To: carranza2 who wrote (210809 ) 2/2/2025 4:10:38 PM From: Maurice Winn Respond to of 218534 C2, the Great Depression is often asserted to be the great example of deflationary disaster. It certainly was a world champion calamitous cataclysm as part of WWI, leading to WWII, with Weimar hyperinflation as part of and causal propellant to the national socialist totalitarianism. But the Weimar hyperinflation stemmed from the Versailles treaty which my father's cousin Ormond Burton disagreed with. And Ormond was in the battle at Gallipoli and then in the hell of Ypres and the rest so he was not an armchair commentator. You can ask Google about him. The Great Depression was more about government intrusion into markets, especially leading up to the calamity in the roaring 20s. The Federal Reserve was formed in 1913 and MMT [Magic Money Theory] was born. Gold was finally cut loose in 1971 and the price of gold in US$ took off to reflect reality but it had already moved from $20 when the Federal Reserve was formed to $35 an ounce when the pressure became unbearable and it was abandoned, after which gold soared to $870 an ounce. The idea was that clever people in government could by diluting and manipulating money and interest rates reduce peaks and troughs in economics. But they found in mostly attractive to nab free money. When Made in China poor people working for very low pay cut prices bigly, the government Magic Money Tree people did not allow prices to fall as they should have done, they diluted dollars bigly as they claimed to be avoiding dreaded deflation. Ooops a daisy. Now Made in China people are paid market rates being vastly higher and the Magic Money Tree has run out of steam. But the addiction to Magic Money has resulted in bankruptcy because as you know, drug addicts can't just turn off their addiction. They NEED the free money. They do. But there's no more free money.Deflation lowers prices, thus reducing income, thus bankrupting banks and firms, thus reducing capital projects, thus reducing production, thus reducing employment, thus reducing taxes. Rinse, wash, repeat. That’s why it is called a deflationary spiral. That's the common mistake of a faulty chain of reasoning. Lower income doesn't matter if everything is cheaper or free because robots make what people want, or because computers instead of papyrus are used for information management and the computers are free. The papyrus people, like the Luddites, have to find something useful to do. But diluting money by the megaton doesn't enable them to get a new job, it just means the Magic Money Tree people get to spend the money and any money the papyrus people get in their new low paid jobs can't buy them much at all. Banks go bust because they make bad loans. Their job is making secure loans. If they can't figure it out, they go bust and have to get jobs more suited to their talents. They join the papyrus people. The Greenspan Put tempted banks to expect free opm from the pixelation process of Magic Money Trees, but that's their fault for being tempted. The shareholders deserve to lose their money and unsecured creditors should have examined the bank accounting and security. It's a business, not a right to make a lot of money. Bung businesses badly managed go bust. Shareholders and creditors lose their money. I would love to have bought a big bank in 2008 and acquired $100 billion in mortgages which I'd have revalued at the right price being $1 for the bank with unsecured creditors revalued to 1c in the dollar and mortgages revalued to a quarter of their pre-crash value. Everyone could have stayed in their houses with much reduced mortgages. More or less. I'd have even kept most of the mortgage managers on, though probably at lower pay depending on employment market pricing. Yes, the shareholders would have had to join the papyrus people. They could have offered to mow the lawns and maintain the houses of the mortgagors. Deflation is a good thing C2. Solid money which has a value that rises and falls depending on demand is a great thing. That's the idea of bitcoin - though that is a badly designed system that won't last as it will be superseded by a better design. But bitcoin shows the value of money that is not subject to Magic Money Tree theft. Deflationary spiral - I know about inflationary and hyperinflationary spirals of which there are many examples leading to disaster. But I can't think of any deflationary spirals let alone any leading to disaster in which the government was not the cause by bad ideas - the Great Depression is the only one I can think of and that was government run combined with speculative frenzy in the roaring 20s. Japan had a huge price collapse after the speculative frenzy of the 1980s, with houses dropping in price by 90% and the Nikkei going from 40,000 to about 5,000. That was despite vast MMT by Japan so it's not even that MMT can stop big price falls and economic slowdown. Mqurice