- BTW, this.... I have no doubt that gov't regulation works as intended. Except that it's intended to make sure government gets more and more power, the politicians get access to monopoly type money and the voters are used in a ploy to destroy any type of economy that works, by creating monopolies and destroying free market.
Yes, because our "free market" health care system is working so well...
-?? Why should I reply to your comment, as you are replying to my with such an obvious ignorant statement or maybe a lie? Where do you free market in US business and US government?
--
Now if there was actual free market, a US Citizen would have been able to buy health insurance from ANY COMPANY IN THE WORLD. Why not? Why can't you buy health coverage from a company located in Hong Kong or Malaysia or Germany or anywhere?
There is no free market in US, it ended with the invention of the Fed and IRS.
For every snake oil business that is shut down (and likely not, after all, they didn't bother with Madoff,) how many real businesses are destroyed, that would have brought costs down, increased competition, increased choices, created jobs and improved economy and increased overall wealth?
I want a competing sewer business, ffs, I want a competing water main, competing electrical lines, competing everything, including roads and education and medical, everything, and it's not a bad thing even to have some overcapacity in any of these things, and lower prices are not bad for business, no matter how much your friend, Bernanke, likes you to believe.
I would rather not have government involved in anything that has to do with business, including medical business. I like my costs low, my drugs cheap, my doctors competing with each other based on price and efficiency, maybe I am the only one, in which case it's a non-starter here.
AFAIC, I don't actually care whether his treatment is fake or not, I really do not care. He seems to have gotten the FDA Trial Phase I and Phase II approvals. So the stuff is safe for consumption, that's all that is actually important to know.
At that point I don't want government being anywhere near the treatments. There are plenty of cases where FDA involvement does one thing only: increase the cost of drugsorworse. If FDA even has to exist, it's role should be limited to questions concerning safety and nothing more, as it's useless in most important cases anyway.
But understand that this will not happen, because patents depend on government, government is the issuer of patents, governments wants monopolies, thus government wants patents. Government wants to have franchises, monopolies, it hates competition and it destroys it everywhere it sees it, and government likes to control things, to be involved into everything in the economy, where it clearly does not belong at all.
So that's why patents will not be killed, though all patents need to be killed to improve the economy.
What do you think would happen to that corporation if it came out they were tracking everybody like this? They'd be run out of business quite fast
- Correct. News of the World shutdown once it was publicly apparent what they were doing, but governments around the world are doing this same thing, and what happens? What happens to US or UK or French or German or Chinese or Russian or any other government, when it gets discovered that they spy after their citizens?
I got into my first accident once I had insurance, because I leased a car, so I couldn't continue driving without insurance, as I did for about 8 years before that, and they don't let you lease a car without also buying insurance. If you just own a car though, you don't need to own insurance if you aren't driving it (that's the trick).
But I thought it was funny that it happened that way, insurance works just like government moral hazard works - makes you less careful.
I think there should be no mandatory insurance and no road signs or lights - will make drivers much more careful
The FDIC was created to instill confidence in banks by removing the fear in depositers that they were going to lose their savings. Assuming that your 2% figure is accurate, runs on banks were very real and very destabilizing.
- yeah, great trick that governments do to get more power is to pretend that they can remove risk from the system and not to cause the system to become unbalanced in the long term.
FDIC Freddie/Fannie FHA 0% interest SS Medicare 70 million cap on deep off-shore oil drilling FDA FAA EPA Department of education Department of small business Department of agriculture
etc.etc.etc., all there to remove risk. All there eventually to cause some catastrophe.
Of-course while the video of Friedman that I linked shows Milton being incorrect about the Fed's role in terms of ability to help during depression by printing money, he is correctly attributing inflation to the ability of the Fed to print money.
This is what US Fed did starting in 1925 to prop up UK pound
Hoover further charged that by shaping New York Fed interest rates to facilitate maintaining the British return to gold after 1925, Strong artificially depressed U.S. interest rates at a time the stock speculation fever was getting out of control in 1927, in effect adding fuel to the fire which led to the spectacular 1929 collapse.
- was confiscation of private property (gold) part of the 'beginning of recovery'?
You probably think that Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), Civil Works Administration (CWA) was recovery? That started in 33.
You probably think that FHA, FSA, HOLC, NRA (National Recovery Act,) PWA, SSA, TVA and WPA were recovery?
You think public projects are equivalent of an actual economy? If so, how come the USSR was bankrupt even it was all only public projects?
This recovery was eventually completed by the forced employment (aka the wartime draft)
- aha, that and the fact that women had to go to work to the weapons factories is wonderful, 100% employment. Just like USSR had - 100% employment.
Too bad that government 100% employment produces nothing that economy actually needs. No, don't get me wrong, it surely is one way to fight a war and must be done somehow, but to say that war time draft and weapons manufacturing causing 100% (well, probably a bit below that, but not much) employment is actually a real economic activity that helped to alleviate the ills of Depression?
That's just silly. What is the use of those resources - that's the question. Of-course the Krugmans of the world will tell you that it is irrelevant what the employment that gov't provides is, as long as people are employed. That's of-course horse crap. Anybody would do anything rather than having to go to war and work building bombs that are immediately destroyed and don't do anything for the market except killing potential customers and producers.
Again, during an even such as war, normal economy stops, but that does not mean that war helps the normal economy to get better. The only way in which war helps is that it allows some to steal a bunch of stuff from some others, but again, that's not a sustainable economic model.
Deflation is great for the creditor.
- that's not the point. The point for the consumers is that deflation is great for them.
Government on the other hand, they have a huge problem with deflation, as they get fewer tax dollars, though the dollars they get buy more, but they get fewer of them, so they see it as a problem. Their other and more important problem is that government owes money.
If government lived within its means deflation wouldn't have hurt it, but government does not want to do that. Who wants to do that? Why would you go to government to live within your means, isn't that's just silly?
The FDIC was created to fight crises of confidence---just like the one that took out Lehman Brothers and started the broader financial crisis
- no, FDIC was created to fight an imaginary problem because the problem it was created to fight only hit 2% of deposits. If you create an agency, which introduces systematic moral hazard into an existing market structure, then you are fighting an imaginary problem by doing the worst thing possible.
It was an imaginary problem, because while 2% of deposits were lost, the rest of the deposits (98%, just to make sure you understand that little mathematical point) were not lost, in deflationary environment those 98% of deposits gained much more value than the 2% of the lost deposits wiped out.
Assuming that the US *government* owned the British debt during the 1920s (I'll need a source)
but you don't understand how the Fed works. It doesn't really print money -
- thank you, I know that the Fed is not actually printing money, they are marking up their accounts that the member banks are holding, and then the banks actually issue credit from those accounts.
It's the same thing as printing money.
Regulating FRL is the Fed's purpose and that is where the evil comes in.
- no it's not. Fed's mandate was 'price stability' and for some reason now it also became 'maximum employment', but in actual reality their actual powers are in inflation generation, which is now their actual mandate, as stated by Bernanke. Of-course the Fed is an abysmal failure in both: price stability and maximum employment.
They physically cannot fail in the mandate of generating inflation, because that's easy. That's money printing (and I don't mean physical printing with paper and colors, etc., spare me.)
The Objectives of Monetary Policy... Recognizing the interactions between the two parts of our mandate, the FOMC has found it useful to frame our dual mandate in terms of the longer-run sustainable rate of unemployment and the mandate-consistent inflation rate .... The longer-run inflation projections in the SEP indicate that FOMC participants generally judge the mandate-consistent inflation rate to be about 2 percent or a bit below. In contrast, as I noted earlier, recent readings on underlying inflation have been approximately 1 percent. Thus, in effect, inflation is running at rates that are too low relative to the levels that the Committee judges to be most consistent with the Federal Reserve's dual mandate in the longer run....
s for deflation, no, it is not "great". I'll tell you what would be great: steady predictable growth, just like population. No bubbles, no crashes.
- a fools errand. You can't have economy that is stable and non-dynamic, in a non-dynamic economy you'll only have worsening economy. There are no benefits to preventing the market solutions at work to the bubbles. The busts are solutions, not problems. Bubbles are the problem, and bubbles will always form since people are not perfect in decision making even when the government is not interfering. In absence of government interference, any bubbles are quickly busted and the resources are reabsorbed by the economy, fixing the problem quickly - the companies go bust, people get fired, money gets freed, new companies form, people get hired, new products are created. This is good stuff, this is dynamic stability, not this artificial staleness that you want economy to be.
Read my sig. Economics, like relativety, was all figured out around the begginning of the 20th century, only unlike relativety, with economics the truth has been surpressed.
- nobody needs to suppress garbage. Real economics that is actually suppressed is Austrian economics, and it's suppressed for a reason - governments hate reduction of their power, and that's the logical outcome of following actual sound money.
More horse-tripe, unfortunately. 'Unfunded liabilities' is just another way of projecting a deficit into the future and assuming nothing will ever be done to deal with it.
- no, unfunded liabilities means that there are debts, liabilities that have no funding behind them.
As in they are only funded on paper with IOUs, that are US Treasury T-bills that need to be sold. Somebody has to buy them. On the other hand if US could scrap the entire liability situation, as in default on its payments for these unfunded liabilities, then it would deal with its debt. By defaulting, just like it did in 1971, when it defaulted on its promise to pay gold for US dollars.
When you say
assuming nothing will ever be done to deal with it.
what exactly do you mean by 'deal with it'? US cannot deal with it in any way, that requires paying these out in actual money that is actually worth anything.
Imagine yourself, owing 100 million dollars to a bunch of people, with whatever current salary that you have. How would you 'deal with it'? The only way you can deal with it is by refusing to pay, declaring yourself a bankrupt and then having an sale, paying down something, but basically a penny on a thousand dollars or something to that tune.
US can deal with it the same way. It doesn't have the revenue to deal with it by funding it, but it can deal with it by stopping the payments. The worst thing that US could do is to print more money to 'deal with it' by inflating the dollar further, because that will cause hyperinflation and insane interest rates. Unfortunately it looks like that's going to the the modus operandi here.
The reality is that no deficit survives long enough to come remotely close to the numbers the talking heads spew out. Changes are made (or forced to be made) long before then.
- you think debt is magic, and solutions are magical. No no, this debt is real and there is no revenue to cover it and there will be no revenue to cover it, especially given what the government is doing to 'deal with it'. Inflation will drive more capital out of US, the production capacity will diminish further, the US consumer will lose all ability to buy foreign goods, as the foreigners will stop supplying them, because what foreigners are doing now is gifting the US with their goods, they are not selling them, they are giving them away, it's a charity, because they are absorbing worthless dollars and bonds by printing their own currency and they are lending US the money to buy their own products and they build the products.
US will default on their debts of-course by destroying the dollar and the foreigners will get nothing in return for all that manufacturing they did to provide US consumers with all those goods. So it's going to be a few lost generations of manufacturing for the foreigners, while they are on a quest to devalue their own money to subsidize the US consumer.
Just like the 'hundreds of trillions' of dollars of face value people were screaming about for CDSs, these numbers are meaningless. You are taking the scare-mongers statements hook line and sinker without bothering to understand what the numbers actually mean.
- no, you don't understand that those are now products/assets and liabilities that US tax payer owns through the Fed and now the Treasury, as the Fed changed the way it deals with the Treasury. Those are real losses that must be accounted for. They are on US Treasury books, at their former 'valuations', which are insanely high and need to come down by a disturbing factor (I don't know, by a million? I don't know.) The point is that that those are in your possession, on the books and they cannot be sold at their book value. It's impossible.
Here's a little hint: Everything congress mandates comes out of somebody's pocket. 'Funded' vs 'Unfunded' is a feel-good gimick used by politicians. It doesn't matter how it
Claiming that only SQL (and RDBMSs) is right is like claiming only Windows is the right OS. It simply shows you never saw any other OS and have no clue at all.
- while my advice is actually something that's useful to people who may otherwise be going in the wrong direction, yours is just stupid and pretentious and doesn't even apply to me, since I did enough work for AT&T, Bell Canada, Symcor, IFDS to have worked with some things, you may not even recognize as databases.
Yes, for the majority of people RDBMS is correct, both from their business perspective and the skill sets necessary.
The unfunded liabilities are what, about 114 trillion? Today US lives only because the interest payments are low, they won't stay low, just like they didn't stay low for the variable rate teaser mortgages.
. 13 other countries besides the U.K. had decided to abandon their currencies' gold parity in 1931. Bernanke and James' data for the average growth rate of industrial production for these countries (plotted in the top panel above) was positive in every year from 1932 on. Countries that stayed on gold, by contrast, experienced an average output decline of 15% in 1932. The U.S. abandoned gold in 1933, after which its dramatic recovery immediately began. The same happened after Italy dropped the gold standard in 1934, and for Belgium when it went off in 1935. On the other hand, the three countries that stuck with gold through 1936 (France, Netherlands, and Poland) saw a 6% drop in industrial production in 1935, while the rest of the world was experiencing solid growth. - this entire paragraph is ridiculous.
The US didn't begin a recovery in 1933 at all. US only recovered once the WWII ended, so the government stopped with the spending and the credit could be reallocated back into the private sector. 1929-1945 were the years of bail outs and stimulus. And when talking about 'output decline', yeah, that's their most important metric. For the government of-course, as when prices fall in a deflation, they collect less taxes and they owe money, so to a government this is a double hit - they collect less in taxes and they must repay debts in appreciating currency.
Of-course they hate deflation, but deflation is great for the consumer. FDIC was created to fight an imaginary problem - only 2% of deposits were wiped out during the Depression, but the prices fell by a much bigger amount due to the deflationary pressure, which was a healthy unwinding of the bubble, that the US government has created in the twenties, when it was buying UK debt, to prop up UK pound, so they inflated a huge bubble in agriculture, prices needed to go down and they fought it tooth and nail by printing so much money, it was obscene by those times.
The consumers who didn't have their deposits disappear, gained hugely from the increase in purchasing power, much more than 2%, as the prices for agricultural products were plummeting, and government was trying to keep the prices up then, just like it's trying to keep prices for houses and various companies (banks, GE, GM, etc.) up today.
Real gold standard wouldn't have let US to get into the Great Depression in the first place, because the Fed wouldn't be able to print money. The current depression wouldn't have happened either.
US lost money on this and it will lose money going forward on these very bail outs again.
1. Moral hazard was created - now everybody knows they will be bailed out again. Everybody can gamble, government made sure of it. You loan money to these major banks, you can't lose. The government won't let you. All managers at the banks know, they can take any crazy risks, the government will bail them out.
2. The bail outs are causing massive price hikes, the money printing is inflation and inflation causes prices to go up. You are saying: the loans are paid back. How does any of it help the consumers, who have to pay higher prices?
3. The bail outs money printing and borrowing increased the total debt of USA. This is money that needs to be paid back with interest.
4. The same companies that were bailed out before will inevitably fail again. Except that the bail outs made sure that the currency also will be destroyed, as that's how government 'bails' out, by printing and borrowing.
5. The economy is not growing, it's shrinking, the bail outs just worsen the inflation and capital flight, and thus worsen the economy.
6. In reality the money wasn't even repaid. This is the MOST IMPORTANT POINT. The Fed did NOT UNWIND THE TRADES.
The so called repayment is no such thing. Let the Fed show the actual money, because the moment they try to sell the assets that they own from those banks they will find out their actual worth, and it's nowhere near what they tell you, there is no repayment.
Also, don't forget that they are creating about 10% inflation annually, so anything you can even count as 'repayment' is already 10% below what it was last year, you have to repay with extra 10% just to be at 0.
Bail outs did not work because the same institutions that were bailed out are just as insolvent today, as they are now loaning from the Fed's discount window and making a spread by buying/holding T-Bills. Once the interest rate goes up, they fail, and real interest is going up, Fed won't be able to hold interest down as long as it's printing, and it will continue to print.
Fed now cannot even technically be bankrupt, as a couple of months ago, the Fed changed the rules, that any liabilities it holds actually count towards its balance with the Treasury, so any liabilities of the Fed are now your liabilities.
About 1/3 of the mortgage market was underwater, now is owned by the Treasury - you, the 'taxpayer'.
The real bail outs are still coming, the States, the municipalities, then businesses again, probably student loans, etc. This won't stop, because bail outs are exactly the instruments that don't let it stop by letting the market get rid of the companies that must fail and the debt that must be written off.
Those same banks that were bailed out will fail again shortly.
Slashdot Mirror
Government regulation works.
- BTW, this.... I have no doubt that gov't regulation works as intended. Except that it's intended to make sure government gets more and more power, the politicians get access to monopoly type money and the voters are used in a ploy to destroy any type of economy that works, by creating monopolies and destroying free market.
Government regulations exist in order to destroy any semblance of real competition and to provide politicians with a way to stay in power.
Yes, because our "free market" health care system is working so well...
-?? Why should I reply to your comment, as you are replying to my with such an obvious ignorant statement or maybe a lie? Where do you free market in US business and US government?
--
Now if there was actual free market, a US Citizen would have been able to buy health insurance from ANY COMPANY IN THE WORLD. Why not? Why can't you buy health coverage from a company located in Hong Kong or Malaysia or Germany or anywhere?
There is no free market in US, it ended with the invention of the Fed and IRS.
For every snake oil business that is shut down (and likely not, after all, they didn't bother with Madoff,) how many real businesses are destroyed, that would have brought costs down, increased competition, increased choices, created jobs and improved economy and increased overall wealth?
I want a competing sewer business, ffs, I want a competing water main, competing electrical lines, competing everything, including roads and education and medical, everything, and it's not a bad thing even to have some overcapacity in any of these things, and lower prices are not bad for business, no matter how much your friend, Bernanke, likes you to believe.
I would rather not have government involved in anything that has to do with business, including medical business. I like my costs low, my drugs cheap, my doctors competing with each other based on price and efficiency, maybe I am the only one, in which case it's a non-starter here.
AFAIC, I don't actually care whether his treatment is fake or not, I really do not care. He seems to have gotten the FDA Trial Phase I and Phase II approvals. So the stuff is safe for consumption, that's all that is actually important to know.
At that point I don't want government being anywhere near the treatments. There are plenty of cases where FDA involvement does one thing only: increase the cost of drugs or worse. If FDA even has to exist, it's role should be limited to questions concerning safety and nothing more, as it's useless in most important cases anyway.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mifepristone#FDA_controversy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QqIN9EfQwM
because if there is a word 'health' in it, that's it, you are not your own person, you are property of your government and even when there is cancer treatment that can help you, created by a guy back in 1976, you can't have that treatment because the government says so and you can't choose to exercise your freedoms, you are not your own person.
All government is for the benefit of corporations and contractors, what do you think government is for in the first place?
As long as government has permission from its people to regulate and tax and subsidize businesses, the businesses will be running the governments.
Kill all patents.
But understand that this will not happen, because patents depend on government, government is the issuer of patents, governments wants monopolies, thus government wants patents. Government wants to have franchises, monopolies, it hates competition and it destroys it everywhere it sees it, and government likes to control things, to be involved into everything in the economy, where it clearly does not belong at all.
So that's why patents will not be killed, though all patents need to be killed to improve the economy.
nt
office of predominately women (like I am now)
- whaaa? Are you saying you are a predominantly woman?
the vast majority are freezing once the temperature drops below 75F
- it's clear what to do now - women should be used as cooling exchangers.
What do you think would happen to that corporation if it came out they were tracking everybody like this? They'd be run out of business quite fast
- Correct. News of the World shutdown once it was publicly apparent what they were doing, but governments around the world are doing this same thing, and what happens? What happens to US or UK or French or German or Chinese or Russian or any other government, when it gets discovered that they spy after their citizens?
I got into my first accident once I had insurance, because I leased a car, so I couldn't continue driving without insurance, as I did for about 8 years before that, and they don't let you lease a car without also buying insurance. If you just own a car though, you don't need to own insurance if you aren't driving it (that's the trick).
But I thought it was funny that it happened that way, insurance works just like government moral hazard works - makes you less careful.
I think there should be no mandatory insurance and no road signs or lights - will make drivers much more careful
The FDIC was created to instill confidence in banks by removing the fear in depositers that they were going to lose their savings. Assuming that your 2% figure is accurate, runs on banks were very real and very destabilizing.
- yeah, great trick that governments do to get more power is to pretend that they can remove risk from the system and not to cause the system to become unbalanced in the long term.
FDIC
Freddie/Fannie
FHA
0% interest
SS
Medicare
70 million cap on deep off-shore oil drilling
FDA
FAA
EPA
Department of education
Department of small business
Department of agriculture
etc.etc.etc., all there to remove risk. All there eventually to cause some catastrophe.
Of-course while the video of Friedman that I linked shows Milton being incorrect about the Fed's role in terms of ability to help during depression by printing money, he is correctly attributing inflation to the ability of the Fed to print money.
This is what US Fed did starting in 1925 to prop up UK pound
Hoover further charged that by shaping New York Fed interest rates to facilitate maintaining the British return to gold after 1925, Strong artificially depressed U.S. interest rates at a time the stock speculation fever was getting out of control in 1927, in effect adding fuel to the fire which led to the spectacular 1929 collapse.
begin* in 1933,
- was confiscation of private property (gold) part of the 'beginning of recovery'?
You probably think that Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), Civil Works Administration (CWA) was recovery? That started in 33.
You probably think that FHA, FSA, HOLC, NRA (National Recovery Act,) PWA, SSA, TVA and WPA were recovery?
You think public projects are equivalent of an actual economy? If so, how come the USSR was bankrupt even it was all only public projects?
This recovery was eventually completed by the forced employment (aka the wartime draft)
- aha, that and the fact that women had to go to work to the weapons factories is wonderful, 100% employment. Just like USSR had - 100% employment.
Too bad that government 100% employment produces nothing that economy actually needs. No, don't get me wrong, it surely is one way to fight a war and must be done somehow, but to say that war time draft and weapons manufacturing causing 100% (well, probably a bit below that, but not much) employment is actually a real economic activity that helped to alleviate the ills of Depression?
That's just silly. What is the use of those resources - that's the question. Of-course the Krugmans of the world will tell you that it is irrelevant what the employment that gov't provides is, as long as people are employed. That's of-course horse crap. Anybody would do anything rather than having to go to war and work building bombs that are immediately destroyed and don't do anything for the market except killing potential customers and producers.
Again, during an even such as war, normal economy stops, but that does not mean that war helps the normal economy to get better. The only way in which war helps is that it allows some to steal a bunch of stuff from some others, but again, that's not a sustainable economic model.
Deflation is great for the creditor.
- that's not the point. The point for the consumers is that deflation is great for them.
Government on the other hand, they have a huge problem with deflation, as they get fewer tax dollars, though the dollars they get buy more, but they get fewer of them, so they see it as a problem. Their other and more important problem is that government owes money.
If government lived within its means deflation wouldn't have hurt it, but government does not want to do that. Who wants to do that? Why would you go to government to live within your means, isn't that's just silly?
The FDIC was created to fight crises of confidence---just like the one that took out Lehman Brothers and started the broader financial crisis
- no, FDIC was created to fight an imaginary problem because the problem it was created to fight only hit 2% of deposits. If you create an agency, which introduces systematic moral hazard into an existing market structure, then you are fighting an imaginary problem by doing the worst thing possible.
It was an imaginary problem, because while 2% of deposits were lost, the rest of the deposits (98%, just to make sure you understand that little mathematical point) were not lost, in deflationary environment those 98% of deposits gained much more value than the 2% of the lost deposits wiped out.
Assuming that the US *government* owned the British debt during the 1920s (I'll need a source)
- who's "I"? You don't even exist, AC.
Friedman's video or something to
read.
but you don't understand how the Fed works. It doesn't really print money -
- thank you, I know that the Fed is not actually printing money, they are marking up their accounts that the member banks are holding, and then the banks actually issue credit from those accounts.
It's the same thing as printing money.
Regulating FRL is the Fed's purpose and that is where the evil comes in.
- no it's not. Fed's mandate was 'price stability' and for some reason now it also became 'maximum employment', but in actual reality their actual powers are in inflation generation, which is now their actual mandate, as stated by Bernanke. Of-course the Fed is an abysmal failure in both: price stability and maximum employment.
They physically cannot fail in the mandate of generating inflation, because that's easy. That's money printing (and I don't mean physical printing with paper and colors, etc., spare me.)
Here in so many words by Bernanke himself
The Objectives of Monetary Policy ... ... ...
Recognizing the interactions between the two parts of our mandate, the FOMC has found it useful to frame our dual mandate in terms of the longer-run sustainable rate of unemployment and the mandate-consistent inflation rate .
The longer-run inflation projections in the SEP indicate that FOMC participants generally judge the mandate-consistent inflation rate to be about 2 percent or a bit below. In contrast, as I noted earlier, recent readings on underlying inflation have been approximately 1 percent. Thus, in effect, inflation is running at rates that are too low relative to the levels that the Committee judges to be most consistent with the Federal Reserve's dual mandate in the longer run.
s for deflation, no, it is not "great". I'll tell you what would be great: steady predictable growth, just like population. No bubbles, no crashes.
- a fools errand. You can't have economy that is stable and non-dynamic, in a non-dynamic economy you'll only have worsening economy. There are no benefits to preventing the market solutions at work to the bubbles. The busts are solutions, not problems. Bubbles are the problem, and bubbles will always form since people are not perfect in decision making even when the government is not interfering. In absence of government interference, any bubbles are quickly busted and the resources are reabsorbed by the economy, fixing the problem quickly - the companies go bust, people get fired, money gets freed, new companies form, people get hired, new products are created. This is good stuff, this is dynamic stability, not this artificial staleness that you want economy to be.
Read my sig. Economics, like relativety, was all figured out around the begginning of the 20th century, only unlike relativety, with economics the truth has been surpressed.
- nobody needs to suppress garbage. Real economics that is actually suppressed is Austrian economics, and it's suppressed for a reason - governments hate reduction of their power, and that's the logical outcome of following actual sound money.
Here is a little something on monopoly power created by the government. - at least this is an interesting read.
More horse-tripe, unfortunately. 'Unfunded liabilities' is just another way of projecting a deficit into the future and assuming nothing will ever be done to deal with it.
- no, unfunded liabilities means that there are debts, liabilities that have no funding behind them.
As in they are only funded on paper with IOUs, that are US Treasury T-bills that need to be sold. Somebody has to buy them. On the other hand if US could scrap the entire liability situation, as in default on its payments for these unfunded liabilities, then it would deal with its debt. By defaulting, just like it did in 1971, when it defaulted on its promise to pay gold for US dollars.
When you say
assuming nothing will ever be done to deal with it.
what exactly do you mean by 'deal with it'? US cannot deal with it in any way, that requires paying these out in actual money that is actually worth anything.
Imagine yourself, owing 100 million dollars to a bunch of people, with whatever current salary that you have. How would you 'deal with it'? The only way you can deal with it is by refusing to pay, declaring yourself a bankrupt and then having an sale, paying down something, but basically a penny on a thousand dollars or something to that tune.
US can deal with it the same way. It doesn't have the revenue to deal with it by funding it, but it can deal with it by stopping the payments. The worst thing that US could do is to print more money to 'deal with it' by inflating the dollar further, because that will cause hyperinflation and insane interest rates. Unfortunately it looks like that's going to the the modus operandi here.
The reality is that no deficit survives long enough to come remotely close to the numbers the talking heads spew out. Changes are made (or forced to be made) long before then.
- you think debt is magic, and solutions are magical. No no, this debt is real and there is no revenue to cover it and there will be no revenue to cover it, especially given what the government is doing to 'deal with it'. Inflation will drive more capital out of US, the production capacity will diminish further, the US consumer will lose all ability to buy foreign goods, as the foreigners will stop supplying them, because what foreigners are doing now is gifting the US with their goods, they are not selling them, they are giving them away, it's a charity, because they are absorbing worthless dollars and bonds by printing their own currency and they are lending US the money to buy their own products and they build the products.
US will default on their debts of-course by destroying the dollar and the foreigners will get nothing in return for all that manufacturing they did to provide US consumers with all those goods. So it's going to be a few lost generations of manufacturing for the foreigners, while they are on a quest to devalue their own money to subsidize the US consumer.
Just like the 'hundreds of trillions' of dollars of face value people were screaming about for CDSs, these numbers are meaningless. You are taking the scare-mongers statements hook line and sinker without bothering to understand what the numbers actually mean.
- no, you don't understand that those are now products/assets and liabilities that US tax payer owns through the Fed and now the Treasury, as the Fed changed the way it deals with the Treasury. Those are real losses that must be accounted for. They are on US Treasury books, at their former 'valuations', which are insanely high and need to come down by a disturbing factor (I don't know, by a million? I don't know.) The point is that that those are in your possession, on the books and they cannot be sold at their book value. It's impossible.
Here's a little hint: Everything congress mandates comes out of somebody's pocket. 'Funded' vs 'Unfunded' is a feel-good gimick used by politicians. It doesn't matter how it
Claiming that only SQL (and RDBMSs) is right is like claiming only Windows is the right OS. It simply shows you never saw any other OS and have no clue at all.
- while my advice is actually something that's useful to people who may otherwise be going in the wrong direction, yours is just stupid and pretentious and doesn't even apply to me, since I did enough work for AT&T, Bell Canada, Symcor, IFDS to have worked with some things, you may not even recognize as databases.
Yes, for the majority of people RDBMS is correct, both from their business perspective and the skill sets necessary.
The unfunded liabilities are what, about 114 trillion? Today US lives only because the interest payments are low, they won't stay low, just like they didn't stay low for the variable rate teaser mortgages.
. 13 other countries besides the U.K. had decided to abandon their currencies' gold parity in 1931. Bernanke and James' data for the average growth rate of industrial production for these countries (plotted in the top panel above) was positive in every year from 1932 on. Countries that stayed on gold, by contrast, experienced an average output decline of 15% in 1932. The U.S. abandoned gold in 1933, after which its dramatic recovery immediately began. The same happened after Italy dropped the gold standard in 1934, and for Belgium when it went off in 1935. On the other hand, the three countries that stuck with gold through 1936 (France, Netherlands, and Poland) saw a 6% drop in industrial production in 1935, while the rest of the world was experiencing solid growth. - this entire paragraph is ridiculous.
The US didn't begin a recovery in 1933 at all. US only recovered once the WWII ended, so the government stopped with the spending and the credit could be reallocated back into the private sector. 1929-1945 were the years of bail outs and stimulus. And when talking about 'output decline', yeah, that's their most important metric. For the government of-course, as when prices fall in a deflation, they collect less taxes and they owe money, so to a government this is a double hit - they collect less in taxes and they must repay debts in appreciating currency.
Of-course they hate deflation, but deflation is great for the consumer. FDIC was created to fight an imaginary problem - only 2% of deposits were wiped out during the Depression, but the prices fell by a much bigger amount due to the deflationary pressure, which was a healthy unwinding of the bubble, that the US government has created in the twenties, when it was buying UK debt, to prop up UK pound, so they inflated a huge bubble in agriculture, prices needed to go down and they fought it tooth and nail by printing so much money, it was obscene by those times.
The consumers who didn't have their deposits disappear, gained hugely from the increase in purchasing power, much more than 2%, as the prices for agricultural products were plummeting, and government was trying to keep the prices up then, just like it's trying to keep prices for houses and various companies (banks, GE, GM, etc.) up today.
Real gold standard wouldn't have let US to get into the Great Depression in the first place, because the Fed wouldn't be able to print money. The current depression wouldn't have happened either.
US lost money on this and it will lose money going forward on these very bail outs again.
1. Moral hazard was created - now everybody knows they will be bailed out again. Everybody can gamble, government made sure of it. You loan money to these major banks, you can't lose. The government won't let you. All managers at the banks know, they can take any crazy risks, the government will bail them out.
2. The bail outs are causing massive price hikes, the money printing is inflation and inflation causes prices to go up. You are saying: the loans are paid back. How does any of it help the consumers, who have to pay higher prices?
3. The bail outs money printing and borrowing increased the total debt of USA. This is money that needs to be paid back with interest.
4. The same companies that were bailed out before will inevitably fail again. Except that the bail outs made sure that the currency also will be destroyed, as that's how government 'bails' out, by printing and borrowing.
5. The economy is not growing, it's shrinking, the bail outs just worsen the inflation and capital flight, and thus worsen the economy.
6. In reality the money wasn't even repaid. This is the MOST IMPORTANT POINT. The Fed did NOT UNWIND THE TRADES.
The so called repayment is no such thing. Let the Fed show the actual money, because the moment they try to sell the assets that they own from those banks they will find out their actual worth, and it's nowhere near what they tell you, there is no repayment.
Also, don't forget that they are creating about 10% inflation annually, so anything you can even count as 'repayment' is already 10% below what it was last year, you have to repay with extra 10% just to be at 0.
GM will be bankrupt again of-course as well.
Bail outs did not work because the same institutions that were bailed out are just as insolvent today, as they are now loaning from the Fed's discount window and making a spread by buying/holding T-Bills. Once the interest rate goes up, they fail, and real interest is going up, Fed won't be able to hold interest down as long as it's printing, and it will continue to print.
Fed now cannot even technically be bankrupt, as a couple of months ago, the Fed changed the rules, that any liabilities it holds actually count towards its balance with the Treasury, so any liabilities of the Fed are now your liabilities.
About 1/3 of the mortgage market was underwater, now is owned by the Treasury - you, the 'taxpayer'.
The real bail outs are still coming, the States, the municipalities, then businesses again, probably student loans, etc. This won't stop, because bail outs are exactly the instruments that don't let it stop by letting the market get rid of the companies that must fail and the debt that must be written off.
Those same banks that were bailed out will fail again shortly.
no, that's not it. Those normally get +5Insightful as they should.
You, on the other hand, are always +1.7NotTooBright.
you have to learn to count better than that.
excellent argument. It wins the Internets.