Recent comments

  • Fairly good article going into the latest.

    Reply to: This is Scary, Possible Currency Crisis   16 years 1 week ago
    EPer:
  • Check out shadow stats if you do not trust the stats. but look, there is something called theory, science, statistics and macro economics out there and this is the kind of thing we're looking at discussing.

    Economics is not about doing some psychological trust issue, unless you want to go to the behavioral economics, which is a new, warm and fuzzy branch of the field.

    Reply to: 2009: Recession vs. Recovery (Update 2)   16 years 1 week ago
    EPer:
  • Roosevelt's version, Carter's version, Reagan's version, Clinton's version, or W's version?

    The CPI calculation has changed so much since 1928, I have grave doubts of it still being a predictor of anything other than administration propaganda.

    Reply to: 2009: Recession vs. Recovery (Update 2)   16 years 1 week ago
    EPer:
  • Since the way Clinton "balanced the budget" was to borrow money from the Social Security Trust Fund, thus violating the concept of specialized funds.

    My question is this- why do we trust the mathematics and economic indicators? Why do we call them facts after being lied to over and over and over? We all suspect that the government has been messing with the calculations of some of these numbers for years; the CPI for instance no longer contains food, fuel, or housing; unemployment no longer contains "discouraged" or "disabled" workers, moving millions out of the labor force just to make the numbers look better.

    What makes us think that they're suddenly telling the truth now?

    Reply to: 2009: Recession vs. Recovery (Update 2)   16 years 1 week ago
    EPer:
  • I found a site devoted to tracking the money supply, inflation, deflation and is using shadowstats to figure out M3. M3.

    All of it is now pointing to deflation vs. recovery but this M3, a tutorial/blog post on it would be really enlightening.

    Reply to: 2009: Recession vs. Recovery (Update 2)   16 years 1 week ago
    EPer:
  • You had one under Clinton. Unless you're 8 yrs old you had one in your lifetime.

    What NDD and others are trying to do is look at the theory and the mathematics, the facts, the economic indicators to see what's really going on here.

    Trust is a behavioral issue.

    Reply to: 2009: Recession vs. Recovery (Update 2)   16 years 1 week ago
    EPer:
  • What I find interesting is we have zero description on even one of these models. I've yet to find a paper or a mathematical description on one and that's a real problem.

    They are blaming these math heads but let's see the math, what specifically are they doing.

    Reply to: 60 Minutes repeating itself   16 years 1 week ago
    EPer:
  • people will accept the fact that the only way to reduce risk is to have real savings and don't take on debt.
    This derivatives play doesn't reduce risk. At best it off-loads it onto someone else.

    Reply to: 60 Minutes repeating itself   16 years 1 week ago
    EPer:
  • Is trust.

    And it isn't helped by the Chairwoman of the FDIC claiming our deposits are backed by "the full faith and credit of the United States Government". I was yelling back at the screen "Is this the same federal government who is nearly $9 trillion in debt and hasn't had a balanced budget in my lifetime?"

    Reply to: 2009: Recession vs. Recovery (Update 2)   16 years 1 week ago
    EPer:
  • It's one of the basic marks of a modern nation- you have to have housing.

    Without housing, you are going to quickly end up with large numbers of young people who have no investment in real estate and nothing to do- guaranteed widespread violence and vandalism.

    Therefore, I predict that even if BernakeMagicBucks addition to the money supply eliminates deflation for now, it will at best be a short term solution, one that runs the risk of wide scale rioting and revolution.

    Reply to: It's Official, We're in a Recession, Well, Almost   16 years 1 week ago
    EPer:
  • Is that you can't have money itself overleveraged without creating problems.

    When your futures market is FAR beyond anything annual production can account for, the futures market will be setting prices outside of supply, demand, OR cost.

    And that, in and of itself, is extremely dangerous.

    I'm thinking perhaps the ancient Israelis in Exodus 22 had the better idea of economics- no long term debt, no robbing people by charging interest.

    Reply to: This is Scary, Possible Currency Crisis   16 years 1 week ago
    EPer:
  • What's most amazing is derivatives are sold as something that reduces risk.

    Reply to: 60 Minutes repeating itself   16 years 1 week ago
    EPer:
  • I actually agree, I don't think the US will see hyperinflation, at least not immediately but what I most wonder is the massive deficit. Last tally was this alone has added 2.6 trillion and while the US never defaulted and ran even higher deficits in WWII, we also have a massive trade deficit.

    China, who knows what they will do but they might be able to switch to a domestic economy vs. being so dependent on exports or within the Asian corridor as countries decouple from the US.

    Reply to: 2009: Recession vs. Recovery (Update 2)   16 years 1 week ago
    EPer:
  • Look at Brazil in the 70's, the Confederacy in the 1860's, Weimar Germany, Argentina at the start of the current decade.

    A structural imbalance in the balance of payments ... in inability to reconcile the current account and capital accounts and a consequent Red Queen's Race as money creation to chase after foreign exchange itself depresses the foreign exchange rate.

    For the US, the structural dependencies are on consumer goods imports and energy imports. On consumer goods imports, as long as China has the massive growth in the labor force, its not going to kick up too much fuss about the Chinese official account deficits that allow the US to maintain a trade account deficit with China ...

    ... and the mess that the credit crunch is making of the supply chain in Oil markets means that the boil is off the structural imbalance in energy.

    If the counter-movement to the current flow into dollars to unwind positions is a flow out again, we still might see a move toward the Euro as an international reserve currency, which would set up the pre-conditions for a hyperinflation with the US$.

    It therefore is quite important whether the US makes any headway on the structural energy deficit and on the presently unsustainable current account deficit, in the next few years ... or the Teens could see that kind of hyper-inflationary melt-down.

    Reply to: 2009: Recession vs. Recovery (Update 2)   16 years 1 week ago
    EPer:
  • I've never heard of this so I just googled it.

    He even mentions CT as a reason they would do such a thing.

    Have you located another "not A" argument?

    Reply to: 2009: Recession vs. Recovery (Update 2)   16 years 1 week ago
    EPer:
  • out,

    but in 2005, the Fed stopped publishing the M-3 money measure, and this is roughly the same period in which the CDS bubble was occurring. CDS contracts create "money" because they represent an agreement to make a creditor whole if the underlying asset fall.

    Now the issue is that if the underlying asset is insured multiple times, that means that money is being created without any basis in terms of an expansion of the product base. In english, more money, less stuff. As the quantity of stuff to money falls, the amount of money needed to buy stuff rises. This is inflationary.

    But, what if this expansion of the money supply is hidden, because there is no M-3 measure that shows the rapid growth of the money supply as these CDS contracts pile up creating values that are a multiple of the underlying asset.

    Money for nothing. A massive transfer of wealth from the real economy to the financial economy conducted by way of financial instrument.

    And now the measure amount of hidden money that existed in the M-3 measure is being placed back on the books as the Fed "recapitalizes" these banks. So the massive amounts of funny money that existed in the M-3 measure, but have been hidden for the past 3 years since the Fed stopped publication of the M-3 measure, are shifted onto the M-2 and M-1 measures s the Fed "launders" the bankers bad money.

    Reply to: 2009: Recession vs. Recovery (Update 2)   16 years 1 week ago
  • M2

    I mentioned it because that's another one of the correlations to inflation, whereas M1 doesn't correlate.

    Reply to: 2009: Recession vs. Recovery (Update 2)   16 years 1 week ago
    EPer:
  • I went looking at Japan for some explanation of the "not A" argument and I couldn't find any money base graphs but I did find one article going through some theories as to why they didn't recover.

    Can the Bank of Japan Create Inflation.

    what do you mean nothing in our day comparing this to 1929? For the overextended credit, wage repression, deflation...

    Reply to: 2009: Recession vs. Recovery (Update 2)   16 years 1 week ago
    EPer:
  • ... so the following is basically automatically true:

    f money supply increases at greater than the rate of inflation (in the presence of a positive yield curve from 12 months previous, which has existed since September 2007, so we don't have to worry about that here), there has always been an expansion.

    If there is an increase in demand for the creation of money over and above what is required to track inflation, that is demand for money to be created on the purchase of newly produced goods, and if that is happening, we are in a recovery.

    Reply to: 2009: Recession vs. Recovery (Update 2)   16 years 1 week ago
    EPer:
  • when the Fed bailed out these banks that got caught in CDS they took the funny money that existed as credit value in what would have been the M3 measure, and brought it on the books to the M2 measure when the Fed made loans to the banks to cover it.

    Of course the Fed ended reporting of the M3 measure in 2005, I wonder why?

    Reply to: 2009: Recession vs. Recovery (Update 2)   16 years 1 week ago

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