues

https://www.forbes.com/sites/randybrown/2021/03/11/inflation...

Inflation fears hit markets as Fed sticks with low-rate policy

https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...

Ok, so Jamie Dimon says not to worry and Jerome Powell doesn't see the US exceeding 2% target rate for an extended period of time.

Your Guardian link is about the market (!= economy) and quotes "Andy Haldane, warned that an inflationary “tiger” might be on the loose"... so one "might".

Your Forbe's link says, "Could this debt buildup and related deficit spending push inflation and rates significantly higher? Developed economy experience suggests the answer is no. Over the last two centuries, wealthy democracies have generally succeeded in preventing capital flight." And it has a sub-section entitled "Corrosive Inflation Is Fairly Rare".

Your third link has a quote, ""The market's still trying to figure [this] out, myself included," said Dominic Nolan, senior managing director at Pacific Asset Management". Ok... so a money manager admitting he's still "figuring it out".

What is the point of these links?

Does anyone have a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation which shows that $1.9 trillion is "wrong" for inflation? If so, I haven't seen it. Instead we just get to read about the id of money managers (and probably classmates of the journalists).... barf...

And I would ask you to do your own calculation. Is a few thousand dollars per family going to materially change the nature of their chronic underpayment (relative to productivity increases of last 40 years)?

The point is that 8 in 10 only read headlines, and there are many headlines saying about inflation fears, which embeds in peoples subconsciousness and is then used by politicians and commentators to manipulate

It's really no joke that these sort of memes are pushed through every form of media until they dominate the debate. I wish there were newspapers that published my fears every morning, but would be cited in "serious" company as evidence of the reality of those fears.

Jerome Powell last week:

“But I do think it’s more likely that what happens in the next year or so is going to amount to prices moving up but not staying up and certainly not staying up to the point where they would move inflation expectations materially above 2%.”

I find this incredibly hard to believe personally... I think the 2% projection is bogus, and find it unlikely that prices will magically just come down following this anticipated inflationary event?? Have we ever experienced that outside of very subsidized markets?

https://www.axios.com/federal-reserve-powell-inflation-3061f...

Actually yes, all the damn time.

The deflationary forces at work in our economy greatly outweigh the inflationary forces even in the face of massive fiscal stimulus and easy money policies.

In fact I predict as a result of the workplace changes enabled by forced work from home during the pandemic these deflationary forces will accelerate and put even more pressure on wage growth (which is by far the biggest influencer of consumer inflation).

We are already seeing the first stages of this with an exodus of knowledge workers out of high cost of living areas. This is merely the first stage and these early movers will reap a temporary benefit of carrying their existing salary to a lower cost area but the long term impact is companies will now freely hire from lower cost areas and as a whole depress prices of labour.

Not to mention the emphasis this places on digitisation of processes that results in increasing efficiencies (read less employees, especially low skill ones) and economies of scale.

I think the future of inflation is headed one way, to the absolute dumps for the foreseeable future with perhaps a tiny bump to 3-4% during Covid recovery. Long term I see the Fed actually struggling to keep things hot enough to run inflation up to their target without stepping in to force wage growth and labour competition up.

One problem with the current form of monetary policy is that it is "pricing out" people. Now that asset prices are higher you have to cut back spending to afford the increased prices. This is especially important for people who are saving for retirement and those who want to buy a house with a mortgage.

I personally see myself falling into "traps" where I cut back on spending because it is easier to make money from investments than from actual honest work. Sometimes it is even circular. I invest more so that I can afford consumer spending in the future even though buying the thing I need is is not out of reach for me.

A lot of people think the Fed already has problems seeing as how they barely ever hit their 2% target! Their tools don’t seem to work already!

That's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure that will counteract the natural competition for talent, and for less desirable skills locality doesn't seem like such an issue (ie you can find relatively mediocre talent in most places).

Bogus in which direction? The Fed has had a 2% target rate for the last 15 years, I think, and has only exceeded it for a handful of quarters. Under what theory would giving people a few thousand dollars push it over 2% for any extended period of time?

So Powell is saying there are no inflation fears!

Edit: I've never heard of "breakeven" rates, sounds like a betting market. Forgive if I don't believe that rich investors can actually predict this stuff. Again, what track record do they have?

People on the right need a boogeyman whenever (poor) people get a benefit, to scare them lest they lose the will to work.

So lately it's been inflation (not the deficit now that it's paying for tax cuts for the rich).

Meanwhile a deflationary spiral is truly scary, but it doesn't sound scary (my money is worth more!) so these people don't focus on it.

It’s not even “the right”! The narrative is uniform from NyTimes and onward.

Prices don't need to come down, just stop going up. Given the current state of the economy there's no evidence that this level of stimulus is actually inflationary.

But there are many tools that the Fed has to tame rising prices. It could suck liquidity out of the market by selling their massive collection of bonds, or just raise interest rates.

It's actually very unlikely that the Fed would have to do much of either of those because just the threat would have people acting very differently in terms of lending, investment and hiring/pay rises.

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