Edit: Too many downvotes for my view that this Opel case is yet another symptom of the wrong handling of the panedmic by any governments, leading to inflation and supply chain disruptions.
If opinions are downvoted then I do not need to participate.
If opinions are downvoted then I do not need to participate.
Also regarding laying off people. Germany kept unemployment below 4% during the entire pandemic because of its more flexible labor market mechanism known as Kurzarbeit that allows people to work less during economic crises. The rigid labor market in the USA encourages employers to lay off entire people rather which tends to fuel recessions, make them worse and delay recovery. Just think about how inefficient it is to lay people off, pay them to do nothing, do massive state intervention through a rent moratorium and then hire them again. The unemployed still need housing and food. The idea that there is something more productive than producing food for them is laughable.
>This would have been "mean" in the short-term, but good for the entire society in the mid- and long-term.
I don't get it. Paying people unemployment benefits is the long term strategy. We give people food stamps because if they starve to death they won't be able to work at all. Even if they stay on welfare their children will have a better shot at life. Abandoning them is the height of short term thinking.
This is completely wrong and trivial to research: https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/research/average-savings-acc...
Most Americans couldn't handle a $400 emergency. 56% have $5000 or less in savings.
These people have no one to borrow money from. This is one of the most insidious forms of privilege: It's much easier to "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" when you have a rich parent or uncle to loan you O(10000) to start a business or to give you food and shelter when you're down, but the VAST majority of people have no such resources.
Thanks to our moral frameworks we interpret strategies like Keynesian fiscal stimulus as some sort of bad drug that the economy is addicted to and should quit. There is a huge double standard here. People want money and they don't want anyone to go into debt. It's the height of hypocrisy. People demand debt and they vilify it at the same time.
An amoral interpretation of Keynesian stimulus is that it effectively makes the debt market available to the unemployed. The unemployed are in debt in regards to the government which issues treasury bonds and the government is in debt in regards to the savers. In other words, it is decreasing market rigidity and decreasing overall market distortions.
The reason why Keynesian stimulus is a bad idea has nothing to do with morals. Rather, the problem is that using the government to bypass market rigidities shows a deep underlying problem in the labor market that nobody wants to address.
There are people who work more than they demand work and there are people who work less than they demand work. In a perfectly flexible market this should be impossible and you know what, it's impossible in a barter economy. People wouldn't work to pile up money that they don't intend to spend the same way a farmer wouldn't produce and pile up potatoes that they won't sell to the economy.
I don't know if the same statistics apply to Germans, but you at least need a different source to cite.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
However many downvotes you may have gotten initially, most of them are now for this reason.
To the original comment, what exactly was the role of government handling in the automotive industries mishandling of their chip supply chain? How did these automotive industry missteps lead to inflation?
I didn’t downvote you for your original response but holy hell the entitlement at
> If opinions are downvoted then I do not need to participate.
If you are incapable of accepting that people may disagree with your opinion, then yes you do not need to participate, but I don’t know how you’re gonna get through life if you pull out of any situation where there is disagreement
> I try to simplify the root cause like this:
> - people kept getting money while not working
> - those people did not work, hence, no goods were produced
> Same amount of money without the goods in the market. Inflation and good shortages. I believe that those government helicopter money was a huge mistake. It would have been better to lay off people; many have money saved to survive a few months; others could have lend some money (and pay it back when employed again). This would have been "mean" in the short-term, but good for the entire society in the mid- and long-term.
Secondly, you're wrong. The shortage has nothing to do with "government helicopter money". It has to do with changing spending habits due to the pandemic plus companies anticipating, wrongly, where those changing habits will lead. And that's topped off by the fact that the electronics supply chain is not agile, so once you change your mind, you can't really go back quickly.
Your opinion is downvoted because you're wrong.
If you think those furloughed workers shouldn’t have gotten any money sue it would be “good” for the long term system, then might I suggest as a modest proposal that you simply toss them into a meat grinder? Very simple and removes the people spending too much money from the economy
That's before you get into whether the official number is underestimated (e.g homeowner's equivalent rent, which is a quarter of the CPI basket). Is it significant? Maybe, maybe not.
Besides CPI, the main inflation is actually asset inflation. Look at the huge stock, real estate, etc. price booms since 2020.
[1] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/quality-of-life-r...
Sorry, but not everything is "right wing", except ofc you are one of those "special kids".