Slashdot Mirror
Research Finds Link Between Inflation and Laughter In Federal Reserve Meetings
schliz writes "A one percentage point increase in an inflation forecast brings about a 75% rise in laughter, according to an American University PhD student, who studied transcripts of the Federal Open Market Committee at the Federal Reserve. Laughter usually comes in response to witticisms during a meeting at the time of the inflation forecast, and has been shown to be a mechanism for coping with the stress of a perceived threat."
I propose an alternate title to this story:
"An open invitation for cranky Slashdotters to complain about waste of taxpayer money -- despite it being non-governmental funded -- to study a topic I find ridiculous."
I am not a crackpot.
Banks are now rushing to plant stand-up comics on the reserve board so they can game on metric they haven't been able to before.
In other news, concept of "causation" completely lost on those making the most important decisions affecting the world economy.
From 2012: http://multiplier-effect.org/?p=3362
Especially when discussing inflation 5 years out.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Nobody else gets to vote themselves a raise, create their own health plan, retirement, etc.
Um, that's pretty much how C-level executives work at large companies. They are nominally under the control of the board, who is nominally the elected representatives of the shareholders, but like with our elected political representatives, in practice they have quite a bit of unrestrained control over things like voting each other raises and approving golden-parachute contracts (formally on behalf of the shareholders who voted the board in, of course).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
hahahah ahaha haha hahahahaha hahahah ahahaha...
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The powerful don't want to see inflation, it makes their money worth less.,
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
The powerful don't want to see inflation, it makes their money worth less.,
Inflation makes everybody's money worth less. I visited Brazil during hyperinflation. It wasn't just the "powerful" suffering.
BTW, "the powerful" did fine in the US during the 1970s .../p?
http://wheresthefridge.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/thumbs_we_told_them_the_wealth_would_trickle_down.jpg
The powerful are fine with inflation. They hold a wide range of assets, some of which will be inflation proof.
While their net wealth might go down in a time of high inflation, it will go down more slowly than the vast majority of people and the powerful's income is likely to be somewhat inflation proof allowing them to buy up yet more assets as people are forced to sell the few things they own that are inflation proof in order to raise funds for day to day living.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
It's pretty easy to laugh all the way to the bank when you're already there.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
There is good inflation and bad inflation.
Good inflation is when the cost of goods and services rise, to match in increase of income of the consumers.
Bad inflation is when the cost of goods and services rise, at a faster rate then the increase of income of the customers.
We are having low inflation now... However income has dropped, so it is still bad, and it is worse then when we have high inflation and a strong growth of income.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
On balance, inflation helps borrows and penalizes lenders.
For the conspiracy minded the Fed is controlled by the banks. In theory they would love deflation – except for the economic recessions that tend to follow.
For historical context read about the Cross of Gold speech – or read the Wizard of OZ: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Gold_speech
The powerful can absorb the costs more. If you have $20m in cash and inflation reduces your currency's value by 50% that is a negligible loss for you in terms of being able to live comfortably. However, someone who had only $20k in cash savings has been effectively crippled because the loss to their savings has a much nearer term effect on their quality of life. That is to say, a millionaire can get by on inflated millions in savings and be fine until they die if they live a middle class life style, but a middle class person may have just much of their ability to survive unemployment wiped out or reduced from a year down to 3 or six months.
There is good inflation and bad inflation. ...
We are having low inflation now...
Spoken like a true Keynesian.
As you quantitatively ease yourselves into our bungholes to the tune of 85 billion a month...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
You realize it's a comment and not an argument at all, right?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Except that cost of living has continued to increase, though you wouldn't know that looking at the official numbers because the government rules out everything that gets more expensive as "too volatile" to include in the index, so the government's official cost of living numbers excludes everything that gets more expensive.
Rofl. Yeah, money in the bank. Julius Baer, Switzerland, in several european currencies. Tokyo, Japan, in several asian currencies. OK how about financial instruments. Short term bonds in dollars (US, Canadian, Australian, NZ), euros, pounds, reals, yen, rubles... Stocks, in several stock exchanges around the world, in diversified sectors. Gold, silver, platinum, copper, diamonds (and I ain't talking jewelry or certificates here). Now let's talk real estate....
Seriously, you are full of shit. The rich don't give a damn about inflation in one country or the next. What they DO care about is how to profit from the situation. There's always profit, if you're big enough.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Or any other type of economics that acknowledges the basic reality of the way economies and peoples' lives interact. Behavioralism makes no denial of this premise either. If your economic system requires you to specifically ignore one way things can turn out to be valid, that isn't a testament to its quality.
Wrong. The powerful get to use the printed money first, stealing purchasing power from everyone else. This is one of the most fundamental arguments against fiat currency.
Good inflation is when you print money and spend it first. Bad inflation is when other people print money and devalue the dollars in your pocket.
Let's not forget super-leveraged investments that are so disconnected from the value of the currency they're priced in, that for simplicity's sake, banks often barter the interest rates of one security to another.
That is incorrect. Inflation is great for those who get to print it. The Fed and thus the banks are the ones that get first access to that money, and get to charge interest on it, interest that can mathematically be paid from no source except default. Default destroys resources. This monetary system thus forces destruction of resources through malinvestment.
Money is not wealth. Money is a CLAIM on wealth, which is composed of real things. Printing money does not create more wealth--it just dilutes it, and redistributes it to those who get first access to the printed money.
The Keynesian School (along with some Monetarists), which controls The Fed, claims to not believe that printing money ("quantitative easing") can in, in fact, create price inflation (they contend it should get the economy roaring and the opposite should happen). Now Keynes himself didn't believe this, but his disciples think he was mistaken on that particular count.
Meanwhile, the Austrian School economists contend that the money creation is itself the monetary inflation (by definition...) and that price inflation is just an inevitable consequence of monetary inflation (more dollars in the pool means each dollar has less value).
The trouble is, the Austrians take that consequence to say that it means that ultimately the central banks are harmful to the economy, since they're constantly interfering in the transfer of information across the economy by interfering with pricing and interest signals. If you're a central banker, the idea that central bankers are harmful can't be true, so if anything happens that indicates the the Austrians might be right after all, it's going to be a a bit unsettling.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Like how destructive to everyone the "deflation" of the cost of technology over the last 30 years has been?
"Deflation" is a canard. It simply means that the actual value created by human innovation and efficiency increases, for a particular lucky domain, hasn't been siphoned off entirely by the financial system. The "goal" of 0% means nothing other than it's a number that the public has been hypnotized into thinking is optimal, for which the siphoners should be praised in acheiving. Quite the opposite. Human progress means the costs of goods and services -should- be going down, and the standard of living going up correspondingly. Those savings on particular goods in a massive scale translate into investment in more jobs and more prosperity, precisely as we have seen in the tech industry, despite having every imaginable impediment and rent-seeing drain placed on it.
Respect history and the economic realities directly before your eyes before blindly repeating the mantra of theft that keeps the majority of the country making no net economic progress, year after year, decade after decade, generation after generation.
If more people realized that "inflation" doesn't mean that a gallon of milk costs more, it means that you will see a nominal rise in your paycheck, it wouldn't be such a boogeyman.
It means both. However, whether you're talking about inflation or deflation, the change in your paycheck always trails the effect on the price of consumer goods, so a gallon of milk still costs more relative to your current paycheck. Under deflation it's just the opposite: sure, your paycheck is decreasing, but your expenses are decreasing even faster.
This is not to say that we'd be better off with forced deflation rather than inflation. As with any other commodity, the price of money is best left to the market rather than central planners. Natural deflation is a signal that there is a need for saving and investment, while inflation signals that it's time to spend. Forcing either results in a suboptimal allocation of resources.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Almost all outputs of human labor are perishable. Grain stored in a silo will rot or get infested. Cars break down. Computers become obsolete. Money should reduce in value too, since money is (or should be) foremost a mechanism for exchange of perishable goods or labor. If money increases in value in time, or even stays the same, this encourages hoarding, since money becomes a better investment than what it supposed to stand for. If you did me a favor ten years ago, it matters to me less than if you did one today, because time erases everything. Your money should also be worth somewhat less today. It's silly to think that the labor or goods of your ancestors should entitle you to goods today, but people think that way about money.
Of course, the rich DO NOT want their money to diminish in value.