nhaehnle

88 ms·

841.
by nhaehnle 13y ago
> when you are moving around at everyday speeds the "now" on planets across the galaxy is going back and forth by thousands or millions of years This feels like it is either entirely incorrect, or you're taking something t
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
The question you lead with may answer itself once you clearly distinguish between "saving" and "investing" -- you muddle those terms up quite a bit in your comment. Saving decisions by households primarily mean less spen
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
In fairness, though, there is a big disconnect between what economists in the media say on average when they feel free to say whatever they like, versus what economists concede in an academic context when pressed on the matter. Part of this
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
That seems awfully similar to http://perspectives-project.org/ I don't know which one was first, but I wish they would cooperate to establish a standard protocol for notaries. The model of notaries that observe SSL cer
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
It is doubtful that your second point really stands against what I wrote. After all, retirement funds add at least one layer of indirection between the person who ultimately owns something (in this case, the person saving for retirement) an
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
I gave you an upvote even though you're factually wrong/misguided, because you don't deserve to be in the gray. > I personally strive to be debt free and self sufficient, and I would like my country to be the same. First o
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
You're attempting to transfer your intuitive, everyday understanding of the situation of an individual household to the situation of an entire country or its government. In doing so, you are making a mistake, especially when you apply
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
To be fair, people defend Hitler on economic policy. Richard Koo (who got famous for his comparisons of the financial crisis to lessons from Japan) said something along the lines of Germany under Hitler unfortunately being the only Europe
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
Right. The question is, where do we get reliable ratings of the "safety" of investment products without the conflict of interest and the political biases of rating companies? It seems very difficult to impossible. An even more out
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
I don't know which ivory towers you frequent and what you mean by "limited", but the idea that the money supply should be flexible has been pretty well established after some failed experiments in the 1970s and 80s. As for th
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
And if they do want integer division, they have to remember // and %.
852.
by nhaehnle 13y ago
That is correct as far as my understanding is concerned. And again, I think it's important to point out that this doesn't mean that banks are unconstrained, it just means that the constraints are somewhere else (capital requiremen
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
Again, that's not how it works. You don't need the reserves at all (if you're a bank; if you're not a bank, then you have never in your life held reserves, and the way you may or may not be able to make loans is qualitat
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
The rules say that amount of reserves held by a bank must be at least r * X, where r is the reserve ratio and X is the amount of deposits owed by the bank. That is, there is absolutely no link between loans and reserves in the rules (laws
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
That's one of the main problems with the efficient market hypothesis, actually. The EMH is false for values of "efficient" that are interesting, and the values of "efficient" for which it might be true are boring an
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
It's a common misconception, but QE does not change the ability of private banks to make loans in any way. If you think I am wrong about this, please explain the mechanism by which you think QE increases the ability of private banks to
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
> Suppose there are two branches, 0 and 0'. Miner receives 0 first. The probability of mining a block is proportional to the time spent mining. Miner thus (a) starts mining 0 immediately upon notification and (b) has a greater proba
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
I have no idea why you were down-voted. I think you're right. For example: The Wikipedia article claims that the Hawala system is unusual in that no promissory notes are exchanged. However, directly after that, the article explains how
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
The irony, of course, is that last time I checked, large parts of this scripting language were disabled in the official client due to security concerns.
860.
by nhaehnle 13y ago
Perhaps. There are two problems that significantly weaken that kind of transmission mechanism: 1. It is not clear how sensitive to interest rates business are anyway. If you have an X increase of savings, which reduces business revenue by X
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
This. Also, remember that infectious disease called smallpox?
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
If inflation is much higher in one country than another, then exports from the country with lower inflation will be more competitive on the global market. Depends on what the inflation actually does . For global trade, it's only re
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
I would rather not use terms like "evil" in a discussion of policy. With that out of the way, counterfeiting does not necessarily take wealth away from anybody. In a depressed economy, it could just activate unused resources and s
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
> In a free market prices generally fall. [citation needed]
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
Low interest rates is exactly what you want in a normal, non-inflationary environment. It encourages lending for investment into projects that allows a rise in economic activity. The only time you don't want low interest rates is w
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
How can you argue that doctors care about avoiding high blood pressure? I don't know where you've been, but I've been watching those doctors here trying to help a bleeding patient, and not once have they done anything to pr
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
For your last point, I do wonder. How does high inflation make investment unattractive? It should do the opposite, since holding cash is very unattractive under high inflation. As to the cost of living going up: in nominal terms, sure. Bu
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
As to the relationship between savings and investment, and the role of banks in there, ask yourself the following question: Suppose that Alice decides that, from this month on, she will start putting aside 10% of her monthly income into a l
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
The savings identity is usually misinterpreted by laypeople, though. Here's a small story to illustrate why S=I can be very misleading: Company C has always produced some type gadgets, for many years. Demand for the gadget has been sta
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
I generally agree, and I tried to make that abundantly clear in my comment. It's not even about having to agree on every topic. There is reasonable doubt that I wouldn't even agree on the topic of surveillance with many libertar

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