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Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

Huh?

I wonder if a CS article would ever receive any attention on a finance website.

This isn't a CS website. "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

What I meant to imply is that the article is incomprehensible, at least to me, and I was wondering if a technical CS article would be of interest to finance people.

I also found this article to be pretty much incomprehensible. It lacks conciseness and clarity. What are they suggesting will happen to the US economy in 2010?

They are suggesting that the US Government needs to borrow a very large amount of money in 2010. To do this, one of three things needs to occur.

1) Another round of quantitative easing (Fed increases the money supply) This will lead to a dollar collapse, or at the very least, a severe dollar devaluation, which is generally not good for the economy.

2) Fed raises interest rates. With higher interest rates, more people are willing to buy treasuries, and so, there's more money coming in to pay the bills coming due in 2010. Higher interest rates are generally not good for the economy, particularly if it's already sick.

3) US Government engineers a stock market collapse, to send people scurrying to the safety of treasuries (and thereby allowing government to borrow what they need to). Of course, stock market collapses are generally bad for the economy.

So, in summary, I'd say they are predicting that the U.S. economy will have a rough 2010.

They also mentioned how corporations sold very few bonds in the first two quarters of 2009, so I am imagining that the US Gov is not the only player that needs to sell a lot of bonds next year.

Thanks for this... Interesting article but not the easiest read.

Also that because this is a global recession, every country is focused on revitalizing their own economy, especially developing countries (i.e. emerging markets). Thus the global demand for US Treasuries in 2010, especially among EMs, who have historically been larger purchasers of US Treasuries, will also fall, placing more pressure on the US government to raise cash domestically.

More the point, economics is just short of comprehensible to the vast majority of non-economists. Which is why the ability to know that you DON'T know shit, is so important. But few people have that kind of self awareness.

A long time ago the HN audience consisted mostly of people who knew at least that much. That's no longer the case.

http://mattmaroon.com/2009/05/01/hacker-news-disease/

If economists were so smart, they'd be running a startup making a web 2.0 photo-sharing website :)

A long time ago the HN audience consisted mostly of people who knew at least that much.

Every online community has this myth: that in the beginning all the members were as intelligent as Einstein, as humble as Gandhi, etc., etc., and that over time hordes of newcomers arrived and the quality fell drastically. But having been in on the ground floor of quite a few of them I can say with certainty that it's a myth.

I've taken (and received pretty good marks) in two accounting courses, and five economics courses. I read the Business section of the Wall Street Journal and NYT daily, and try and closely pay attention to the issuances of the Fed. I tried to read that article for the better part of 30 minutes, and it was close to incomprehensible to me. I'm wondering if the author was deliberately trying to be obtuse, or if they are really so caught up in their jargon, that this was the attempt at making things clear. The closest I can think in the Hacker Community would be Steve Gilmor - who can also be quite obtuse:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/12/23.html

Hmmm; I've only read The Wall Street Journal since 3rd grade and studied some Austrian economics on my own, and I understood it (well, I'm not sure why raising interest rates would cause an increase in inflation, but I'm getting some traction on that from first principles).

Yes, it is verbose and very heavy on the jargon, but if you know the jargon i suspect it's clear enough. I suppose it also helps if you've been thinking about the same problem, who's going to buy the trillions in new debt the US federal government plans to issue in the coming years.

They have a bit of a mission to not dumb down the material. I certainly only get a percentage of it, but have learned a lot. Grab the RSS for a few weeks if you'd like to learn more than the mainstream media presents.

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