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Comment by crumpets | Hacker News Reader

None of this is how this stuff works.

>Huge amounts of cheap debt allow companies to buy lots of stock, driving up prices.

Companies don't use debt to buy stock. Taking on the debt to do that would depress the stock price the same amount that the buying would attempt to appreciate it.

>All of this causes massive asset price inflation.

This would be reflected in the CPI.

>Stock prices are detached from actual revenue

No they aren't. See UBER/LYFT/AAPL.

>so the FED gets to claim "there is no inflation"

The Fed does not claim that. They claim inflation is nominal near their intended target.

Finally, stop saying FED. It's not an acronym.

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> Companies don't use debt to buy stock.

Sure they do.

Edit: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-08/companies...

By the way, the claim “Taking on the debt to do that would depress the stock price“ doesn’t seem correct. The influence of leverage on valuation is complex and depends on the cost of debt and equity, tax shielding considerations, the increase in risk due to the financial leverage... and essentially on what the money is going to be used for.

All the time in fact. There's been $5 trillion in stock buybacks by US companies in the last decade. Most of it through leveraged buybacks.

It often makes more sense to use debt than cash for buybacks.

> None of this is how this stuff works.

If you make that claim, you should do some actual debunking instead of just nitpicking.

> Companies don't use debt to buy stock.

Yes, they do.

> Taking on the debt to do that would depress the stock price the same amount that the buying would attempt to appreciate it.

Maybe if valuation was strictly tied to fundamentals, which it isn't.

> This would be reflected in the CPI.

Eventually it will be, but that can take a while, because many of the prices involved in the CPI are sticky.

> No they aren't. See UBER/LYFT/AAPL.

I'm sorry, I meant to write "profits" there. Sure, UBER and LYFT may have a lot of revenue, but they're losing a lot of money in the process. I wouldn't say Apple is overvalued, but clearly the market is taking its lack of growth prospects unkindly.

> The Fed does not claim that. They claim inflation is nominal near their intended target.

Fair enough, to be precise, that is what they are saying, and what I mean by "no inflation (to worry about)".

> Finally, stop saying FED. It's not an acronym.

I'm aware of that, but I think it looks better this way. If writing it that way annoys just one nitpicker on the internet, it's worth it.

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