5 ms·

Could you please elaborate? I'm reading his newsletter for quite some time and I'd like to read a rebuttal that's more in depth than just 'that's garbage'.

by nisa 5y ago

russdpale 5y ago
It's quite sad that this is the level of discourse found on these forums. This place used to be great, but over the last few years I notice more and more of these comments which offer absolutely nothing or proffer misinformation to the reader.
- throwawaymanbot 5y ago
credit_guy 5y ago
Not the OP, but I'll chime in. In the context of inflation, the standard party line theses are like this. Right wing: inflation is caused by huge Government spending. Left wing: inflation is caused by a range of factors, and Government spending is just a minor one. The other ones are the supply chain, the emergence of the economy from a crisis, a spike in commodity prices, especially oil, some of which could be attributed to the hurricane Ida that resulted in lots of refineries being shut down, etc. About a month ago another idea was added to this list: inflation is caused by corporate greed. The problem with this idea is that corporate greed is not new. If corporate greed could cause inflation, it would have caused inflation 5 years ago, or 10, or whatever. The proponents of this idea claim that it's the market consolidation that lead to increased pricing power for the corporations, and there's some truth to this, but again, this consolidation did not experience any quantum leap recently. I think on this topic, the Right wing is absolutely right, the inflation is without a doubt caused by the massive, unprecedented money printing. What they forget is that this money printing started during the previous administration, so there's that.
- julianapostate 5y ago
  the reason for which trump started it are totally different than the reasons for which democrats want to continue it.
  - geraldyo 5y ago
    Can you explain how?
    - julianapostate 5y ago
      trump started printing money during an unprecedanted employment and business crisis, airlines and much critical business would have likely collapsed in months without that intervention. then trump wanted to do it again probably just to get reelected or something dumb but at that point the mid-point of republic thought was not really eager for more stimulus. and now at this point the economy is fully humming along and there is no employment or business crisis, business actually have more work than they can hire for and yet democrats still want stimulus. so i can only conclude that any stimulus is ostensibly for "crisis" but really its just form of wealth redistribution since stimulus checks go not to the non-rich but will end up being paid for by the rich. so for democrat stimulus is now a form of policy implementation by a precedented and popular mechanism.
- mox1 5y ago
  So money printing != government spending.... I think of government spending as all of the money needed to fund / run the federal government. While the Fed is printing money and spending that to purchase assets..I wouldn't really put that into the same bucket as Medicare or Military spending..
- daniel-cussen 5y ago
  If only it were still money printing. Those were the good old days, printing money looks like the gold standard compared to what's going on today. Now it's just account *= 10;
- quantified 5y ago
jdgoesmarching 5y ago
It’s especially weird to call it unsubstantiated when the entire post is a very detailed breakdown of economic methodologies. How much more substance could you ask for? Sounds like this person is just reacting to the headline and Stoller’s name, or maybe it’s Larry Summers’ alt account.
- anm89 5y ago
  he posts a couple of tweets and like 2 graphs. I wouldn't call it a very detailed breakdown of anything besides what he happened to be thinking when he wrote it.
jrsj 5y ago
I’m not an expert in this topic but to me this kind of seems like a big hand wavy extrapolation & it’s not clear how accurate any of the specific numbers in here are. In particular the corporate profits being cited are coming from ALL non-financial corporations which is a suspiciously broad data set to use when trying to make an argument about price fixing. As an example if there were a shift in profits from small businesses towards larger corporations driven by pandemic behavior, that would contribute to increasing this. And are we really supposed to believe that near 0 interest rates and unprecedented levels of quantitative easing have no impact on this? Another thing that’s still worth consideration is that even if 3% of inflation were attributable to corporate profits (it’s probably safe to say he’s exaggerating this a bit at least), is the real rate of inflation actually 6.8%? Many think this is an understated number and the reality may be in the low double digits. If this were the case, corporate profits would represent a relatively smaller portion of real inflation.
- kesselvon 5y ago
  Base inflation is never zero. In the article he mentions the 1.8% average inflation rate, plus 2% attributed to gov't stimulus, and 3% towards corporate profits. That adds up to a 6.8% inflation rate. It's hard to blame this purely on ZIRP or QE because we've had both for the last ten years, all without any meaningful spike in inflation.
anm89 5y ago
He's stating an opinion which couldn't be proven with data and then just citing some data and calling it incontrovertible. It would be like saying democracy declined due to corporate profits and then showing a poll saying that democracy declined and another graph that corporate profits went up. It's meant to pander people who are going to believe it full well knowing that nothing has been proved. You cannot prove causality for inflation. Even the things that superficially seem intrinsically linked to inflation like the money supply cannot be proved to account causally for specific inflation. It's a complex system. No one thing causes any other one thing. So yeah, this is a flaming pile of utter bullshit and Stoller embarrasses himself by putting it out.
thoughtstheseus 5y ago
If this article indicates the quality of his other work you should stop reading. Naming Summers over and over again is a red flag for me. I respect the guy. I think he was the last Treasury Secretary to have a balanced budget (Clinton)(?) Dude was vital in mitigating the fallout from the Asian financial crisis. Whatever. The author seems to focus on corporate profits but fails to slice that by industry… software services are booming. He explicitly ignores productivity gains. Many companies became more efficient due to the pandemic. I could go on and on here…

Could you please elaborate? I'm reading his newsletter for quite some time and I'd like to read a rebuttal that's more in depth than just 'that's garbage'.

by nisa 5y ago

Could you please elaborate? I'm reading his newsletter for quite some time and I'd like to read a rebuttal that's more in depth than just 'that's garbage'.

russdpale 5y ago

It's quite sad that this is the level of discourse found on these forums. This place used to be great, but over the last few years I notice more and more of these comments which offer absolutely nothing or proffer misinformation to the reader.

throwawaymanbot 5y ago

credit_guy 5y ago

Not the OP, but I'll chime in. In the context of inflation, the standard party line theses are like this. Right wing: inflation is caused by huge Government spending. Left wing: inflation is caused by a range of factors, and Government spending is just a minor one. The other ones are the supply chain, the emergence of the economy from a crisis, a spike in commodity prices, especially oil, some of which could be attributed to the hurricane Ida that resulted in lots of refineries being shut down, etc. About a month ago another idea was added to this list: inflation is caused by corporate greed. The problem with this idea is that corporate greed is not new. If corporate greed could cause inflation, it would have caused inflation 5 years ago, or 10, or whatever. The proponents of this idea claim that it's the market consolidation that lead to increased pricing power for the corporations, and there's some truth to this, but again, this consolidation did not experience any quantum leap recently. I think on this topic, the Right wing is absolutely right, the inflation is without a doubt caused by the massive, unprecedented money printing. What they forget is that this money printing started during the previous administration, so there's that.

julianapostate 5y ago
the reason for which trump started it are totally different than the reasons for which democrats want to continue it.
- geraldyo 5y ago
  Can you explain how?
  - julianapostate 5y ago
    trump started printing money during an unprecedanted employment and business crisis, airlines and much critical business would have likely collapsed in months without that intervention. then trump wanted to do it again probably just to get reelected or something dumb but at that point the mid-point of republic thought was not really eager for more stimulus. and now at this point the economy is fully humming along and there is no employment or business crisis, business actually have more work than they can hire for and yet democrats still want stimulus. so i can only conclude that any stimulus is ostensibly for "crisis" but really its just form of wealth redistribution since stimulus checks go not to the non-rich but will end up being paid for by the rich. so for democrat stimulus is now a form of policy implementation by a precedented and popular mechanism.
mox1 5y ago
So money printing != government spending.... I think of government spending as all of the money needed to fund / run the federal government. While the Fed is printing money and spending that to purchase assets..I wouldn't really put that into the same bucket as Medicare or Military spending..
daniel-cussen 5y ago
If only it were still money printing. Those were the good old days, printing money looks like the gold standard compared to what's going on today. Now it's just account *= 10;
quantified 5y ago

jdgoesmarching 5y ago

It’s especially weird to call it unsubstantiated when the entire post is a very detailed breakdown of economic methodologies. How much more substance could you ask for? Sounds like this person is just reacting to the headline and Stoller’s name, or maybe it’s Larry Summers’ alt account.

anm89 5y ago
he posts a couple of tweets and like 2 graphs. I wouldn't call it a very detailed breakdown of anything besides what he happened to be thinking when he wrote it.

jrsj 5y ago

I’m not an expert in this topic but to me this kind of seems like a big hand wavy extrapolation & it’s not clear how accurate any of the specific numbers in here are. In particular the corporate profits being cited are coming from ALL non-financial corporations which is a suspiciously broad data set to use when trying to make an argument about price fixing. As an example if there were a shift in profits from small businesses towards larger corporations driven by pandemic behavior, that would contribute to increasing this. And are we really supposed to believe that near 0 interest rates and unprecedented levels of quantitative easing have no impact on this? Another thing that’s still worth consideration is that even if 3% of inflation were attributable to corporate profits (it’s probably safe to say he’s exaggerating this a bit at least), is the real rate of inflation actually 6.8%? Many think this is an understated number and the reality may be in the low double digits. If this were the case, corporate profits would represent a relatively smaller portion of real inflation.

kesselvon 5y ago
Base inflation is never zero. In the article he mentions the 1.8% average inflation rate, plus 2% attributed to gov't stimulus, and 3% towards corporate profits. That adds up to a 6.8% inflation rate. It's hard to blame this purely on ZIRP or QE because we've had both for the last ten years, all without any meaningful spike in inflation.

anm89 5y ago

He's stating an opinion which couldn't be proven with data and then just citing some data and calling it incontrovertible. It would be like saying democracy declined due to corporate profits and then showing a poll saying that democracy declined and another graph that corporate profits went up. It's meant to pander people who are going to believe it full well knowing that nothing has been proved. You cannot prove causality for inflation. Even the things that superficially seem intrinsically linked to inflation like the money supply cannot be proved to account causally for specific inflation. It's a complex system. No one thing causes any other one thing. So yeah, this is a flaming pile of utter bullshit and Stoller embarrasses himself by putting it out.

thoughtstheseus 5y ago

If this article indicates the quality of his other work you should stop reading. Naming Summers over and over again is a red flag for me. I respect the guy. I think he was the last Treasury Secretary to have a balanced budget (Clinton)(?) Dude was vital in mitigating the fallout from the Asian financial crisis. Whatever. The author seems to focus on corporate profits but fails to slice that by industry… software services are booming. He explicitly ignores productivity gains. Many companies became more efficient due to the pandemic. I could go on and on here…