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Comment by throwingrocks | Hacker News Reader

Yeah....and the inflation we're seeing elsewhere in the world is just a coincidence.

EU had negative interest rates for a decade. Low interest rates during the good times is definitely a mistake You end up paying for eventually

That’s the thing that makes me question the whole Keynesian/ interest rate setting problem, you cannot know if you are living in good times are bad times. That requires knowledge of the future.

Let’s say all of this is due to the war in Russia, or in some alternate reality China carpet bombs Taiwan, if you thought you were living in bad times before the event you are in for a rude awakening. It’s the same as black swans and cannot really work over time.

You know if unemployment is low and the economy is having solid growth at the time.

You mean like right now?

I understand this is a bit snarky, but I think it perfectly makes my point clear. By some metrics right now looks like a golden age, by other metrics it looks like staring into the abyss.

Personally I’m still divided on the current situation. I’m not sure why we as workers would view very low unemployment as anything other than amazing. Our overlords seem to hate that workers have bargaining power finally and are doing everything they can to end it

there is some truth in that rant. The inflation, btw, can be imoorted via currency exchange.

For example, anything for which you pay in dollars (a strong dollar now) is more expensive. If you add the exchange rate to the fact of the inflation itself you end up paying the sum of both differences.

The strong dollar is also the reason why EU has no choice but to follow the interest rate escalation from dollars: if they do not do it, people run away to buy follars because the euro suffers depreciation.

Complex topic, with more ramifications than it looks at first.

Seeing as every single central bank has similar monetary policy to the US, and almost all governments in Europe and elsewhere injected huge amounts of cheap/free cash into their economies in attempts to counter the economic effects of lockdowns/Covid, it's anything but a coincidence. It's a confirmation that such policies do in fact cause inflation.

"Elsewhere" they have also had 0% or even negative Central Bank Interest rates.

https://pearsonblog.campaignserver.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/...

The US Dollar is a world currency.

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