thomashobohm

"Most economists" never believed that. Lots of people in finance did, sure, but they're not economists.

Yes, this is a good methodology: we should take the lowest point of a random ETF, extrapolate it out, and use that number in our analysis of the Fed's actions.

edit: they edited their comment extensively after I sent this haha.

This is not accurate. A "plummet" in value when it comes to the fallen angels that the Fed is purchasing is more like a 10% drop, and even if you treat the difference between the "true" value of the bonds (if the Fed didn't purchase them) and what the Fed pays as a surplus, the aggregate value of all those surpluses is still tiny in the grand scheme of things.

I have no idea why you're being downvoted; anybody should be able to understand that the Fed is independent (from the "government" in the typical sense of the word, but especially from private interests) by simply googling it. Do these conspiracy theorists really believe the Fed is secretly controlled by a cabal of private banks or something?

Absolutely BEGGING you to figure out the difference between the Fed and the Treasury.

Sorry, let me be clear: by "smart people" I mean economists who have spent their lives studying monetary and fiscal policy and analyzing how it can be used to make the world a better place.

Not sure why the onus is on me to be "reasonable" in my response when we all agree that the person I was replying to was making an entirely unreasonable assertion.

Uh, actually, the notion that the economy has the capacity to provide enough for everyone is a falsifiable statement supported by facts. You can analyze the total amount of resources and the amount of work required to produce them, and figure out how they could be distributed differently. We've known for a long time that, in the US at least, there is enough food, shelter, and healthcare for everyone.

That's not how any of this works; inflation statistics are calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistic, independently of the Federal Reserve.

There's no conspiracy among Fed economists to try and hide inflation.

These things are not known, actually. There are people much smarter than you or me that would disagree with your sentiment that "we know MMT is a bad long term policy."

That is NOT what M2 means! Have you discounted the value of the ETFs and bonds the Fed has purchased? They're not suddenly valueless.

The actual reason why inflation hurts young people has to do with economic stability and its cascading effects on the economy. A period of significant inflation can wipe out generational mobility. Inflation has a minimal effect on "closing the wealth gap" in comparison and I think it's irresponsible to act like hyperinflation would be a reasonable way to solve economic inequality.

This is inaccurate; most economists think we're most likely to see deflation over the next several months as demand collapses. Considering the position of the dollar, a "monetary implosion" like you're describing is still exceedingly unlikely.

What are you even talking about?

Love the interface!

I really have no idea what large parts of this comment are supposed to mean. Regardless:

What is the "monster" in this case? Obsession? That's just a feeling; in a vacuum, there's nothing wrong with it. No philosopher, Nietzsche included, would say "obsession" is always bad. If stuff like that could be dealt with in absolutes, then people like Nietzsche wouldn't have spent their lives writing books about the nuance of it. Clearly, for any feeling or action, "obsession" included, the actor and the object both matter. There is a qualitative difference between self-obsession and obsession with someone else.

I fail to see how this is an example of how we "collectively create our own demons." That's a cute turn of phrase, sure, but in its original usage, "demons" refers to one's own insecurities and internal emotional challenges, not every bad thing that exists. Clearly, if you think about it with some nuance, some "demons" exist outside of oneself. Nobody believes that people trapped in poverty have "collectively created" the demon of inequality. Nobody believes that victims of violence "collectively created" the trauma they experienced. In reality, some demons simply exist, at no fault of one's own; the people complaining about Wolfram didn't collectively invent him. He exists, he's writing and funding these huge research projects, and that's a material fact external to the people complaining about him.

As for your last point-yes, technically, everything we think and feel comes from inside us. But that doesn't make everything we think and feel the same.

Just btw, I think that it's generally cringey to vaguely quote Nietzsche (or any philosopher) to defend a point, unless you are a philosopher writing to other philosophers, or you're citing some unique idea of his. And I hate this whole style of writing, to be honest, where one papers over any nuanced interrogation of their beliefs with shoddy references to pop-philosophy.

I have no stake in this at all and (I literally just learned what "Wolfram Derangement Syndrome" was by reading the comments that you linked to). It looks like you've said several times in the past that the people talking about Wolfram's self-obsession are practicing a "counterversion" of the same thing, but you've never explained why or how; to me, it seems obvious that being obsessed with another person who you don't personally know, like Wolfram, is the exact opposite of being obsessed with yourself.

Please show me a single time in history when the Fed has implemented a fiscal stimulus. I'll wait.

I, personally, believe we need a stimulus for working families, and that we should significantly increase taxes on capital owners, etc. If you believe in that too, then you should be directing your energy towards getting the government to pass a stimulus, not towards trying to get the Fed to do it (they can't).

BTW, even in a socialist utopia, presuming that there are still markets and currency, we will probably still need an independent central bank.

Yes, giving money to people/governments directly is a good idea, but it's not something the Fed can actually do. The government has to step in for that sort of policy. This isn't "creating money as private debt"-it's purchasing debt. Eventually, these bonds will pay out, and that will take most of the money just injected into the money supply back out of it. The only new loans it's issuing are to states and municipalities.

Any state that wants a loan can get one. This isn't really a "stimulus" per se; the Fed is just ensuring that states facing short term liquidity issues can continue operating. To solve the broader structural problems at play, the government needs to step in with some fiscal stimulus.

I mean, panic attacks have no "real" cause by definition. They are your body overreacting in response to a perceived threat that isn't really there; they are a type of cognitive distortion. If a panic attack was in response to a "real" cause, it wouldn't be a panic attack, it would be a normal response to a threat.

I deal with a panic disorder and what you're describing sounds super similar to what a garden-variety panic attack is like. Especially the part about your heart rate rising but your oxygen saturation staying pretty much the same (the difference between 94-97 and 97-100 is within the normal variation during physical activity). What's likely happening is that your brain is latching onto some small thing, like laying down on your back and putting more pressure on your diaphragm. Instead of interpreting that small thing as totally normal, your brain interprets it as a "warning sign," because of your stress/anxiety around COVID, and it goes into panic mode. At this point, it's pumping out a lot of chemicals that stimulate what's called a "fight or flight" response; it's your natural response to any perceived threat, real or otherwise. Those chemicals will cause your heart rate to increase and will often cause shortness of breath. Usually these can last 45 minutes-a few hours and will subside. Deep breathing exercises work for some people, but I find that when I focus on my breathing I end up spiraling more, so I focus on grounding exercises and progressive muscle relaxation. I'd recommend trying those out next time you have a bout of that and see if it helps :)!

I'm still in school and am just starting to get into more difficult math; right now I'm learning introductory odes, vector calculus, and introductory analysis. All three are really enjoyable, but in some ways vector calculus and differential equations feel like a review, in that the hardest part of each is just the calculus I've forgotten since Calculus I-III. I find analysis to be the most interesting course because of how novel it is. I remember at the start of the semester, it was so confusing; the concepts weren't difficult to grasp, but I just didn't understand why we were learning what we were learning, or what it had to do with calculus, for which we were supposedly trying to develop some theoretical foundation. But as the weeks went on, I began to appreciate the beauty of the subject, in small increments. I began to understand why the real numbers were constructed just so, and why we needed to understand ideas like compactness before we could talk about ideas like convergence.

One quote about analysis that I read online somewhere is that you should study it until it starts to feel "natural." At the time, I guess it sounded true, but I didn't appreciate what it actually meant. Now, I'm starting to.

It takes a lot of effort to digest each new lecture, but I'm excited to see what the rest of the course holds, and to graduate to "real analysis" afterwards.