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Comment Modern monetary theory (Score 1) 270

Let's consider history and debt. The economies of the world have passed through several stages. Prior to the gold standard things could only scale so far before it failed. The gold standard reintroduced stability and fostered even more international trade. The principle of the gold standard was to maintain the peg of a currency to gold. This worked really well up till world war one. Its weaknesses had started to become carat before that where the need for currency expansion could not be satisfied till the next unpredictable gold rush discovery. As a result under capitalized banks became at risk and eventually their were crises that led into world war 1 and utterly failed after it leading to the great depression

We got out of the Great Depression largely in part ti temporary suspension of the gold standard.
A new way of pegging currency emerged with the Brettin woods agreement. All countries would peg to the us dollars and use treasuries as the medium of international money transfer not gold. The us would remain on the gold standard because it could afford to buy gold with all those treasury purchases.

But eventually this too saturated and limited growth. Under Nixon the us left the good standard.

The goal of the fed central bank was not to maintain the dollar per se since the dollar stood alone as the international benchmark. But instead the goal of the Fed was to curb inflation and curb unemployment. The weakness is the Fed only can use monetary policy not fiscal policy. As a result those two goals are in conflict since they cannot be decoupled with a single point of control ( monetary policy without fiscal policy)

But somehow we've done a great job using that system.

But now the international system has again scaled to a new problem which is deficit spending is reaching a point where debt service is a burden.

The next evolution of this is well known. It was beta tested in The depression when the us both went off the gold standard briefly but also excersized both monetary policy abs fiscal policy in concert.

The approach is called modern monetary theory. It has its critics but critics fixate on sound bite summaries of mmt and really fail to grasp that actually it not only can work but has worked in all the instances it has been tried ( us, Italy, Venezuela all recovered from crises under mmt approaches)

The fact that Europe is having problems is in fact due to the euro not allowing fiscal policy since states can't control their own money supply any longer.

The Fed not true problem with mmt is tgat one cannot actually trust politicians to conduct proper discipline in fiscal policy. That has to be solved before it can be implemented. What allowed its implementation in the past was the automatic and not political and transient spending needed to meet crises like the Great Depression. But to do it outside of unemployment periods is dangerous unless it can be done by an apolitical entity -- something similar to the Fed but with different powers and madates.

In any case the bottom line is this, under mmt a debt equal to your gdp is not a bad thing! No need to panic.

Comment Modern monetary theory. (Score 1) 270

The economies of the world have passed through several stages. Prior to the gold standard things could only scale so far before it failed. The gold standard reintroduced stability and fostered even more international trade. The principle of the gold standard was to maintain the peg of a currency to gold. This worked really well up till world war one. Its weaknesses had started to become carat before that where the need for currency expansion could not be satisfied till the next unpredictable gold rush discovery. As a result under capitalized banks became at risk and eventually their were crises that led into world war 1 and utterly failed after it leading to the great depression

We got out of the Great Depression largely in part ti temporary suspension of the gold standard.
A new way of pegging currency emerged with the Brettin woods agreement. All countries would peg to the us dollars and use treasuries as the medium of international money transfer not gold. The us would remain on the gold standard because it could afford to buy gold with all those treasury purchases.

But eventually this too saturated and limited growth. Under Nixon the us left the good standard.

The goal of the fed central bank was not to maintain the dollar per se since the dollar stood alone as the international benchmark. But instead the goal of the Fed was to curb inflation and curb unemployment. The weakness is the Fed only can use monetary policy not fiscal policy. As a result those two goals are in conflict since they cannot be decoupled with a single point of control ( monetary policy without fiscal policy)

But somehow we've done a great job using that system.

But now the international system has again scaled to a new problem which is deficit spending is reaching a point where debt service is a burden.

The next evolution of this is well known. It was beta tested in The depression when the us both went off the gold standard briefly but also excersized both monetary policy abs fiscal policy in concert.

The approach is called modern monetary theory. It has its critics but critics fixate on sound bite summaries of mmt and really fail to grasp that actually it not only can work but has worked in all the instances it has been tried ( us, Italy, Venezuela all recovered from crises under mmt approaches)

The fact that Europe is having problems is in fact due to the euro not allowing fiscal policy since states can't control their own money supply any longer.

The Fed not true problem with mmt is tgat one cannot actually trust politicians to conduct proper discipline in fiscal policy. That has to be solved before it can be implemented. What allowed its implementation in the past was the automatic and not political and transient spending needed to meet crises like the Great Depression. But to do it outside of unemployment periods is dangerous unless it can be done by an apolitical entity -- something similar to the Fed but with different powers and madates.

In any case the bottom line is this, under mmt a debt equal to your gdp is not a bad thing! No need to panic.

Comment Re: MAGA! (Score 3, Interesting) 321

I concur. The unemployment rate is about 4% and even the more padded U6 unemployment rate is below 5%
Those are normal.
Under condition when unemployment rates are normal the primary job of the federal reserve is to bring down inflation. It's not simply a good idea. It's their mandate

The fact that there are more jobseekers than jobs is also close to normal. There's always a mismatch between jobs and jobseekers.

It may well be that those jobs are demotions or involve moving etc..

So the Fed has done everthing correctly.

But now they are on toes because we have the immigrant labor leaving and hightarrufs.

While those might increase the number of jobs available it might not fund takers. And both will cause supply side inflation. Simultaneously extending the tax cuts and the debt ceiling means the high rate of pumping debt into the economy will continue.

So the Fed is in an uncharted territory . It could mean high inflation is coming. Most likely. But it could mean a recession. You love the rate in opposite directions there! Most likely is both: stagflation. Which is awful. We did the stagflation experiment in the early 70s and tried both spending into it and later raising interest rates sky high. Only the latter worked.

Fed is exactly doing the right Thing by being watchful

Comment Re: Kiss Monetary policy and the USA goodbye (Score 2) 52

I understand your knee jerk intuition about crypto currency. But very earnestly I suggest learning a bit about monetary policy. It's indispensable. And after that you may want to read about bretton woods and how banks in different countries actually can trade money to each other. The US treasury and its impact on monetary policy enables this. It's not just a methodology in the sense that bitcoin is a method for moving money. Monetary policy is how countries can perform the miracle of Keynesian economics to regenerate Growth in a downturn. That cannot ever be done ever without fiat currency and a central bank. Period. This was. Why for example Germany plunged in to pre-hitler ruin after world war 1. There was no way to climb out of turned down economy when you had no gold reserves (France took them). Germany only managed to recover when they pegged their mark to a kilo of wheat-- not a long term solution but a desperate move that mostly worked. But the economic malaise didn't end till Hitler started spending money into the economy. That was made possible by moving off the gold standard prior to Hitler.

Without monetary policy you are left with the austerity of Austrian economics which pretty much inverts the rational of monetary policy and loses all it's advantages.

Comment It was for the Altair. (Score 2) 134

Altairs had a little as 1K memory and you entered the boot loader by hand using binary switches. I got a lot of practice with octal using that very Altair computer that bill gates gifted my high school.

Why octal you might ask and not hex. The importance of hex only emerged after we started trying programs. But when you had to enter machine code by hand using 16 dip switches in a row octal could be done using three fingers on each hand. Try to slap four switches at the same time is two spastic a movement for most people's hands. You could go wickedly fast in octal

With the Altair there was no overriding operating system at all so comparing it to Linux is weird. No hard or floppy drives. To write a program you keyed in the boot loader that had enough brains to read something off cassette tape which was a more sophisticated loader that then could read in the 2K basic. The basic could then accept input from a teletype.
If you wanted a file manager for your cassette tape then you write one in basic and ran it.

Comment No worries (Score 1) 132

For me the phone is an appliance. I don't seek crazy standout features if it an anyway degrades my legacy knowledge and expectations in operating my appliance. I don't like relearning how to use a different microwave oven. A toaster is simple and all that matters is that it's a good toaster that cooks evenly and reproducibly.
But I like new features so I don't just want to keep my old phone. I just want an ecosystem that has tamed new innovations and integrates those across my existing apps well.
Getting the cheapest phone is never of interest. Anything you touch more times per day than your wife should be a graceful pleasant experience and so paying a dollar or even two per day for the best experience phone is a no brainer.

You may note I did not say the word Apple. If that sounds like I just described the Apple experience that is your imputation. But you'd not be wrong that Apple serves that customer better than any other

Comment Apple ecosystem, privacy, seamless processor chang (Score 1) 117

The competition has had years to study Apple, and even hire away their engineers but no one has such a user centric experience as Apple,

I don't need to care what processor I have inside. My privacy is as protected as much as possible. Devices last years. Everything works together. Apple saves time rather worrying about flash.

Apple has been creating its own processor and bus architecture letting it make fan free high performance long battery life computers. It may not be a new product category per se but it sure is innovative as it has let them create awesome performance systems.

You may recall Microsoft spent years failing at moving its OS to arm. Abysmal failure. Surfaces are still playing catchup.

I also like the expansion of my privacy on sppple with things like private relay and on board AI task specific entiiies rather than external servers.

The Apple AR system was sure shell of a lot better than anything Zuckerberg produced. Just because AR isn't being adopted fast doesn't change that they smoked Zuckerbergs
passion project

And the Apple ecosystem still "just works" better than the competition. The creation of a secure privacy centered seamless integration of long lived products is very satisfying to any user that values their time

Comment Apple M1 (Score 2) 117

Apple has been creating its own processor and bus architecture letting it make fan free high performance long battery life computers. It may not be a new product category per se but it sure is innovative as it has let them create awesome performance systems.

You may recall Microsoft spent years failing at moving its OS to arm. Abysmal failure. Surfaces are still playing catchup.

I also like the expansion of my privacy on sppple with things like private relay and on board AI task specific entiiies rather than external servers.

The Apple AR system was sure shell of a lot better than anything Zuckerberg produced. Just because AR isn't being adopted fast doesn't change that they smoked Zuckerbergs
passion project

And the Apple ecosystem still "just works" better than the competition. The creation of a secure privacy centered seamless integration of long lived products is very satisfying to any user that values their time

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