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A nephew who will buy heroin if the uncle doesn't supervise him (the money has to be used for good causes sometimes instead of solely for the profit of the business).
Sadly, I think you might actually believe this paternalistic garbage. Profit, and the distributions that result from it, are good causes.
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Originally Posted by NJ Brazen_3133
I think people in this thread see it as the Uncle is the dealer
That is a much more accurate description of the relationship between the government and the private sector.
Deflation is cancer. You realize that if people stop spending nothing gets made, businesses go bankrupt, and people lose their jobs. This means they have less money to spend and go into poverty. It's a self perpetuating downward spiral. Does this sound like a healthy economy to you?
Just the opposite was true during the deflationary period that lasted from 1895-1920. The increased productivity made manufactured goods cheaper, and everyone benefited. Our productivity gains with the computer revolution should have resulted in a similar increase in the standard of living, but currency manipulation by the Fed was one of the reasons we ended up worse off instead.
Credibility lost and end thread because he made a joke about the loonies? No, the thread is not closed.
Deflation IS bad, healthy inflation IS good.
There is no evidence to support that theory, just propaganda from those who benefit from inflation. If you are rich enough to hold real assets, inflation just makes you richer. If you only have a savings account, inflation pushes you into poverty. Inflation is bad for the general public, but good for the fortunate few.
Agreed. Although I think it would be neglecting the big picture to ignore the exponential increase in lobbying activities & expenditures in the last few decades.
There was a significant increase in lobbying activity around debate of the health care act. If you excise the "surge" from that period from the record, there hasn't been this great increase, certainly no "exponential" increase. What may have increased however is the amount of partisan propaganda written about lobbyists.
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Originally Posted by ChiGeekGuest
It was a wet dream for the FIRE sector. & both aisles most likely acted as both seduced & seducer.
Finance, insurance, and real estate are not the same thing, despite popularity of the cutesy acronym. Banking interests of course have historically turned to Republicans as the guardians and protectors of their interests, and so it was with the long war to amend Glass-Steagall, the arch-Republican Phil Gramm having been quarterback over the final years of the fight. The war was so long of course only because the other side had kept refusing to give in. And in the end, GLB was not a cause of the credit crisis and resulting Great Recession in any case. Banks and brokerages had been under the same roof for years already by the time of GLB and the Citigroup deal made it clear that none of the remaining walls was going to be defended by a Republican Congress. Clinton played the little Dutch boy for a good while, but eventually got an offer he couldn't refuse.
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Originally Posted by ChiGeekGuest
The exponential increase in lobbying activities & expenditures may be evidence of more than idle chit chat.
Or people may just decide to find what they are looking for. Large portions of what people in all walks of life say to each other are not meant to be taken literally.
Hah! I was thinking more along the lines of control. It may be easier or comforting to think there may be definitive (albeit spooky, mysterious) answers (although not based on logic &reason) rather than accepting the sometimes chaotic reality of an ever changing world.
Yes, the need for some comforting explanation of the unknown may often have been the source of myth and superstition through the years, but over on the modern right, we have myth and superstition being proposed as replacements for explanations of things that are perfectly well known and established. If you see in that an effort to keep certain vulnerable sorts riled up in constant but baseless states of fear and agitation so as to render them more easily manipulated, I would hardly argue with that.
Oh yeh, that is what I meant to say. Dont they only print at the behest of the FED, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing that is?
In a general sort of way. But keep in mind that currency and coin are quite a small part of the money supply. When people say the government is "printing money", that is literally true, but still not at all meaningful.
I partially agree. After the stock market collapse of 2000-2002, investors all over the world were wondering where to park their cash, and where to obtain decent rates of return. It wasn't in stocks, in bonds or commodities. Where else? How about real estate?
The stock market's "return to normalcy" (sparked by realization that things under Bush were not going to be as good as they had been) should have lured in the dollars of bargain hunters. But no. There was a lot of liquidity floating around as the result of steps taken to resolve the Russian and Asian financial crises, and then Bush's tax cuts for the rich created even more. When those tax cuts failed to spark any sort of economic growth, Greenspan stepped in as the backstop and said he would keep the federal funds rate at 1% until economic activity picked up. Institutional investors were not interested in 1% returns, so they did indeed set off on a hunt for yield. And they indeed found it in normally staid secondary mortgage markets where assets famous for their safety were suddenly carrying attractive yields. Unfortunately, Wall Street was watching all this and saw an opportunity for profits. They hooked up with new (and rather less than scrupulous) private brokers, then built major securitizing shops that would bypass the standards of the GSE's in turning mortgages into marketable securities for the hungry institutional investors. This worked well for a while. But only for a while.
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Originally Posted by ohio_peasant
My view is that the second stock market collapse, of 2007-2009, was merely an echo of the first...
There were no connections, and 2002-03 was not a collapse. The crash of 2008 resulted from mounting job and income losses and the effects those were having and would continue to have on aggregate demand. We were in a self-reinforcing credit-driven downward spiral, something we had not seen before.
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Originally Posted by ohio_peasant
Real estate did become overvalued by 2007, in the sense of a decade or half-decade of price increases that greatly exceeded the historical norm, without any substantial evidence of lack of supply or upsurge in demand.
The value of a given home is what a willing buyer and a willing seller can agree that it is. There are no external bounds that come into play here, nor are there bases for making supercilious God-like judgements concerning the propriety of prevailing prices.
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Originally Posted by ohio_peasant
...I'm not persuaded that the rises and declines of recent times can be attributed directly and primarily to the actions of central-bankers.
Bad mistakes were made all over the place upon the turn of the century, and a few of them were in fact made by the Fed. Announcing in 2002 that that interest rates would be frozen at 9/11 levels for the foreseeable future was one. So was the failure to appreciate and rein in the scale of credit market abuse that created the notes that later failed that started the credit crisis that became the Great Recession. The relentless ramping up of interest rates between mid-2004 and mid-2006 is also suspect, but more for the means than for the ends.
Oh, has burning jet fuel replaced thermite paint as the WTC conspiracy theory du jour?
I dont know, but I think that is what they are talking about.
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