I got massively downvoted in my other comment for pointing out that there are boom and bust cycles and that COVID just brought ours closer to one of the larger bust cycles, but in the interest of informing (I wrote that on a phone) I found a link which explains it much better than I could[0].
I highly recommend taking 30 minutes to watch it, the person speaking is a well regarded economist.
Talking about inflation seems to have turned into some sort of political issue. I know I can feel the prices rising everywhere. But ppl counter it immediately by saying 'fed has tools like increasing interest rates if it really becomes a problem, they know better than you'
> Talking about inflation seems to have turned into some sort of political issue.
It is political. The method in which inflation is created benefits bankers via interest. Further, higher inflation widens the divide between the asset class and the rest of us.
However, the mainline (I would say propaganda) is that `...they know better than you` where `they` are unelected technocrats.
It is a feeling to ppl who want to start a family, buy a house. Official Inflation doesn't count for those. What else is the word that we can use here?
Rents are falling slightly in dense urban areas that were already inflated from a decades long surge (65% in LA, 30% nationally [1]), but are actually increasing in suburban areas [2]. In those areas, the increases are affecting all sectors of the market:
"Overall, CoStar data show the largest rent increases have come in higher-end properties, where average rent for a vacant unit in the Inland Empire has grown 9.3% over the last year, compared with the previous four-year average of 3.8%.
In older, more rundown properties where lower-income households are likely to live, rent is up 3.4%, compared with the previous four-year average of 4.9%."
Not quite sure what you mean by 'may not real'. Its not possible for most ordinary ppl to even think about buying a house right now. Why isn't this a concern for policy makers.
I mean that the prices need to be measured objectively, because people aren't very good a tracking prices. They may think prices have risen when they have not.
Sure, but inflation should be viewed as individual vectors.
Each vector corresponding to a delta of price and time in a generalized location for a specific good.
Something like the CPI cannot be a hard science as it refuses to acknowledge that each and every person will experience inflation based on the inflationary vectors of goods and services multiplied by a persons relative use of said goods and services.
Every person experiences a unique inflation rate, and to try and average that in something as wholly simplistic as a basket of goods is pure chicanery aimed at making this topic intractable.
That would be the cost of living for a particular person. Inflation is not that. It's literally a change in the price level of an economy, and what they are trying to measure is exactly that.
Yes, the average of the above for the entire economy. I agree, but the methodology of CPI does not at all match anything grounded in the averaging of the above logic.
A proper measure of inflation should start from the individual level and reason from there.
So if on average 1 loaf of bread is bought by a US consumer and a loaf of bread's rate of inflation is increasing(or even decreasing) by %x, and that's %y of the average consumer's expenditure, then that should contribute %x*%y of the overall inflation rate experienced by the average American consumer.
Clearly this is a complex line of reasoning, but it should be the basis of thought on measuring inflation. Yet, housing and medical expenditure are not even considered in CPI. CPI is a terrible measure that I believe was designed to obfuscate.
Housing and health expenditure are listed as components of the CPI [0], so it's almost certain that they're included in its calculation.
Again, inflation means an increase in the general price level. An increase in the price of bread is not inflation, because the price of bread is not the price level. It can be used as a data point to try to estimate a change in the price level, but by itself it doesn't tell us anything about the inflation rate (unless of course bread is the only good being produced in the economy).
Are you kidding. There will be an insane recession, if not a depression.
Capitalist economies have a short boom bust cycle and a long one. Short ones cause recessions every 10-20 years. Long ones cause depressions every 100~ years.
It was clearly stated that Covid (if nothing else) could easily cause a recession, with other factors played in as well then it could easily trigger a depression.
A recession is an actual economic term, a depression is a cultural term with no economic definition that basically means "a massive terrible recession".
These boom bust cycles are caused by fiat money, inflationary debt/spending, government stimulus and over regulation that causes false market signals and creates bubbles, it’s not a capitalism problem, capitalism would be the solution.
Yes, and the most accepted theory nowadays is that gold-tied money was a leading cause of the ~10y cycle we saw at the 18th century.
As soon as countries adopted fiat money, that one cycle mostly disappeared and even its timing became much more variable. But there are a lot of confounding factors, so this isn't the smoking gun it appears at first.
You have to face reality at some point. Literally every single capitalist economy, any time, anywhere, with or without fiat money, at all practically possible levels of stimulus, and regulation, has gone through a boom/bust cycle.
If anything, they got better since the introduction of Keynesianism, not worse.
It's inherent to capitalism. Don't try to delude yourself.
It isn't just "capitalism", it's inherent to economics, period. One of the valuable lessons of studying differential equations is just how easy it is to have cyclic behavior appear. Anywhere you have a the size of a change in velocity that is the negative of how far the value is away from some baseline... in other words, the second derivative is negative... you almost certainly have a cycle of some sort showing up. (Technically it can be avoided, but a lot of those ways are physically implausible.) Negative second derivatives are going to be pretty common.
(It doesn't have to be "pure". "Simple harmonic motion" is the result of when the negative second derivative fully characterizes a system. There are, of course, plenty of systems that aren't as simple, and things get complicated... but where ever you get a significant negative second derivative you've got a system that is going to exhibit some sort of cyclic behavior, even the the cycles vary wildly in size, duration, how fractal the value behaves on smaller time scales, etc.)
Economies do not necessarily have to follow differential equations with highly volatile second derivatives.
In fact, historically, they haven't.
This is only possible because of the volatility of capital markets that lead to even higher volatility in production which leads to volatility in general markets which leads to volatility in capital markets again - there is a loop of unstable prices.
And this loop is the unique and defining feature of capitalism. It didn't exist before capitalism, and in experiments like those of the Soviet Union, it didn't exist either, because there were no capital markets at all.
What you're describing is a behaviour of capital markets, but due to a lack of perspective it's described as a behaviour of economies in general - and it isn't.
Basically every time varying system, no matter how complex, can be thought of as a system of differential equations. Human systems of production -- any such system -- is a time varying system, and as such, probably has some cyclic behavior, instability, etc. somewhere inside.
The USSR experienced all sorts of issues like this, where the central management would first over supply something, then react by massively undersupplying it, then overreact in the other direction. It also experienced a total collapse. It makes no sense to point to it as a model of stability.
(Also, as you read my message here, recall my claim isn't that communisms has cycles and capitalism doesn't, but everything does because there is no way to build an economic system that doesn't have -d^2/dt^2 terms showing up somewhere in it.)
Just because a set of differential equations has -d^2/dt^2 somewhere in it doesn't mean that it will lead to an increasing amount of instabilities that will eventually lead to spontaneous -30% economic activity.
The economy of the USSR, in aggregate, literally only ever suffered two recessions - one in 1963 due to political instability (which was a very minor fall in GDP), and one at the beginning of WW2. The collapse of the USSR itself was a purely political issue - the USSR maintained growth right up until its dissolution.
I understand your point, but it is a case of diagnosing a second-order effect but not taking into account it's actual impact. Outside of capitalism, there were not really any economic systems that had such gigantic vorticity that they would spontaneously enter disastrous depressions.
Those cycles that you diagnosed, for example, eventually ended up by either a worker lying to stop the cascade, or someone at the planning office realizing the issue. They never snowballed into a Great Depression, because that simply could not happen. The reason the behaviour of unrestrained vorticity is possible in capitalism is because of capital markets. Without capital markets, or an equivalent, the behaviour you are diagnosing is inevitably dampened.
Think about it like a PID loop - there is a -d^2/dt^2 term in it, the D-loop term. But because of the I-term and the P-term, if you tune it correctly, general error always goes down over a full wavelength. Capital markets allow the D-term to overpower the loop.
Fiat money is the outcome of unfettered capitalism. The government needs money to pay its loans that it took with interest, so what does it do? Detach the currency from anything tangible like gold or other precious metals, then print more money as it desires, devaluing the hard work of people who are trying to save money.
There's a reason that interest and usury are prohibited in Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.
Market competition is good. Interest and usury are destructive dangerous practices.
As population grows and goods get cheaper, it can work the other way too. That can make money more scarce and more valuable.
Economics is complicated. Pointing to one lever and saying "I understand the whole machine" is lazy. I call it 'playing dot to dot'. If you just draw lines between any dots you please, you can make the picture look like anything you want.
But there is a real picture there, it has lots of dots, and its worth understanding. Pontificating on the internet is not showing real understanding.
That's why we also should use a bartering system to keep things in check, just like how societies survived for thousands of years.
I'm not claiming to understand the whole machine, however, we know for certain there are rotten practices that make the machine unstable and also much more difficult to understand. Interest and usury are at the core, along with other things that are prohibited by Islam (e.g. selling things that you don't own and several more).
Once those are removed, the system will become much more stable, fair, and better off for everyone.
Why do you feel that a dollar bill needs to buy exactly the same amount of real-world stuff in a decade's time? Cash is not an investment, so why do you expect it to be one?
Why? The very fact that they are engaging in usurious loans is a sign of incompetence. Who ends up paying for it? The hard working people trying to save money.
So they're forcing me how to spend my money. What if I don't want to engage in interest (practically all companies deal with interest in one form or another), so when I buy their stocks I'm dealing with interest in some form.
Do you really expect the entire country to change its monetary policy in order to accommodate the peculiar way in which you conduct your finances? That doesn't seem very reasonable.
Well, then let people keep crying everytime the market crashes due to the destructive practice that underly it. As I said, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism prohibit interest, we don't learn from history.
> The government needs money to pay its loans that it took with interest, so what does it do? Detach the currency from anything tangible like gold or other precious metals, then print more money as it desires.
That sounds like a government problem--not a capitalism problem. Though I do agree that this is the heart of the fiat issue.
There's information on Wikipedia, even though Wikipedia is generally not a good source on nuanced religious topics. I found many incorrect things mentioned about Islam for example (I'm Muslim).
> At times, many nations from ancient Greece to ancient Rome have outlawed loans with any interest. Though the Roman Empire eventually allowed loans with carefully restricted interest rates, the Catholic Church in medieval Europe, as well as the Reformed Churches, regarded the charging of interest at any rate as sinful (as well as charging a fee for the use of money, such as at a bureau de change). [1]
So we see how the Church changed its opinion over time. They weaseled their way out of the prohibition, and today they don't say anything. Separation of Church and State also made it easier to engage in these sorts of practices.
The usury comes from the government taking loans with interest, so it is forced to print more money to cover its deficits which keep growing due to interest.
Printing money is the problem there, not interest. If you banned interest/loaning, you could still end up having inflation because government would print money (or do other things such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coin#Debasement_and_clipping ).
It's a combination of interest as well as printing money. Interest keeps the deficit growing, forcing the government to print money. If we switch to a non-inflationary currency not at the control of a single entity, these wouldn't happen.
So in the same paragraph you blame capitalism for something the government does without our consent? We have to at least assign blame equally, instead of picking and choosing which involved systems and actors to blame. Especially if we can't agree on the actual causes.
On a side note: I have seen some good analysis/speculation/theorizing done about how interest/loaning would work in a world without government-regulation. Have a look, there may be some redemption in those concepts for you if you divorce them from government meddling (which I would posit, causes a huge chunk of all the evils we blame on capitalism).
We have to move away from interest as an underlying mechanism, it's one of the root causes of the chaos in today's financial world.
The superior model is investments, similar to how VCs invest in companies in exchange for equity. Loans are to be relegated to charity only. If we apply all this, loans will become close to non-existent. We have seen this successfully work because interest is prohibited in Islam, yet it was able to flourish especially in the Islamic Golden Age to push the boundaries of knowledge and science and exploration, during a time where Europe was in the dark ages.
How do you reconcile your idea that Islamic banking systems will lead to no inflation with the inflation rates of countries that have large Islamic banks, which are much higher than the US?
Another crash coming in the next couple of years?