thomashobohm's comments

FOMC Meeting Minutes: https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/fomcminutes202...

Fed Audited Financial Statements: https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/audited-annual-fi...

I’m sorry that your Swedish central bank is classified, since, based on your worldview, there are presumably a bunch of Swedish economists working there behind closed doors to screw you over.

Totally agree! I just don’t want people to get the wrong impression-easy to think that the takeaway is “inflation is always good for young people.”

Please, this isn’t Soviet Russia, economists disagree about practically everything, so the whole argument that the profession has a serious groupthink problem is unconvincing to me. The reason why economists mostly agree on this particular topic-the way the Fed operates-is because it’s exceedingly transparent, theoretically (not to mention mathematically) simple, and empirically verifiable.

I don’t understand how your quote from Ben Bernanke is relevant. Where in the quote does Bernanke say that we’ve fully eliminated volatility? And how is he representative of “most economists?”

I’ve said in other parts of the thread that economists can, in fact, be wrong sometimes. I just find the people making completely unjustifiable assertions about the economy, while simultaneously castigating the economics profession as some cabal of out-of-touch elites who can’t be trusted, unconvincing, when I know that the vast majority of economists are simply researchers trying to understand the world and how to improve it.

I'm not sure what your point is? The comment I was replying to said "we know this is always true" I said, actually, economists aren't really sure about that issue. If your concern is that economists aren't good at making certain predictions, then guess what, we agree. Economists are also acutely aware of this fact and most of the ones involved in actual economic research are careful not to overstate the implications of their models.

Regardless, I simply have to laugh at your comment. The "finance bro says economists are all morons who would be traders if they actually knew anything" trope is pretty great!

"Most economists" never believed that. Lots of people in finance did, sure, but they're not economists.

Yes, this is a good methodology: we should take the lowest point of a random ETF, extrapolate it out, and use that number in our analysis of the Fed's actions.

edit: they edited their comment extensively after I sent this haha.

This is not accurate. A "plummet" in value when it comes to the fallen angels that the Fed is purchasing is more like a 10% drop, and even if you treat the difference between the "true" value of the bonds (if the Fed didn't purchase them) and what the Fed pays as a surplus, the aggregate value of all those surpluses is still tiny in the grand scheme of things.

I have no idea why you're being downvoted; anybody should be able to understand that the Fed is independent (from the "government" in the typical sense of the word, but especially from private interests) by simply googling it. Do these conspiracy theorists really believe the Fed is secretly controlled by a cabal of private banks or something?

Absolutely BEGGING you to figure out the difference between the Fed and the Treasury.

Sorry, let me be clear: by "smart people" I mean economists who have spent their lives studying monetary and fiscal policy and analyzing how it can be used to make the world a better place.

Not sure why the onus is on me to be "reasonable" in my response when we all agree that the person I was replying to was making an entirely unreasonable assertion.

Uh, actually, the notion that the economy has the capacity to provide enough for everyone is a falsifiable statement supported by facts. You can analyze the total amount of resources and the amount of work required to produce them, and figure out how they could be distributed differently. We've known for a long time that, in the US at least, there is enough food, shelter, and healthcare for everyone.

That's not how any of this works; inflation statistics are calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistic, independently of the Federal Reserve.

There's no conspiracy among Fed economists to try and hide inflation.

These things are not known, actually. There are people much smarter than you or me that would disagree with your sentiment that "we know MMT is a bad long term policy."

This is inaccurate; most economists think we're most likely to see deflation over the next several months as demand collapses. Considering the position of the dollar, a "monetary implosion" like you're describing is still exceedingly unlikely.

What are you even talking about?

I really have no idea what large parts of this comment are supposed to mean. Regardless:

What is the "monster" in this case? Obsession? That's just a feeling; in a vacuum, there's nothing wrong with it. No philosopher, Nietzsche included, would say "obsession" is always bad. If stuff like that could be dealt with in absolutes, then people like Nietzsche wouldn't have spent their lives writing books about the nuance of it. Clearly, for any feeling or action, "obsession" included, the actor and the object both matter. There is a qualitative difference between self-obsession and obsession with someone else.

I fail to see how this is an example of how we "collectively create our own demons." That's a cute turn of phrase, sure, but in its original usage, "demons" refers to one's own insecurities and internal emotional challenges, not every bad thing that exists. Clearly, if you think about it with some nuance, some "demons" exist outside of oneself. Nobody believes that people trapped in poverty have "collectively created" the demon of inequality. Nobody believes that victims of violence "collectively created" the trauma they experienced. In reality, some demons simply exist, at no fault of one's own; the people complaining about Wolfram didn't collectively invent him. He exists, he's writing and funding these huge research projects, and that's a material fact external to the people complaining about him.

As for your last point-yes, technically, everything we think and feel comes from inside us. But that doesn't make everything we think and feel the same.

Just btw, I think that it's generally cringey to vaguely quote Nietzsche (or any philosopher) to defend a point, unless you are a philosopher writing to other philosophers, or you're citing some unique idea of his. And I hate this whole style of writing, to be honest, where one papers over any nuanced interrogation of their beliefs with shoddy references to pop-philosophy.