Which is about a 4x increase in real terms.
https://www.multpl.com/us-gdp-inflation-adjusted/table/by-ye...
If you measure a country and M2 and GDP go up together, that's important to know, but you don't "adjust for M2" and pretend that GDP didn't actually go up.
Also, slight, but mostly consistent inflation is far better for everyone than what the US went through in it's first 150 years as a country.
The average American household is worth more than $1MM and the median is close to $200k. All time highs, even adjusting for all the inflation.
The benefit of mild inflation, to phrase what you wrote a little differently, is that it encourages people to create assets with substantial intrinsic value as a way to dispose of currency. Everyone wants to own as little currency as possible. There are many positive externalities to asset creation.
I disagree.
This 2,5% is just pocketed by yhe central bank.
People shouldn't be penalised for saving money.
"Oh, but just invest it!"
With investment comes risk. Why shouldn't people be allowed to save without risk or having their savings melted by lost purchasing power through inflation?
Inflation is a hidden tax and theft of those furthest from the newly "minted" money to benefit those that are closest to the source i.e. banks and large borrowers.
This is the same thing - when you go to the bank to get a loan, the money is created out of thin air. It simply appears in a database. It is not the money someone has deposited in the bank. The only reason the bank has to keep reserves is for stability in case of bad loans.
It is strictly not. All money is borrowed. This seems like free/unlimited printing when the interest rate is 0%. But when the interest rate rises, this has real consequences and you can't print your way out of a 5.5% interest rate.
This is why US politics got heated about finance as of late. If inflation doesn't come down, the US will have to "print" that money. Essentially rendering the Fed to the likes of Pakistan, Turkey and Argentina.
If GDP was the end all be all of measurements, why is Russia winning the war despite having a fraction of GDP compared to its western opponents?
Sure seems like the wrong things are being measured...and rewarded.
This was a huge eye-opener for me, the fact that we are spending 20x more on the military industrial complex and yet it cannot supply enough shells and bullets for the war, to me, indicates that all of our posturing is a bad joke.
Either there is huge waste and abuse in the system, or we've literally set Ukraine up to lose.
On top of that, there's fear of nuclear weapons taking the stage. If the US military went head to head with the Russian military, and we didn't have to worry about MAD, I think it's reasonable to assume that the US would win. But is the Ukrainian military, supplied with Western military supplies (and even Western military advisors), a better fighting force than the Russian military, even with a home-field advantage? Unclear.
And on the other hand... when the war started, a lot of people assumed Russia would achieve their objectives within a few weeks, or at most a month or two. Ukraine has turned out to be much more capable than initially expected.
> ...and yet it cannot supply enough shells and bullets for the war
It absolutely can, but politics, as usual, gets in the way. And, as I said, shells and bullets are necessary, but not sufficient.
Zelenski became, rich, powerful AND popular much faster than Putin. He was insanely jealous. Consumed. Ukraine was on a path to eliminate corruption and join NATO and then easily become far more wealthy than Russia. It would have consumed Russia by the will of the people on both sides of the border.
Zelenski created his own media empire before he was thirty years old. Then he created a new political party and it beat all the others. He is preferred by the people. He accomplished more in a quarter of his life than Putin could in all of his and was going to help Ukraine achieve prosperity. Putin just wanted to stop that. Period.
Putin gave an "explicit warning that Russia perceived NATO's eastward expansion as a threat to its national security" as early as 2007 in his Munich speech [0]. The Russo-Ukrainian war began in 2014 with the ouster of Yanukovych, who was pro-Russia and opposed closer ties with the EU [1]. Zelensky became president in 2019 and initially promised to end the Russo-Ukranian war, but instead continued to pursue NATO protection and in August 2021 "urged NATO members to speed up Ukraine's request for membership" [2]. Russia escalated the Russo-Ukrainian war and invaded Ukraine for a second time in February 2022 [3].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Munich_speech_of_Vladimir...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_War
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volodymyr_Zelenskyy
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine
Putin gave an "explicit warning that Russia perceived NATO's eastward expansion as a threat to its national security" as early as 2007 in his Munich speech.
And as a result (in combination with other factors) Ukraine's NATO aspirations were effectively halted by 2009. Simply put - some hawks in the U.S. wanted it, but it never got traction in Europe - not even after the initial invasion in 2014. In other words - in regard to the NATO-Ukraine question Putin had by that time already achieved a successful, non-violent containment strategy. But ultimately he opted for the full-scale invasion in 2022 anyway.
Why? Because it was never his real reason in the first place.
The Russo-Ukrainian war began in 2014 with the ouster of Yanukovych, who was pro-Russia and opposed closer ties with the EU.
First, it wasn't an "ouster" - he fled to escape likely imminent charges of corruption and complicity in murder. Second - if you really believe that whatever happens in the internal politics of one country is a "reason for", or can "provoke" another country into launching a full-scale invasion -- then I don't know what to tell you.
what do you mean? internal politics is just a label and the issue will most certainly not be contained by a border.
Beginning in 2019, Ukraine went full-press on seeking NATO membership. In fact, they "voted 334 to 17 to amend the constitution to state Ukraine's strategic objectives as joining the European Union and NATO" [0]. Again, Ukraine went as far as amending their constitution to codify the goal of joining the EU and NATO.
Now, was that Putin's "real" motive for the 2022 invasion? Who knows, I'm sure there are a number of reasons. Putin frankly denied Ukraine's right to exist. But regardless, it is very clear that his rhetoric over the past 17 years, and subsequent actions, are at least consistent with the NATO issue.
> First, it wasn't an "ouster" - he fled to escape likely imminent charges of corruption and complicity in murder.
There was a revolution in Ukraine in 2014 and he was overthrown. On February 22, 2014 the "Ukrainian parliament voted to remove Yanukovych from office by 328 to 0" [1]. He fled that evening. I have no doubt corruption and any number of other things led to the revolution. Regardless, he was very anti-EU and pro-Russia and his removal from office directly led to the 2014 Crimea invasion and the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war. In fact, Russia began organizing troops outside of Ukraine the very same day Yanukovych was voted out and the invasion began 5 days after his removal [2].
> Second - if you really believe that whatever happens in the internal politics of one country is a "reason for", or can "provoke" another country into launching a full-scale invasion -- then I don't know what to tell you.
If one country has been saying for nearly 2 decades that if another country joins NATO it means war, and then that country ratifies their constitution to seek NATO membership, and then a war happens, is it really that surprising? When the two countries are already at war over allegiances in the first place?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Ukraine#2004_a...
We've gone through this already. Yes, Ukraine wanted to join NATO - but the bigger fact was that Europe was against it. So it wasn't going to happen.
If one country has been saying for almost 2 decades that if another country joins NATO it means war
Have you actually read the Munich speech? It doesn't even mention Ukraine, and doesn't come close to using the belligerent language that you're saying it does.
I suggest that you develop a practice of reading original source materials, such as for the the 2007 Munich speech, directly -- rather than uncritically relying on random snippets from Wikipedia quoting what certain pro-Russia commentators (like Mearsheimer and Cohen) say about them.
I don't recall any direct threats of war. In fact, in the first few years of the war, Russia denied that their soldiers were even in Ukraine. They tried to portray the war as a civil conflict within Ukraine.
As to indirect threats and vague hints of total annihilation, Russia has been threatening everyone in Eastern Europe over everything they don't like; from EU and NATO to insignificant things like parking fines that their diplomats have been raking up, and this bullshit has been going on straight from USSR's collapse in early 1990s. Russia's permanent unwillingness to offer peaceful and mutually respectful relations is a key driver behind Eastern Europe seeking closer relations with Western Europe. Handing national sovereignty to Russia over threats is not a serious option.
Ukraine's mistake is not that they seeked NATO membership, but that they underestimated the Russian threat and didn't hurry with EU and NATO integration like other countries did.
The U.S. has (had?) colossal stockpiles of shells and ammunition. There is a false equivalence between the ability to supply the Ukrainians at a rate of 10,000+ shells a day for years on end and the ability of the United States to engage in a major conflict. The Russians are also having trouble keeping their artillery pieces adequately supplied. The calculus is about the acceptable rate of drawdown of stockpiles in relation to the increase in the likelihood of a near-peer conflict arising due to the support given by the very drawdown of those stockpiles. If we give everything we have to Ukraine, and they lose, for whatever reason, then we have disadvantaged ourselves.
However, any major conflict between the United States and a near-peer adversary wouldn’t be so heavily reliant on artillery as this current war is — the U.S. has spent decades building an Air Force that can dominate the battle space in ways that artillery alone cannot match. As Ukraine is set to receive several squadrons worth of F-16s this year, I believe we will see things change. Planes can interdict resupply and troop movements in ways that are beyond the capability of artillery. SEAD aircraft can target and destroy SAM radars to allow large strike packages to accurately blow bridges and rail lines with a much greater radius and accuracy than any other conventional munition.
It is very cynical realpolitik, but Russia’s armed forces have been gutted with this approach.
a growing feeling of this being the conflict's main objective makes me shiver of what comes next
There are the edge cases (heavily financed/resourced countries) like Ireland, Singapore, Qatar, etc... and then you have Western countries "manipulating" the numbers. For example, your rental payment goes into the GDP; even if you are not renting -__-. So if you are sitting on your ass doing nothing in your own home that because of the financial bubble is now worth $2.5 million and $10k of rent, you are adding $10k/month to the GDP of said country.
First, companies just began making shitty products. Use glued and compressed pulp instead of wood, use fructose instead of glucose, use bleached and desiccated wheat, use chips instead of anything mechanical, use cheaper less pure and thinner metals, etc. in the realm of food there was also shrinkflation.
Second, the USA exported much of its inflation as dollar imperialism.
Today, making products of less quality is nearly impossible without sacrificing sales, and the USA has run out of countries to add to its empire while simultaneously having sanctioned enough countries that they’ve now formed their own trading bloque. All of this means that dollars are staying at home after printing and that dollars are starting to come home from the rest of the world. This follows after the government shutdown parts of the economy and concomitantly printed trillions. So, there’s now rather high inflation once again.
Deregulation actually played less important a part of all of the financialization of the economy than did the transition to debt-based economics. The inversion of time in money is a dance with the devil, and the devil usually wins that dance.
I may have exaggerated slightly, but it's a touchy subject because investment is the legitimate way by which rich people get paid for being rich, which is how class works in capitalist societies. The long term sustainability of investment supply / demand dynamics have deep implications for the legitimacy of this enterprise, its winners and losers, and the policies that prop them up (or don't).
Why is money being pushed in? Put yourself in the shoes of a wealth-weighted non-US citizen. Wealth weighting is critical for understanding many aspects of economics yet systematically under-discussed to make the economy seem more altruistic than it is, but that's another story. So you have a bunch of money and you're outside the US. You want to preserve or grow your wealth, but your local government keeps devaluing the currency to pump the real economy, or hiking taxes, or there's a labor party that you think might get in power and do those things, or your government is literally called the Chinese Communist Party and is ideologically predisposed to confiscating your wealth tomorrow. Where do you put your savings? Some of it you still keep locally, for practical reasons, but the rest you invest abroad. Where? A peer country with the same issues? A developing country where investment never comes back? A small banking haven that will fold at the first sign of hard power? Or do you send it to the rabidly capitalist country with a 50 year track record of delivering investor returns and dozens of aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines to put between your bank account and the New Workers Collective of Yourlandia? That's right. You send it to the USA.
What happens when the money lands in the USA? It pumps assets, because that's what the money buys, and it dumps exports, which now must compete with a literal money printer for access to talent and resources. Asset holders do great. People who sell services to the asset holders do OK. People who build shit for export, though, oof. Software, chip designs, and movies might be lucrative enough that they don't have to care (thus far) but in general, oof.
"We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now all we do is put our hand in the next guy's pocket." - The Wire
That's exactly right, but it's extremely important to understand the macro that drives this so that you can understand how the macro affects you and make informed guesses about where it is headed. For example, I wouldn't bet on this dynamic collapsing tomorrow.