Deutsche Bank Predicts the US Will Tumble Into Recession in 2023 as the Fed Hikes Interest Rates Hard (businessinsider.com) 152
Deutsche Bank has said it expects the US economy to fall into a recession in late 2023 as the Federal Reserve raises interest rates sharply, becoming the first major lender to make such a prediction. From a report: The bank's analysts, including chief US economist Matthew Luzzetti, said the Fed has historically triggered recessions when it hikes rates to deal with strong inflation. "A mild recession will be needed to take sufficient steam out of the economy and labor market to bring inflation back down," they wrote in a major report on the global economy, released Wednesday.
Inflation has soared to a 40-year high in the US as demand has rebounded from coronavirus lockdowns, aided by government stimulus, but supply chains have remained snarled. The Fed has already raised interest rates by 25 basis points as it tries to cool borrowing and spending. But analysts say the hiking cycle has a long way to go, raising fears about economic growth. Deutsche expects the Fed to raise the federal funds rate by 50 basis points at each of the next three meetings, and thinks the rate will go above 3.5% next year. They said the Fed has only avoided inducing a recession when raising interest rates that hard on two occasions. On all other occasions, significant Fed rate hikes were followed within a year or two by recessions, they said.
Inflation has soared to a 40-year high in the US as demand has rebounded from coronavirus lockdowns, aided by government stimulus, but supply chains have remained snarled. The Fed has already raised interest rates by 25 basis points as it tries to cool borrowing and spending. But analysts say the hiking cycle has a long way to go, raising fears about economic growth. Deutsche expects the Fed to raise the federal funds rate by 50 basis points at each of the next three meetings, and thinks the rate will go above 3.5% next year. They said the Fed has only avoided inducing a recession when raising interest rates that hard on two occasions. On all other occasions, significant Fed rate hikes were followed within a year or two by recessions, they said.
Trump's bank? (Score:2)
Did they also predict that he will not pay them back their money?
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Funny you should mention that. Yes. Yes they did. But they decided to go forward with it anyway due to name recognition and 'other reasons'.
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They dropped him as a client over Jan 6th.
https://www.reuters.com/articl... [reuters.com]
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Deutsche Bank continues to do the Kremlin's bidding.
Funny fed raised rates 0.25% (Score:4, Insightful)
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So what's your solution for handling inflation? Interest rates have been near zero for years.
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Get a raise if you can and save cash. That's what you do. This isn't a demand driven inflation, but supply-side shocks. These will pass and we'll revert to a deflationary trend.
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That's good advice, but I was meaning what is the solution for inflation from the perspective of the Fed or the government other than what they have been doing. We don't live in a command economy.
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There's isn't much of anything helpful that the Fed can do. Threaten to hike rates fast and sell bonds in order to keep credibility, which is what they are doing. Meanwhile, be prepared to do nothing or ease if the economy starts rolling over later this year.
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Re: Funny fed raised rates 0.25% (Score:3)
The only difference really is where the money goes.
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Just different groups of rich/donors feeding from the trough of tax dollars(growing public debt).
"Out of curiosity, who are you voting for now?" atm I don't know.
maybe just vote'em all out hope for better? atm there is no one I voted for in power at the state or federal level.
Crisis pop up because of a lack of leadership, vision and competence in government.
We have politicians and bureaucrats who are mostly politic
Re: Funny fed raised rates 0.25% (Score:4, Insightful)
While both parties have their problems, when it comes to fiscal responsibility I don't know how you can conclude they are the same. Democrats historically actually pay for their spending while Republicans just deficit spend. It has been that way for 30 years now.
You can even look at the more extreme end with Bernie Sanders wanting to provide all these new government services openly admitting he'll pay for it with higher taxes. Whether you agree with his proposal or not, he's at least trying to pay for it rather than the Republican mantra that government doesn't work and I'll do everything I can to make sure it doesn't no matter what it costs the American people.
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Democrats historically actually pay for their spending while Republicans just deficit spend.
Yes, historically the Democrats may have a better record of paying for their spending with tax increases, but Republicans have a far better record of complaining about spending when the opposition is in the Whitehouse. :)
Re: Funny fed raised rates 0.25% (Score:2)
Re:Funny fed raised rates 0.25% (Score:5, Insightful)
. Real life made me a (not a democrat anymore) life long fiscal conservative.
In the USA there really isn't a fiscally conservative party. History has shown there is usually only fiscal constraint when the democrats control the white house.
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Having lived through the inflation/gas lines of olde! I never thought the US could be energy independent in a fossil fuel world.
And we were for a microsecond, until the powers to be ended that! And we could be again!
Re:Funny fed raised rates 0.25% (Score:5, Insightful)
You let us know when any fiscal conservatives actually end up in power. The Republican's big tax cut when Trump first got into office was basically funded by debt. I mean, a government could build bridges and chip fab plants with debt, you know, infrastructure that will persist for years and decades to come. Or they can just borrow money to hand over to their base so they can keep winning elections.
Fiscal conservatism isn't merely about reigning in deficits. Fiscal conservatism is about sensible spending, and sensible borrowing. No government in the last 2,000 years (and probably a lot longer, though I know a lot less about pre-Roman debt instruments) has been able to function without borrowing money. Heck, the modern banking system evolved in Italy to fund various kinds of public spending, and as a side effect allowed non-government actors to use an increasing array of debt instruments to fund their own expansion and pool capital.
The kind of fiscal conservatism the Libertarians in the Republic Party seem to envisage is a kind of endless austerity, where every manner of public spending, whether it makes sense or doesn't, is squeezed. But even the Founding Fathers knew the value of debt, and the first thing they tried to do, even during the War of Independence, is try to find governments and bankers willing to lend them money. Lincoln blossomed the national debt during the Civil War, and by some calculations, the Federal Government has never been debt free in any meaningful way since the 1860s. And yet, by the 20th century, the US had ascended to become the most powerful economy on the planet.
Democrats aren't perfect, but some of the issues have to do with the way that Congress functions. You can't even build a bloody rocket without having earmarks for twenty districts thousands of miles away from where they're actually putting the damned thing together, because unless a Representative can't see some of that sweet gravy come their way, they won't vote to approve. The US system was in fact designed to be inefficient, as a means of countering centralized authority, but that inefficiency means many Federal projects are automatically more expensive than they could be.
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Woah, woah, woah. Hold on there. That is not correct. Hamilton recognized how debt could be used for government purposes, but many others, including Madison, saw the downside of perpetual debt. That is why, right after the treaty with England, the Founding Fathers were trying to find a way to pay off all the accumulated debt.
I just finished a book about the three lives of James Madison which details his struggles with Hamilton both at the Con
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The national debt increased by about $8 trillion during trump's disastrous presidency, so I hope you aren't under the impression that the GOP is fiscally conservative.
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Re:Funny fed raised rates 0.25% (Score:5, Insightful)
The 'current administration' has extremely little to do with all this. This has been coming ever since the fed had to drop the interest rate to around 0 because of all kinds of fuckups in *all* the previous administrations.
But you believe what you believe. It's almost like the economy isn't really all that much influenced by a specific 'administration'.
re: current administration (Score:3)
No, historically, you're absolutely right. The economy rises and falls in a roller coaster pattern over time, regardless of who is the President. But people think in the short-term, and always place blame on the current leadership when things are going bad, and give them undeserved amounts of credit when time are good.
Still, there are a couple of major things in play that allow the leadership to influence the outcomes:
First has to do with their ability to make people feel confident (or unconfident) about th
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If you're referring to Keystone, that was first canceled by Obama, then Trump overrided that and approved it, but the whole thing was caught up in lawsuits with farmers, tribes and environmentalists on one side and the oil industry on the other, so not even Trump's approval meant a bloody thing. Biden just put a bullet in a horse that was in all reality already dying, if not outright dead. And really, don't you think punching a pipeline through sandy land on top of a major aquifer seems like kind of a bad i
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Also let's not forget the fact that when Biden pulled the plug on it it was something like 3-10% complete, would not be finished for about another decade and it was designed to ship dirty tar sand oil out of Canada for processing in majority overseas refineries.
It's a convenient easy to grasp thing to shift blame on the surface but do just any little digging about the project and it's pretty easy to see why it was a boondoggle and how it has very little impact on problems happening right now.
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If you're lucky, like Clinton or Obama, you get elected when the economy is firing up, or firing on all cylinders, and then you get to claim "Look how good I am!" If you're unlucky George HW Bush or even to some extent Trump (though his Administration sucked in so many ways I don't know if you can point to just the economy, and there is the pandemic), then you come in as things begin to crash and burn, and then your opponents can say "Look at how much that guy sucks!"
It's not that politics doesn't have an i
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Bush inherited a budget surplus, and trump had a very healthy economy to work with. Not the case at all for Obama or Biden.
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The banks I deal with went up 1%. Glad I am not loaded with debt atm. Now they are predicting multiple 0.50% rate hikes. Going to be a wild ride with the current administration running things into the ground. I lived through the Carter years, it was bad. Cant use debt in a high interest rate environment. Anyone who does/needs to is going to be hurt bad.
Glad I did get loaded with the debt I have during the peak of the recession, not sure why you're glad you're not loaded. I locked in a mortgage and car note at historically low rates, if inflation truly kicks in fierce, I'll be paying 80c on the dollar or so by the time I'm done with the car note and 60c on the dollar by the end of the mortgage (or less) and I work in a job where my pay tends to be accommodating to increases because of inflation.
For those riddled with credit card debt, particularly if it's
Re: Funny fed raised rates 0.25% (Score:2)
I'd prefer for rising rates to collapse the housing market. My money makes more in the market than it does tied up in a mortgage, so I've just been saving for a house and don't expect to ever take out a mortgage.
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It's all a bit of luck too. Your house could of burned down and you would of probably lost nearly everything, even after insurance. On the other hand, if you would of invested into energy companies or pharm companies prior to the pandemic with your 220k, you may very well have even more then 750k.
I don't follow either market all that well, but I agree the real estate gains have been insane over the past 10 years. I bought my place for 118.5k and it's worth 400k now. Possibly more. Insanity.
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My money makes more in the market than it does tied up in a mortgage, so I've just been saving for a house and don't expect to ever take out a mortgage.
Where I'm living that's not accurate if you take into consideration how much rent would've been. Over 9 years, my property value has gone up an estimated 185%.
My mortgage payment (including insurance and property tax) has run me about the same as rent where I live (until about 2 years ago when rent skyrocketed), $700/mon, so if you assume that 1/5 of that would be saved by repairs that the renter would've been paying for, that's roughly $15k savings vs the equity already in the house for me. If I had been
hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah. That and people's costs went way down during the whole period of covid as well.
Things like going out for dinner, paying gas for commuting, etc, etc, are all relatively little amounts of money, but add up to rather large amounts.
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Why would Trump do such a thing?
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Because it was a bill with wide bipartisan support and he would have been unable to veto it anyways? The only stimulus that didn't have wide bipartisan support was the one passed under Biden, as it was widely expected to cause runaway inflation at the time...I wonder what happened with that one.
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"bipartisan"
“Do I want to sign them? No,” he said, but called the plan to send more than $292 million to American households a “Trump administration initiative.”
https://time.com/5821097/donal... [time.com]
He made sure his name was on those checks too.
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"bipartisan"
Yes, bipartisan, as in both sides supported the stimulus checks.
He made sure his name was on those checks too.
So what? Has nothing to do with it being a bill that both side supported and felt needed to happen.
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It's easy to criticize, but it's not easy to come up with a better solution.
It's a blunt tool. And of course when the blunt tool was used, it was not expected that there were going to be such shortages - really, it created many of the shortages.
But so many studies have shown that direct cash aid is generally more effective than targeted aid. It was an easy mistake to make and probably one that would be made again. It was an attempt to prevent total societal collapse.
Meanwhile, the PPP program - ignoring
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Thank you for being a reasonable human being with a nuanced opinion.
Re:hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
People had been claiming inflation was predictable, but they have been claiming it for well over a decade as money has been pumped into the system and interest rates have been historically low since the Great Recession. Anyone who says they accurately predicted inflation have as much credibility as someone who claims victory after predicting there will be another recession sometime in the next century.
It was not clear that employment and supply chains would stay strained for this long, and that we have finally hit the point where increased money supply outstripped availability of labor and resources.
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Only partially true. That money was spent already and only had negligible impact on inflation. The true cause is supply-side shock, which the Fed can't do anything about. If anything, they should be staying put or easing. We are heading for a deflation next year.
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That's not really the problem (Score:2)
We did however give about $7 trillion to the top 1%. About $3.5 trillion was direct cash subsidies given out in exchange for a promise not to fire employees (which they largely broke). Another $3.5 trillion was them profiteering from the pandemic while buying up assets on the cheap.
So now the top 1% are flush with cash, what do they do? They go on a buying spree, buying up houses, apartments and busines
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You're right, but you're also trying to imply the wrong thing.
The handing out money has been in the form of cheap debt for the past 14 years, since 2008. Housing market inflation came first, and now we're seeing that inflation hit commodities, food, etc. The trickle of money from the pandemic stimulus was nothing.
The root issue here is banking regulation, which led to 2008's crash, which led to "too big to fail" quantitative easing, a massive injection of cash into the banking system and the resulting fai
Headline vs. Quote (Score:3)
Honestly, the quote is a reasonable assessment. If the economy is over stimulated, the options are:
1. Do nothing, and let inflation run wild.
2. Slow economic growth close to zero, and wait for supply to catch up to demand.
3. Create an economic contraction (recession) and reduce demand to match supply.
Personally, I think option 2 is the preferred path. But I'm sure the current administration is anxious the economy won't be stable in time for the next election cycle. Therefore, option 3 is a likely scenario.
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The government has one seat on the board but by no means actually controls the Federal reserve board. It would not be the administration's decision to do 1,2,or 3.
This isn't fantasy land, it's the United States. Nothing is above politics. Not the CDC, [cnbc.com] and certainly not the Federal Reserve. [reuters.com]
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Fingers crossed (Score:2)
My fingers are crossed for a housing meltdown. Nothing could be sweeter than rising rates leading to plummeting home values. May your ARM rate reach for the stars!
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Not enough homes for their to be any kind of real correction. The last article I read said there was something like 400k listed homes when in pre-pandemic times there was closer to ~1.5 million listed.
The principle prices of homes may drop a little bit with the increase of interest rates, but clearly the link of affordability and the average family's ability to buy a home is already decoupled. The average family already cannot afford to own a home, so they are forced to rent. No one prevents you from paying
Fed is just jawboning the market (Score:5, Interesting)
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Interest rates will have to go up high enough to make other investment vehicles outside of stocks more attractive. This could cause a recession, which is two consecutive quarters of negative fiscal growth. This could cause lots of stock prices to tumble, and making them more attractive if you have cash or other investments that you can shift around in.
Always opportunity!!!
The only thing harder to predict than (Score:2)
the future is peoples' reactions to being wrong about the future.
Too little too late (Score:2)
Not only Deutsche Bank says so. US is heading for a recession later this year regardless of what the Fed does. But it will be interesting to watch how the events unfold. Some people say that the Fed is already behind the curve and this "aggressive" stance is too little too late and may be counter productive. If anything, they'll be forced to unwind the tightening and flood the banks with more money mid-year.
The stock market bubble and the following crash should be spectacular. Y2K bubble was just a rehearsa
Consider the source (Score:2)
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Indeed, just why would we listen to the biggest money launderer on the planet?
Re:We need this inflation (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, except you can no longer afford anything now since your wages have not kept up with inflation, yet the cost of everything else has gone up. Inflation is a paycut for most people.
How about we spend the people's money responsibly instead of coming up with retarded ideas like inflating the national debt away. Lets fuck the economy harder.
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My wife just got a 10% raise. My first thought was "Congratulations!". Second (silent) thought was "this almost offsets inflation..."
May we live in interesting times...
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Do you own a home? With a fixed rate mortgage? Most peoples biggest expense, by far, is their home. Both in terms of raw value and monthly budget. So existing homeowners got to buy their home at pre-inflated prices, and finance/refinance at historically low interest rates. Now those payment will never change, while income and the minority of your budget expenses goes up.
Yes, it feels like income doesn't rise as fast as inflation raises other costs. That's true in the short term, as income lags behind infla
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You have an incorrect assumption in your theory. Specifically: that people's incomes will go up. If we're headed for a recession, this may not be the case, and incomes may actually go down through layoffs and furloughs.
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In a recession, wages stagnate, but consumer prices also stop rising. That is the point of the interest rate increase. The recession is the price we will pay for past fiscal and monetary irresponsibility.
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HEY!!! You can't expect the average person to have the foresight to start investing from day one on a their first w2 job into 401k. You can't expect the average person to understand just how important a fixed rate mortgage is and how nice of a financial tool it can be.
Or that once you own some kind of propriety like this, that you make long-term investments into the property itself, such as increased insulation, solar and/or battery and even a water catchment system (depends on where you live, but the south
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Heck most people do not get yearly raises that are higher than inflation. So now Virginia, you do not catch up.
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More and more people are starting to realize this. The 'big quit' was just the beginning.
Re: We need this inflation (Score:2)
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It just takes a little more time. I thought I was shut out of the housing market when I was 25, but got in at 40. In the meantime, I lived below my means in small apartments in cool locations. I saw my peers do the same things, adapting and getting by.
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Things have a long way to go before they are as bad as when I was young. When I was first old enough to start thinking about buying a home (circa 1980), the mortgage rate was 18%, making the actual cost of the home irrelevant.
By the time I could afford to buy anything (a small, old fixer-upper), mortgages were at 8%.
I'm in the middle of buying what I hope will be my last house, and I'm paying 4.5%. Not as good as if I had bought over the last year or two, but still far better than during most of my adult
Re:We need this inflation (Score:5, Informative)
Except that more than offsets inflation.
The problem is that the MSM is lumping corporate price gouging into "inflation" and very dishonestly not separating the two.
If you look at the increase in corporate profits over the last year, it accounts for about 60% of "inflation". Inflation is fine, and nothing we need to worry about right now. The real issue is corporate greed, and most of our legislators are being paid to ignore that, along with the MSM.
And no, you can't wail about the increased price of raw materials and supply chain issues - we are literally talking profit, not anything else. That's more than half of what everyone is calling "inflation".
I saw some math which ballparked the increase in corporate profit at about $2500 per person in the US over the last year.
Re:We need this inflation (Score:5, Informative)
This will definitely not be a popular opinion but Keynesian economic theory holds a big chunk of the answer. In the first half of the cycle, when things are going to shit, add money into the hands of those that spend it in order to boost the economy. We did a mostly good job at that with the stimulus checks and the child tax credit. Lifting people out of poverty, kept people solvent and injected money into the economy when we needed it. The downside was that a lot of that money was funneled into companies and rentiers that took it out of the economy and and denied us the benefit of the public investment.
The second half, and the one that people conveniently ignore, is raising taxes to take money out of the cycle to keep it from overheating. Usually those taxes are on assess the don't produce anything for the economy, i.e. stocks, bonds, rent seeking activity, etc. however instead of using tax increases to chill off the economic cycle, we use interest rates which only benefit the rent seekers and not the workers. This is probably intentional to fark over anyone isn't part of the rentier class.
There are lots of people who are completely allergic to taxes but is the only tool we have to encourage the transfer of value from idle capital into productive use. Which in turn fuels the expansion of business which makes the economy grow for everybody not just the rentier class.
One of the things that I don't believe Key had to deal with was cheating through stock buybacks and using assets as collateral for loans as a way of avoiding taxes. If we close those loopholes then we may not need to actually change the tax rate because we increase what can be taxed. On the other hand, history shows that we did show significant gains when we had a high tax rate and tax code rewarding reinvesting productively.
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Tax deductions are so restricted today that even someone with a 7-figure income might be best off not itemizing their deductions! Effective tax rates for these people have gone up dramatically.
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Re:We need this inflation (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't save anything, spend spend spend, leave a pile of debt when you die... Sounds like you're part of the problem here.
Re:We need this inflation (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't save anything, spend spend spend, leave a pile of debt when you die... Sounds like you're part of the problem here.
Wait a minute there, unbridled inflation is the dream of everyone holding debt at a sane interest rate from bygone times. What could be sweeter than buying a nice home, furnishings, cars, and some toys then in a few years wiping yourself with some worthless paper and sending it in to cover all your debt? It’s the people earning a paycheck that won’t keep up, with their money in banks, have low or no debts held, doing what we were all told was responsible, that are going to be the biggest losers.
Envy my grandparents (Score:2)
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I envy the rates my grandparents got back in the day. I envy the amount of interest they were paid on their savings more than the interest rate they got on their home.
Odds are if you tell someone under 30 that a bank savings account used to provide great interest rates they would either look confused, shocked, or both.
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Weren't mortgage rates in the 80s something like 13-18%? Property was cheap on principle but you had to already have cash, which no one did.
Only the early 80s. By the late 80s they were about 10% and 7-8% in the 70’s.
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To paraphrase Tracy Morgan, I never saw a Brinks truck at a funeral.
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Wrong! Pay down your debts and save the cash. Deflation is coming, and it'll last several years.
Re: We need this inflation (Score:2)
Re: We need this inflation (Score:2)
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That's completely insane.
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Credit cards never caught on in most of Europe, and people saved money even when they were short of it. There's probably still old socks with now obsolete currency hidden somewhere in houses...
Re:We need this inflation (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right - embedded in the design of our fiat currency is the need for continual inflation. But the government also carefully controls this rate to the best of its ability in the range of 1-3% annually. Making things suck for savers is supposed to make corporations and the rich reinvest rather than hoard in the long run.
Re:We need this inflation (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is inflating the debt away will be more harmful to society than increasing taxes and making better investments with those taxes (the real solutions).
Raising taxes is a non-starter, and we're already taxed too heavily anyway.
It is laughable to say we are already taxed too heavily. The US Money Supply [tradingeconomics.com] has grown by about 500% since 2007, but federal, state, and local taxes have only grown 50% (and inflation was 37%). So money supply has outpaced inflation by 1350% while taxation has outpaced inflation by 35%.
So those who benefited most from that increased money supply have plenty of money to have their taxes significantly increased. There was a $13 trillion increase of wealth (in 2020 dollars) for millionaires and billionaires in the US since before the Great Recession, when the money supply exploded. That an increase of over 100% even after factoring in inflation.
Like I said, to say there isn't money available to be taxed is laughable. If taxation had kept up with increased money supply, focused only on those whose wealth was actually growing because of this spending, the national debt would not have grown at all until Covid-19 related spending in 2020.
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That and, you have to drive up unemployment enough that people will take any job with any pay.
Can't have people demanding higher wages, you know. That ruins everything (for the Fat Cats).
Fact is you don't want to have 20% inflation or such. But lots of countries have balanced out the inflation/unemployment equation so that inflation is maybe more 5%-ish percent and unemployment is then very, very low.
Also lots of average people hold lots of debt, so helping that debt disappear helps them a lot, too. Cred
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30-35% tax is a joke. Try 40-60% income tax with a 15% sales tax.
Re:How is that even possible... (Score:4, Insightful)
... with USA economy doing so great and with all that "democracy" at the helm of famous "Free Market" ?
“The free market doesn’t need rules, it regulates itself” is logic about as sound as putting a coke addict in charge of the drug evidence locker.
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"Free Market" (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember that law California passed to fix dodgy "independent contractor" business practices like Uber was using? Turns out it basically eliminated independent owner-operator trucking operations as well. So, most of them left the state rather than be forced to work for a trucking company, or setting up their own shipping company in California which would cost a lot. These were mostly long-haul truckers who did most of the cross-country logistics.
This had a huge effect on the number of trucks available, especially as the trucking companies can't get new trucks (supply chain issues) or hire new truckers as the pay isn't competitive with being an independent driver.
Source: My sister-in-law is a buyer for a job shop for the big three automakers. She is at the point where she is ordering shipping containers herself, getting them on boats, and lining up trucking companies to deliver their parts, which is usually all handled two or three levels removed via parts wholesalers and distributors.
Re:"Free Market" (Score:4, Interesting)
My Uncle was an independent owner-operator for 20 years. He retired two years ago and left California. Just like my mother and another uncle, all three ended up shutting down businesses in California and moving out of state. Two retired and the other is half retired.
I'm still happy in southern California but I'm just a w2 essential worker, so I have a pretty secure job. The price of general life is definitely getting tighter and if it were for my wife's parents, we may move ourselves.
P.S. Both my Uncle and my mother would of ran their businesses for a few more years but California is also making it harder to leave the state and making it harder for small businesses to succeed. My uncle made good money but was ready to leave with the rest of the family and my mother's business was property management. Kind of hard to run a management company when over half your tenets don't have to pay their fucking rent for well over a year. Half her owners either sold the rental unit or were forced to move back into the rental unit itself. All of the units were single family homes.
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companies have not yet admitted to holding back production to maintain their profits.
FIFY. Seriously, there is serious evidence that this inflation is not driven by the cash infusion into the economy but by corporate practices withholding product to increase profits. The market has failed and we have too few companies controlling too many segments of the economy. We need better regulation to break up these concentrations of power and increase the ability for competition to exist.
Trade deficits are good (Score:2)
China is burning through it's population and land to meet our needs. From a foreign policy standpoint that's a win. The real problem isn't the offshoring, it's that the wealth
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