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The more money the banks print, the richer they get, with the side-effect that prices rise (they make the monetary units less scarce and worth less). 2-3% just

by npoc 3y ago

The more money the banks print, the richer they get, with the side-effect that prices rise (they make the monetary units less scarce and worth less). 2-3% just happens to be the most they can get away with in the long term without the population getting concerned. What the general population don't realise is that the value of goods and services are going down over time, due to efficiency increases, at a rate of around 5% / year. The banks can print enough money to soak that up unnoticed, and then an extra 2% just because they can. It's essentially a stealth transfer of wealth from the people to the banks and it's been going on for decades/centuries (before fiat, it used to take the form of coin shaving, impure metals etc). You really see the effect when you look at house prices. They are roughly the same price in gold as they were in the 1970s. Rather than housing going up in value since then, it has been the monetary units going down in value, due to the supply roughly doubling every decade (look up M2 USD). You can understand the incentive to print money when you realise that every year the banks are collecting interest on every dollar/euro/pound etc. in existence. And the banks don't really own any of them - they printed them out of thin air as loans and have to destroy them when the loans are repaid, but total debt only increases every year...

silent_cal 3y ago
Good answer. Inflation is just a euphemism for stealing from working people.
- Wytwwww 3y ago
  Still preferable to deflation. At least the working class has something that can be stolen..
  - npoc 3y ago
    In a healthy economy, deflation (i.e. falling prices) is a good thing. Things get cheaper over time - it's the utopia we should be living in now. We've made massive increases in production efficiency across the board over the years, but the banks and government have creamed off all those efficiency gains for themselves, by printing money, creating the illusion that everything is instead going up in value, and have made themselves mind-blowingly powerful. As the world economies are so broken, if the money supply went down instead of up (i.e. deflationary supply), the real value of the already enormous debts would increase even if the nominal value didn't, causing the economies to collapse suddenly. By keeping the money supply increasing, the economies are collapsing slowly instead, ultimately ending in hyperinflation.
    - Wytwwww 3y ago
      If the real costs is decreasing that's usually good, a decrease in nominal prices not so much. Why would you invest into increasing productivity etc. if you know that you revenue will only go down Longterm? Generally we'd want to quality to increase while prices stay more or less the same to encourage innovation. > We've made massive increases in production efficiency Likely much if not most of that wouldn't have happened if monetary supply was constrained and there would have been a lot less investment. > the real value of the already enormous debts would increase even if the nominal value didn't Why would you even want that to happen? I mean that was a pretty common situation in the 19th century and generally and it was pretty horrible. Imagine if you were a farmer who had a mortgage and the price of the goods you were selling kept going down every year... OTH other hand you could just buy government bonds and spend your days not doing anything useful (e.g. if you were an English aristocrat on a fixed income). > By keeping the money supply increasing, the economies are collapsing slowly instead Except they are not collapsing. What we have now is generally a huge improvement over the permanent boom and bust cycles that kept happening until the 1930s in large part because the money supply was constrained and increased at a slower pace than the economy was growing. > ultimately ending in hyperinflation. What are you basing this prediction on?
    - bradjohnson 3y ago
      Deflation is not a healthy system under capitalism, where people must work to survive. In the ideal scenario the value of work would approach zero due to a reduction of money in circulation. Work done yesterday would always be worth more than work done today and generational wealth would eventually become necessary to not be locked in servitude to the wealthy.
      - npoc 3y ago
        How can the value of work ever approach zero? Human work is value. The value of anything simply derives from the quantity and quality (demand/supply) of the human work that goes into producing it. In the current inflationary system, people are working for something that the banking system produces for almost nothing i.e. in the eyes of the banks/government, they are working for almost free.
- spaceman_2020 3y ago
  You know what truly sucks about all of this? How much it forces people to grind and hustle and do all sorts of undignified crap just to make a living. It truly kills all dignity of labor.
- bradjohnson 3y ago
  If we operated on a deflationary currency, the value of your labour would be tied to cost of goods, and your salary would decrease each year, while the rich continued to accumulate more of the proportion of cash. Working people would still have to spend most of their income on survival, while the rich would be free to sit on piles of deflationary currency and become even richer. In an inflationary currency, the rich invest in assets that aren't affected by inflation. Inflation is not the problem in this scenario. Hoarding wealth is. This would be increased with a deflationary currency.
  - silent_cal 3y ago
    I think this is just propaganda that you've accepted. You think it's bad if things get cheaper? And you think people would just sit there while their employer decreases their wages every year? Not going to happen. Also, we already get wage decreases each year because of inflation. If you don't get a significant raise every single year you're losing purchasing power. And even then, you have to wait a whole year. The fact that people don't realize this is already happening is part of the scam.
    - bradjohnson 3y ago
      > I think this is just propaganda that you've accepted. It's just logical inference. Your point of view shallowly considers everyone as consumers without thinking about the fact that if "things get cheaper", that means that labour has also gotten cheaper. You assert that people won't "sit there" while employers reduce their wages, but that's exactly what would HAVE to happen in this system. Otherwise the company would go under because their product or service gets cheaper each year, but labour stays the same or increases in cost. Especially under capitalism which demands constant growth. It simply would not make sense to pay someone the same price for a bushel of wheat when the cost of bread has reduced to a fraction of its original price. I don't know why you say that it is propaganda to acknowledge this extremely simple logical inference.
hartator 3y ago
Yes, very good explanation. Quantitative easing is just printing money with extra steps through the banks.
- atroxone 3y ago
  In that case it's the government that decides who gets richer
  - npoc 3y ago
    The governments and banking system work hand-in-hand, and the Cantillon effect takes care of the rest
mberning 3y ago
Many people take inflation as an immutable law of nature, but that has not always been so. Food for example, for a long time, became cheaper. Computers and technology as well. Think how nuts it would be if you could get a better house for less money every few years.
- noqc 3y ago
  food became cheaper because it became cheaper to produce. Inflation is a very natural consequence of the fact that If I have money now, I can also very easily have that same money later, but the same cannot be said of having money later. Strategically, having money now dominates having money later, so money now is worth more than money later. How much? Who can say, but some.
  - throw0101d 3y ago
    > food became cheaper because it became cheaper to produce. Which was caused by technological progress which is the key source of deflation (being able to buy more with the same amount of money). It is deflation is happening regularly: > But Inflation is not inevitable. There are numerous countervailing forces that have been at work for much of the past 50 years. The three big Deflation drivers: 1) Technology, which creates massive economies of scale, especially in digital products (e.g., Software); 2) Robotics/Automation, which efficiently create more physical goods at lower prices; and 3) Globalization and Labor Arbitrage, which sends work to lower cost regions, making goods and services less expensive. > Put into this context, Inflation is periodic, driven by specific events; Deflation is consistent, the background state of the modern economy. To fully understand this requires grasping how scarcity and abundance act as the drivers of the price of labor and goods. My suspicion is many economists who came of age during earlier eras of inflation fail to discern how the world has changed since. * https://ritholtz.com/2021/02/stop-stressing-about-inflation/ https://ritholtz.com/2021/02/stop-stressing-about-inflation/ This 1991 Radio Shack add illustrates the point quite well IMHO: There are 15 electronic gimzo type items on this page, being sold from America’s Technology Store. 13 of the 15 you now always have in your pocket. So here’s the list of what I’ve replaced with my iPhone. * All weather personal stereo, [US]$11.88. I now use my iPhone with an Otter Box. * AM/FM clock radio, $13.88. iPhone. * In-Ear Stereo Phones, $7.88. Came with iPhone. * Microthin calculator, $4.88. Swipe up on iPhone. * Tandy 1000 TL/3, $1599. I actually owned a Tandy 1000, and I used it for games and word processing. I now do most of both of those things on my phone. * VHS Camcorder, $799. iPhone. * Mobile Cellular Telephone, $199. Obvs. * Mobile CB, $49.95. Ad says “You’ll never drive ‘alone’ again!” iPhone. * 20-Memory Speed-Dial phone, $29.95. * Deluxe Portable CD Player, $159.95. 80 minutes of music, or 80 hours of music? iPhone. * 10-Channel Desktop Scanner, $99.55. I still have a scanner, but I have a scanner app, too. iPhone. * Easiest-to-Use Phone Answerer, $49.95. iPhone voicemail. * Handheld Cassette Tape Recorder, $29.95. I use the Voice Memo app almost daily. * BONUS REPLACEMENT: It’s not an item for sale, but at the bottom of the ad, you’re instructed to ‘check your phone book for the Radio Shack Store nearest you.’ Do you even know how to use a phone book? You’d have spent [US]$3,054.82 in 1991 to buy all the stuff in this ad that you can now do with your phone. * https://www.huffpost.com/entry/radio-shack-ad_b_4612973 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/radio-shack-ad_b_4612973 That US$1600 Tandy 1600 runs a 286 CPU and has a 20MB hard drive, and supported 640×200×16 resolution (720×350 mode for monochrome monitors): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_1000#Tandy_1000_SL_and_TL_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_1000#Tandy_1000_SL_and_T... If you wish to run the same software as was run on that machine, you can still do so on your desktop/laptop: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOSBox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOSBox Or even in your web browser: * https://js-dos.com https://js-dos.com (JavaScript DOS) * https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games Somehow people don't notice the deflation happening all around them.
cjbgkagh 3y ago
I see it as a wealth tax and I agree, 2% is roughly long term stable maximum returns that leaves enough on the table for the middle class to prosper. I think at 3.5% or whatever they want to up the target to be will not be long term stable. It’ll work for a little while as GDP increases with increased inequality but civil unrest will from said inequality will reduce efficiency as more will need to be spent on security.
- agf 3y ago
  How is it a wealth tax? One of the things the wealthy do is hedge against inflation.
  - cjbgkagh 3y ago
    You have capital gains tax on it eventually, much of that capital gains is from inflation. The only way for it not to be a wealth tax is if capital gains is indexed to inflation.
    - npoc 3y ago
      Capital gains tax is one of the more disgusting taxes. Most capital gains are simply due to the devaluation of the unit of account. The banks and government work hand-in-hand. The more money the banks print (as interest-chargeable loans), the more the government makes you pay in capital gains taxes. A win-win situation for them. One way the wealthy get around this is by taking on debt against their hard assets - generally real estate. As the price of their assets go up, they take out larger and larger loans, each time paying off the old loan and pocketing the difference tax free. The money is devalued faster than the interest rate, so even after paying interest, they are left with free money (our money), tax-free.
      - lupire 3y ago
        Capital gains taxes are discounted to compensate for inflation. (10-20% vs 30-40%). It's not perfect but it's an estimate. Also, capital gains are unearned.
immibis 3y ago
Gold is not a good stable measure of value. In fact there are very few or no good stable measures of value. Something like bread might be, at least in places with stable food supply chains.
unyttigfjelltol 3y ago
Yes, an alternative summary of the article is: The 2% target started as a nonsense 'dog ate my homework' line from inconsequential characters in an obscure corner of the world, that the world's elite latched onto in the last two decades as a post-hoc rationalization for debasing the currency to ensure politically-important businesses never go broke and politicians never have to say 'I'm sorry.' A real fairy tale.
qwytw 3y ago
> They are roughly the same price in gold as they were in the 1970s So you're implying that there was no inflation between 2011 and 2022 (gold prices were basically the same) or that prices increasing 8 times or so between 2000 and 2011 because gold got a lot more expensive? Gold is just a random commodity affected by market supply/demand just like every other commodities (or bitcoin). Implying it's some sort of a "hard currency" or can be used to compare prices of goods/services/housing over long periods of time is just absurd. > when you realise that every year the banks are collecting interest on every dollar/euro/pound etc That doesn't work that well when the real interest rates (i.e. after you subtract inflation) are negative or close to negative (as they were in the Eurozone between around 2012 and 2022).
- vondur 3y ago
  I'm guessing it's that the US Currency was backed by gold and later silver and the central banks couldn't print currency without some precious metal to back it up.
  - qwytw 3y ago
    > was backed by gold and later silver It's the other way around. US switched from a bimetallic system to the gold standard in 1873. > I'm guessing it's that the US Currency was backed by gold Well sort of, only until 1971 (or to some extent 1933) though. So you maybe could do that if you wanted to compare the price of housing in the 1870s and 1920s, certainly not between 1970 and the 2020s.
- npoc 3y ago
  > Gold is just a random commodity affected by market supply/demand just like every other commodities (or bitcoin). Implying it's some sort of a "hard currency" or can be used to compare prices of goods/services/housing over long periods of time is just absurd. It's sensible to use gold or housing as a measure of value - they are both extremely mature markets with a relatively constant supply/demand ratio. It's no coincidence that after 50+ years they are still the same value relatively to each other. I'd argue that using the dollar as a measure of value would be absurd, given that it's demand is relatively constant but it's supply is doubling every decade. > That doesn't work that well when the real interest rates (i.e. after you subtract inflation) are negative or close to negative (as they were in the Eurozone between around 2012 and 2022). The banks are playing a much longer game. While the interest rates are held low, they increase the number of people indebted to them. When they turn the interest rates back up, they get their reward. I recommend reading the short book "The Great Taking" (https://thegreattaking.com/ https://thegreattaking.com/)
madsbuch 3y ago
quite the opposite. inflation is good for the working class. Housing prices are generally congruent to salary with interest rates as the coefficient. personally I see inflation as the innovation dispersion factor - the rate we let the value of innovation disperse throughout the society.
- KarlKode 3y ago
  Hasn’t the percentage an average person spends on housing significantly increased in the past 50 (or 20) years? Additionally I can’t follow your second thought: are you saying that the inflation rate is directly correlated with the rate of the value of innovation dispersement? E.g. a high inflation should eventually lead to a high dispersion of innovations/a more innovative culture?
  - SubjectToChange 3y ago
    Housing costs wouldn’t be on anyone’s radar if they simply grew with inflation.
    - madsbuch 3y ago
      they don't, they have the interest rate as a coefficient. interest rates have reduced signitifanctly over the past 30 years. also, remember that housing is not your San Fransisco condos. it is also the town house at some rural village.
  - madsbuch 3y ago
    the idea with the second statement is: the cost of bringing innovation to a market where inflation is higher makes it easier to pay back to cost of the innovation. ie. you pay your salaries at index 100 and get to sell them at a higher index.
- ejb999 3y ago
  That is such a bizarre statement I have a hard time believing you actually mean it. I think you would be hard pressed to find any/many 'working class' people who enjoy watching the cost of goods and services go up faster than their salaries. The rich benefit from inflation - especially if they have lots of assets like real estate that have increased dramatically in value.
CraigJPerry 3y ago
>> The more money the banks print, the richer they get This is wrong. You’ve misunderstood the creation of credit and money. See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1057521914001434#bb0040 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105752191... - but then spend time reading the relevant legislation pieces. You can safely ignore most of the mainstream economist schools of thought since the actual operational side of money as required by law is mostly a blind spot for them. Economic schools of thought do not link to relevant legislation when sharing their fairy tales since the laws the banks operate under result in behaviour distinct from that claimed by any major economic school of thought.
- npoc 3y ago
  Although a great deal of smoke and mirrors is used when justifying the banks unique right to print money, and it's easy to miss the wood for the trees as you get lost in the details, the bigger picture is quite simple: 1) the banks print new money every time a loan is taken out and charge interest on that money 2) the amount of money loaned out is increasing every year 3) the total amount of money currently loaned is essentially all the fiat money in existence i.e. even 2% interest is a mind-blowing amount of annual income Sure, we can debate about between the banks and government, who receives what proportion of the interest, but if you disagree with any of those three points, please explain.
  - lupire 3y ago
    That created money is lent to borrowers, who in aggregate benefit from it more than the interest costs. The banks don't get to just spend the deposits. Lending out money at the rate of inflation is 0 profit after inflation.
    - npoc 3y ago
      All the fiat currency units in existence are a loan to a bank somewhere. That is over a hundred trillion dollars for the US alone. If you're receiving 2% of $100,000,000,000,000 each year, for money you printed out of thin air, you're not going to worry about the effects of CPI on your monthly budget.
throw0101d 3y ago
> The more money the banks print, the richer they get, with the side-effect that prices rise (they make the monetary units less scarce and worth less). Meanwhile Japan has been increasing money supply for decades, and yet during that time they've had low and even negative rates of inflation: * https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=PA7P https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=PA7P Stop looking at money supply and inflation: > But also – why do so many people insist that inflation is an increase in the money supply? This makes zero sense. Here’s why – our economy is mostly a credit based economy. So, if I take out a loan for $100,000 then the money supply has technically increased by $100,000. But what if I don’t actually tap that loan? What if I borrow the money because, for instance, house prices just went up 25% and I want to have some cash around for emergencies? This doesn’t tell us anything about prices, living standards or really anything. But this is what so much of the money supply represents – money that has been issued and is just sitting around unused. Why is this useful? It’s like calculating your weight changes by counting how much food you have in your refrigerator. No. That’s potential calories consumed and potential weight gain. The amount of food in your fridge tells you little about your future weight changes just like the amount of money in the economy tells us little about the actual price changes in the economy. * https://www.pragcap.com/three-things-i-think-i-think-i-see-dead-mutual-funds/ https://www.pragcap.com/three-things-i-think-i-think-i-see-d...
- margalabargala 3y ago
  Japan is well known to be near-unique among world economies. It's commonly said "There are four kinds of countries: developed countries, developing countries, Japan, and Argentina". To point at some individual thing that happened a certain way in Japan and then try to justify some broad economic policy elsewhere in the world based on that won't work. Absent the other factors that make Japan's economy unique, the lessons there do not apply elsewhere. As a counterpoint to your one example re: money supply and inflation, I would present the following: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation#Notable_hyperinflationary_periods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation#Notable_hyperin...
  - throw0101d 3y ago
    I am aware of Simon Kuznets. > As a counterpoint to your one example re: money supply and inflation, I would present the following: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation#Notable_hyperinflationary_periods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation#Notable_hyperin... People like to point out money supply/printing and inflation (cause of), but often fail to ask what caused the money printing in the first place: * https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1799102 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1799102 People don't 'run the printers' for funsies: there are usually extraneous reasons why it happens (including a good portion of what the US (and most other countries) recently experienced). > Now think about that – did 6 different governments [including Weimar Germany], all within a 4 year time period [in the 1920s], and all bordering each other and/or in the same post WWI region and intellectual/political climate (with the seeds of the some of the farthest right and farthest left regimes in all of history within them that would lead to WWII just ~18 years later)— > Did all of a sudden this little world region and precise time period and intellectual milieu decide to just start spending like crazy? At the same time? While the rest of the world did not? > Or did they share the same underlying, and preceding, set of problems discussed above? * https://clintballinger.com/2021/01/12/the-myth-of-hyperinflation/ https://clintballinger.com/2021/01/12/the-myth-of-hyperinfla... * https://clintballinger.com/2019/05/24/the-autocorrelation-of-hyperinflation-about-7-events-not-58/ https://clintballinger.com/2019/05/24/the-autocorrelation-of... Further, in modern financial systems money is mostly created by banks creating credit: * https://www.pragcap.com/stop-with-the-money-printing-madness/ https://www.pragcap.com/stop-with-the-money-printing-madness... * https://advisoranalyst.com/2014/01/09/cullen-roche-the-ten-biggest-myths-in-economics.html/ https://advisoranalyst.com/2014/01/09/cullen-roche-the-ten-b... * https://rationalreminder.ca/podcast/132 https://rationalreminder.ca/podcast/132
spaceman_2020 3y ago
The real inflation is in asset prices Sometimes it just happens to bleed over into the price of sneakers and steaks and that’s when people get angry But when money is printed out of thin air, the first refuge it seeks is in housing. And housing inflation has beaten all other inflation by a mile and a half
wolverine876 3y ago
> money the banks print Banks don't print money. The government can.
- ccw72 3y ago
  [dead]
- rufus_foreman 3y ago
  They create money. So can you.
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    If you mean by lending it, etc., that is regulated by the government - interest rates, reserves, oversight, much more.
    - rufus_foreman 3y ago
      Well pretty much everything is regulated by the government but banks still create money. As for reserves, have you, or anyone you know with a good credit record, ever applied for a loan and gotten told, "We would like to lend you money, but we are all out of money to lend due to reserve requirements. Can you check back in next week?" That doesn't happen. The bank creates the money and deals with reserve requirements later.
- audunw 3y ago
  > Banks don't print money. The government can. If you mean "physically print" money, you're technically right. In some countries. But I think in this discussion, most of us are thinking about "virtually printing" money. That is, creating numbers in your bank account. Again, you're technically right in that the government is the one steering this process. But the practical matter of actually "printing" the money is handled by the banks. It's their decision when and where to "print" money, as long as they have enough reserves at the end of the day.
pdonis 3y ago
> It's essentially a stealth transfer of wealth from the people to the banks and it's been going on for decades/centuries (before fiat, it used to take the form of coin shaving, impure metals etc). I wish I could upvote this more. If enough people understood that this is the root problem, we might have a chance of actually fixing it.
- audunw 3y ago
  1. This isn't as much of a problem as it's made out to be. It's the same problem we have with the uneven distribution of wealth and poor competition in the economy in general. If the banks are all publicly traded and the shares evenly distributed, the wealth will just go back to the general population. If you have a healthy banking market with several competitors the banks will compete to the point where none of them can extract too much profit. Same as how you end up with companies extracting wealth in any market where they get too much of a monopoly. 2. Nobody has even proposed a solution that is remotely capable of improving on the system we have. Because most proposed solutions are formulated by people who haven't bothered to truly understand how the system of money/banking we have today actually works.
  - pdonis 3y ago
    > If the banks are all publicly traded and the shares evenly distributed Which of course they're not. Nor will they ever be. Even if you forced things to be this way on some particular day, they wouldn't stay that way, because people have different needs, different expectations, and different judgments about the best ways to use their money. And in a free market, they will act differently because of those differences, and quickly trade away from any "even distribution" of anything. > If you have a healthy banking market with several competitors the banks will compete to the point where none of them can extract too much profit. I agree that banking should be a competitive free market (as I think every good and service should be). > you end up with companies extracting wealth in any market where they get too much of a monopoly If "monopoly" means "ability to buy favors from the government to avoid free market competition", then I agree with this. But such a "monopoly" in no way requires there to be a lack of competition in an industry. There is plenty of competition in banking. It just all takes place against a backdrop of monetary manipulation by the government.
esoterica 3y ago
Gold fell 50% from 1980 to 2000, does that mean we had 50% deflation over that time period?
- npoc 3y ago
  Did gold fall or did the dollar rise? Define deflation
audunw 3y ago
You've glossed over so many things. The banks are not just in the business of lending out money. They also take deposits and pay interest on those deposits. It's a fraction of what they make on loan interest payments, but it's still a significant expense. Borrowers can go bankrupt and default on debt. That's also effectively a huge expense. Banks are competing to offer the best interest rates to their customers. If a bank could still make a lot of money while offering a lower interest rate than their competitors, they would. > The more money the banks print The only way they can print more money, is to issue more debt. But issuing debt is an expense for a bank. Either you do due diligence, which takes a lot of work. Or you accept the risk of issuing risky loans that may be defaulted on, which again, will be an expense. And then there's a mountain of regulations on top of that to try to prevent the banks from taking the second option, which also takes work. It's not the free money machine you make it out to be. (Edit: Not that I'm saying it's not at all lucrative. But it's a risky and difficult high-skill job, which is extremely important to every aspect of society so that in itself isn't remotely surprising) > they printed them out of thin air as loans and have to destroy them when the loans are repaid, but total debt only increases every year... Sure.. that's how the economy has worked since the dawn of time. Money is just an abstraction over credit in general, and credit is always how most of the economy has worked, even before money was invented. You need a barn built? You ask your neighbors to help you build it, and promise them some grains or something in return. Boom. Credit (i.e. money) created from thin air. And the more the economy grows, the more this kind of debt is created. Some of the earliest texts we've discovered was records of this kind of debt. That's exactly what paper (and digital) money is.. a record of debt distilled to its purest essence and made easily tradable. The difference now is that instead of credit being created through these informal arrangements, you go to the bank, which does the work of ensuring that you're good for the debt. You get some numbers in an account which then lets you go to the neighbors and pay them to help. Whether you repay them by doing work for them directly, or work for someone else in the community, doesn't matter anymore. Which makes the whole system much more efficient.
- npoc 3y ago
  > You need a barn built? You ask your neighbors to help you build it, and promise them some grains or something in return. Boom. Credit (i.e. money) created from thin air. And the more the economy grows, the more this kind of debt is created. You're missing the bigger picture. The difference is that banks are handing out unlimited credit notes for something they don't have, and are charging interest on them.
hsjsbeebue 3y ago
Those efficiency increases - aren’t they affected by supply chain shocks, covid, limits on natural resources etc.?
unboxingelf 3y ago
This guy gets it. Bitcoin fixes this.

by npoc 3y ago

silent_cal 3y ago

Good answer. Inflation is just a euphemism for stealing from working people.

Wytwwww 3y ago
Still preferable to deflation. At least the working class has something that can be stolen..
- npoc 3y ago
  In a healthy economy, deflation (i.e. falling prices) is a good thing. Things get cheaper over time - it's the utopia we should be living in now. We've made massive increases in production efficiency across the board over the years, but the banks and government have creamed off all those efficiency gains for themselves, by printing money, creating the illusion that everything is instead going up in value, and have made themselves mind-blowingly powerful. As the world economies are so broken, if the money supply went down instead of up (i.e. deflationary supply), the real value of the already enormous debts would increase even if the nominal value didn't, causing the economies to collapse suddenly. By keeping the money supply increasing, the economies are collapsing slowly instead, ultimately ending in hyperinflation.
  - Wytwwww 3y ago
    If the real costs is decreasing that's usually good, a decrease in nominal prices not so much. Why would you invest into increasing productivity etc. if you know that you revenue will only go down Longterm? Generally we'd want to quality to increase while prices stay more or less the same to encourage innovation. > We've made massive increases in production efficiency Likely much if not most of that wouldn't have happened if monetary supply was constrained and there would have been a lot less investment. > the real value of the already enormous debts would increase even if the nominal value didn't Why would you even want that to happen? I mean that was a pretty common situation in the 19th century and generally and it was pretty horrible. Imagine if you were a farmer who had a mortgage and the price of the goods you were selling kept going down every year... OTH other hand you could just buy government bonds and spend your days not doing anything useful (e.g. if you were an English aristocrat on a fixed income). > By keeping the money supply increasing, the economies are collapsing slowly instead Except they are not collapsing. What we have now is generally a huge improvement over the permanent boom and bust cycles that kept happening until the 1930s in large part because the money supply was constrained and increased at a slower pace than the economy was growing. > ultimately ending in hyperinflation. What are you basing this prediction on?
  - bradjohnson 3y ago
    Deflation is not a healthy system under capitalism, where people must work to survive. In the ideal scenario the value of work would approach zero due to a reduction of money in circulation. Work done yesterday would always be worth more than work done today and generational wealth would eventually become necessary to not be locked in servitude to the wealthy.
    - npoc 3y ago
      How can the value of work ever approach zero? Human work is value. The value of anything simply derives from the quantity and quality (demand/supply) of the human work that goes into producing it. In the current inflationary system, people are working for something that the banking system produces for almost nothing i.e. in the eyes of the banks/government, they are working for almost free.
spaceman_2020 3y ago
You know what truly sucks about all of this? How much it forces people to grind and hustle and do all sorts of undignified crap just to make a living. It truly kills all dignity of labor.
bradjohnson 3y ago
If we operated on a deflationary currency, the value of your labour would be tied to cost of goods, and your salary would decrease each year, while the rich continued to accumulate more of the proportion of cash. Working people would still have to spend most of their income on survival, while the rich would be free to sit on piles of deflationary currency and become even richer. In an inflationary currency, the rich invest in assets that aren't affected by inflation. Inflation is not the problem in this scenario. Hoarding wealth is. This would be increased with a deflationary currency.
- silent_cal 3y ago
  I think this is just propaganda that you've accepted. You think it's bad if things get cheaper? And you think people would just sit there while their employer decreases their wages every year? Not going to happen. Also, we already get wage decreases each year because of inflation. If you don't get a significant raise every single year you're losing purchasing power. And even then, you have to wait a whole year. The fact that people don't realize this is already happening is part of the scam.
  - bradjohnson 3y ago
    > I think this is just propaganda that you've accepted. It's just logical inference. Your point of view shallowly considers everyone as consumers without thinking about the fact that if "things get cheaper", that means that labour has also gotten cheaper. You assert that people won't "sit there" while employers reduce their wages, but that's exactly what would HAVE to happen in this system. Otherwise the company would go under because their product or service gets cheaper each year, but labour stays the same or increases in cost. Especially under capitalism which demands constant growth. It simply would not make sense to pay someone the same price for a bushel of wheat when the cost of bread has reduced to a fraction of its original price. I don't know why you say that it is propaganda to acknowledge this extremely simple logical inference.

hartator 3y ago

Yes, very good explanation. Quantitative easing is just printing money with extra steps through the banks.

atroxone 3y ago
In that case it's the government that decides who gets richer
- npoc 3y ago
  The governments and banking system work hand-in-hand, and the Cantillon effect takes care of the rest

mberning 3y ago

Many people take inflation as an immutable law of nature, but that has not always been so. Food for example, for a long time, became cheaper. Computers and technology as well. Think how nuts it would be if you could get a better house for less money every few years.

noqc 3y ago
food became cheaper because it became cheaper to produce. Inflation is a very natural consequence of the fact that If I have money now, I can also very easily have that same money later, but the same cannot be said of having money later. Strategically, having money now dominates having money later, so money now is worth more than money later. How much? Who can say, but some.
- throw0101d 3y ago
  > food became cheaper because it became cheaper to produce. Which was caused by technological progress which is the key source of deflation (being able to buy more with the same amount of money). It is deflation is happening regularly: > But Inflation is not inevitable. There are numerous countervailing forces that have been at work for much of the past 50 years. The three big Deflation drivers: 1) Technology, which creates massive economies of scale, especially in digital products (e.g., Software); 2) Robotics/Automation, which efficiently create more physical goods at lower prices; and 3) Globalization and Labor Arbitrage, which sends work to lower cost regions, making goods and services less expensive. > Put into this context, Inflation is periodic, driven by specific events; Deflation is consistent, the background state of the modern economy. To fully understand this requires grasping how scarcity and abundance act as the drivers of the price of labor and goods. My suspicion is many economists who came of age during earlier eras of inflation fail to discern how the world has changed since. * https://ritholtz.com/2021/02/stop-stressing-about-inflation/ https://ritholtz.com/2021/02/stop-stressing-about-inflation/ This 1991 Radio Shack add illustrates the point quite well IMHO: There are 15 electronic gimzo type items on this page, being sold from America’s Technology Store. 13 of the 15 you now always have in your pocket. So here’s the list of what I’ve replaced with my iPhone. * All weather personal stereo, [US]$11.88. I now use my iPhone with an Otter Box. * AM/FM clock radio, $13.88. iPhone. * In-Ear Stereo Phones, $7.88. Came with iPhone. * Microthin calculator, $4.88. Swipe up on iPhone. * Tandy 1000 TL/3, $1599. I actually owned a Tandy 1000, and I used it for games and word processing. I now do most of both of those things on my phone. * VHS Camcorder, $799. iPhone. * Mobile Cellular Telephone, $199. Obvs. * Mobile CB, $49.95. Ad says “You’ll never drive ‘alone’ again!” iPhone. * 20-Memory Speed-Dial phone, $29.95. * Deluxe Portable CD Player, $159.95. 80 minutes of music, or 80 hours of music? iPhone. * 10-Channel Desktop Scanner, $99.55. I still have a scanner, but I have a scanner app, too. iPhone. * Easiest-to-Use Phone Answerer, $49.95. iPhone voicemail. * Handheld Cassette Tape Recorder, $29.95. I use the Voice Memo app almost daily. * BONUS REPLACEMENT: It’s not an item for sale, but at the bottom of the ad, you’re instructed to ‘check your phone book for the Radio Shack Store nearest you.’ Do you even know how to use a phone book? You’d have spent [US]$3,054.82 in 1991 to buy all the stuff in this ad that you can now do with your phone. * https://www.huffpost.com/entry/radio-shack-ad_b_4612973 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/radio-shack-ad_b_4612973 That US$1600 Tandy 1600 runs a 286 CPU and has a 20MB hard drive, and supported 640×200×16 resolution (720×350 mode for monochrome monitors): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_1000#Tandy_1000_SL_and_TL_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_1000#Tandy_1000_SL_and_T... If you wish to run the same software as was run on that machine, you can still do so on your desktop/laptop: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOSBox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOSBox Or even in your web browser: * https://js-dos.com https://js-dos.com (JavaScript DOS) * https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games Somehow people don't notice the deflation happening all around them.

cjbgkagh 3y ago

I see it as a wealth tax and I agree, 2% is roughly long term stable maximum returns that leaves enough on the table for the middle class to prosper. I think at 3.5% or whatever they want to up the target to be will not be long term stable. It’ll work for a little while as GDP increases with increased inequality but civil unrest will from said inequality will reduce efficiency as more will need to be spent on security.

agf 3y ago
How is it a wealth tax? One of the things the wealthy do is hedge against inflation.
- cjbgkagh 3y ago
  You have capital gains tax on it eventually, much of that capital gains is from inflation. The only way for it not to be a wealth tax is if capital gains is indexed to inflation.
  - npoc 3y ago
    Capital gains tax is one of the more disgusting taxes. Most capital gains are simply due to the devaluation of the unit of account. The banks and government work hand-in-hand. The more money the banks print (as interest-chargeable loans), the more the government makes you pay in capital gains taxes. A win-win situation for them. One way the wealthy get around this is by taking on debt against their hard assets - generally real estate. As the price of their assets go up, they take out larger and larger loans, each time paying off the old loan and pocketing the difference tax free. The money is devalued faster than the interest rate, so even after paying interest, they are left with free money (our money), tax-free.
    - lupire 3y ago
      Capital gains taxes are discounted to compensate for inflation. (10-20% vs 30-40%). It's not perfect but it's an estimate. Also, capital gains are unearned.

immibis 3y ago

Gold is not a good stable measure of value. In fact there are very few or no good stable measures of value. Something like bread might be, at least in places with stable food supply chains.

unyttigfjelltol 3y ago

Yes, an alternative summary of the article is: The 2% target started as a nonsense 'dog ate my homework' line from inconsequential characters in an obscure corner of the world, that the world's elite latched onto in the last two decades as a post-hoc rationalization for debasing the currency to ensure politically-important businesses never go broke and politicians never have to say 'I'm sorry.' A real fairy tale.

qwytw 3y ago

> They are roughly the same price in gold as they were in the 1970s So you're implying that there was no inflation between 2011 and 2022 (gold prices were basically the same) or that prices increasing 8 times or so between 2000 and 2011 because gold got a lot more expensive? Gold is just a random commodity affected by market supply/demand just like every other commodities (or bitcoin). Implying it's some sort of a "hard currency" or can be used to compare prices of goods/services/housing over long periods of time is just absurd. > when you realise that every year the banks are collecting interest on every dollar/euro/pound etc That doesn't work that well when the real interest rates (i.e. after you subtract inflation) are negative or close to negative (as they were in the Eurozone between around 2012 and 2022).

vondur 3y ago
I'm guessing it's that the US Currency was backed by gold and later silver and the central banks couldn't print currency without some precious metal to back it up.
- qwytw 3y ago
  > was backed by gold and later silver It's the other way around. US switched from a bimetallic system to the gold standard in 1873. > I'm guessing it's that the US Currency was backed by gold Well sort of, only until 1971 (or to some extent 1933) though. So you maybe could do that if you wanted to compare the price of housing in the 1870s and 1920s, certainly not between 1970 and the 2020s.
npoc 3y ago
> Gold is just a random commodity affected by market supply/demand just like every other commodities (or bitcoin). Implying it's some sort of a "hard currency" or can be used to compare prices of goods/services/housing over long periods of time is just absurd. It's sensible to use gold or housing as a measure of value - they are both extremely mature markets with a relatively constant supply/demand ratio. It's no coincidence that after 50+ years they are still the same value relatively to each other. I'd argue that using the dollar as a measure of value would be absurd, given that it's demand is relatively constant but it's supply is doubling every decade. > That doesn't work that well when the real interest rates (i.e. after you subtract inflation) are negative or close to negative (as they were in the Eurozone between around 2012 and 2022). The banks are playing a much longer game. While the interest rates are held low, they increase the number of people indebted to them. When they turn the interest rates back up, they get their reward. I recommend reading the short book "The Great Taking" (https://thegreattaking.com/ https://thegreattaking.com/)

madsbuch 3y ago

quite the opposite. inflation is good for the working class. Housing prices are generally congruent to salary with interest rates as the coefficient. personally I see inflation as the innovation dispersion factor - the rate we let the value of innovation disperse throughout the society.

KarlKode 3y ago
Hasn’t the percentage an average person spends on housing significantly increased in the past 50 (or 20) years? Additionally I can’t follow your second thought: are you saying that the inflation rate is directly correlated with the rate of the value of innovation dispersement? E.g. a high inflation should eventually lead to a high dispersion of innovations/a more innovative culture?
- SubjectToChange 3y ago
  Housing costs wouldn’t be on anyone’s radar if they simply grew with inflation.
  - madsbuch 3y ago
    they don't, they have the interest rate as a coefficient. interest rates have reduced signitifanctly over the past 30 years. also, remember that housing is not your San Fransisco condos. it is also the town house at some rural village.
- madsbuch 3y ago
  the idea with the second statement is: the cost of bringing innovation to a market where inflation is higher makes it easier to pay back to cost of the innovation. ie. you pay your salaries at index 100 and get to sell them at a higher index.
ejb999 3y ago
That is such a bizarre statement I have a hard time believing you actually mean it. I think you would be hard pressed to find any/many 'working class' people who enjoy watching the cost of goods and services go up faster than their salaries. The rich benefit from inflation - especially if they have lots of assets like real estate that have increased dramatically in value.

CraigJPerry 3y ago

>> The more money the banks print, the richer they get This is wrong. You’ve misunderstood the creation of credit and money. See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1057521914001434#bb0040 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105752191... - but then spend time reading the relevant legislation pieces. You can safely ignore most of the mainstream economist schools of thought since the actual operational side of money as required by law is mostly a blind spot for them. Economic schools of thought do not link to relevant legislation when sharing their fairy tales since the laws the banks operate under result in behaviour distinct from that claimed by any major economic school of thought.

npoc 3y ago
Although a great deal of smoke and mirrors is used when justifying the banks unique right to print money, and it's easy to miss the wood for the trees as you get lost in the details, the bigger picture is quite simple: 1) the banks print new money every time a loan is taken out and charge interest on that money 2) the amount of money loaned out is increasing every year 3) the total amount of money currently loaned is essentially all the fiat money in existence i.e. even 2% interest is a mind-blowing amount of annual income Sure, we can debate about between the banks and government, who receives what proportion of the interest, but if you disagree with any of those three points, please explain.
- lupire 3y ago
  That created money is lent to borrowers, who in aggregate benefit from it more than the interest costs. The banks don't get to just spend the deposits. Lending out money at the rate of inflation is 0 profit after inflation.
  - npoc 3y ago
    All the fiat currency units in existence are a loan to a bank somewhere. That is over a hundred trillion dollars for the US alone. If you're receiving 2% of $100,000,000,000,000 each year, for money you printed out of thin air, you're not going to worry about the effects of CPI on your monthly budget.

throw0101d 3y ago

> The more money the banks print, the richer they get, with the side-effect that prices rise (they make the monetary units less scarce and worth less). Meanwhile Japan has been increasing money supply for decades, and yet during that time they've had low and even negative rates of inflation: * https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=PA7P https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=PA7P Stop looking at money supply and inflation: > But also – why do so many people insist that inflation is an increase in the money supply? This makes zero sense. Here’s why – our economy is mostly a credit based economy. So, if I take out a loan for $100,000 then the money supply has technically increased by $100,000. But what if I don’t actually tap that loan? What if I borrow the money because, for instance, house prices just went up 25% and I want to have some cash around for emergencies? This doesn’t tell us anything about prices, living standards or really anything. But this is what so much of the money supply represents – money that has been issued and is just sitting around unused. Why is this useful? It’s like calculating your weight changes by counting how much food you have in your refrigerator. No. That’s potential calories consumed and potential weight gain. The amount of food in your fridge tells you little about your future weight changes just like the amount of money in the economy tells us little about the actual price changes in the economy. * https://www.pragcap.com/three-things-i-think-i-think-i-see-dead-mutual-funds/ https://www.pragcap.com/three-things-i-think-i-think-i-see-d...

margalabargala 3y ago
Japan is well known to be near-unique among world economies. It's commonly said "There are four kinds of countries: developed countries, developing countries, Japan, and Argentina". To point at some individual thing that happened a certain way in Japan and then try to justify some broad economic policy elsewhere in the world based on that won't work. Absent the other factors that make Japan's economy unique, the lessons there do not apply elsewhere. As a counterpoint to your one example re: money supply and inflation, I would present the following: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation#Notable_hyperinflationary_periods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation#Notable_hyperin...
- throw0101d 3y ago
  I am aware of Simon Kuznets. > As a counterpoint to your one example re: money supply and inflation, I would present the following: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation#Notable_hyperinflationary_periods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation#Notable_hyperin... People like to point out money supply/printing and inflation (cause of), but often fail to ask what caused the money printing in the first place: * https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1799102 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1799102 People don't 'run the printers' for funsies: there are usually extraneous reasons why it happens (including a good portion of what the US (and most other countries) recently experienced). > Now think about that – did 6 different governments [including Weimar Germany], all within a 4 year time period [in the 1920s], and all bordering each other and/or in the same post WWI region and intellectual/political climate (with the seeds of the some of the farthest right and farthest left regimes in all of history within them that would lead to WWII just ~18 years later)— > Did all of a sudden this little world region and precise time period and intellectual milieu decide to just start spending like crazy? At the same time? While the rest of the world did not? > Or did they share the same underlying, and preceding, set of problems discussed above? * https://clintballinger.com/2021/01/12/the-myth-of-hyperinflation/ https://clintballinger.com/2021/01/12/the-myth-of-hyperinfla... * https://clintballinger.com/2019/05/24/the-autocorrelation-of-hyperinflation-about-7-events-not-58/ https://clintballinger.com/2019/05/24/the-autocorrelation-of... Further, in modern financial systems money is mostly created by banks creating credit: * https://www.pragcap.com/stop-with-the-money-printing-madness/ https://www.pragcap.com/stop-with-the-money-printing-madness... * https://advisoranalyst.com/2014/01/09/cullen-roche-the-ten-biggest-myths-in-economics.html/ https://advisoranalyst.com/2014/01/09/cullen-roche-the-ten-b... * https://rationalreminder.ca/podcast/132 https://rationalreminder.ca/podcast/132

spaceman_2020 3y ago

The real inflation is in asset prices Sometimes it just happens to bleed over into the price of sneakers and steaks and that’s when people get angry But when money is printed out of thin air, the first refuge it seeks is in housing. And housing inflation has beaten all other inflation by a mile and a half

wolverine876 3y ago

> money the banks print Banks don't print money. The government can.

ccw72 3y ago
[dead]
rufus_foreman 3y ago
They create money. So can you.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  If you mean by lending it, etc., that is regulated by the government - interest rates, reserves, oversight, much more.
  - rufus_foreman 3y ago
    Well pretty much everything is regulated by the government but banks still create money. As for reserves, have you, or anyone you know with a good credit record, ever applied for a loan and gotten told, "We would like to lend you money, but we are all out of money to lend due to reserve requirements. Can you check back in next week?" That doesn't happen. The bank creates the money and deals with reserve requirements later.
audunw 3y ago
> Banks don't print money. The government can. If you mean "physically print" money, you're technically right. In some countries. But I think in this discussion, most of us are thinking about "virtually printing" money. That is, creating numbers in your bank account. Again, you're technically right in that the government is the one steering this process. But the practical matter of actually "printing" the money is handled by the banks. It's their decision when and where to "print" money, as long as they have enough reserves at the end of the day.

pdonis 3y ago

> It's essentially a stealth transfer of wealth from the people to the banks and it's been going on for decades/centuries (before fiat, it used to take the form of coin shaving, impure metals etc). I wish I could upvote this more. If enough people understood that this is the root problem, we might have a chance of actually fixing it.

audunw 3y ago
1. This isn't as much of a problem as it's made out to be. It's the same problem we have with the uneven distribution of wealth and poor competition in the economy in general. If the banks are all publicly traded and the shares evenly distributed, the wealth will just go back to the general population. If you have a healthy banking market with several competitors the banks will compete to the point where none of them can extract too much profit. Same as how you end up with companies extracting wealth in any market where they get too much of a monopoly. 2. Nobody has even proposed a solution that is remotely capable of improving on the system we have. Because most proposed solutions are formulated by people who haven't bothered to truly understand how the system of money/banking we have today actually works.
- pdonis 3y ago
  > If the banks are all publicly traded and the shares evenly distributed Which of course they're not. Nor will they ever be. Even if you forced things to be this way on some particular day, they wouldn't stay that way, because people have different needs, different expectations, and different judgments about the best ways to use their money. And in a free market, they will act differently because of those differences, and quickly trade away from any "even distribution" of anything. > If you have a healthy banking market with several competitors the banks will compete to the point where none of them can extract too much profit. I agree that banking should be a competitive free market (as I think every good and service should be). > you end up with companies extracting wealth in any market where they get too much of a monopoly If "monopoly" means "ability to buy favors from the government to avoid free market competition", then I agree with this. But such a "monopoly" in no way requires there to be a lack of competition in an industry. There is plenty of competition in banking. It just all takes place against a backdrop of monetary manipulation by the government.

esoterica 3y ago

Gold fell 50% from 1980 to 2000, does that mean we had 50% deflation over that time period?

npoc 3y ago
Did gold fall or did the dollar rise? Define deflation

audunw 3y ago

You've glossed over so many things. The banks are not just in the business of lending out money. They also take deposits and pay interest on those deposits. It's a fraction of what they make on loan interest payments, but it's still a significant expense. Borrowers can go bankrupt and default on debt. That's also effectively a huge expense. Banks are competing to offer the best interest rates to their customers. If a bank could still make a lot of money while offering a lower interest rate than their competitors, they would. > The more money the banks print The only way they can print more money, is to issue more debt. But issuing debt is an expense for a bank. Either you do due diligence, which takes a lot of work. Or you accept the risk of issuing risky loans that may be defaulted on, which again, will be an expense. And then there's a mountain of regulations on top of that to try to prevent the banks from taking the second option, which also takes work. It's not the free money machine you make it out to be. (Edit: Not that I'm saying it's not at all lucrative. But it's a risky and difficult high-skill job, which is extremely important to every aspect of society so that in itself isn't remotely surprising) > they printed them out of thin air as loans and have to destroy them when the loans are repaid, but total debt only increases every year... Sure.. that's how the economy has worked since the dawn of time. Money is just an abstraction over credit in general, and credit is always how most of the economy has worked, even before money was invented. You need a barn built? You ask your neighbors to help you build it, and promise them some grains or something in return. Boom. Credit (i.e. money) created from thin air. And the more the economy grows, the more this kind of debt is created. Some of the earliest texts we've discovered was records of this kind of debt. That's exactly what paper (and digital) money is.. a record of debt distilled to its purest essence and made easily tradable. The difference now is that instead of credit being created through these informal arrangements, you go to the bank, which does the work of ensuring that you're good for the debt. You get some numbers in an account which then lets you go to the neighbors and pay them to help. Whether you repay them by doing work for them directly, or work for someone else in the community, doesn't matter anymore. Which makes the whole system much more efficient.

npoc 3y ago
> You need a barn built? You ask your neighbors to help you build it, and promise them some grains or something in return. Boom. Credit (i.e. money) created from thin air. And the more the economy grows, the more this kind of debt is created. You're missing the bigger picture. The difference is that banks are handing out unlimited credit notes for something they don't have, and are charging interest on them.

hsjsbeebue 3y ago

Those efficiency increases - aren’t they affected by supply chain shocks, covid, limits on natural resources etc.?

unboxingelf 3y ago

This guy gets it. Bitcoin fixes this.