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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (755586)	12/2/2013 6:48:10 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575200

Hi mindmeld; Re: "Hmmm. What is QE doing to the price of goods? I wonder…Stagnant incomes and rising prices can't be good for the 99%." If you think prices are rising now, wait till we come out of this slump. Then you're going to see real inflation. But, as before, your argument completely misses the point. What you're saying is that "the current situation is bad" and "therefore QE is wrong". That does not follow. Depressions take about a decade to recover from. If we get to 2018 and still no improvement in the economy, then you can start your whining. In fact, in every depression incomes are stagnant. Of course they're stagnant now, have you even cracked a history book on economics???? You can't blame stagnant incomes on QE. Stagnant incomes are practically what defines a depression you dummy. It's always like this. It has happened, in this country, a dozen times in the past 300 years and it's gonna happen another dozen times in the next 300 years. And every time incomes are going to stagnate. Get used to it. To show that QE is bad you have to compare QE to what would happen in the absence of QE. So? Do you think that if we didn't have QE incomes would be soaring????? How about looking at the rest of the planet you dumbass. Incomes are stagnant everywhere. The world economy sucks. What a f'ing idiot. Talking to you is like shouting down a well. In 2014 we're going to triumph at the polls. I expect us to win in 2016 as well. Hopefully by that time the economy will be doing well enough that a hard money policy won't destroy the economy and the public will credit the Republicans with saving the economy (which would have eventually come back just like it has so many times in the past and will so many times in the future, in so many countries, no matter who is president or what the banks do). The time to implement hard money (if any) is when times are good. Times are not good now. Hence the stagnating incomes. That's why this is not a good time to talk about hard money. -- Carl P.S. Asking people to implement hard money in bad economic times is hopeless. It never happens. And in good times, it's hopeless too. When times are good no one cares about sound money. That's why hard money isn't going to happen. And if we went on a gold standard? All it would mean is that instead of our money supply being "controlled" by the Federal Reserve, it would be controlled by miners and the international market in gold. Putting the US on a gold standard would be a disaster about an order of magnitude worse than Obamacare. That's because Obamacare only screwed up around 10% of the economy, a gold standard would screw up everything. Our whole economy is designed around the assumption that the dollars we use are constantly devaluing. You can't change that overnight. There is no way to get to a "hard money" world from the world we're in. It's the right-wing equivalent of the socialist dream of single payer healthcare. Or more accurately, single-payer everything. Historically, the Republicans (under Lincoln) destroyed the value of the dollar with "green-backs" to pay for the Civil War. That debt was repaid and the US was put back on parity to the gold standard. It took about 20 years and the result? 20 years of depression. They should have just revalued the dollar, but they were confused by a presumption of a relationship between morality and money. The hard money advocates now are suffering under a similar assumption. No. Soft money is not evil. Money is just a medium of exchange. If that medium tends to change in value with time, people will adjust to it. We've adjusted to it. Changing it now isn't going to be painless and it isn't going to lead to a world where incomes never stagnate. And selling hard money to the public as a cure for the business cycle is just as wrong as Obama selling the ACA to the public as a cure-all that would decrease the cost of healthcare. If the Republicans get voted into office on the basis of "hard money is a cure for what ails ya", they will be voted out of office the same way the Democrats are being voted out now. As incompetent fools and liars. Don't push us down that road. It is an old road. The economies that went down that road had depressions and booms that were far worse than the mild ones we have.

To: RetiredNow who wrote (755586)	12/3/2013 11:19:54 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575200

Hi mindmeld; The whole idea of conservatism is to look at the past and to not make sudden, emotional decisions. Running a tight-money Fed policy in the middle of a depression is an emotional response to an economic problem. The emotion you're feeling is one of morality. You feel it's wrong to spend money you don't have. I completely understand your point of view and I reject it. Here's a nice book on financial crashes and recoveries: This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly Reinhart and Rogoff Covering sixty-six countries across five continents, This Time Is Different presents a comprehensive look at the varieties of financial crises, and guides us through eight astonishing centuries of government defaults, banking panics, and inflationary spikes--from medieval currency debasements to today's subprime catastrophe. Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, leading economists whose work has been influential in the policy debate concerning the current financial crisis, provocatively argue that financial combustions are universal rites of passage for emerging and established market nations. The authors draw important lessons from history to show us how much--or how little--we have learned. Using clear, sharp analysis and comprehensive data, Reinhart and Rogoff document that financial fallouts occur in clusters and strike with surprisingly consistent frequency, duration, and ferocity. They examine the patterns of currency crashes, high and hyperinflation, and government defaults on international and domestic debts--as well as the cycles in housing and equity prices, capital flows, unemployment, and government revenues around these crises. While countries do weather their financial storms, Reinhart and Rogoff prove that short memories make it all too easy for crises to recur. amazon.com Let's examine the issue. The problem has been going on for 800 years in 66 countries on 5 continents. And you think you have a solution to it??? And your solution is tight money in the middle of a depression??? You're insane. Do you really think that no one thought of trying tight money as a cure for booms and busts??? Do you really think that in 800 years of history across five continents and in 66 countries no one has thought of this before??? The only reason you can sit there and give the most obvious (wrong) advice on what to do to end a financial crisis is because you're completely unaware of what's already been done in history. Nothing you're suggesting is in any way new. Gold was tight money. And the booms and busts went on. In fact they were worse. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The advice that the Fed keep tight money (and avoid inflation) is the same (morality based) economic advice that most people like you were giving back before the financial collapse. Hey I agreed with you then, though perhaps for slightly different reasons, and so I disagree with you now. Let's get this straight. You think you have an extremely simple cure for an 800-year-old problem. And by some incredible coincidence, the cure you want applies to any situation; it will fix a boom just as well as it fixes a bust. Holy moly! What you're pedaling is holy water! It works no matter what ails ya! Hey, many people have worked on this problem for a lot longer than you have. These are people who are very smart. They have read and know a lot more about economic history than you. And their solution (determined by voting) is quantitative easing. If they could fix the economy by the incredibly simple solution of maintaining a fixed money supply, of course they would do it. The people who run the Federal Reserve are in the 1%. Tight money is a policy that favors people who own money, not people who own mortgages. If tight money fixed a depression the Fed would be the first group of people to use it. No! Tight money fixes inflation! Right now we have a mild inflation problem and a very serious unemployment problem. In that situation, the proper course is easy money. This has been found through examining the histories of all those capitalist countries operating for all those centuries. There are times when tight money is appropriate. Those times are when inflation is a problem and unemployment is not. Under those circumstances the Fed will introduce tight money. They've done it in the past and they will do it again as soon as this economy gets rolling again. But now is not the time. -- Carl