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Evil left wing Economists jailed in El Salvador for planning terrorist ploy
Who are you going to believe, a bunch of economists who went to woke Universities, or Our Lord And Savior Donald Trump?
Trump policies are just taking the mask off of previous fed policies at a faster rate. Wealth effect nonsense to fake a healthy economy eventually comes due.
Trump is hyper focused on asset inflation because he’s a moron who is literally incapable of seeing a bigger picture, but Powell and every previous administration have been doing the same damn things since before 2008 that increased income inequality and further divorced the actual productive economy from “the economy.”
Yeah exactly. There’s a bunch of stuff that counts towards the GDP that is actively sucking resources out of the economy. Health care is a good example of that: the most expensive system in the world, with outcomes that are near the bottom of the developed countries. But it’s making a few people very rich, so you’re not allowed to fix it.
Yeah but what you and the op ascribe to the Fed isn’t accurate. They’re in charge of monetary policy, not financial policy.
A lot of the issues with American society are due to financial policy which is the responsibility of Congress and the executive branch.
Monetary policy, interest rates, asset inflation, and stagflation all are directly linked. The Fed isn’t alone in causing this disconnect, which I acknowledged by noting previous administration policy, but the interest rates and quantitative easing have always been very related to asset inflation and wealth inequality and have been a direct target of the Fed. There’s a reason why Trump wants them to reduce interest rates further so badly despite the fact that since Volker even the Fed itself says that worsens stagflation. I directly dispute the models that say this stuff is benign or helpful because if anything rising income inequality is one of the biggest predictors for extreme economic depressions. And frankly it’s not just the Fed that’s doing this shit. It’s the whole Western liberal economic system.
Yeah I mean quantitative easing isn’t fully causal of inequality, but it definitely helps. Anyone whose primary income comes from holding appreciating assets sees that income rise, and anyone whose primary income comes from working sees nothing guaranteed happen.
They have a pet theory that pushing a lot of money into the top end of the economy via spreadsheet doesn’t necessarily immediately cause inflation because the “velocity of money” (i.e., how often people spend it) is lower at the top of the economy. So they justify basically pumping the rich full of cheap to free money based upon the idea that the rich won’t spend that money.
It “worked” for a time in that inflation wasn’t high enough to them to warrant alarm, but in a pandemic even the rich will spend a lot of money to bid up rare things when supply is low for them.
There are definitely other factors, but low – practically negative – interest rates for decades are part of what got us into this mess.
Well the people who’s primary income that comes from their labor sees their wages stay the same while the rising assets take more of their income in the form of rents or the cost to actually buy things like property. That is until they can’t afford to buy necessities at all and completely abandon that economy. Those pressures exist both on individuals and new productive enterprises.
Yep that’s the other part of the dynamic. Everyone assumes that wage earners will at least get an inflationary bump, but companies, the Fed, and the government have all abandoned workers.
Even during times of “low inflation” prices continue to rise for things like housing. Over time that “low inflation” adds up for people with no assets working low wage jobs. Then when there’s high inflation (like mid to late COVID, where the dumb dumbs encouraged anyone who could afford it to buy housing via historically low interest rates at the same time folks were trapped in their current living quarters, the supply of housing was in the toilet, and the price of housing was already at all time highs) people get permanently priced out of fucking shelter.
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I’d say the same if you believe quantitative easing and low interest rates to increase asset prices were helping the productive economy in any real way and wouldn’t eventually lead to stagflation. Winter has always been coming.
Who knows what they believe. They’re just throwing out arrogant, condescending insults for no reason.
You’re 100% correct; and I’m always mildly surprised at how many lemmings downvote anyone who dares criticize the Fed’s playbook: a decade-plus of near-zero interest rates, endless quantitative easing, and asset purchases that inflated the markets while wages stagnated. These policies weren’t accidents, they were deliberate tools to keep wealth flowing upward while the rest of us were told to be patient, grateful, and “fiscally responsible.”
During the pandemic, the Fed granted itself the right to buy ETFs if I recall correctly.
Wait, I’m in agreement with economists? That’s a first.
