Hacker News Reader

Comment by edmcnulty101 | Hacker News Reader

Didn't they forgive a massive amount of bank debt during the 2008 financial crisis?

And that didn't cause any worrisome inflation.

Forgive these kids loans, who were just trying to go to college to learn and gain job skills to compete in the world and are now debt slaves.

View on HN

>Forgive these kids loans, who were just trying to go to college to learn and gain job skills to compete in the world and are now debt slaves.

Nah. Those kids spent 4 years partying and treating adult life like an extension of high school with no consequences and free rent. I graduated highschool in ‘08, and I can clearly remember wondering how in the hell all of my friends on social media were living the lives they were, as I scraped by working minimum wage jobs in the depths of the recession.

I’m all for forgiving things like nurses and teachers who meet some public service requirements, but the people who spent $100k they didn’t have on a Communication degree can cry me a river.

I agree. But I also think that they should be able to bankrupt out of them like Trump and many other rich people have done numerous times.

Trapping students into non-bankruptable student loans is pure debt slavery.

Then every student will just declare bankrupty when they graduate and already have non-existent credit.

You mean just like how rich people bankrupt out of their failed loans and then the taxpayers bail out the banks?

Do you mean the taxpayer absorbing the debt should target loans given to people who did job skill-related degrees?

2008 was on the verge of a massive deflationary spiral. Bank debt forgiveness likely did cause inflation, but we needed it then! We are now in a period of high inflation already, so we would very much not like more.

Looks like inflation's was as high as it was today in 2008.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2021/07/06/...

No, it's not at all actually: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=T1OA

2008 had one of the top 5 or 6 peaks of inflation over the past century!

So not sure how you're deducing there was no inflation. The deflationary spiral happened AFTER the bank bailout.

> 2008 had one of the top 5 or 6 peaks of inflation over the past century!

More like the 9th or 10th, but nonetheless I see what you're talking about with the summer 2008 oil spike. The problem with this analysis is that a deflationary spiral is really more about price jerk than inflation itself. In other words, the rate at which inflation is changing is the bigger concern than the inflation rate itself.

> So not sure how you're deducing there was no inflation.

This is a strawman you've entirely made up, so I won't respond to this portion.

> This is a strawman you've entirely made up, so I won't respond to this portion.

> More like the 9th or 10th

I think you just did.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com