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The emperor has no clothes. How many crises do we have to go through before we admit the fed and banks either have no idea what they are doing or they know exa

The emperor has no clothes. How many crises do we have to go through before we admit the fed and banks either have no idea what they are doing or they know exactly what they're doing and it's malevolent? The number of people here defending the system and saying this isn't inflation is mind boggling. Where do you think the money comes from when the government rescues banks? No matter how you slice it, the taxpayer pays through higher fees, higher rates or inflation. This system of rescuing banks with no prosecution of the people responsible and printing a mountain of money is unsustainable. It's clear that humans will never implement an equitable system and it makes the case for Bitcoin every day...unless you profit from the financial system and then I'm sure you'd be thrilled to kick the can down the road.

nwah1 4y ago
Bitcoin regularly dives by orders of magnitude worse than the 2008 financial crisis. Angsty posting like this probably sounded really cool to people in high school, but I'm not sure why we should be impressed with your fact-free faux-radical grifterism.
- shagymoe 4y ago
  The value of Bitcoin would not fluctuate wildly if it were the default currency. You're not even attempting to argue in good faith or imagine how things could be different. What you call "angsty" is what I call "rational". I see you're happy to continue experiencing these crises which are, in fact, happening. Also, I don't think you know what grifterism means, if that's even a word.
  - latchkey 4y ago
    HN can't think past price goes up/down and see that a lot of crypto is a valuable resource that you can use as collateral and borrow against it without having to go to a bank and beg for permission.
    - philipwhiuk 4y ago
      You still need permission from the person/company on the other side to use crypto as collateral.
      - red-iron-pine 4y ago
        And there have been a lot of painful lessons lately as to why that's a bad idea.
      - latchkey 4y ago
        Maybe I'm not explaining myself correctly. I can take crypto (and I'm talking about BTC/ETH, but can be others) and lend it out (generally for a positive APY). I can then borrow (typically USD*, but can be many other tokens) against that collateral (sometimes even for a positive APY!). No permission needed and happens in the scope of transactions that cost pennies. This is a massively important aspect of finance that goes beyond daily price swings. It is a relatively new aspect in crypto that has only been around for the last ~3 years or so. Example: https://aave.com/ https://aave.com/ ($8.2b locked up right now)
  - jeezfrk 4y ago
    magical thinking about very un-tethered and highly manipulated currency is not a help. imagining it will change for an entire economy ... is quite irrational. no magic will make a constantly shifting ice floe into boring bedrock.
    - shagymoe 4y ago
      The current system is more irrational, unless you're benefiting from the corrupt system. Bitcoin is democratic and you vote with a node.
      - roarcher 4y ago
        Yes, and its voters vote for their own profits, which makes it swing wildly. Being "democratic" doesn't make something immune to greed.
        shagymoe 4y ago
        It's clear you don't understand how nodes or "voting" works. There's no mechanism there which would induce wild swings.
        roarcher 4y ago
        I do, actually. I never said there was a mechanism that induces swings--there doesn't need to be one. The users do it through speculation, just like with any other asset, only it's worse with Bitcoin because it isn't tied to anything of real value, even theoretically (unless you think wasted CPU/GPU cycles are valuable). Being "democratic" doesn't magically safeguard against that. I'm not a fan of the fed and I think some sort of decentralized currency would be great. Bitcoin was a good idea and I'm glad we're experimenting along those lines, but it's a failed experiment. It's never going to work as a mainstream currency. Maybe some future iteration of the cryptocurrency idea will be the solution, but Bitcoin ain't it.
        latchkey 4y ago
  - csomar 4y ago
    > The value of Bitcoin would not fluctuate wildly if it were the default currency. I wouldn't think so. Many of our "crisis" are due to the value of "cash" or liquidity to fluctuate significantly. This is the case in the recent banking crisis. In the case of Bitcoin, this will be a deep dive in price. Now which one is better? I don't know.
erlich 4y ago
Everyone in charge are already extremely wealthy. They have zero skin in the game. J. Powell, 50MM. Yellen, 20MM. There is no ability for them to empathize with a regular taxpayer. Whatever happens their lifestyle will not be impacted one bit. You have to ask: what drives someone in this position. And this is a question that only the 200k ultra high net individuals (30mm+) in the world can answer. I think people stop chasing material possessions and start chasing prestige and power. These people don’t interact with the average joe much so they don’t really care about their opinion, unless you are a populist like Trump for eg. They care about their family friends and peers. So I think it creates a broey kind of culture where you want your peers to be happy with the job you are doing. If you are in finance you want the bankers to be happy. Your political party to be happy etc. I think it becomes more about making and keeping friends. This stage for life without need for material possessions is all about people and relationships and power. You just have to imagine yourself with infinite wealth but no friends. You would quickly run out of things to spend it on, and you would just want people to love and respect you.
- shagymoe 4y ago
  All good points. Let's remove the power to control money from these people.
  - nebula8804 4y ago
    Great idea! As someone who spent time volunteering for Bernie Sanders campaign, I'll wait here while you go do that: Good luck!
    - shagymoe 4y ago
      I was right there with you. We're collectively too stupid or too easily manipulated to enact the change we need.
      - nebula8804 4y ago
        Gen-Z are absolute rockstars. I like to think that part of the surprise win for Dems in 2022 was boomers passing away (possibly accelerated due to anti-vax COVID deaths) and Gen-Z really coming out in the hopes of some sort of college loan relief. Hopefully down the road the millennials and gen-z become a large enough collective that they finally push out the garbage...although the establishment wont go down without a massive fight.
AnimalMuppet 4y ago
> How many crises do we have to go through before we admit the fed and banks either have no idea what they are doing or they know exactly what they're doing and it's malevolent? False dichotomy. The Fed can have good intentions, and a good-but-not-perfect idea what they're doing, and things can be working out, not perfectly, but better than they would in the absence of the Fed. Is there any evidence for that? Yeah, look at the world before the Fed. Look at the "Panic/Depression of 18xx". There's several to choose from. They're 2008-or-worse events, over and over and over. The economy is a really complicated system, with lots of humans (and their emotions!) as part of the system. It's really hard to tune it perfectly. That doesn't mean that the Fed is either malicious or incompetent.
- sheepybloke 4y ago
  Exactly. Economics likes to pretend it is a hard science because it has mathematics and formulas and hard numbers, but it's not. It is much closer with a social science, where work has either big assumptions or is much closer to a study about the market's behavior. But because economics has masqueraded as a science, we expect it to be more exact than it really is, and I think that dissonance can be quite impactful to how we see the fed as it tries to make decisions at times like this.
  - Teever 4y ago
    Please. One look at Norway tells me this is malarky. If Norway can have such a stable economy and society, why can't the rest of the world? What have they figured out that has eluded everyone else?
    - 3dbrows 4y ago
      Sitting atop the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, accumulated over decades of judicious management of national oil wealth, perhaps insulates Norway from realities that apply elsewhere.
      - Teever 4y ago
dragonwriter 4y ago
> How many crises do we have to go through before we admit the fed and banks either have no idea what they are doing or they know exactly what they're doing and it's malevolent? Considering how bad things were before the Fed, quite a lot before there is support for the idea that it isn’t making things better.

nwah1 4y ago

Bitcoin regularly dives by orders of magnitude worse than the 2008 financial crisis. Angsty posting like this probably sounded really cool to people in high school, but I'm not sure why we should be impressed with your fact-free faux-radical grifterism.

shagymoe 4y ago
The value of Bitcoin would not fluctuate wildly if it were the default currency. You're not even attempting to argue in good faith or imagine how things could be different. What you call "angsty" is what I call "rational". I see you're happy to continue experiencing these crises which are, in fact, happening. Also, I don't think you know what grifterism means, if that's even a word.
- latchkey 4y ago
  HN can't think past price goes up/down and see that a lot of crypto is a valuable resource that you can use as collateral and borrow against it without having to go to a bank and beg for permission.
  - philipwhiuk 4y ago
    You still need permission from the person/company on the other side to use crypto as collateral.
    - red-iron-pine 4y ago
      And there have been a lot of painful lessons lately as to why that's a bad idea.
    - latchkey 4y ago
      Maybe I'm not explaining myself correctly. I can take crypto (and I'm talking about BTC/ETH, but can be others) and lend it out (generally for a positive APY). I can then borrow (typically USD*, but can be many other tokens) against that collateral (sometimes even for a positive APY!). No permission needed and happens in the scope of transactions that cost pennies. This is a massively important aspect of finance that goes beyond daily price swings. It is a relatively new aspect in crypto that has only been around for the last ~3 years or so. Example: https://aave.com/ https://aave.com/ ($8.2b locked up right now)
- jeezfrk 4y ago
  magical thinking about very un-tethered and highly manipulated currency is not a help. imagining it will change for an entire economy ... is quite irrational. no magic will make a constantly shifting ice floe into boring bedrock.
  - shagymoe 4y ago
    The current system is more irrational, unless you're benefiting from the corrupt system. Bitcoin is democratic and you vote with a node.
    - roarcher 4y ago
      Yes, and its voters vote for their own profits, which makes it swing wildly. Being "democratic" doesn't make something immune to greed.
      - shagymoe 4y ago
        It's clear you don't understand how nodes or "voting" works. There's no mechanism there which would induce wild swings.
        roarcher 4y ago
        I do, actually. I never said there was a mechanism that induces swings--there doesn't need to be one. The users do it through speculation, just like with any other asset, only it's worse with Bitcoin because it isn't tied to anything of real value, even theoretically (unless you think wasted CPU/GPU cycles are valuable). Being "democratic" doesn't magically safeguard against that. I'm not a fan of the fed and I think some sort of decentralized currency would be great. Bitcoin was a good idea and I'm glad we're experimenting along those lines, but it's a failed experiment. It's never going to work as a mainstream currency. Maybe some future iteration of the cryptocurrency idea will be the solution, but Bitcoin ain't it.
        latchkey 4y ago
- csomar 4y ago
  > The value of Bitcoin would not fluctuate wildly if it were the default currency. I wouldn't think so. Many of our "crisis" are due to the value of "cash" or liquidity to fluctuate significantly. This is the case in the recent banking crisis. In the case of Bitcoin, this will be a deep dive in price. Now which one is better? I don't know.

erlich 4y ago

Everyone in charge are already extremely wealthy. They have zero skin in the game. J. Powell, 50MM. Yellen, 20MM. There is no ability for them to empathize with a regular taxpayer. Whatever happens their lifestyle will not be impacted one bit. You have to ask: what drives someone in this position. And this is a question that only the 200k ultra high net individuals (30mm+) in the world can answer. I think people stop chasing material possessions and start chasing prestige and power. These people don’t interact with the average joe much so they don’t really care about their opinion, unless you are a populist like Trump for eg. They care about their family friends and peers. So I think it creates a broey kind of culture where you want your peers to be happy with the job you are doing. If you are in finance you want the bankers to be happy. Your political party to be happy etc. I think it becomes more about making and keeping friends. This stage for life without need for material possessions is all about people and relationships and power. You just have to imagine yourself with infinite wealth but no friends. You would quickly run out of things to spend it on, and you would just want people to love and respect you.

shagymoe 4y ago
All good points. Let's remove the power to control money from these people.
- nebula8804 4y ago
  Great idea! As someone who spent time volunteering for Bernie Sanders campaign, I'll wait here while you go do that: Good luck!
  - shagymoe 4y ago
    I was right there with you. We're collectively too stupid or too easily manipulated to enact the change we need.
    - nebula8804 4y ago
      Gen-Z are absolute rockstars. I like to think that part of the surprise win for Dems in 2022 was boomers passing away (possibly accelerated due to anti-vax COVID deaths) and Gen-Z really coming out in the hopes of some sort of college loan relief. Hopefully down the road the millennials and gen-z become a large enough collective that they finally push out the garbage...although the establishment wont go down without a massive fight.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago

> How many crises do we have to go through before we admit the fed and banks either have no idea what they are doing or they know exactly what they're doing and it's malevolent? False dichotomy. The Fed can have good intentions, and a good-but-not-perfect idea what they're doing, and things can be working out, not perfectly, but better than they would in the absence of the Fed. Is there any evidence for that? Yeah, look at the world before the Fed. Look at the "Panic/Depression of 18xx". There's several to choose from. They're 2008-or-worse events, over and over and over. The economy is a really complicated system, with lots of humans (and their emotions!) as part of the system. It's really hard to tune it perfectly. That doesn't mean that the Fed is either malicious or incompetent.

sheepybloke 4y ago
Exactly. Economics likes to pretend it is a hard science because it has mathematics and formulas and hard numbers, but it's not. It is much closer with a social science, where work has either big assumptions or is much closer to a study about the market's behavior. But because economics has masqueraded as a science, we expect it to be more exact than it really is, and I think that dissonance can be quite impactful to how we see the fed as it tries to make decisions at times like this.
- Teever 4y ago
  Please. One look at Norway tells me this is malarky. If Norway can have such a stable economy and society, why can't the rest of the world? What have they figured out that has eluded everyone else?
  - 3dbrows 4y ago
    Sitting atop the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, accumulated over decades of judicious management of national oil wealth, perhaps insulates Norway from realities that apply elsewhere.
    - Teever 4y ago

dragonwriter 4y ago

> How many crises do we have to go through before we admit the fed and banks either have no idea what they are doing or they know exactly what they're doing and it's malevolent? Considering how bad things were before the Fed, quite a lot before there is support for the idea that it isn’t making things better.