Is this about the Fed not raising the interest rate?
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Is this about the Fed not raising the interest rate?
[QUOTE=KevinNYC]Again, this is simply you believing you know better than the central banks, thousands of mainstream economists, etc.
[/QUOTE]
Nope, no one is claiming they know better than the Federal Reserve. The problem is with the power it yields combined with the very little transparency (and FOMC minutes mean nothing and are often misleading). The way it operates, they are the ones that act like they know better than everyone else (the market), when history shows that they are just as bad, if not worse, when it comes to needed economic foresight:
[URL="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/26/AR2005102602255.html"]Bernanke: There's No Housing Bubble to Go Bust[/URL]
[URL="http://dailycaller.com/2014/01/07/new-fed-chair-didnt-see-housing-bubble-coming/"]Nor could the current Fed Chair Yellen see it either[/URL]
[QUOTE=KevinNYC]You're talking about getting value for your money, that's not deflation. For folks who don't know, economists fear deflation because people would hold to their money and the economy as a whole would suffer. People delay purchasing because they can buy more in a month or two months, now businesses have more stuff on their shelves, so they cut prices to move their stuff and they don't restock, so suppliers now see their revenue go down, so they lay people off or cut wages. Now these unemployed folks buy less things and pay less taxes. With folks buying less there's still less spending and we are back where we started.
[/QUOTE]
Wrong, wrong, wrong. That is at best only partially true. People cannot hold onto their money and not buy food, or not buy gas. Or not buy any of the daily things that they need to survive. Rent, healthcare, etc. And when people delay buying and save, they tend to invest the money in what would be a myriad of options that are no longer feasible anymore (like CD's). They may have only two mandates, but by being able to set interest rates, the Fed has enormous power over individuals and their spending/saving habits, as well as a countless number of unforeseen abilities (like enabling bubbles and speculative behavior that a normal market would not allow).
[QUOTE=KevinNYC]
You're a Niall Ferguson fan, aren't you?
The whole point of keeping the FED from political influence to focus on long-term macroeconomic goals, not short-term decisions.
None of this is to say the FED is above criticism or making a mistake, but it should be quite clear to everyone, that if the FED followed what Ron Paul or Paul Ryan or Rick Santelli or it's numerous other critics wanted during the financial crisis. It would have made things worse, probably much worse.
So, UK in answer to your original question, quite of a few of these folks arguing for reasonable transparency are END THE FED folks like Dresta.[/QUOTE]
You are doing yourself no favors accusing people of being part of some Libertarian conspiracy theory, which you do over and over in your posting. More complete auditing and asking for more transparency does not equal END THE FED. I've never seen you name-throw so much. Cut the crap :no:
There are a lot of legitimate concerns when groups like millennials (who really see no recovery in sight) are having to suffer the consequences of Fed easy money policy. Furthermore, given the history of mistakes made by the fed in creating bubbles and encouraging speculative behavior, is it really surprising that there are calls for more transparency of the most powerful economic entity in the world?
[QUOTE=Dresta][B]Do i think introducing a national bank in the first place was a huge disaster?[/B] Yes. But i know you can't go back in time, despite the fact that many of our present problems (corruption, the dominance of finance, its influence on politics, and so on), stem from that terrible mistake.[/QUOTE]
I think this is why I thought you were an END THE FED type. Is it safe to say you're a hard-money type?
So huge disaster? Compared to what? The 1800's were recessions tended to go deeper and last longer.
We've seen six years of low rates because interests can't go negative and the crisis we are recovering from was that severe -- interest rates would have had to go deeply negative. We are in a global system with a large pool of capital looking for a place to get safe returns. If there was a safe place that had a 6% return, the money would find it and banks would have to change their low rates to compete for that capital. But folks aren't finding those opportunities and that is due to the overall business environment and not the Federal Reserve. Rates are not artificially low. If the Treasury or your local savings bank didn't find customers at the current rates, they would have to raise them.
Given that raising rates too early would lead to MORE unemployment I don't get why your argument about demographics and young men and unemployment is an argument against the Fed's policies.
[QUOTE]That is alarmist rhetoric used to justify robbery. [/QUOTE]Yeah, your posts have been so devoid of alarmist rhetoric, except for the occasional [I]wearerunningoffacliffandheadingfordisaster!thiscanonlyendbadly![/I] rhetoric.
[QUOTE=falc39]when history shows that they are just as bad, if not worse, when it comes to needed economic foresight:
[URL="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/26/AR2005102602255.html"]Bernanke: There's No Housing Bubble to Go Bust[/URL]
[URL="http://dailycaller.com/2014/01/07/new-fed-chair-didnt-see-housing-bubble-coming/"]Nor could the current Fed Chair Yellen see it either[/URL]
[/QUOTE] Yellen got it more right than Bernanke. (That's not a quote from from Bernanke by the way. That the headline.) [URL="http://www.frbsf.org/our-district/press/presidents-speeches/yellen-speeches/2005/october/update-on-the-us-economy/"]In 2005, she said this[/URL]
[QUOTE]Certainly, analyses do indicate that house prices are abnormally high
[QUOTE=KevinNYC]I think this is why I thought you were an END THE FED type. [B]Is it safe to say you're a hard-money type?[/B]
So huge disaster? Compared to what? The 1800's were recessions tended to go deeper and last longer.
We've seen six years of low rates because interests can't go negative and the crisis we are recovering from was that severe -- interest rates would have had to go deeply negative. We are in a global system with a large pool of capital looking for a place to get safe returns. If there was a safe place that had a 6% return, the money would find it and banks would have to change their low rates to compete for that capital. But folks aren't finding those opportunities and that is due to the overall business environment and not the Federal Reserve. Rates are not artificially low. If the Treasury or your local savings bank didn't find customers at the current rates, they would have to raise them.
Given that raising rates too early would lead to MORE unemployment I don't get why your argument about demographics and young men and unemployment is an argument against the Fed's policies.
Yeah, your posts have been so devoid of alarmist rhetoric, except for the occasional [I]wearerunningoffacliffandheadingfordisaster!thiscanonlyendbadly![/I] rhetoric.[/QUOTE]Sure, in an ideal world, it is far preferable to catering to bankers and monied men, and having politicians controlled by the world of finance. Not having a national bank is inordinately superior to the degraded corruption of our existing institutions. But i know full well (unlike you, Yellen and your God Obama) that politics is the art of the possible, and the purporting of pain-free solutions is a quite evident lie and effort to mislead the populace. Difficult choices are ahead, and there aren't any pleasant solutions - that is not alarmism, that is reality. If you can't see a correlation between being a creditor nation and being a growing world power, and between being a debtor nation and a decaying power, then you are blind to pretty much all of world history. There is nothing new about these doctrines either: they are ancient fallacies dressed up in a new garb, and all the evidence of history attests to it ending badly.
You are a walking contradiction: one minute the crises of the early 1800s (and there was a national bank for a good portion of this period) were ones that 'go deeper and last longer' and then he says the last recession we had was soooo bad that it required an unprecedented 6 years of 0% interest rates - but yeah, none of these problems have anything to do with the Fed (right at the centre of all the problems), rather it's explained away as vague appeals to the 'overall business environment' (care to explain what this is, and just how the policies of the Federal reserve manage not to impact on this 'environment'?). There were banking problems prior to Madison's rechartering, sure, but they were localised, and certainly didn't put the nation under the tramping foot of the financial industry, and create this monstrous alliance between banking and government that continues to plague the nation. The chartering of that bank was akin to getting rid of all the rats in a house by burning said house down - it was foolish, unconstitutional, and completely unnecessary. The economic problems of the Jefferson and Madison administrations, moreover, have far more to do with Jefferson's foolish embargo, and Madison's equally foolish war with England - once again, the destruction wrought by war being used to centralise Federal power. After Jackson got rid of the bank, there was only one long recession before the Civil War (and many periods of boom and growth) - the downturn of the late 30s and early 40s was brought on by the increase in banking without capital, and speculation - contractions are both necessary and desired to limit malinvestment and check confidence - human beings, by nature, being overly optimistic and confident in their own ability and enterprise. The rest of the 1800s is so skewed by the most disastrous war in US history that a like-to-like comparison between the second half of that century and this one, makes no sense at all. The idea that the economy is faltering because people don't want enough stuff, is frankly ludicrous - consumerism is predominant, and people want more things, they simply can't [I]afford[/I]. You know why? Because demand doesn't drive wealth... Nor is economic growth the be-all and end-all - i would exchange a fair amount of American wealth if it made politics serious again, and not simply a play thing for the wealthy, and a circus show for the masses. Though i suppose we differ on this point as well, in that you apparently think economic wealth is the be-all and end-all of life - i, on the other hand do not, and consider many things far more important once a certain point has been reached (that we reached long ago).
Again, you appeal to authority, despite there being many economists (yes, even in the mainstream), who balk at what Yellen & co. have been doing. Criticism of the Fed is not limited to the Austrians, and never was. I fundamentally disagree with and think fallacious the philosophical basis on which macroeconomics is built (as any skeptic must) - but of course economists are going to be supportive of such economics, because it provides a great demand for [I]more economists[/I]. Everyone has an economist these days; and no politicians is ever short an 'economic expert' when it comes to justifying something they want to do; Keynes provided a basis for economics that was convenient for both economists and politicians, and that is the biggest reason why it has prospered so. Not to mention the way it is taught: you are never prompted to even question the fundamental assumptions that underlie their theories, so an economist starts his education taking a large number of basless assumptions for granted - this is why there is such a mass of ignorance in economcs, and also why people have no respect for them (e.g. Keynesians predicting that housing prices were going to keep rising literally weeks before the crash - Ben Bernanke thought things were going swell when the crisis [I]had already started[/I] - so sorry if i don't accept the opinions of these men as gospel).
The idea that Economics is a distinct science that can be separated and studied independently (in the abstract), and aside from all the other disciplines that affect human interactions is false regardless: there are innumerable non-economic factors which cannot be properly separated from any study of human activity. The world of macroeconomic abstraction simply doesn't exist or pertain to reality (i.e. how things actually happen and affect real people in the [I]real[/I] world): it is no more than a fancy, and is built on a foundation of air. An Economist who is deficient in training in every other respect really has no place in discerning 'long-term macroeconomic goals' - because there are so many non-economic factors, and long-term historical, cultural and political trends to take into account.
The study of anything related to human activity can never be exact due to the nature of the human being, and this is the pretence of economists today. You talk about the mainstream economists of today as if conventional wisdom has never been wrong, and also ignore that the economic theorising of today would be rejected by just about every economist prior to the 1930s (when economists started to become more heavily involved in politics). Marshall would be horrified at the modern mutilation of the discipline of Economics, because he knew mathematics could be of only tangential importance to the subject if it were to remain capable of dealing with the [I]practical realities of the world[/I] (rather than the models and abstractions that exist only in the minds of those who create them).
As for Yellen and San Francisco: looks like her former protectorate is doing fine and dandy:
[IMG]http://wolfstreet.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/US-San-Francisco-California-median-home-sales-prices-1971-2015-05.png[/IMG]
Nope, no problem there alright, no problem at all - if GDP is going up then it's allll gravy. Praise the all-wise and all-knowing economists, they will micromanage our way to prosperity, praise be had :bowdown: .
[QUOTE=Dresta]Sure, in an ideal world, it is far preferable to catering to bankers and monied men, and having politicians controlled by the world of finance. Not having a national bank is inordinately superior to the degraded corruption of our existing institutions. But i know full well (unlike you, Yellen and your God Obama) that politics is the art of the possible, and the purporting of pain-free solutions is a quite evident lie and effort to mislead the populace. Difficult choices are ahead, and there aren't any pleasant solutions - that is not alarmism, that is reality. If you can't see a correlation between being a creditor nation and being a growing world power, and between being a debtor nation and a decaying power, then you are blind to pretty much all of world history. There is nothing new about these doctrines either: they are ancient fallacies dressed up in a new garb, and all the evidence of history attests to it ending badly.
You are a walking contradiction: one minute the crises of the early 1800s (and there was a national bank for a good portion of this period) were ones that 'go deeper and last longer' and then he says the last recession we had was soooo bad that it required an unprecedented 6 years of 0% interest rates - but yeah, none of these problems have anything to do with the Fed (right at the centre of all the problems), rather it's explained away as vague appeals to the 'overall business environment' (care to explain what this is, and just how the policies of the Federal reserve manage not to impact on this 'environment'?). There were banking problems prior to Madison's rechartering, sure, but they were localised, and certainly didn't put the nation under the tramping foot of the financial industry, and create this monstrous alliance between banking and government that continues to plague the nation. The chartering of that bank was akin to getting rid of all the rats in a house by burning said house down - it was foolish, unconstitutional, and completely unnecessary. The economic problems of the Jefferson and Madison administrations, moreover, have far more to do with Jefferson's foolish embargo, and Madison's equally foolish war with England - once again, the destruction wrought by war being used to centralise Federal power. After Jackson got rid of the bank, there was only one long recession before the Civil War (and many periods of boom and growth) - the downturn of the late 30s and early 40s was brought on by the increase in banking without capital, and speculation - contractions are both necessary and desired to limit malinvestment and check confidence - human beings, by nature, being overly optimistic and confident in their own ability and enterprise. The rest of the 1800s is so skewed by the most disastrous war in US history that a like-to-like comparison between the second half of that century and this one, makes no sense at all. The idea that the economy is faltering because people don't want enough stuff, is frankly ludicrous - consumerism is predominant, and people want more things, they simply can't [I]afford[/I]. You know why? Because demand doesn't drive wealth... Nor is economic growth the be-all and end-all - i would exchange a fair amount of American wealth if it made politics serious again, and not simply a play thing for the wealthy, and a circus show for the masses. Though i suppose we differ on this point as well, in that you apparently think economic wealth is the be-all and end-all of life - i, on the other hand do not, and consider many things far more important once a certain point has been reached (that we reached long ago).
Again, you appeal to authority, despite there being many economists (yes, even in the mainstream), who balk at what Yellen & co. have been doing. Criticism of the Fed is not limited to the Austrians, and never was. I fundamentally disagree with and think fallacious the philosophical basis on which macroeconomics is built (as any skeptic must) - but of course economists are going to be supportive of such economics, because it provides a great demand for [I]more economists[/I]. Everyone has an economist these days; and no politicians is ever short an 'economic expert' when it comes to justifying something they want to do; Keynes provided a basis for economics that was convenient for both economists and politicians, and that is the biggest reason why it has prospered so. Not to mention the way it is taught: you are never prompted to even question the fundamental assumptions that underlie their theories, so an economist starts his education taking a large number of basless assumptions for granted - this is why there is such a mass of ignorance in economcs, and also why people have no respect for them (e.g. Keynesians predicting that housing prices were going to keep rising literally weeks before the crash - Ben Bernanke thought things were going swell when the crisis [I]had already started[/I] - so sorry if i don't accept the opinions of these men as gospel).
The idea that Economics is a distinct science that can be separated and studied independently (in the abstract), and aside from all the other disciplines that affect human interactions is false regardless: there are innumerable non-economic factors which cannot be properly separated from any study of human activity. The world of macroeconomic abstraction simply doesn't exist or pertain to reality (i.e. how things actually happen and affect real people in the [I]real[/I] world): it is no more than a fancy, and is built on a foundation of air. An Economist who is deficient in training in every other respect really has no place in discerning 'long-term macroeconomic goals' - because there are so many non-economic factors, and long-term historical, cultural and political trends to take into account.
The study of anything related to human activity can never be exact due to the nature of the human being, and this is the pretence of economists today. You talk about the mainstream economists of today as if conventional wisdom has never been wrong, and also ignore that the economic theorising of today would be rejected by just about every economist prior to the 1930s (when economists started to become more heavily involved in politics). Marshall would be horrified at the modern mutilation of the discipline of Economics, because he knew mathematics could be of only tangential importance to the subject if it were to remain capable of dealing with the [I]practical realities of the world[/I] (rather than the models and abstractions that exist only in the minds of those who create them).
As for Yellen and San Francisco: looks like her former protectorate is doing fine and dandy:
[IMG]http://wolfstreet.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/US-San-Francisco-California-median-home-sales-prices-1971-2015-05.png[/IMG]
Nope, no problem there alright, no problem at all - if GDP is going up then it's allll gravy. Praise the all-wise and all-knowing economists, they will micromanage our way to prosperity, praise be had :bowdown: .[/QUOTE]
How's that dissertation coming along?
Look Kevin, the basic principle of democracy and of its ever being a success, is to have an informed and intelligent electorate. Do you not realise that political centralisation is completely incompatible with this? With the complexity of the Federal government, its tax-code, and the multiplicity of bureaucracies it has spawned, no moderately informed person can understand the machinations of their government. Hence why localism (and as much devolution of power as possible) is an absolute necessity in democracies, and all the ideas you further are utterly at odds with the founding republican values of the United States. These are the only values compatible with democratic republicanism, and the absolute foundation of the American civil order (hatred of offensive war, jealousy of the State governments towards the General Government - see 'general' - twas never intended to apply to particulars, as this was the domain of the states; concern about the influence of the Executive over the coordinate branches of government [Marbury vs. Madison has been made entirely defunct, and was before FDR even]; a loathing of public debt [again centralises power, disenfranchises the populace, empowers politicians and wealthy elites], taxes and excises; tenderness for the liberty of the citizens, and intense jealously of the patronage of the President. These are the founding principles of the American Republic, and it's funny how one can't even profess them, without being lumped with a bunch of people tagged as 'extremists' or some other slander.
You're just a shill for centralised power and the domination of government by financial elites - your sort always has been - you use your professed egalitarianism to hide your true elitism. That was the problem with the bank in the first place: it was a huge centralisation of power, and permanently wedded banking and finance to politics, with disastrous and irreparable consequences for any idea of integrity or honesty in politics - it thus being divorced from the concept of duty and having become simply another career-path, another means for gain.
The disgusting spectacle that is currently United States politics is a direct consequence of the policies and decisions that you think were good ideas, and you don't even realise it. Your views are completely illogical and riddled through with irreconcilable contradictions. You really need a better understanding of the contiguity of political decisions (and the law of unintended consequences) if you want your aims and desires to be at all realised; as of now, your methods lead directly to the things you profess to dislike, and which you mock.
[QUOTE=Dresta]Look Kevin, the basic principle of democracy and of its ever being a success, is to have an informed and intelligent electorate. Do you not realise that political centralisation is completely incompatible with this? With the complexity of the Federal government, its tax-code, and the multiplicity of bureaucracies it has spawned, no moderately informed person can understand the machinations of their government. Hence why localism (and as much devolution of power as possible) is an absolute necessity in democracies, and all the ideas you further are utterly at odds with the founding republican values of the United States. These are the only values compatible with democratic republicanism, and the absolute foundation of the American civil order (hatred of offensive war, jealousy of the State governments towards the General Government - see 'general' - twas never intended to apply to particulars, as this was the domain of the states; concern about the influence of the Executive over the coordinate branches of government [Marbury vs. Madison has been made entirely defunct, and was before FDR even]; a loathing of public debt [again centralises power, disenfranchises the populace, empowers politicians and wealthy elites], taxes and excises; tenderness for the liberty of the citizens, and intense jealously of the patronage of the President. These are the founding principles of the American Republic, and it's funny how one can't even profess them, without being lumped with a bunch of people tagged as 'extremists' or some other slander.
You're just a shill for centralised power and the domination of government by financial elites - your sort always has been - you use your professed egalitarianism to hide your true elitism. That was the problem with the bank in the first place: it was a huge centralisation of power, and permanently wedded banking and finance to politics, with disastrous and irreparable consequences for any idea of integrity or honesty in politics - it thus being divorced from the concept of duty and having become simply another career-path, another means for gain.
The disgusting spectacle that is currently United States politics is a direct consequence of the policies and decisions that you think were good ideas, and you don't even realise it. Your views are completely illogical and riddled through with irreconcilable contradictions. You really need a better understanding of the contiguity of political decisions (and the law of unintended consequences) if you want your aims and desires to be at all realised; as of now, your methods lead directly to the things you profess to dislike, and which you mock.[/QUOTE]
Dude, you're just procrastinating.
[QUOTE=Dresta]Look Kevin, the basic principle of democracy and of its ever being a success, is to have an informed and intelligent electorate. Do you not realise that political centralisation is completely incompatible with this? With the complexity of the Federal government, its tax-code, and the multiplicity of bureaucracies it has spawned, no moderately informed person can understand the machinations of their government. Hence why localism (and as much devolution of power as possible) is an absolute necessity in democracies, and all the ideas you further are utterly at odds with the founding republican values of the United States. These are the only values compatible with democratic republicanism, and the absolute foundation of the American civil order (hatred of offensive war, jealousy of the State governments towards the General Government - see 'general' - twas never intended to apply to particulars, as this was the domain of the states; concern about the influence of the Executive over the coordinate branches of government [Marbury vs. Madison has been made entirely defunct, and was before FDR even]; a loathing of public debt [again centralises power, disenfranchises the populace, empowers politicians and wealthy elites], taxes and excises; tenderness for the liberty of the citizens, and intense jealously of the patronage of the President. These are the founding principles of the American Republic, and it's funny how one can't even profess them, without being lumped with a bunch of people tagged as 'extremists' or some other slander.
You're just a shill for centralised power and the domination of government by financial elites - your sort always has been - you use your professed egalitarianism to hide your true elitism. That was the problem with the bank in the first place: it was a huge centralisation of power, and permanently wedded banking and finance to politics, with disastrous and irreparable consequences for any idea of integrity or honesty in politics - it thus being divorced from the concept of duty and having become simply another career-path, another means for gain.
The disgusting spectacle that is currently United States politics is a direct consequence of the policies and decisions that you think were good ideas, and you don't even realise it. Your views are completely illogical and riddled through with irreconcilable contradictions. You really need a better understanding of the contiguity of political decisions (and the law of unintended consequences) if you want your aims and desires to be at all realised; as of now, your methods lead directly to the things you profess to dislike, and which you mock.[/QUOTE]
Really impressed with some of your replies here. There is really no need for me to continue due to how elegant and fleshed out they are.
I still find it funny that another audit will jeopardize the independence of the federal reserve. It's not like congress will be given the powers to set interest rates and do open market operations. But given the rhetoric, you would be misled to think that extra transparency would eventually lead to the whole economy collapsing. It is rubbish to think that an institution so powerful could be so vulnerable.