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Comment by darth_avocado | Hacker News Reader

This is the right move. Inflationary pressures due to high oil prices and tariffs are not going away anytime soon. All the economic numbers point to a need for a rate hike. Not doing so has a much larger effect on the financial system than a 25 bps rate hike. Stagflation is a bigger risk to the economy.

Counterintuitively the rate hike can help lower things like mortgage rates by stabilizing the bond yields.

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Definitely the right move, 100% agree.

I don't think that mortgage rates are going to go down; I think they will go up. Just my opinion.

I also think oil is about to go up even more, maybe for multiple years, which is going to be inflationary on everything we do. But, could be really good for solar growth, electrification, and electric cars.

Re: mortgage rates

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/09/16/heres-wha...

Remind me in 6 months :)

I'll be you; they are higher this time.

That wouldn’t be a great way to measure it. I’m only talking about the fed rates, how it impacts the bond market and therefore the mortgage rates. If someone decides to nuke the oil infrastructure of the world tomorrow, this rate hike doesn’t matter and your hopes and dreams of a low mortgage rate get nuked along with the oil infrastructure.

We'll continue through the depression we've started since 2008. (GDP growth should be closer to 3.5%-5%, but we haven't really escaped sub-2% since 2008) - our GDP has been depressed by at least 1-2% growth since that crisis, and I think a large part of it has been the inflationary cycle we started and never stopped.

The wars already put us into too much debt, Obama continued it for 8 years (granted, the deficit slowly went down, but it wasn't fixed). Trump and Biden did a huge disservice to the debt (but neither really cared much about it), and now I fear the path Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden have laid will not be easily fixed.

I agree with you. We are still paying for 2008, and compounded the problem with Covid stimuli. I sure wish we would just rip the band aid off at this point, but it might already be too late. The global economy is jacked, China needs everyone to be consumers, and that well is running dry, globally.

GDP growth is never going to be that high again. GDP growth is just per-capita GDP growth (1-1.5% per year) + population growth (used to be 1%, now is 0% or slightly negative). GDP growth of 1-1.5% will be normal going forward and could even go lower if population decline is at -.5% per year, for example.

I did list GDP growth per capita[0], so that already was accounting for population changes.

Having said that, you are depressingly very correct. A negative population growth will cause the post-2008 depression to continue even longer, and probably more agressively.

[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD.ZG?end=2...

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