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After following Peter Schiff for over a decade, and him being thoroughly wrong about inflation after 2008, I can't help but think "this time is different". Bef

• xwdv 6y ago
  A powerful argument against UBI.
  • turbinerneiter 6y ago
    So, bailing out the rich is good, feeding the poor causes an inflation crash. What a world we live in.
    • xwdv 6y ago
      The poor would soon learn their one shot out of poverty is keeping their job and throwing their UBI income straight into the stock market. This would propel the prices of equities to even greater stratospheric heights, and as the investor class gets richer eventually the prices of all commodities rise to capture this easy money flowing around. So now the poor have more money but it still buys less or equal to what it did before, so it’s a wash. Meanwhile anyone who isn’t putting all their UBI into stocks and is instead using it to live and pay bills will fall behind and be comparatively poorer to everyone else. It will happen.
      • jlangenauer 6y ago
        Any UBI is not going to be "in addition to" whatever other money you might earn, but is more likely to look something like a minimum income, below which you cannot drop (even if you stop working).
        • xwdv 6y ago
          And you don’t think people getting UBI with a bunch of free time aren’t going to occupy that time by taking unofficial jobs and getting paid under the table to earn more income? Get real.
        • zpeti 6y ago
          Wait what? Isn't that the whole point? It's UNIVERSAL. So we don't have to have bureaucracy to run it bla bla. How is it UBI if I stop getting it if I'm working? Then it literally is just another form of government help to the unemployed and a massive disincentive to work.
        • sovsovsod 6y ago
          That drops the U in UBI, most it’s merits, and creates a poverty gap. UBI only makes sense when it’s universal. It makes most sense when it replaces other entitlement programs. I don’t think UBI is necessarily doomed to an inflationary spiral, but the onus is on its proponents to prove otherwise. Come up with a scheme that won’t become a bread and circus, and wont cause inflation, and I’m all for it! But I’d rather just smash the machines (that’s ultimately what UBI aims to solve) and solve the automation problem by giving ppl the dignity [1] of work. [1] my local grocer employees a few folks with Down syndrome at the cash register. They’re super slow, but otherwise good at their job. I love them. They value their job so much, and they have by far the best attitude. Their job gives them the dignity of knowing that they aren’t mere consumers, but also (in their limited way) contributors. That’s very powerful for the soul.
          • curryst 6y ago
            I don't see why inflation is necessary. UBI doesn't have to change the amount of money flowing through the economy; one option is heavy taxes. Wealth redistribution, effectively. That does beg the question of whether incentives will remain high enough to maintain the technological forward momentum we have been making, and whether that slowing down is even necessarily a bad thing. > [1] my local grocer employees a few folks with Down syndrome at the cash register. They’re super slow, but otherwise good at their job. I love them. They value their job so much, and they have by far the best attitude. Their job gives them the dignity of knowing that they aren’t mere consumers, but also (in their limited way) contributors. That’s very powerful for the soul. That's very different from smashing the machines to me. They really and truly are contributing something to the world; we need people to check people out and bag their groceries. If we built a machine that could check people out and bag their groceries, smashing that machine so people can get the "sense of pride and accomplishment" of having needlessly manually bagged the groceries seems a little... patronizing? I mean, at that point why don't we just keep using the machines and send everyone to school for the rest of their lives to keep them busy like we do with children? I think people will gravitate towards work on their own, it just won't look like what you're accustomed to. With that amount of automation, we can support a lot more work that isn't strictly industrial. Arts and culture, artisanal goods, baskets woven underwater, etc. Is it going to propel us forward? Probably not, but I think it will make people a lot happier than pointlessly bagging groceries. If we accept that the value of the work is intrinsic (i.e. the value is in doing the work, not in the product of the work), we might as well let people work on what makes them happy.
      • sovsovsod 6y ago
        You’re right, of course, that if the UBI is giving any meaningful amount of money, then ceribus paribus, (massive) inflation is the result. It’s a basic argument too. Of course you don’t have to keep the “ceribus paribus” condition, Although I’m skeptical any leader in the USA will break the ceribus paribus.
    • sovsovsod 6y ago
      I don’t think OP argued to bail out the rich. They only argued that UBI doesn’t make sense. Maybe UBI makes sense. Maybe it doesn’t. I’m on the fence, personally. But bailing out the way we did in 2008-2009, where CEOs and other saboteurs got massive bonuses instead of jail time, was highly immoral. Some of believe that that caused latent inflation. Bailing out the rich has nothing to do with UBI. I’ll welcome an UBI scheme that doesn’t wreck personal agency and responsibility. But the onus is on the proponents to prove that it isn’t a terminal civilization’s 21st century version of the Roman “bread and circus” Btw, a great implicit UBI is to - reduce the work week to 30 hours. Shares existing jobs with more people - change the “part time” rules to discourage hiring “part time” employees to avoid benefits - increase minimum pay. Yes, that too. But it has to be local government in a manner that makes sense to their local economy. Alternatively the federal imposed min. wage should depend on geography - Bring back weekends to low wage earners (my wife’s entire family works at Walmart or similar places. I see how weekend instability wrecks their ability to enjoy being together). Either close on weekend, or have workers choose a week day they always get off. Mandate 50% overtime for work on weekends. - Put a 15% tariffs on all goods (no exceptions!). This acts like a sales tax (counter cyclical to the economy. Big plus one) that isn’t as regressive as a sales tax since it encourages local jobs for cheap things and for fancy things the rich pay).
      • turbinerneiter 6y ago
        Didn't want to imply or criticize OP in any way, just make an observation. I think your arguments against UBI make sense, I also know a lot of good pro arguments. But ultimately, whatever the arguments, as long as we bail out the rich, I don't care about potential downsides of UBI. Nobody cares about the downsides of bailing out the rich, so why should I care about the downsides of bailing out the poor? In short, if: "UBI wrecks personal agency and responsibility", than so does QE, bailouts etc. for the rich. So these points aren't the real reason why the one thing happens and the other doesn't. Fully agree with all your points, a better labour market is better than UBI.
  • nfin 6y ago
    is it? UBI is really a strange beast. I wish I had more time or fitting frameworks / mental models to understand better the consequences. UBI... - might be the only solution out of the crazy money printing and MMT - seemed to me initially (!) strangely similar to communism/socialism, but actually is very different (for example there is something to be gained from being innovative or creating stuff (instead of doing the minimum you can), which was not (!) the case in communism - might be the only solution when most (current) jobs will be replaced by robots (if all agriculture gets 99% automated, can we not have basic (!) free food for everyone? And additionally just a simple roof... both would cover most of your basic needs) I am not sure about UBI, I also see problems with it too, but could solve more of those than it creates... maybe? edit: formating
  • atq2119 6y ago
    Not really. It's a mechanism by which UBI could turn out to be futile, but it's only a qualitative mechanism. Whether UBI actually becomes self-defeating via inflation is a quantitative question which nobody can honestly answer today because (a) a lot hinges on what the tax regime is like and (b) nobody has ever done the experiment, and we need the experiment to gather quantitative data. (Yes, there have been UBI experiments. None of them were large enough for macroeconomic effects.)
• mschuster91 6y ago
  > But once everyone suddenly starts spending after a year and a half of lockups, suddenly there won't be enough product to go around. People in need are already spending it to survive or to pay up debts they had to take on due to dysfunctional / non-existing social security networks. And even when the lockups eventually expire, many won't immediately splurge - because the next lockdown is only one mutation away. For what it's worth I'd guess most of the helicopter money ends up at banks eventually by mortgage payments and student loan repayments.
• locallost 6y ago
  I listened to what Schiff had to say in 2008, but the same talking point of how he was right became tiring quick. Eventually years later I realized he basically always has the same forecast of impending doom, that just happened to be correct once. So he's a bit of a broken clock is correct twice a day person.
  • womitt 6y ago
    He is peddling gold, doom scares are good for his business
  • kthejoker2 6y ago
    Economists have correctly predicted 8 of the last 4 rrcessions.
    • throw0101a 6y ago
      You may wish to actually look up that quotation: > To prove that Wall Street is an early omen of movements still to come in GNP, commentators quote economic studies alleging that market downturns predicted four out of the last five recessions. That is an understatement. Wall Street indexes predicted nine out of the last five recessions! And its mistakes were beauties.[20] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Samuelson#Aphorisms_and_quotations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Samuelson#Aphorisms_and_q... Paul Samuelson was one of the most important economists in the 20C, and literally wrote the textbook: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_(textbook) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_(textbook)
• ptero 6y ago
  I highly recommend analysis by Lyn Alden. She looks at the situation with an engineer's approach without pushing any political agenda. She looks at several options and provides the justification that "this time is different"; also lists other potential scenarios that could happen and things to look for to determine which one is developing. https://www.lynalden.com/money-printing/ https://www.lynalden.com/money-printing/ is a recent public article. She has a couple of more recent updates in her premium research section, but the main thesis stayed the same. EDIT: Her more recent public article on the subject: https://www.lynalden.com/february-2021-newsletter/ https://www.lynalden.com/february-2021-newsletter/
• sovsovsod 6y ago
  Was he really wrong? If I gift money to an extremely over leveraged banks to save them and, with puckered sphincters (they just saw the abyss), they hold onto it then we won’t “see inflation”. It’s there, but it’s latent inflation. If I demolish wages by exporting jobs overseas, that will have a deflationary effect to counter the effect of inflation. If I replace cocoa butter with food wax, I hide inflation. If I don’t include price of housing in the CPI [1], I manipulate inflation. Schiff’s theory is sound. But, like the GME debacle proved, it’s like shoring a doomed company. Can you stay solvent long enough to prove your point? [1] I know and understand the argument why houses it arent included. I just reject the argument completely as flawed.
  • waheoo 6y ago
    What's the argument for housing not being included thats blizzare.
    • throwaway0a5e 6y ago
      I haven't crunched the numbers but so much of people's income goes to housing and housing prices vary so much that I think that would likely result in the outliers trashing any utility the index has.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • sovsovsod 6y ago
      Rents included in the CPI. The argument is that a house is an investment. I.e you sell it in the end. Investments aren’t included in the CPI. I think that’s BS because investments increase in value due to inflation (and not just because of their inherent growth). I get the difficulty of extracting the natural growth of the asset from the inflationary growth, but I also believe most of the 2008 monetary mass increase was shoveled into financial assets and this has to be considered. that’s the gist of it.
  • zpeti 6y ago
    I agree with you, but that doesn't take away from the fact that now we might see actual inflation at the level of "everyone". Which is different to the asset price inflation we've seen in the last 12 years.
• addicted 6y ago
  What’s wrong with stimulus checks? Inflation is only a problem if it doesn’t reflect actual economic activity. Thanks to COVID there is so much slack built into the real world economy right now that there is probably a ton of capacity to absorb any additional “created” dollars. I suspect the real problem will be if for whatever reason the vaccines start failing and COVID comes raging back and worse for at least another year.
• roenxi 6y ago
  > ... and him being thoroughly wrong about inflation after 2008 Yes, but I've listened to a lot of Peter Schiff, so I'll offer a defence of his position that he might agree with (although it isn't one he'd make) by breaking inflation into 2 parts: Assumption (wildly radical) - inflation is exactly equal to the change in monetary supply. Say there is 100% inflation of the monetary base (and, by assumption, cost of everything doubles) and people become twice as productive from technological improvement (cost of everything halves). The BLS would say inflation is 0%, because the net availability of goods and services to people hasn't changed. Schiff would say there has been 100% inflation because in a counterfactual everyone could have had twice as much stuff. I'm not sure what word the economic mainstream would use to describe what Schiff is talking about. I would call it Gross inflation, I suppose.
• nicoffeine 6y ago
  > Before 2020 all money printing went to banks, which increased the wealth of the 1% and increased asset prices, but it didn't create inflation No inflation in housing costs? Health care? Education? Fine art and collector car prices? I don't think "reasonable billion dollar interest free loans to billionaires" turns into "actual helicopter money" the moment it's given to a non-billionaire. In my opinion, this is yet another retelling of the same Weimar Republic ghost story trying to convince you that giving poor people money will lead to hyper inflation. It's total bullshit, just like trickle-down economics. The Weimar Republic collapsed because it couldn't afford to pay its war debt to other countries, or (as some scholars believe) it was done intentionally by the Weimar government so they wouldn't have to pay it back. One hundred years later, there are dozens of other countries that have more debt to GDP ratio, where the minimum wage is a living wage, there is a strong safety net of housing/food/healthcare, and a #3 at McDonalds is not much more expensive. If you have recently seen your wage double, it's actually cheaper. The street is always looking for the next big bet. Let's make it on every day citizens instead of the obscenely wealthy.
  • zpeti 6y ago
    Why are you implying I want aid for billionaires not the poor? I was making a pretty objective point about Peter Schiff's opinions, without adding any opinions of my own. So please don't turn me into the billionaire bailout supporter. I'm not and I never said such a thing.