I've been wondering this question for a while. Ignoring current events, why is a little bit of inflation desirable?

I do understand that it's done to "stimulate" the economy so people don't let their cash rot in a checking account, but isn't it a zero-sum game? Everybody says that money is not meant to stay where it is, rather, should flow through the economy. But if the economy always needs injections of liquidity because otherwise it fails, isn't the economy broken?

I feel like there's something I can't comprehend about that.

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[–] 18 points 10 hours ago (15 children)

Just want to point put the whole "Deflation makes people not want to spend" thing is bullshit conjured up by a wealthy economist.

In reality the inverse happens - deflation makes the general population spend and inflation makes people save. This is because if you're expecting things to get expensive, you stop spending on things you might want so you can have money for emergencies and things you might need. This isn't even theory - you can just look at historical spending patterns.

Inflation primarily benefits the wealthy, because hoarding billions is pointless under deflation.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 hours ago (12 children)

    Could someone for once please explain what you guys actually mean when you say the wealthy are hoarding money? I don't think I've ever gotten a straight answer to this.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 hours ago (1 child)

    Note: I said hoarding billions - I didn't say they're hoarding it in literal cash. They're hoarding it in value.

    Inflation is beneficial if you have billions in value because what you can earn from interest rates and valuations (especially when you can tug at the strings of the stock market) alone will exceed what the inflation rate will be (barring economic collapse where there's runaway inflation, like the Weimar Republic or Argentina).

    This means that your purchasing power goes up since the general population's and smaller business' purchasing power goes down, since you can easily outpace inflation far greater than they can. This allows you to hoard more wealth by making it easier to buy up other companies or stocks - and the more you own, the easier it is to ensure that you control the general population's wages or the growth of competitors and therefore increase your wealth further by staying even further ahead of inflation. If you're an American even remotely paying attention to things, you might realize this cycle sounds familiar.

    This eventually hurts the overall economy if never stopped of course (lack of general active cash flow), because eventually things become too unaffordable for the general population and they can only take so much debt... But if you and your cohorts keep at it, thanks to how the fiat system works, it's fine. Because you'll own so much of everything and have so much value hoarded that it doesn't matter that inflation has crashed everything and your currency has lost significant global power, since you'll be able to buy up anything else left that you don't own (Btw, this isn't hypothetical - this is how Putin and his cronies gained what they had, at the expense of a whole country). From there you and the oligarchs can basically run the government.

    And that's the big picture most people miss - it's not about the money, it's about power.

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  • [–] 1 point 45 minutes ago

    They’re hoarding it in value.

    This is what I'm trying to get you to explain.

    I'm gifted Mona Lisa, my net worth is now billion dollars. Am I hoarding billions in value?
    I start a business and it becomes very succesful and it's valued in billions and as a majority shareholder it makes my net worth now a billion dollars. Am I hoarding billions in value?

    I don't understand who is keeping what away from everyone else. What is being hoarded exactly? What is "value" here?

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  • [–] 2 points 5 hours ago (5 children)

    It's really just simple math.

    Let's say I make $2500 a month, and I buy a car. The payments are $250 a month, so that's 10% of my income.

    If Elon Musk buys a car, even though it costs $3 million, while my car cost about $35,000, he doesn't even need a loan. He just buys it, and the change in his bank account is so small that he can barely see the difference. He could buy ten more cars like that and not notice.

    And yes, he can keep buying cars, but at some point there just stop being more cars to buy. Lamborghini can only make so many new models every year.

    Maybe I spend $25 on lunch. Maybe Elon spends $2500 dollars on lunch. He spent a hundred times as much as me, but he makes millions of times more than me, and he can only eat one lunch.

    So at some point there's just a limit to how much the rich can actually spend. Yes, it's a lot more than any single one of us, but it's a lot less than all of us put together. We spend, they save. Where my paycheck goes into rent, car payments, food, and so on, Elon's money goes into investments. In fact, he's mostly paid in investments. So my money goes to other people, whereas his money stays in his pocket.

    Make sense?

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  • [–] 0 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (4 children)

    Make sense?

    No because it doesn't answer my question. I asked about hoarding wealth - you're talking about spending habits. Your average billionaire can't just walk into a bank and withdraw, say 10 million. They probably don't have anything even close to that much of liquid wealth.

    Already have thousands of times over. My ‘net worth’ is almost entirely due to my ownership stakes in Tesla and SpaceX. I have <0.1% that is cash. Tesla and SpaceX employees all receive stock/options and Tesla is >80% owned by retail investors and index/pension funds, so value increases apply >80% to them.

    From Elon's twitter

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  • [–] 3 points 4 hours ago* (1 child)

    Hmm. So, I think you're struggling to understand how those two things are connected.

    First off, when we talk about "hoarding wealth", yes, we're including assets in that. No one here is saying that Elon has 900 billion dollars in a big old Scrooge McDuck vault. Obviously it's all tied up in shares, bonds, real estate, etc. That makes it technically less liquid, though in practice those issues are largely irrelevant, because a) as I was pointing out in my previous reply, what the ultra-wealthy spend is such a small fraction of what they own that in practice they rarely need to dip into their less liquid assets, and b) because even larger purchases can be handled by simply taking on very cheap debt using those same assets as collateral. Basically, your credit card runs at 20%, Elon's runs at 2%.

    More to the point, that huge hoard of assets is the problem. Because their ability to buy up investments (including things that really shouldn't be investments, like housing) makes those things more expensive for the rest of us. They can buy all the housing and rent it back to us, instead of us actually being able to afford homes.

    But ultimately talking about spending habits is the answer to your question, because those raw differences in what people spend versus what they make account for huge differences in how much of our wealth we can afford to hold onto. The fact that that wealth is stored in assets rather than a bank account is completely immaterial. Or, rather, it is material, but only further proves my point.

    Think about it this way; Elon can afford to have 99.9% of his wealth tied up in assets where he cannot immediately access it, and can still live a life of luxury most people couldn't imagine in their wildest dreams. Do you think the average 9-5 worker could afford to receive even 90% of their pay in the form of assets rather than money? Or would they just be selling those assets immediately to cover their daily costs? That, right there... That's the problem.

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  • [–] 1 point 30 minutes ago

    I'm only focusing on the hoarding part here. I don't understand what is being kept away from others. In the case of Elon, he owns shares in companies he founded. He's not a housing investor. What seems to be implied here is that if you start a company and it grows too large then it gets nationalized or something. These are the specifics I'm trying to figure out here. Is Norway's oil fund hoarding wealth away from the rest of the world? What you're speaking of sounds more like criticism of the power that wealth comes with, but that's not quite what's being discussed here either.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 hours ago (1 child)

    You're right! They can't just walk into a bank and withdraw 10 million!

    Instead, they take out a loan for 10 million against a collateral of 20 million in stocks, expense the interest, claim 0 income and therefore no income tax, and have that transferred to their bank account. Then they withdraw 10 million, while their stocks continue to gain (or lose) value, and at some point they have to take some portion of their dividends as income rather than rolling them into more stocks or, God forbid, sell some of those stocks to pay back the loan.

    In a technical sense, no, that money isn't just sitting in a bank account, but there's a weird effect. If you only have a small amount of stocks, say a few million worth, you can sell them off in a relatively short period without harming the stock because it's just a blip at most in normal volatility. If you have a lot, say billions, you can sell enough to do whatever the average person would ever want to do with only slightly more volatility than is some nobody did it, and much of that is due to the visibility of a billionaire doing that. If that billionaire needs more than a few million, he can just follow the process outlined above with no impact at all to the stock market and a number of benefits to himself. So in a practical sense, if you only have a little stocks, say millions, accessing those millions may take days or weeks, but if you have billions, you can access it only slightly slower than I can withdraw $100.

    This money is still in the economy and helping to economy to function overall, but the majority of that benefit is only experienced by one person, the billionaire. This is effectively them hoarding those billions, not because they're sitting in an account but because a single person is experiencing the majority of that benefit while the rest is spread across thousands or perhaps millions of people.

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  • [–] 1 point 12 minutes ago

    I still don't see what is being kept away from everyone else. Who is left without if I own a billion worth of stocks in different companies? The cartoon example would be me finding a cool rock that suddenly everyone in the village wants and I even get astronomically high purchase offers from the neighbouring villages but I choose to keep the rock to myself effectively making me the wealthiest person of the village - on paper. Is the rest of the village being deprived by that fact that I refuse to sell it and buy everyone a Lamborghini?

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  • [–] 1 point 6 hours ago (3 children)

    The relative amount of spending that rich people do to their net worth or whatever is much much smaller than the amount of spending middle class and poor people do.

    If you think of a minimum wage worker who rents, nearly every dollar they make is back into the economy nearly immediately.

    I on the other hand have maybe a third of my yearly income sitting in a high yield savings account.

    Someone calculated that the amount that musk spent on the elections was the equivalent of a minimum wage worker spending like $30. He’s not doing that daily so he’s not using the equivalent amounts of money.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (2 children)

    That is not what I asked about, though. The claim was that they're hoarding money/wealth. This makes it sound like they have a lair full of chash somewhere like Scrooge McDuck.

    Musk owns multiple succesful companies. His "wealth" is the value of these companies. You can't buy a house by stating you own SpaceX, they want cash.

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  • [–] 6 points 9 hours ago (1 child)

    This songs like it makes sense, but a reference would be very useful

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