Hacker News Reader

Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

There's no economic boom, just a stock market boom. People are helped in proportion to the money they have in the market.

View on HN

A trip to Disneyland costs thousands of dollars per person, Taylor Swift tickets the same, but these attract record crowds. Cruises and hotels and restaurants are full. How would you define an economic boom?

"Rich people exist therefore the economy is doing great".

Meanwhile the average American doesn't have a spare $1500 set aside for a life threatening emergency, let alone for a Taylor Swift concert.

Not to mention Disneyland and Taylor Swift concerts will have a significant population of tourists whose spending patterns would be independent of the state of the US economy.

> How would you define an economic boom?

The way in which "booming economy" phrasing is used in conversation, one would imagine that it refers to growth in GDP that has a multiplier effect in the local economy. In practice, it really just means spending is up now, but will deflate as soon as credit is harder to come by.

A lot of vacations, cars and home improvements are funded by home equity loans, not actual disposable income.

And it's not so much that the stock market is booming, rather the value of the dollar is imploding. Those are equivalent statements but media chose to preset the "number go up" picture. Reality is for every number that "goes up", another number goes down, and the number that goes down is the value of cash.

One metric we can look at to see if "dollar is imploding" is the exchange rate of USD to Euro/Yen/Pound over the past 20 years. None of those exchange rates indicate that the dollar is imploding. Instead they indicate that the dollar is extremely strong.

Similarly we can look at that past 20 years of Euro/Yen/Pound against Argentinian Peso and conclude that it's all fine? Dollar is strong against other currencies only because of the global competitive devaluation.

USD is losing value rapidly. It's amusing to see politicians claiming credit for stocks going up while the food prices are up almost as much, but nobody is responsible for this one. Dollar is down massively and downplaying this fact is only encouraging more of the same.

> Similarly we can look at that past 20 years of Euro/Yen/Pound against Argentinian Peso and conclude that it's all fine?

Have you looked at those conversions?

One June 1st 2007, 1 Argentinian Peso was worth 0.082£, today it is 0.00078£.

There was a huge corporate profit boom as well.

I wish a President would say that

as well as publications leaning either direction

Real wages are up, especially for lower earners. Unemployment is low.

Real wages are not up for low earners. This is such an obvious math flaw I can't understand how nobody is challenging it. Real wages are adjusted for average inflation based on all consumers. However low earners experience much higher inflation than the average, at least double, and their consumption is vastly different (all of it is housing, food and energy in that order). Many of these low wage earners are periodically homeless or otherwise avoid paying bills to begin with.

Real median wages for full time workers are up a little less than 2.5% since Q4 2019. It could be worse, but it's not really something worth getting excited over.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

Reply on news.ycombinator.com