lnino's comments

So, 30% a year is just business as usual? Yes, oil hit then hard. But they already had pretty high inflation before. Not sure what counts as "hyper". Certainly having my salary go down 10% a year automatically is not a reasonable proposition.

The burden of proof is on the side making the nonsensical claim that hyper-inflation is always caused by supply problems, never ever by monetary policy. I've been nice enough to provide some first-hand reports and a few pointers. I'm not your google. If you'd rather remain believing in Keynesian fairy tales, so be it.

There was already super high inflation in both cases before the supply crises. It's just it got way worse because the government reacted to the threat by printing even more money to pay for its spending. Unless you think 100% a year is not hyper-inflation. And how the hell an energy crisis can get the price of beef to go up 5000% a year, in a country that's a leader in beef production?

Take a look at other countries historical inflation too. I bet you'll see 50%-100% inflation rates before the supply problems started.

Only after the government realizes they can't indefinitely finance their spending by printing money, then they turn to seizing wealth production, or do stupid things like price control. Then things get really ugly.

Your graph shows a decline in production in the past year or so. The country has been experiencing major economical hardships for several years. The downturn in oil prices only made worse something that was already awful.

Take a look at: https://tradingeconomics.com/venezuela/inflation-cpi

Of course 800% is worse than 100%.

But how do you explain 30%-100% inflation at a time when oil was at peak price?

It's simply impossible not to have inflation when you're printing money and flooding the economy with it -- no matter the supply side.

Hyper-inflation started before the oil price dropped.

Also note that in both cases (Venezuela and Brazil) there was no external force (war or commercial ban) that artificially reduced supply. At the time Brazil started experiencing hyper-inflation, it was already one of the world's top beef producers, still beef was up 5000% a year. Venezuela was selling it's oil at peak prices to the US when their hyper-inflation started. For a while gas was the only affordable product in the country, because the production kept pace with the money printing. There's just no explanation for inflation in Latin American countries that haven't seen a war or major natural disaster in 100 years, other than bad spending policies. The government themselves admitted that in most cases, and were able to get inflation back in track with massive cuts in spending.

Brazil 1980-1994. The supply problem only started when the government decided to price control everything, before that you could easily buy all you needed, only you'd need spend all your wages the day they paid you, or you'd lose 30% of it every month. Inflation got to above 5000% a year, but there was never mass starvation like in other places. For a few months people couldn't buy any kind of meat or eggs, but things went back to "normal" when the government lifted price control. Source: I lived there, never skipped a meal. But I was quite shocked the first time I saw something costing the same as it had the previous week, it was in 1994.

The same happened in Venezuela, only they weren't able to control it. Inflation preceded the scarcity, and then scarcity made inflation even worse. And now they have mass starvation, no medicines etc.

That's fairly typical. Government prints money, there's hyper-inflation, government tries to fix things by banning marking prices up, people stop selling and manufacturing stuff; scarcity and having to go the black-market to get food makes inflation even worse.

If you want to banish air pollution then allow only electric cars. Perhaps let some basic services use combustion engines because it's cheaper. There is no "free" transportation.

Try scaling that model the whole world. How do you get some random country to join it? The costs of maintaining all that regulation framework are astronomical and depend on political circumstances that might change quite quickly (Brexit for an instance). There's just no way that the whole world will have something like that in the next 25 years. So, if you love your banking system, don't switch to bitcoin. It doesn't mean blockchain doesn't have any value for other people/use cases.

The problem is not just not having access to banks. Try to send money across the world living in the third-world. There's stuff like Western Union in may places, but depending on where you are there are extreme levels of red tape and very low limits on how much and how often you can do it. Also whenever there is unusual volatility in the market, that kind of service will stop servicing. And good luck setting up a US (or EU) bank account remotely from 80% of the world that's not developed.

It's called PoW. Go for the highest total work in the chain. If you go for anything else you are either allowing your self to be attacked by a malicious branch, or you are yourself attacking the network. There's at any given moment exactly one chain that has the most PoW (by definition). That's the reason why Ethereum is switching to PoS, because they know they can't just take over Bitcoin on total PoW. Be advised that PoS means it's not really a public ledger, but a private chain set up by a very large private club.

One of the top 5% economists? LOL Market efficiency is not about prices reflecting "intrinsic value". First lesson of economy is that there's no such a thing. An efficient market allocates resources according to people's preferences. What's the "intrinsic value" of collectible baseball cards? Yet they have a non-zero price in a mostly unregulated market. No economist before has ever bothered to write an article about why ridiculous collectibles disprove market efficiency... maybe because this doesn't make sense? Also, pretty much nobody believes in markets that are maximally efficient in every case. People just understand that markets not being perfect doesn't mean those trying to regulate it are automatically perfectly enlightened. The article conjures a bunch of fallacies in order to attack a straw man.

People think the government is their fairy godmother.

The author may praise efficiency, but seems not to understand it, for the reasons pointed above.

It show mostly that people writing about finance can be total economics and technology ignoramuses.

This article has a lot of economical misconceptions.

To name just one of the most blatant: the author complains about wages not growing enough, but also that tech giants are "less efficient" in job creation, having more market value per employee, and requiring less employees to generate the same revenue and profit.

How the heck is a company supposed to pay more it's employees without being able to make more money per employee? And if it's making more money per employee, then obviously they will have more market value per employee. This is not a company being inefficient at "creating jobs" but actually being efficient at creating high quality jobs with wages that keep growing over time.

That's just basic math and economics, but seems to be beyond the understanding of the author.

All the part about the economic impact of the big four is quite nonsensical, and reads like the proverbial rant of light bulb makers that they can't compete with a free source of light like the sun.

As with most of the current zeitgeist the idea of the article seems to be that success is the problem. The problem with the big four is not that they exist, but why there aren't more of them? Why not the big 100 or 1000? What's hindering other companies from being as successful in generating profits and high-paying jobs? Maybe the big four are doing a lot of evil things to prevent others from joining the club. Maybe the government is also to blame. Maybe both big government and big companies are together in this (anyone knows the meaning of the word "lobbyist"?).

If you keep asking the wrong questions and ignoring basic economic reality you'll never get to know the answer.

Also note that this is the debt of the government, not of the population. There is no guarantee that it will have any objective benefit to the population. Being a third-worlder and having worked for the government and knowing how it works fairly well, I'd rather throw the money from an helicopter than give it to the government. It won't do much good but giving money to the government is almost certain to make people worse off.

Spot on.

The merit (or lack thereof) of his claims and views matter little in this case. The case is visible enough and touches on politically relevant points enough so that there will be tons of people on both sides willing to fund this case all the way to supreme court. Then there is the problem with how damaging discovery would be to the company. It will probably will get settled fast, with Google paying him a few years worth of salary and a non-disclosure clause that will make him never speak publicly about the episode again. Unless the guy gets too greedy and push for too many figures, then it will be a shit storm.