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Broken Machine posted:if the us ceases to be a major player in the financial world, a good idea of what the future may hold for the us is the standard of living of india. maybe a bit better because we have a third of the population, but without having a strong currency, we'll have much less ability to use our dollars to actually buy things from other countries. like what happened to detroit except the whole country Also the US is obsessed with turning the wealth of the poor people and minorities into money for the rich people. Destroying the wealth by lack of maintenance and turning it to meaningless numbers. Bitcoin-rear end country.
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Jan 19, 2021 22:50
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endlessmonotony posted:lolno my question was what’s the impact/difference between borrowing a trillion (from who?) and printing a trillion
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Jan 19, 2021 22:50
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echinopsis posted:my question was what’s the impact/difference between borrowing a trillion (from who?) and printing a trillion You asked if the debt makes it behave differently. The answer is "lolno".
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Jan 19, 2021 22:52
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Economics is simply the study of scarcity. There isn't infinite stuff so how do you allocate that stuff? The reason a barter system doesn't work well is that some things are big and you can't just trade for them. If you want a barn you would need to trade like 1,000 chickens to get it, which is crazy, no one wants 1,000 chickens all at once but you definitely want a barn all at once. The way you could handle it though is that someone builds you a barn and then you give them one chicken a day for four years. That means when you first get the barn you are in debt to whoever gave it to you, and you have created an obligation to give some of your future labor to someone else. There aren't more chickens and there aren't more barns, you're just trading. It does however incentivize you to try and get more chickens in the future though, since you have to give away one every day, and this pushes society forwards. If the first guy doesn't want chickens anymore he can trade his chicken-a-day repayment plan to someone else for something else. An easier way to do this than remembering an endless string of deals is to use some sort of currency that represents those obligations and then just trade those. Instead of getting a chicken a day, I give you 1,200 chickenbux which you can trade to other people and I can give them chickens when they come to give it back. Standardize that across all things and you have a currency. The issue that arises with this is that supply and demand on specific items will change, and so the "price" won't stay the same. you might need two chickenbux to get a chicken if there is a chicken plague and there aren't enough chickens, or if there is a cow plague and people want chickens way more, which is inflation. Inflation is when there is too much money chasing not enough stuff. People are willing to pay more currency for things since they are competing with everyone else. Governments issuing debt means that they gather up a bunch of chickenbux from people who have a lot extra that they aren't using, promise to give them back in the future, and then hand them out to accomplish their goals. There isn't any additional currency, but it might increase demand since those previously dormant chickenbux are now in use which would cause prices to go up which is inflation. If the government just prints a ton and hands it out, then demand would also probably increase and you'd need more chickenbux to get a chicken. Everything else in economics just sort of follows from that and since you can't actually test any hypotheses no one can ever say you are wrong.
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Jan 19, 2021 23:01
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echinopsis posted:isn’t the point, that a ceo is worth that much because of the value they bring into the company? like if that ceo manages the business into 2mil more profit than a ceo paid half as much, then the 750k is justified. think of it as his fee for bringing in more profit. I think it helps to think about history here and other related items the best example is the military where you have a history of the officers being aristocrats vs the working class NCOs and how its just kind of carried on with a similar culture despite that being less the case now, and how that model was represented differently in something like the Spanish anarchist militias which still had a hierarchical command structure because that's useful in military contexts, but officers weren't entitled to more pay or perks a similar thing could be claimed with executive positions, where traditionally those were occupied by owner-operator plutocrats and aristocrats and that's just kind of carried on even as its become a professionalized occupation
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Jan 19, 2021 23:01
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Stereotype posted:There isn't any additional currency, but it might increase demand since those previously dormant chickenbux are now in use which would cause prices to go up which is inflation. If the government just prints a ton and hands it out, then demand would also probably increase and you'd need more chickenbux to get a chicken.  This assumes money is connected to tangible wealth, which lol goldbugs, and that everyone has perfect knowledge. Not even close.
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Jan 19, 2021 23:07
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Stereotype posted:The one I always bring up is that the CEO of Jiffy Lube makes $700k a year, while someone actually changing the oil in the cars makes $20k a year. Is the CEO doing as much work as 35 mechanics? Jiffy Lube makes money by changing the oil on cars, so what is the CEO doing that justifies him getting the compensation of 35 people who are actually making the money? coming at this from the labor theory of value won't get you anywhere, because it doesn't work that way. is a computer toucher doing as much work as 5-10 mechanics? is she producing enough value for society to justify her high compensation? who knows, probably not, but that doesn't enter into the equation at all. if the management of jiffy lube thought they could make an additional 200k in revenue per oil changer hired, and there was a shortage of people who could change oil, then they'd make six figgies too. that's just the market price. it's not fair, but this poo poo was never fair public disclosure of the ratio between ceo compensation and the pay of the median employee at the firm was required by the sec starting last year. the companies made the disclosures, some looked worse than others, a few cute articles got published to highlight the outliers, and beyond that, nobody gave a gently caress. not a single public company changed anything about their ceo compensation practices due to ceo pay ratio, because that sort of comparison was never any part of the decision to begin with. it doesn't matter how much the employees make; the only comparing they do is to other ceos in their peer group. all that matters is how much the ceo can make for the shareholders. the majority of the ceo's pay is directly linked to the stock price or other key metrics. if the ceo gets paid $20 million, that's for two reasons only: (1) the shareholders made so much money that the $20 million is a rounding error, and (2) a similarly qualified alternative ceo would have demanded the same. even if you don't think the ceo does any useful work, surely you agree that a bad ceo can ruin a company. that's why no public company will ever take someone up on their half-joking tweet offering to do the ceo job for the low low price of $1 million also in case it's not clear, on the is-ought scale, this is all "is", no "ought". i'm not saying this is the ideal way to structure a society. but it is in fact the way we have structured ours
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Jan 19, 2021 23:07
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Shareholders like high ceo salaries so ceos get high salaries. It's all voodoo.
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Jan 19, 2021 23:12
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endlessmonotony posted:
I don't think it assumes either of those things. It just assumes that either redistributing money (through loans from rich people) or straight printing more money and distrubuting it will allow people to pay more for the same things. If there are 5 people each with $1 and 5 people with $2 and everyone wants 1 chicken, but there are only 5 chickens, the people with $2 will pay $2 and get the chickens and the people with $1 will not get any. If you print $10 and give everyone $1 now the chickens are going to cost $3, their price inflated, but the outcome remains the same. If you borrow $10 from the guy who sells chickens (who has tons of money) and redistribute it the exact same thing happens. That's why both printing money and borrowing money can cause inflation.
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Jan 19, 2021 23:13
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mystes posted:Shareholders like high ceo salaries so ceos get high salaries. It's all voodoo. also these people are often one in the same -- sit on the board at one company, CEO at another modern plutocrats all the way down, etc
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Jan 19, 2021 23:14
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All of economics is dumbass examples like that. Sometimes they do statistics and have graphs with lines and intercepts, but it always boils down to "who gets the chickens and why"
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Jan 19, 2021 23:15
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mystes posted:Shareholders like high ceo salaries so ceos get high salaries. It's all voodoo. that's pretty close, but to make sense of it, you need to dig down one more level. shareholders like profit, so to the extent that high ceo salaries can be demonstrated to correlate with high profit, shareholders like high ceo salaries. the correlation doesn't necessarily imply causation, but the shareholders aren't incentivized to gently caress around and find out
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Jan 19, 2021 23:15
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echinopsis posted:my question was what’s the impact/difference between borrowing a trillion (from who?) and printing a trillion it is oft-repeated but inaccurate to say that the united states prints money to pay for things. “printing” dollars is done by the federal reserve for obscure technical purposes that are theoretically supposed to keep the economy stable and heathy; whether this is actually done well is beyond my knowledge. importantly, these decisions are not made by elected officials, which is bad in the sense that it insulates them from popular will, but really really good in the sense that it insulates them from popular will. our enormous deficit spending is enabled by massive, massive loans given to us by people when treasury bills are periodically auctioned off. now in a sense this is “printing” money, in that we can spend dollars we didn’t have before, but each new dollar is accompanied by a negative future dollar of debt obligation, so it’s not free money in the “printing press” sense. why can we run up such a huge tab? basically, because if we default on our debts, the world economy completely crashes, making the loans “risk-free” in a particular perverse yet real sense. this means that people are willing to accept extremely low interest rates on them, and we can borrow a lot. (occasionally the rates have even gone negative - people were paying us to hold dollars on their behalf.) raminasi fucked around with this message at 23:19 on Jan 19, 2021 |
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Jan 19, 2021 23:15
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Stereotype posted:I don't think it assumes either of those things. It just assumes that either redistributing money (through loans from rich people) or straight printing more money and distrubuting it will allow people to pay more for the same things. What the gently caress are you smoking? , and .The people buying things aren't frictionless spheres with perfect knowledge what is this garbage, Econ 101 from an especially bad school?
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Jan 19, 2021 23:18
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all this talk of bartering chickens and barns is very confusing to me because when i first read about the history of money in a picture book for children they used apples (plentiful, perishable) and axeheads (scarce, durable). i can't keep all these things straight
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Jan 19, 2021 23:18
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also keep in mind that most of the money in the economy was not printed by the federal reserve. it was created by banks out of thin air. so another way to create more money is to reduce the reserve capital requirements on banks
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Jan 19, 2021 23:18
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DELETE CASCADE posted:coming at this from the labor theory of value won't get you anywhere, because it doesn't work that way. is a computer toucher doing as much work as 5-10 mechanics? is she producing enough value for society to justify her high compensation? who knows, probably not, but that doesn't enter into the equation at all. if the management of jiffy lube thought they could make an additional 200k in revenue per oil changer hired, and there was a shortage of people who could change oil, then they'd make six figgies too. that's just the market price. it's not fair, but this poo poo was never fair the best part about this tho is that ceo also get paid fuckloads for ruining companies. if you’re a ceo, you’ve made it. success is no longer a requirement for success
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Jan 19, 2021 23:18
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endlessmonotony posted:What the gently caress are you smoking? okay then who gets the chickens and why (it's the people with more money paying slightly more than the people with less)
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Jan 19, 2021 23:20
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someone repost qirex's thing about how a CEO can repeatedly fail and make more money each time. i was looking for it the other day and couldn't find it
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Jan 19, 2021 23:20
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DELETE CASCADE posted:also keep in mind that most of the money in the economy was not printed by the federal reserve. it was created by banks out of thin air. so another way to create more money is to reduce the reserve capital requirements on banks suppose in this case it’s generated via debt. if people didn’t need debt there would be no more money creation this way
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Jan 19, 2021 23:21
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Sagebrush posted:someone repost qirex's thing about how a CEO can repeatedly fail and make more money each time. i was looking for it the other day and couldn't find it it’s called the bible and jesus wrote it
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Jan 19, 2021 23:22
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Stereotype posted:okay then who gets the chickens and why (it's the people with more money paying slightly more than the people with less) The guy getting the government subsidies for his farm. Obviously.
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Jan 19, 2021 23:22
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Sagebrush posted:someone repost qirex's thing about how a CEO can repeatedly fail and make more money each time. i was looking for it the other day and couldn't find it meg_whitman.txt
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Jan 19, 2021 23:22
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echinopsis posted:the best part about this tho is that ceo also get paid fuckloads for ruining companies. if you’re a ceo, you’ve made it. success is no longer a requirement for success that's basically true, but it's all relative. the ceo only made $500k instead of 20 million due to bad performance? oh boo hoo, poor baby, still rich as gently caress by any reasonable measure. ceo pay has indeed grown so high that even the severance package for massive failure is more than most people will ever make. but it is a bit comforting to know that the ceo knows he failed, and he's seething inside about the 19.5 million he could have made. it's as close as you'll ever get to actually hurting a rich person. also it depends on the definition of "ruined company". if the ceo ruined it in a financial gamesmanship way that screwed over all the employees and customers but also pumped up the stock sufficiently for the smart money to dump it at the top for a healthy profit, that ceo will get accolades even while standing on top of the burned husk of his company. maybe he'll start a private equity firm next!
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Jan 19, 2021 23:26
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CEOs get paid a lot because its a plutocrat job and plutocrats have power + class solidarity
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Jan 19, 2021 23:31
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its fun watching plutocrats change the rules to shifting conditions too, and for their own advantage elsewhere -- requiring undergraduate degrees to filter the riffraff and do some class selection for your middle management, requiring undergraduate degrees to get into the management training program to grow your executive base; too many people with undergraduate degrees now so get rid of the management training program and just require an MBA -- now you have another filter there where you can externalize the cost of your executive training as well
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Jan 19, 2021 23:35
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still reeling from the secretary of state tweeting out how we are NOT a multicultural state less than a month after white supremacists sacked the capitol
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Jan 19, 2021 23:44
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PIZZA.BAT posted:still reeling from the secretary of state tweeting out how we are NOT a multicultural state less than a month after white supremacists sacked the capitol  that loving traitor italian can’t be out soon enough
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Jan 19, 2021 23:46
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I think it's super funny that they called it the 1776 project as a direct contrast to the 1619 project
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Jan 19, 2021 23:47
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echinopsis posted:the best part about this tho is that ceo also get paid fuckloads for ruining companies. if you’re a ceo, you’ve made it. success is no longer a requirement for success CEOs of established companies do whatever they need to for the board to keep them on. If the board wants the stock price up or the company to be an easy purchase for their other investments, it doesn't matter if the CEO pays themselves a $30 million dollar bonus, as long as they deliver. At least, so says Bruce Bueno de Mesquite and The Dictator's Handbook
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Jan 20, 2021 00:14
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Stereotype posted:Economics is simply the study of scarcity. There isn't infinite stuff so how do you allocate that stuff? easy. you just trade another barn for the one you wabt.
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Jan 20, 2021 00:18
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President Beep posted:easy. you just trade another barn for the one you wabt.
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Jan 20, 2021 00:34
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echinopsis posted:isn’t the point, that a ceo is worth that much because of the value they bring into the company? like if that ceo manages the business into 2mil more profit than a ceo paid half as much, then the 750k is justified. think of it as his fee for bringing in more profit. read your marx, asap
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Jan 20, 2021 00:39
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re: inflation this guy’s blog is neat and this article was fun. pro click imo https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2020/08/17/covid-and-inflation/
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Jan 20, 2021 00:54
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anyway have a fun graph i found in cspam
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Jan 20, 2021 01:12
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it's gotta go up one day
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Jan 20, 2021 01:16
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fart simpson posted:anyway have a fun graph i found in cspam itanium_forecasts.jpg
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Jan 20, 2021 01:17
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echinopsis posted:
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Jan 20, 2021 01:20
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spankmeister posted:We could seize the means of production. won't work, too many ostensibly leftist americans think direct action is icky
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Jan 20, 2021 01:22
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unfortunately it’s impossible to make meaningful change, if we got everyone working to strike, i’m sure they’d fill their positions with even cheaper more desperate peons, and then everyone who went on strike gets doxxed on thisdudestrikes.com and never employed again
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Jan 20, 2021 01:23
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