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You fail to see people who lost trust in their governments and organizations? You don't see how people are unhappy with getting their savings diluted by unlimit

You fail to see people who lost trust in their governments and organizations? You don't see how people are unhappy with getting their savings diluted by unlimited money printing?

the_gastropod 5y ago
It seems like the people most upset by money printing learned to be upset by money printing from crypto propaganda.
- rawtxapp 5y ago
  Propaganda? Does it matter where they learned it as long as it's true and factual?
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    How is it true and factual? The inflation rate is set, it is high now and will be lower in the future to account for that. If you are planning to keep millions/billions sitting around in cash for a decade, instead of investing into assets where it works for you and everyone else, you are the reason we have the inflation rate and deserve to lose out to inflation. A set yearly inflation rate incentivizes actual investment instead of currency speculation. Basically the system we have now exists to prevent what crypto enthusiasts are trying to push on us: a return to a super volatile currency that when it crashed wasn’t able to be fixed by just printing more money temporarily. When you hear about things as complex as Monetary Policy, it is best to assume that lots of people have thought about why it is the way it is and why that’s preferable. The “gold standard” and the hoarding of wealth allowed things like feudalism to exist where lords just sat on their land and gold and were richer every year. Yeah you can pull the “the rich get richer today too” card but so do poor people if they invest in assets, and the difference is that every wealthy person has almost all of their wealth invested in the US economy in order to beat the risk free and inflation rate. I really, really am sick of the bullshit around the big L Libertarian party (and the crypto enthusiasts who identify with them.) Spreading lies about the evil fed and the evil inflation rate, both of which are a huge improvement over the constant depressions we had prior to this century. It took thousands of years for people to develop the sophisticated monetary policy we currently have that allows our economy to be extremely stable and continuously grow, generations of very bright people, and anarcho-capitalists want to throw that away to go back to “basics.” At the very least you could do all those people, and the citizens of the world, the courtesy of understanding why were all in favor of yearly inflation (even if we bitch about prices going up.)
  - ineptech 5y ago
    Right, but it's not. The idea that inflation "dilutes" wealth and is therefore bad for rich people is not true.
    - edgyquant 5y ago
      It would be if rich people held all their money in cash like Smaug in his mountain, but anyone familiar with the current monetary system would know that people invest in assets to prevent losing out to inflation and this is what we’re going for with a steady inflation rate. Keeps the economy pumping and in times when we hit a recession (not depressions, since we don’t really have those anymore thanks to our modern monetary policy) those same rich people want to get their freed up assets into the economy as quickly as possible.
    - JuliusBranson 5y ago
      Correct. Inflation is when the dollar gets weaker for the masses because the elite are printing themselves dollars. Deflation is when the dollar gets stronger for the masses because the elite's proportion of the national currency is decreasing. We have pro-inflation, anti-deflation economic ideology because the elite fund the economists' "research."
      - ineptech 5y ago
        Stronger/weaker refer to the value of a dollar compared to other currencies; inflation/deflation refer to the value of a dollar compared to goods and services. Neither is related to the "elite's proportion of the national currency". Again, I can only suggest reading some articles about this stuff. > We have pro-inflation, anti-deflation economic ideology because the elite fund the economists' "research." Suppose USD deflated; what would happen? Some people would move some money from other assets (stocks/bonds/etc) into currency and hold it for risk-free returns. What would that do? Reduce the amount of money in circulation. What does that do? Deflate the currency even more. What does that do? Incentivize even more people to move money into currency, which makes the currency deflate even more. The whole point of a currency is that people spend it or invest it in something useful. If it's going up in value, they're incentivized not to do that, and it stops being used as a currency. This is an unambiguously bad outcome. I don't believe shadow elites are trying to convince economists of this, because they're already convinced.
  - georgeecollins 5y ago
    Can we start by talking about how modern money works in a more factually accurate way. In particular, can we stop talking about "printing money"? Printing money has no impact on the value of money. I think most people in a forum like this understand that but when we talk that way I worry that someone, somewhere doesn't understand. Money is created when it is borrowed from a bank or banking institution. Even that is an oversimplification but it is still much more accurate than saying money is created by "printing" it because it isn't. One of the really key things to understand is that the money supply is created by government but it is also created by businesses and individuals. I don't have a dog in this fight, but it always drives me crazy when people talk about economics in a sloppy way.
    - ineptech 5y ago
      Sure, but central banks do influence how much banks can borrow, and hence how fast the currency supply grows. Even someone whose understanding of monetary policy is limited to "The Fed has a big meeting each year to decide what the inflation rate will be" can understand why a deflating currency would be really bad.
- JuliusBranson 5y ago
  Weird how most people still don't know about fractional reserve lending and how their food and heat costs more because the ruling class is printing money and giving it to their friends, but if normal people do the same thing they will get locked up.
- koonsolo 5y ago
  Go talk to some Turkisch people and ask how they feel about the Lira.
throwvirtever 5y ago
> You don't see how people are unhappy with getting their savings diluted by unlimited money printing? Money printing dilutes wealth if you hold it in cash, but every other asset appreciates. Moreover if you have more debt than wealth, money printing reduces that burden. How many people actually have more wealth than debt but keep it largely in cash? I never understood who exactly has this problem.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  The vast majority of humanity has no access to credit besides borrowing cash from Uncle Pedro, no access to any other financial instruments besides cash and keeps their savings under their mattress or in a shoe box. You don't understand who has this problem because you don't know anyone who has this problem, but outside of our comfy western countries most people have this problem.
  - throwvirtever 5y ago
    > outside of our comfy western countries most people have this problem. Can you cite some evidence that there are people keeping long-term savings* in cash and has adequate internet access and computing resources to participate in cryptocurrencies? I'm still not buying this. * (I believe people do hold short-term savings in cash, but those are not the type of savings that money-printing erodes significantly.)
pjc50 5y ago
What is crypto if not money printing? While any one chain may be limited in issue, you can always just fork it or create a new currency or token. People are printing tokens at a phenomenal rate. And unbacked or badly backed "stablecoins" are money printing of real-looking but unstable currency.
- rawtxapp 5y ago
  What gives a chain value is the network effects which are notoriously hard to establish. So yes, you can fork it, but can you get people to actually use it? Really doubt it.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    BCH allegedly has a billion dollars of daily transactions and is worth about 1% of officially-forked bitcoin: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/
NoGravitas 5y ago
Up to a point, more money printing is good for me: dollars become devalued, my employer has to pay me more of them to keep up with the cost of living, but my mortgage is still valued in 2009 dollars. I can pay it off faster, or just have more purchasing power left over every month after paying it on schedule.
- rawtxapp 5y ago
  If you have assets and debt (and a job that will actually pay well, keep up with inflation), money printing is awesome for you! If you're in the majority of people who don't have those things, life just gets harder and wealth gap keeps getting larger and larger.
  - prewett 5y ago
    > If you're in the majority of people who don't have those things ... Home ownership in the US is around 65% [0], so the majority do have an asset and mortgage. There are also some people who choose not to own a house but have other types of assets. Things really aren't as dire as you seem to think. And for those people who actually are harmed by inflation, I think the consensus is that they would be harmed by the other option--deflation--even more, mostly because the disincentive to invest leads to fewer employment opportunities. The Great Depression, a deflationary environment, was not good times. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home-ownership_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home-ownership_in_the_United_S...
    - IHLayman 5y ago
      From your Wikipedia article: “ The name "home-ownership rate" can be misleading. As defined by the US Census Bureau, it is the percentage of homes that are occupied by the owner. It is not the percentage of adults that own their own home. This latter percentage will be significantly lower than the home-ownership rate. Many households that are owner-occupied contain adult relatives (often young adults, descendants of the owner) who do not own their own home. Single building multi-bedroom rental units can contain more than one adult, all of whom do not own a home.” According to the US Census in 2020, 139.68 million homes in the US with a 64% owner-occupied rate means 89.395 million homes are owner occupied. Let’s say 85% of those are dual-owned (by couples) which I could not get a solid statistic on but several policy websites seem to cite, and we will assume the other 15% are single owners. Then about 165 million people either own or partially own the house they live in, or roughly 50% of the population. That is the slimmest of majorities, far less than the 65% implies. [0] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045219 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045219

You fail to see people who lost trust in their governments and organizations? You don't see how people are unhappy with getting their savings diluted by unlimited money printing?

the_gastropod 5y ago

It seems like the people most upset by money printing learned to be upset by money printing from crypto propaganda.

rawtxapp 5y ago
Propaganda? Does it matter where they learned it as long as it's true and factual?
- edgyquant 5y ago
  How is it true and factual? The inflation rate is set, it is high now and will be lower in the future to account for that. If you are planning to keep millions/billions sitting around in cash for a decade, instead of investing into assets where it works for you and everyone else, you are the reason we have the inflation rate and deserve to lose out to inflation. A set yearly inflation rate incentivizes actual investment instead of currency speculation. Basically the system we have now exists to prevent what crypto enthusiasts are trying to push on us: a return to a super volatile currency that when it crashed wasn’t able to be fixed by just printing more money temporarily. When you hear about things as complex as Monetary Policy, it is best to assume that lots of people have thought about why it is the way it is and why that’s preferable. The “gold standard” and the hoarding of wealth allowed things like feudalism to exist where lords just sat on their land and gold and were richer every year. Yeah you can pull the “the rich get richer today too” card but so do poor people if they invest in assets, and the difference is that every wealthy person has almost all of their wealth invested in the US economy in order to beat the risk free and inflation rate. I really, really am sick of the bullshit around the big L Libertarian party (and the crypto enthusiasts who identify with them.) Spreading lies about the evil fed and the evil inflation rate, both of which are a huge improvement over the constant depressions we had prior to this century. It took thousands of years for people to develop the sophisticated monetary policy we currently have that allows our economy to be extremely stable and continuously grow, generations of very bright people, and anarcho-capitalists want to throw that away to go back to “basics.” At the very least you could do all those people, and the citizens of the world, the courtesy of understanding why were all in favor of yearly inflation (even if we bitch about prices going up.)
- ineptech 5y ago
  Right, but it's not. The idea that inflation "dilutes" wealth and is therefore bad for rich people is not true.
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    It would be if rich people held all their money in cash like Smaug in his mountain, but anyone familiar with the current monetary system would know that people invest in assets to prevent losing out to inflation and this is what we’re going for with a steady inflation rate. Keeps the economy pumping and in times when we hit a recession (not depressions, since we don’t really have those anymore thanks to our modern monetary policy) those same rich people want to get their freed up assets into the economy as quickly as possible.
  - JuliusBranson 5y ago
    Correct. Inflation is when the dollar gets weaker for the masses because the elite are printing themselves dollars. Deflation is when the dollar gets stronger for the masses because the elite's proportion of the national currency is decreasing. We have pro-inflation, anti-deflation economic ideology because the elite fund the economists' "research."
    - ineptech 5y ago
      Stronger/weaker refer to the value of a dollar compared to other currencies; inflation/deflation refer to the value of a dollar compared to goods and services. Neither is related to the "elite's proportion of the national currency". Again, I can only suggest reading some articles about this stuff. > We have pro-inflation, anti-deflation economic ideology because the elite fund the economists' "research." Suppose USD deflated; what would happen? Some people would move some money from other assets (stocks/bonds/etc) into currency and hold it for risk-free returns. What would that do? Reduce the amount of money in circulation. What does that do? Deflate the currency even more. What does that do? Incentivize even more people to move money into currency, which makes the currency deflate even more. The whole point of a currency is that people spend it or invest it in something useful. If it's going up in value, they're incentivized not to do that, and it stops being used as a currency. This is an unambiguously bad outcome. I don't believe shadow elites are trying to convince economists of this, because they're already convinced.
- georgeecollins 5y ago
  Can we start by talking about how modern money works in a more factually accurate way. In particular, can we stop talking about "printing money"? Printing money has no impact on the value of money. I think most people in a forum like this understand that but when we talk that way I worry that someone, somewhere doesn't understand. Money is created when it is borrowed from a bank or banking institution. Even that is an oversimplification but it is still much more accurate than saying money is created by "printing" it because it isn't. One of the really key things to understand is that the money supply is created by government but it is also created by businesses and individuals. I don't have a dog in this fight, but it always drives me crazy when people talk about economics in a sloppy way.
  - ineptech 5y ago
    Sure, but central banks do influence how much banks can borrow, and hence how fast the currency supply grows. Even someone whose understanding of monetary policy is limited to "The Fed has a big meeting each year to decide what the inflation rate will be" can understand why a deflating currency would be really bad.
JuliusBranson 5y ago
Weird how most people still don't know about fractional reserve lending and how their food and heat costs more because the ruling class is printing money and giving it to their friends, but if normal people do the same thing they will get locked up.
koonsolo 5y ago
Go talk to some Turkisch people and ask how they feel about the Lira.

throwvirtever 5y ago

> You don't see how people are unhappy with getting their savings diluted by unlimited money printing? Money printing dilutes wealth if you hold it in cash, but every other asset appreciates. Moreover if you have more debt than wealth, money printing reduces that burden. How many people actually have more wealth than debt but keep it largely in cash? I never understood who exactly has this problem.

betwixthewires 5y ago
The vast majority of humanity has no access to credit besides borrowing cash from Uncle Pedro, no access to any other financial instruments besides cash and keeps their savings under their mattress or in a shoe box. You don't understand who has this problem because you don't know anyone who has this problem, but outside of our comfy western countries most people have this problem.
- throwvirtever 5y ago
  > outside of our comfy western countries most people have this problem. Can you cite some evidence that there are people keeping long-term savings* in cash and has adequate internet access and computing resources to participate in cryptocurrencies? I'm still not buying this. * (I believe people do hold short-term savings in cash, but those are not the type of savings that money-printing erodes significantly.)

pjc50 5y ago

What is crypto if not money printing? While any one chain may be limited in issue, you can always just fork it or create a new currency or token. People are printing tokens at a phenomenal rate. And unbacked or badly backed "stablecoins" are money printing of real-looking but unstable currency.

rawtxapp 5y ago
What gives a chain value is the network effects which are notoriously hard to establish. So yes, you can fork it, but can you get people to actually use it? Really doubt it.
- pjc50 5y ago
  BCH allegedly has a billion dollars of daily transactions and is worth about 1% of officially-forked bitcoin: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-cash/

NoGravitas 5y ago

Up to a point, more money printing is good for me: dollars become devalued, my employer has to pay me more of them to keep up with the cost of living, but my mortgage is still valued in 2009 dollars. I can pay it off faster, or just have more purchasing power left over every month after paying it on schedule.

rawtxapp 5y ago
If you have assets and debt (and a job that will actually pay well, keep up with inflation), money printing is awesome for you! If you're in the majority of people who don't have those things, life just gets harder and wealth gap keeps getting larger and larger.
- prewett 5y ago
  > If you're in the majority of people who don't have those things ... Home ownership in the US is around 65% [0], so the majority do have an asset and mortgage. There are also some people who choose not to own a house but have other types of assets. Things really aren't as dire as you seem to think. And for those people who actually are harmed by inflation, I think the consensus is that they would be harmed by the other option--deflation--even more, mostly because the disincentive to invest leads to fewer employment opportunities. The Great Depression, a deflationary environment, was not good times. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home-ownership_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home-ownership_in_the_United_S...
  - IHLayman 5y ago
    From your Wikipedia article: “ The name "home-ownership rate" can be misleading. As defined by the US Census Bureau, it is the percentage of homes that are occupied by the owner. It is not the percentage of adults that own their own home. This latter percentage will be significantly lower than the home-ownership rate. Many households that are owner-occupied contain adult relatives (often young adults, descendants of the owner) who do not own their own home. Single building multi-bedroom rental units can contain more than one adult, all of whom do not own a home.” According to the US Census in 2020, 139.68 million homes in the US with a 64% owner-occupied rate means 89.395 million homes are owner occupied. Let’s say 85% of those are dual-owned (by couples) which I could not get a solid statistic on but several policy websites seem to cite, and we will assume the other 15% are single owners. Then about 165 million people either own or partially own the house they live in, or roughly 50% of the population. That is the slimmest of majorities, far less than the 65% implies. [0] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045219 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045219