Former NY Fed President: If Stocks Don't Fall, the Fed Needs to Force Them | Hacker News Reader

Former NY Fed President: If Stocks Don't Fall, the Fed Needs to Force Them

bloomberg.com

14 pointsIdEntities21 comments

"Line go up" is fine when the new money is all concentrated in the imaginary financial sphere and doesn't leak into the real world. Now however they went and created even more new money, and holders of the "imaginary portion" of the money supply want to realize it before it loses value... which is the inflationary disaster they've been pushing ahead and putting off forever with "line go up".

Like living under a big, poorly built dam. You know there's this potential flood on the other side, looming over you. So you pile another foot of dirt on top of the dam and yay! the disater isn't as near. Keep doing this for 15 years and you might forget the reason for the ritual of the dam raising and consider the lake to be proof of your virtue and productivity.

Now the water isn't as wet and we want more, need more; surely we can just carve a few channels in the dam and let some of that water flow, right?

Why is the Fed attacking the stock market? Do they not care about 401ks? What am I missing about stock prices vs bonds except that as interest rates go up people will buy bonds over stocks. But even then stocks are likely a better choice.

The op-ed is by a former regional Fed President who doesn't work or speak for the Fed now. However, his argument is that the wealth effect of high asset prices is a key driver of higher spending and rising consumer prices.

Is there any evidence that is true? The majority of Americans don't even participate in the stock market outside of a 401k at best.

It is not Starbucks barista or some amazon warehouse worker, who is bidding up for two homes, but those with fat 401ks and cushy jobs are.

Even 10% of people can push the inflation.

>>The majority of Americans don't even participate in the stock market outside of a 401k at best.

It seems that stock market household participation has inched up over the past 4 decades driven by a variety of factors and is likely a (slight) majority participation rate at this point[1][2] although as one might expect heavily skewed towards higher-income households.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/03/25/more-than-h...

[2] https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2021-03-1...

High asset prices will make rent go up, but why would it affect anything else like food, energy or durable goods?

As rents go up, these rents eat up most of the wages, thereby increasing wages. Increasing wages cause inflation, and it is called "cost-push inflation", as both cost of goods, cost of services include wages.

As just one example, a tech employee whose unvested RSUs are sitting at the 2021 highs might be more willing to splash out on all kinds of things -- vacations, restaurants, a nicer fridge, primary or investment residential properties, etc -- than they would if the share price was a lot lower.

Middle America's 401k gets hammered (pushing retirement off x-years) and small set of tech workers can't buy as much? Seems more harmful than good. fwiw, I don't have 401k/and I own a tiny amount of stock.

> Why is the Fed attacking the stock market?

The uncomfortable answer is (possibly) that a subsection of the elite have all sold mass amounts of stock and bought cryptocurrency...or, at least that's what the optics & legislation seem to indicate.

https://archive.ph/A0lFJ

As the Fed has backstopped every drop since 2009 with seemingly endless liquidity, passive investing has been all the rage over the last decade+. Unfortunately, the party is coming to an end soon, and who knows how history will judge the Fed's experimental QE and ZIRP policies in retrospect. With inflation at 40 year highs, the Fed no longer has the privilege of supporting the passive indexers like it did in the past.

Being worried about very low or even negative real returns over the next 10-15 years (as has happened many times in the past, most recently 2000-2013) led me to start building sophisticated algorithmic trading models that can produce positive absolute returns in any market context in early 2020. While there have been ups and downs, I've turned 525k into 1.4M since deploying live in April 2020. I've recently decided to publish 7 of them at https://grizzlybulls.com, 3 totally free and 4 premium.

I wonder how your models are going to compare to S&P500 over the next 10-30 years.

This sounds very much like a sales pitch, "I've turned 525k into 1.4M since", and too good to be true.

There are no shortcuts in the stock market, and this person is clearly selling a shortcut.

ads disguised as hn comments is really proof hn has jumped the shark.

You realize the whole point of HN is to be a big advertisement for silicon valley startups right? This is right on brand

Well, HN became big enough that it's worth trying to game it with ads. But HN does a pretty good job of removing (or at least hiding) them by flagging and downvoting, so I'm not sure that it's proof of jumping the shark.

> since deploying live in April 2020.

That was right about the bottom of the last big dip. Anyone could have made good gains now if they jumped in right then.

All I can afford is 5 easy payments of $19.99. Will that be enough for premium?

> 525k into 1.4M since deploying live in April 2020

Given the timeline, that really is not very impressive.

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