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This comm has lost any sense of meaning. This comm is basically /c/main at this point.
something that is fucked to me, and off center to the point of the tweet, is how monetary policy in US political economy is basically in thrall to this "money supply" mindset, especially in the neoliberal dominant era. government spending used to mean something else in the New Deal era. but all that stopped, and the only game in town is a single lever that adjusts the pain of borrowing.
the logic goes: higher interest rates means businesses contract, owners lay off workers, and demand goes down. thus reducing the price of things because people are broke. also, nobody wants to buy a big ticket item like a car or a house or take out a HELOC to fix a roof when interest rates are high, because the loan takes a bigger chunk of your ass.
and maybe there was some logic to that when 25% of the population wasn't functionally unemployed and that inflation was not being driven by the production and transport capacity of liquid fuel being shithammered for 8 months with an increasingly bleak future.
but i do not see how raising interest rates is going to do anything but bring more pain. the housing market is already batshit from speculators and short term rentals eating the excess inventory. no chance it slows down housing prices. tariffs have fucked construction, which was already pretty fucked anyway. people need places to live and everybody already moved back in with their parents 10 years ago. cars are a shit deal and lot inventory is high, used cars are astronomical. everybody with the option is already heavily disincentivized from doing anything except surviving, so making borrowing hurt more is just making everything worse but i don't see it actually slowing down consumption much more than it already is and was going to be with all the cuts to federal programs.
trump is obviously pissed, because low interest rates are when rich people can run wild with borrowing and VCs can do their scams and ponzi bubbles with all the easy credit. but the fed doesn't want to play along because the dogma is to raise rates when inflation goes up. i kinda assumed his attempts to pressure the fed for lower or at least stable interest rates would be kind of successful, but i guess that ship has sailed.
anyway all signs point towards a hard winter and policymakers at every institution doing what they can to make it worse than it had to be.
I like citing the Bank of England on interest rates v inflation
Higher interest rates mean higher payments on many mortgages and loans, meaning people must spend more on them and less on other things. Saving becomes more attractive because the returns are higher and it becomes more expensive to take out a loan. These things all discourage consumers and businesses from spending.
The explicit reason to raise interest rates is so that poor people in debt have less money and can't buy stuff they likely need, and we give that money to rich people as a payment for not spending it.
Oh you're drowning in debt and can't buy food? Sorry pal but that's literally the explicit, intended effect. Now pay Mr Moneybags another hundred so he doesn't increase the demand on golden yachts.
For comparison, China far more heavily relies on other mechanisms to control money/goods supply. Their interest rate is significantly more stable, and their inflation rates continue to be low despite massive growth. Which has resulted in people earning more money while food, necessities, and houses are not becoming equally more expensive. Which is an alien concept to my western brain.
Historically, the market becomes more volatile and trades lower in October. Maybe this is The Money deciding to put their thumbs on the scale of the Midterms to neuter Trump's agenda so he can't fuck anything else up. Or it's an inside job (despite Trump's bluster) and Trump plans to somehow use a market crash before the Midterms as an excuse to do... something?
The whole thing is weird.
Is it just me or is it weird to use pi as a variable?
how can it be a constant when they are always talking about increasing the pie and so on?
I assume the number pi doesn't spawn barely anywhere in Economics, which makes its use possible. I think it's a dogshit idea, but probably doesn't lead to a lot of confusion.
Yeah wtf does this economics equation have to do with a circle?
non-marxist econ is just making shit up
π represents the equalized profit rate in Das Kapital vol3 ch9-10… or rather, that’s how it is referred in the literature. I just checked the primary source and Marx actually labeled it p’.
Tbf the actual 3.14 pi shows up in a lot of unexpected places so I wouldn't automatically count it out
Its not actually Pi, they just use that greek letter to indicated the targeted inflation rate for some reason
'We can use pi too! We're a real science! We have a Nobel and everything! '
What a stupid idea, there are so many letters, Greek and otherwise, why use the one that famously represents a specific number
It is pi, the name of the greek letter is pi. Maybe you mean it's not 3.1415
It's weird, but not unheard of. E.g., in reinforcement learning, the policy the agent learns is denoted by π(s,a).
Further explanation:
"You can't keep either of the terms involving a chokepoint (alpha or beta) below 25 basis points, or 2.5%."


HE'S A WITCH
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